Is the Move Away From Artist to AI a Repeat of the Industrial Revolution?

Is the move away from artist to AI a repeat of the industrial revolution? Progress, through innovation, is a hard force to stop.

The industrial revolution is when the master/apprentice system of building was replaced by product cloning. This era shifted us away from a time when unique crafts were built by a master and taught to an apprentice. [These craftsmen may have called themselves artists – but their work was not the purest form of art. Art with function is actually design.]

Keep in mind that art may seem “unneeded”… it might be easy to dismiss art. “Why do we need the David or the Mona Lisa? Who needs a particular song?" What if we got something equally as artistic, but different? Would anyone miss it?

Alas…Think you don’t need art? Try to get through a pandemic without the artists’ creativity to fill your mind. The artist will take you from deep in their soul to a world away.

The medium and methods may keep changing – sometimes drastically – but the artist will always be there to awe and entertain us. And we will evolve to adapt. We have an excellent track record for surviving unprecedented times. But we can't always beat the odds. The house always wins. So, we must skeptically embrace transformational ideas. A new, good idea ineffectively adopted is a bad a idea.

Endnote: This is my first blog post using custom generated AI images to accompany a piece.

The Future of AI

Things we enjoy in the real world, we don’t like online. I like it, when I walk into my local coffee shop, that they know my favorite food or drink. But, it seems creepy when I visit Facebook and see ads for products I searched for, days ago, on Amazon.

Like all technology, we’ll learn how these interactions work and we’ll get used to it, especially those who will grow up with it. But we sometimes forget too quickly; especially if we didn't live through it. Even our grandparents are too young to remember a time when people scoffed at teenagers, living a hundred years ago, because they learned to drive a car instead of ride a horse. 

AI of tomorrow, like the iPhone X, will know who you are from more than touch (PIN or Touch ID). Like another person, the iPhone X can now see literally see and recognize who you are. And it already knows exactly where you are. Perhaps, its camera and microphone will guess more about what you're doing before you ask, if we can trust it.

Living with AI will be like living with a new species. Almost human, but not quite, probably even after passing the Turing Test.

Future-proofing Naïveté

How naive we were, ten years ago, to think that URL shorteners needed to withstand the apocalypse. Even back then, we called it future-proofing. Today, clicking on a ten year old link typically yields a four-oh-four unless you're visiting the website of an Internet power-player with a keen interest in archival like the NYT or Wikipedia 

While shortened links may last a decade or longer, web pages have a much shorter shelf life. As technology quickly changes, so do server-side URL naming schemes that break links. Today's working links will eventually become tomorrow's orphaned links.

404 Solution

I saw a fix to this problem when working at a corporate conglomerate. Every morning, someone analyzed a list of all the 404s from the past day and then did their best to fix the "referrer." Usually that was easiest done by fixing the source, if it was an internal brand webpage. If the broken link was on an important, external website then we set up a web page, where the 404 was landing, to redirect the user to the correct destination. Fix the problem at the source, and when you can't then fix the symptoms rather than shifting the blame.

In The Future

Soon, it'll be common for digital anthropologists to piece together the Internet puzzle, from days long gone, to document the digital history of a culture. No different than a traditional anthropologist, except dealing with electrons instead of atoms.

The web is what it is, it is us who need to adapt our thinking to be inline with online.