You are ultimately right. Progress cannot be stopped, won't be stopped. My only wish is to help mitigate the pain. You brought up t-shirt manufacturing. That was true and while the luddites ultimately lost, I thought maybe a lesson society could have gained from that was some level of compassion to who it is happening to. Because it's not just artists this time, it's not just the factory, this time it is every profession that can be done at a computer. I am a programmer and I feel like I see the writing on the wall for us too. Soon we will be the Luddite who is scorned, but yes, society and economics don't owe me or any artist a damn thing. This is an emotional post, but reading these stories I feel like the only answer I have come up with is to just allow it to up-end all of our worth, security, and jobs. If you are a 50 year old corporate artist, hopefully something help you on your way to a new profession. It's the same way why I feel like society doesn't do nearly enough for coal miners either. Coal is a nasty product, yes, and a coal miner should clearly not "just learn to code". I don't know what should be done, but something of compassion clearly needed to have been done ethically.
Why don't you say what you want? You don't want compassion. Compassion is an internal emotional experience. I am having compassion right now for the hypothetical hordes of unemployed former commercial artists as I consign them to history's scrapheap. Compassion is a story we tell to tug at the heartstrings of ourselves and others.
Compassion is not a policy. Compassion is not a plan. Compassion isn't what coal miners or Luddites wanted. What they wanted was to freeze in amber a way of life that served them well and could be passed on. That's both a reasonable thing to want and a very unreasonable thing to expect.
Or maybe you don't know what you want as an outcome. That's OK. It might be worth thinking about that.
For my own part, I'm not too worried about programmers quite yet. After all, programming is the easy part. All you have to do is get the business to decide precisely what they want and communicate it clearly. For the future, well, adaptability and rapid learning have been the hallmarks of every good engineer I've ever worked with. We're a flexible lot.
I don't know what I want as an outcome. I think that is part of the discussion. You have come at me with a lot of really good questions. I think the discussion is the most important before we hit that hypothetical soon.
For sake of clarity I am an engineer as well. I hope you are right? As I see it now, it seems like every single job is on the chopping block before I hit retirement age. We already see a few experts arguing about this already.
I think I am doing a poor job conveying what I want or mean by compassion, as you said that is true that the Luddites or coal miners in those examples want to pause time. That is clearly a very bad idea when it comes to something like coal, but at the same time I think when I say compassion it is not that I want to tug at the heartstrings of ourselves and others. I mean it in a selfish way that when we are able to answer the question as to what people do when their livelihoods are removed from them, we get a better functioning society. When we use coal miners as an example there has been a few studies that have shown much higher usage of drugs as despair has grown in those communities. I see that and have extrapolated that out to the large white-collar hypothetical hordes of unemployed commercial artists. Perhaps all desk workers (my self included).
It legitimately has kept me up at night trying to think what sort of policy, what responsibility do we all have now? Economically nobody owes anyone anything, but is that an ethical answer?
I don't know what that looks like. Which goes back to my original answer, I don't know what I want as an outcome. I just think that perhaps, we will see less animosity and less anxiety when we have better answers to our modern Luddites.
Unlike the luddites, information is so available today, that it'd be easy for an artist to predict the demise of their profession (presumably).
Therefore, why is it not the artist's responsibility now, to look for alternatives, and not wait till they truly become obsolete, and personal resources run out? If you went back in time and told the luddites that in 5 years time, their services would no longer be required by society, would they not retrain themselves instantly, instead of waiting for the 5 years and hope that society has some sort of welfare program ready for them?
