From The Milken Institute Review, January 24:
For many ages to come the old adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich today, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavor to spread the bread thin on the butter — to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. ... for three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old adam in most of us!— John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930)
A case in point is the latest generation of AI-based image-generation engines, which have given rise to conversations about the potential redundancy of artists and illustrators — a major category of creative work. Over the past few months, multiple tech companies have unveiled platforms like DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion that all boast of easy-to-use, low-cost services that allow anyone to generate both photorealistic and artistic images based on any text they can dream up — and with striking results. Want to see “a robot hand that is sketching a picture of another robot in photorealistic style”? You got it! We used DALL-E 2 to create it for you on page 36. The system comes with lots of examples that are more original than our prompt, such as “a bowl of soup that is a portal to another dimension.”
What this will mean for the human workers who operate in this space remains to be seen. One firm pitted their flesh-and-blood graphic designer against DALL-E 2 in a series of John Henry-style challenges. In blind judging, the human won two of the three contests, but it took the human three days to render the three images while DALL-E completed the same tasks in a matter of minutes.
Some artists see these image-generation platforms as a way to free them for other aspects of creativity. But, however they choose to rationalize the arrival of AI, there is little debate that these new tools will reduce the amount of labor required to complete graphic illustrations — even if humans remain involved in the process for the next few years.
Of course, this application is only one of a number of technological advances in recent years that have reduced the need for labor in areas as varied as reading mammograms and ringing up grocery purchases. And the range of tasks that AI systems can accomplish continues to grow beyond traditional rote computation into areas that involve creativity and even emotional intelligence. This flood of advances prompts questions whose answers were left to science fiction writers until quite recently. Will human labor be replaced by AI — and, if so, how do we prepare society for a future without work?
In the past, rather than eliminating the need for human labor, new technologies have only shifted the tasks for which humans are employed. For example, before the great waves of mechanization in the 19th century, the majority of Americans worked in agriculture; today only 1.5 percent of the population remains on the farm. This sort of profound shift can be observed even in the span of a single lifetime: some 64 percent of all job titles that are used today did not even exist in 1940. And while the churning hasn’t been in everyone’s interest, average pay has risen more or less in tandem with productivity. As a result, technological progress has broadly served to raise standards of living.
There is, however, no guarantee that history will repeat itself. Far from it: there is reason to believe that future technological change will decouple productivity growth from the fate of workers and may ultimately lead to the end of human labor. We believe this transition is likely to proceed in three stages....
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