I share this feeling. The coming years will be a time of deepening melancholia. More and more people will face the unpleasant experience of waking up to realize that the art they spent a life mastering, the profession they take pride in, the work they do, are suddenly considered irrelevant and inferior. The psychological and cultural consequences of this will be profound, unpredictable and very destructive in ways that we are not yet seriously considering.

True, the experience of losing your sense of purpose and meaning is not something new. On the contrary, it has been the backbeat all through the process of industrialization and modernization. Skilled workmen have been outcompeted by new machines, and then productive workers in the new industries in their turn have been laid off and considered as “burdens” when industrial production moves overseas etc.

The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it’s not doing people well to lose their sense of purpose and meaning. It results in depression, drug-abuse, alcoholism, misogyny, belief in conspiracies etc.

This time that experience will come for everyone. The visual artists currently fighting against AI-art is facing this ahead of the curve. And as much as I love Midjourney I really feel for them. Their sense of self and identity was connected with being good at doing something where they’ve suddenly – almost overnight – have become if not entirely irrelevant so at least very devalued. Gosh what a nightmare as a human being.

Someone here wrote that it is as if we discovered the cheat codes in the simulation. And it sure feels cool at first being able to fly through the game. But it doesn’t take very long from that, at least for me, until I completely lose interest in the game. Because cheating defies the whole purpose of playing. And being without purpose is to be dead, in a way.