I wonder what new skills we will develop, as we all start using AI based on General Purpose Transformers. The sorts of magical scenes that we are used to watching in science fiction and fantasy movies will no longer seem magical, as they become everyday skills.
For example, if you and your friends are designing a house, you and your collaborators will soon just be able to talk through what you’d like to see and it will start to show up. Acts of creation and design will simply be woven into your conversation.
You might say “the roof should be pointed and green,” and I might add “the driveway curves this way, and there is a dog running across the lawn,” and these things will appear before us. As we go on in our discussion, we continually refine our design, adjusting, adding details, gradually making things more specific.
The experience will not be that different from how today we might hire a 3D expert to make rendered sketches of our ideas, except that the process will be faster and cheaper, and the results will be more visually realistic.
Another similarity will be that there will be no magic bullet — the act of creation will still be “Garbage in, garbage out.” If you are a bad designer, your A.I. will faithfully deliver to you a highly detailed and impressively rendered bad design.
There will be a shift in the nature of expertise, but not in the need for expertise. Bad designers might find themselves out of a job, but good designers will still get work — even more so than today.
The difference will be that those good designers will be paid for their talent and good judgment, rather than for their time. And that will be a much better deal for the good designer.