I think it depends on the thoroughness of the replacement. Cooking is still a useful life skill, economics of it are such that you can in fact cook for your own. But while someone probably still practices calligraphy and miniature for the heck of it, how many great miniaturists have there been since the printing press drove ’em out of a job? Do you know anyone who could copy an entire manuscript in pretty print?
Obviously this isn’t necessarily a tragedy, some skills just stop being useful so we move on. But “art” is a much broader category than a single specific skill. And you will notice that since photography was born, for example, figurative arts have been taking a significant hit—replaced by other forms. The question is whether you can keep find replacements or if at some point the well dries up and the quality of human art takes a dive because all that’s left to do for humans alone is simply not that interesting.
Stack Exchange + Google can replace a poor software developer, so we will not have great software developers?
Those things alone can’t. GPT-4 or future LLMs might, and yes, I’d say that would be a problem! People are already seeing how the younger generations, who have grown up using more polished and user-friendly UIs, have a hard time grasping how a file system works, as those mechanisms are hidden from them. Spend long enough with the “you tell the computer what to do and it does it for you”, and almost no one will seek the skill to write programs themselves. Which is all fine and dandy as long as the LLM works, but it makes double-checking their code when it’s really critical a lot harder.
I think it depends on the thoroughness of the replacement. Cooking is still a useful life skill, economics of it are such that you can in fact cook for your own. But while someone probably still practices calligraphy and miniature for the heck of it, how many great miniaturists have there been since the printing press drove ’em out of a job? Do you know anyone who could copy an entire manuscript in pretty print?
Obviously this isn’t necessarily a tragedy, some skills just stop being useful so we move on. But “art” is a much broader category than a single specific skill. And you will notice that since photography was born, for example, figurative arts have been taking a significant hit—replaced by other forms. The question is whether you can keep find replacements or if at some point the well dries up and the quality of human art takes a dive because all that’s left to do for humans alone is simply not that interesting.
Those things alone can’t. GPT-4 or future LLMs might, and yes, I’d say that would be a problem! People are already seeing how the younger generations, who have grown up using more polished and user-friendly UIs, have a hard time grasping how a file system works, as those mechanisms are hidden from them. Spend long enough with the “you tell the computer what to do and it does it for you”, and almost no one will seek the skill to write programs themselves. Which is all fine and dandy as long as the LLM works, but it makes double-checking their code when it’s really critical a lot harder.