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Comment by skavi | Hacker News Reader

I think people tend to enjoy creating art more than farming. So technology that makes it less feasible to be an artist is more worrying than agricultural automation.

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Cinema killed a lot of jobs of live theater actors. Phonograph records killed a lot of jobs of live musicians. ...

My great grandmother and her family traveled across the U.S. doing bit pieces in vaudeville. They loved it, so I was told. A life of adventure, for them at least. Taking trains everywhere, often along with the circus.

By the time my grandparents were children, those days were over and they had to become farmers in Michigan. The family tried to stay in the performing arts but ever-increasing division of labor and modernization made that difficult.

I wish I had seen the days of vaudeville. The scrapbooks are amazing.

Less feasible to be a professional artist with a good chance of having a large audience yes. But I wonder if it will be like with hand-sewing and become a hobby. Or there will be a sizeable audience that will demand human made art for whatever reason. We still have live music and theatre despite recordings existing. Or maybe AI will never become good enough to replace the best humans.

What were the chances of being an artist before the industrial revolution compared to today? Assuming you didn't die of starvation before reaching adulthood.

So like movies/TV shows, and recorded audio playback? Those sorts of things?

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