Naomi Alderman:
"Consider what happened after the invention of the desktop publishing computer programme. A package called QuarkXpress (you can look it up) decimated certain jobs - people who used to do page layouts using scalpels and letraset suddenly had to retrain to use Quark or lose their jobs. But please note three things.
a. it was very possible to retrain relatively quickly for a lot of people. If you already had the skills in one format, for many many people it was a matter of a few weeks or months to learn how to apply them in another format.
b. one of the things that happened was that a lot more things were better designed, demand increased for stuff that looked like it was professionally laid-out and the quality of the laying out improved
c. most importantly of all: that technology, although it could make doing page layout faster and easier once you had the skills, although it could ‘snap to gridlines’ rather than needing a ruler… still needed a person to know when the page looked good. You can create an eye-bleedingly ugly page using QuarkXpress just as easily as you can create a layout of surpassing loveliness. You need human discernment to tell the difference.
The same is really really true today, and if you think AI can just produce finished work in any field whatever that is because you do not have sufficient skill and discernment to tell the difference between good work and eye-bleeding work. Sure, sure, after QuarkXpress (and MS Word) a lot of people started making their own flyers in Comic Sans, and they looked better than the handwritten photocopied ones but they still looked, my friends, really really bad. The job of a professional designer was not suddenly redundant. Skills of discernment retain value in these times of technological change."