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Comment by doe_eyes | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that many of what you describe as "terrible" jobs are just a low-overhead way for creative folks to pay their bills. You don't make a living writing timeless poems or painting masterpieces, at least not usually. You make a living doing copyediting or painting commissioned artwork - and then work on achieving greatness in your free time.

AI doesn't have to be good to destroy this income. This is making it harder for creativity to thrive. Relatively few budding artists can count on private patronage or government sponsorship, and both of these come with plenty of strings attached. And pie-in-the-sky ideas like universal income are not going to wish the problem away.

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There is some history here, like the musicians that went on strikes and picketed radio stations after one dared to play a record on the radio instead of a live orchestra!

The difference is that arguably this is the endgame — the entire process can now be automated.

Every doomsday prediction is wrong… until the final one isn’t.

The entire process is very much not automated

Music in general isn’t (and never will be), but the generation of musak that’s good enough for most commercial purposes very nearly is.

Also the creation of musak can be done by much more wider amount of people and requires less studying. Like driver I we requires less studying than driving a black cab without GPS.

Music is sort of its own thing. Individual musicians can put their music out there and gain a following. Visual art not so much. Not many people care about “great artists”. Most visual artists make a living making art assets of no particular individual expression and are at a lot of risk imo. I’m not sure that I believe most musicians make a living composing music.

Is that how they secured their rights to residuals?

> Relatively few budding artists can count on private patronage or government sponsorship, and both of these come with plenty of strings attached.

It follows that mass-AI adoption should tilt the creative economic model more towards state-funding, ideally supported by a tax on AI usage. (i.e. taxing and reallocating some of the value saved by using it, to redress the things it's probably destroying)

> ideally supported by a tax on AI usage.

Curious to see how you'd write this legislation. Because I know a lot of programmers and lawyers, and they're all a lot better at finding loopholes than preventing them.

Target AI infrastructure providers.

Ideally metered by perf-per-energy-per-time.

You'll tax out some low-value use cases, but that seems less concerning as long as the tax rates are kept modest (<10%).

Those are some pretty high-level bullet points. Say I'd like to build out a rendering farm with a bunch of GPUs to support the movie industry. On paper, my hardware is good for rendering, crypto, and AI. Do I get taxed?

If it were going to be implemented, I think only imposing it on large+ clouds that offer IaaS/PaaS would make sense.

That would simplify collection and traceability.

And a bit of extra pressure on decentralization wouldn't be the worst thing.

>state-funding, ideally supported by a tax on AI usage

Why should the state be funding artists in the first place? If the public can't be convinced to patronize artists directly (eg. buying their stuff), what makes you think they'd want to be compelled to fund artists via taxation?

For the same reason democratic states should fund news and education -- because it's in the public's interest to have these things.

And because when you run a capitalist economy, things that aren't profitable... don't spontaneously spring into existence at scale.

Unlike the travesty we made of rolling out social media, maybe we should think about what AI will cannibalize in the future, what we'd like to keep, and set up systems to financially support those things?

Personally, I'd rather not live in a future where all music, art, and news is the same milquetoast pablum regurgitated by an LLM.

But that means finding an economic model where not-that is feasible.

>For the same reason democratic states should fund news and education -- because it's in the public's interest to have these things.

Is it? What are we going to miss out on if art's purely commercial? The most visible art that the public sees is already commercial, whether it's music on spotify or movies in theaters. Hell, even most art that's in museums are commissions funded by wealthy patrons. If anything, government funded art is a recent phenomena, and we have gotten along just fine without it.

> What are we going to miss out on if art's purely commercial?

Opinions that are commercially unpopular, and the larger and more diverse talent pool to generate art of all sorts.

Patronage is a corrupting influence, and I'd feel much better about most art being funded through public grants (even via a baroque allocation system) than by Starbucks.

Because it's funny, labor organization never seems to come up as a theme in Starbucks-sponsored art...

> If anything, government funded art is a recent phenomena

That's stretching the truth a bit, or are we not considering the Catholic Church or Medicis government? Or not recent?

(to pull the most pop-culture examples, without delving into the actual royal courts/republics)

How would you prevent the government from similarly imposing a corrupting influence on artists?

There are plenty of historical examples of art that opposed the government and likely played a part in changing public opinion. There's a pretty reasonable argument to be made that art plays an important role as a check on authority when needed.

You put the organization that funds it at arm's length from the actual government.

Positions in it, all the way to the top, are regular jobs that get hired for, not political appointments. Write something into its charter about the funding never being conditional on content, only on some proof of ability. Make the amount of funding (for the organization as a whole) indexed to something meaningful—like inflation, or Congressional salaries, or something like that, with a multiplier based on national population—rather than having to be appropriated annually or at some fixed level.

It's not perfect, and it can't be, because Congress can always decide they don't like what it's doing and go back and meddle. But there are many safeguards that can be put into place to reduce the amount of direct government interference with such an organization—and those above are just what I could come up with off the top of my head in a couple of minutes. Given a committee with an actual mandate to assemble something like this, and people who are genuinely interested in doing so, I'm sure a much more solid framework could be ironed out.

Agreed. I don't think it's easy or that unchecked government funding is a panacea.

But I do think it fills in a public need that the free market is blind to. And perhaps structurally incapable of addressing. (Bezos running a charity newspaper notwithstanding)

The NIH / DOE / NSF grant process has its trend-following and insider problems, but generally parcels out money in an acceptable way. It's not impossible.

Of course there are plenty of creative people who pay the bills by doing things other than the commoditized analogue to their art, no? The stereotypical actor waiting tables comes to mind, as does Einstein in the patent office.

(Edit: this submission seems timely and relevant - The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41240152 )

> waiting tables

Yeah but talk about terrible jobs.

If I were an artist I think I'd prefer doing commodity art pieces to pay the bills vs. working in a restaurant.

And yes, it's subjective. I know some people probably like waiting tables.

Heh, this is kinda funny...

> > waiting tables

> Yeah but talk about terrible jobs.

From sibling comment to yours, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41276998 :

> ...a great deal of implicit classism ('i don't want to do a job like that, therefore such jobs are worthless').

Has it occurred to you that those jobs are finite? Can restaurants continue to exist if we have scores of under/unemployed people working as waitstaff, who don't make enough money to eat out themselves?

Previous rounds of innovation and steep changes in work/jobs, all the way back to the industrial revolution, were both a) not seamless transitions and left huge swathes of highly skilled people impoverished for the remainder of their lives, and b) for those who did transition to new jobs, there were new jobs for them to transition to. Not everyone can learn to be an AI developer. What jobs does AI create? Is everyone who isn't well versed enough in IT infrastructure going to have get a job as a janitor working the data centers for Azure cloud? Those are going to be some clean bloody floors.

I get so tired of the rhetorical "this has happened before," no it really fucking hasn't. Not on this scale, and not when having money was so utterly critical to one's ability to survive.

Frankly it used to be a lot easier to support yourself working a blue collar job part time or full-time (40h) and still have a lot of free time left over for creative endeavor. The technologically mediated rise of productivity has been accompanied by steady erosion of perceived value for non-technical labor, along with a great deal of implicit classism ('i don't want to do a job like that, therefore such jobs are worthless').

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