AI Will Soon Put Creators Out of Work. How Should We Adapt?
A review of Daniel Susskind’s ‘A World Without Work’
It wasn’t long ago that “creatives” were told automation would finally validate our life choices. Those of us who chose to major in the liberal or fine arts would have the last laugh, as our less remunerative careers would still be around while the accountants and lawyers of the world were automated straight into the history books.
Our creative, non-routine jobs would survive the purge and we could shake our heads and chuckle as we performed creative work that AI, no matter how advanced, could never do.
Today, that story looks more like a sophomoric pipedream. Algorithms write more than passable articles now. Need a logo for your business? There are a multitude of AI-generated options at your fingertips. In short, a lot of the things we were told AI could never do as well as a human are now being accomplished by artificial intelligence.
As Daniel Susskind explains in A World Without Work, this mistaken prophecy was due to a fundamental misunderstanding of how AI actually works. For decades, economists and pundits have told us that AI will never be able to mimic the workings of the human mind. And they weren’t wrong — it can’t (yet).
