In the 2020–21 financial year, the average personal income in Australia was approximately $A70,000.* Only one-third of authors earned this amount from all their sources of income combined. The average total income for authors, including all sources of income, was $64,900.
And the amount they earned from their books alone was far, far less.
“And the poets down here don’t write nothing at all” – Jungleland Bruce Springsteen**.
In contrast, the jobs deemed most resilient to disruption included many artistic professions, such as illustrating and writing.
The Oxford report encapsulated the conventional wisdom of the time—and, perhaps, of all time. Advanced technology ought to endanger simple or routine-based work before it encroaches on professions that require the fullest expression of our creative potential. Machinists and menial laborers, watch out. Authors and architects, you’re safe.
This assumption was always a bit dubious. After all, we built machines that mastered chess before we built a floor-cleaning robot that won’t get stuck under a couch. But in 2022, technologists took the conventional wisdom about AI and creativity, set it on fire, and threw its ashes into the waste bin.
This year, we’ve seen a flurry of AI products that seem to do precisely what the Oxford researchers considered nearly impossible: mimic creativity.
It sounds like it is going to get worse for writing.
Meanwhile, Cormac McCarthy’s latest work gets a rave review as he ponders the fading of his light. I haven’t read much of his work. Pretty Horses was it. I read some Harold Bloom raves about him and saw a movie or two so I am no expert but I appreciate him from afar. Time is the fire we burn in and other interests intercede. The review is very insightful. If nothing else, I will remember him for his brook trout passage.
The weirdness of McCarthy’s style is hard to overstate. He abjures quotation marks and most commas and apostrophes, so even his text looks denuded and desertlike, with the remaining punctuation sprouting intermittently, like creosote bushes. (I once compared an uncorrected proof of Blood Meridian with the finished book. I found that he’d struck just a couple of commas from the final text. That amused me: Looks good, McCarthy must have decided. But still too much punctuation.)
It seems he is a kindred soul based on my posts. LOL
* Australian Dollar equals 0.67 United States Dollar
** There is nothing like a Springsteen reference to date yourself.
Hard to say. People believed that self driving cars were ‘just round the corner’, but apparently the multitude of conditions people handle acceptably or well is just that bit more than what computers can do — a self driving car might work wonders in ideal conditions, but throw a few roadworks in, the need to get the hell out of the way of an ambulance, and a few more irritants we can all cope with very effectively, and it breaks down to pieces.
That does not mean some unexpected stuff will not be replaced by computers (say, animation could be much simpler: provide enough sketches and a computer could generate a whole animated movie — the stress is ‘enough sketches’). But the future is famously hard to predict, and programming software to solve problems that change over time is not that trivial.
updated Dec 9,2022 *** The Generative-AI Eruption