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Comment by njharman | Hacker News Reader

The real income inequality has nothing to do with skills, the inequality is between those who work and those who own. Top few percent vs everyone else.

If you think skilled jobs are automation / off-shoring proof, I'll see you in the bread lines in 10-20yrs.

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Heh I didn't say that. Automation just means available jobs will get increasingly higher skilled.

It's with mixed-feelings that I anticipate the day when people "work" by by solving sub-problems for weak AI.

For example, being flashed security-images while wearing a skullcap so that a machine "reads" whether (in your judgement) the picture contained something suspicious.

Not that many people don't work as interchangeable parts in machines today, we just call them companies.

Or we'll just find new jobs that were previously impossible, or at least unfeasible to do without the aid of AI. Just like how film photographers complained about digital cameras and related technology like Photoshop. Photographers haven't been put out of business (not even by everyone wielding a camera phone). The people that have been put out of business were those who couldn't figure out how to add value to what machines could now do. There are plenty of photographers doing just fine still, but they all realized they need to offer something that machines can't do, like high quality image manipulation.

The major value photographers add to what the machine can do is social status. People like an identical photograph more if they know it was taken by a famous photographer. Social status is a positional good. It's not possible to have high social status unless others have low social status, and those with low social status are in the majority. They cannot be successful photographers, no matter how good their skills, because technical advances have made skills much less important than status. This kind of change limits social mobility and is bad for society.

I see your point, but I think this kind of meritocratic status increases mobility, at least for talented people. Instead of having say someone give me $50,000 to open a store front studio, I can buy camera equipment for a couple thousand bucks, open a website and start advertising in Instagram, FB whatever (side note, I do some photography on the side, and book most of my paid work from organic marketing there) and be in business. Creative enterprises in particular are fields where talent, not inherited social status, determine ones success.

And yes there are OK photographers (Annie Leibowitz comes to mind) who just cash in on their brand. But I knew one guy who worked as a florist, and built a high-end wedding photography bussines. He was not rich, but had artistic talent and marketing savvy, and now has people working for him.

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