How The New Era Will Change Art
(Second part)

There are concerns that there will be no work left for people if AI continues to evolve, but just like the farmers of before, many of these jobs will shift over a long period of time. In the age of the internet, jobs will be lost at a more rapid pace, but we still have time to consider our options because it will not happen all at once.

This figure shows some jobs of the past that have disappeared, and I find it somewhat interesting.

Do you know what jobs these are? On the left, you can see a person sitting on top of a tall podium, reading something. They are reading the day’s news to keep factory workers from losing interest in their monotonous tasks. That used to be a job people had.

The middle picture shows a job that was quite popular in Europe at the time, but do you know what it is? You can see a man tapping on an upper window with a stick. I actually first learned about this before giving this talk. This is a wake-up service?he’s waking people up in the days before the alarm clock was invented. If you think about it, you can see how the alarm clock was really a massive innovation.

The right shows a job I think you know about, a telephone switchboard operator. This was considered a glamorous trade in the early days of Hollywood, much like that of flight attendants in our times.

Looking at it like this, it’s safe to say that there are jobs that will be lost to AI, but it’s also quite likely that some of those jobs are ones that we will look back on and think, “wow, did that used to be a job?” If we think about it from that perspective, our jobs are things that change with the times.

At the end of the day, one thing we can say with certainty about the evolution of humanity is that it has created free time. In the times of First Human Giatrus, they survived without factories or the internet. But human beings want to enjoy themselves. And they want to be ready if a crisis should happen. You see, in primitive times, if you fell into ill health and became bedridden, you’d have nothing to eat. Human history is a cycle of making time and killing time, just as Yukio Kitsukawa from Digital Media Research, whom I admire, wrote in his book Himatsubushi-no-Jidai: Sayonara Kyoso Shakai (Heibonsha), which translates to “The era of killing time: The end of competitive society”.