I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

But do you think if none of these things had changed, and everyone was still doing nearly everything themselves, with a limited subset of libraries in use, writing everything in C, we would have all of these applications, services, pieces of software, etc? That all of these viable businesses employing people would still exist?

I doubt it. And like the poster from the reddit link, a lot of software devs truly did enjoy a lot of that work that they did. I've talked to plenty of greybeards who will wax nostalgic over spending months writing things that a pip install and import solve in a few seconds now.

If we double the efficiency of a team, do we fire half of them? Or do we double the amount of products we're releasing? Or double the amount of features for one product?

I think we have far more software devs today because of the advent of higher level languages, large library selections available with package managers, feature-rich IDEs, etc.

Is this always the case, for every industry? Obviously not. There are a lot fewer people making furniture by hand today than there was before automated manufacturing, and any individual only needs so many chairs. But there is, of course, still demand for hand built furniture using traditional joinery techniques.

"Art" is a big space, and I don't think that the impact will be universal across every part of it. For games in specific, I think we'll see something more like the software development side - people will make more and more unique assets vs. reusing them, we'll see the artwork be more detailed and "populated" in general. We'll see more and more smaller studios putting out work with higher quality and more art assets. Same thing for other media-related positions. And the people who are reliably selling prints for people to hang on walls, collect, etc., I think are also likely quite safe. I think people relying on twitter/instagram/etc. commissions to draw people's D&D characters or anime waifu are likely in a lot of trouble.

If AI destroys the middle class, then the whole system collapses. No middle class = no spending = less businesses = more low-income and at risk people, and the cycle continues.

We'll basically create a neofeudalist society where the rich will control everything and the people will work for them (food, housing, etc...).

It seems crazy, etc... but not improbable. I'm not a conspiracy person, but I can't stop thinking about this: These advancements align with "You'll own nothing, and you'll be happy" sentence from the WEF.

They weren't "scared it's going to take their jobs" -- they were _seeing_ the jobs they had _actually disappear_ (not hypothetical future fear), replaced by worse-paying jobs with much worse conditions. They were exactly right that their actual lives were going to get a lot harder.

From a recent Cory Doctorow post: https://doctorow.medium.com/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-stea... :

> Despite what you may have heard, the Luddites weren’t technophobes. They were skilled workers, expert high tech machine operators who supplied the world with fine textiles. Thanks to a high degree of labor organization through craft guilds, the workers received a fair share of the profit from their labors. They worked hard, but they earned enough through their labors to enjoy lives of dignity and comfort.

> Nineteenth century textile workers enjoyed a high degree of personal autonomy. Their machines were in their homes and they worked surrounded by family and friends, away from the oversight of the rich merchants who brought their goods to market. This was the original “cottage industry.”

> The factory owners who built their “dark, Satanic mills” weren’t interested in making life easier for textile workers by automating their labor. They wanted to make workers’ lives harder.

> Textile machines were valued because they were easier to operate than the hand-looms that preceded them, and that meant that workers who wanted a fair wage for a fair day’s work could be fired and replaced with new workers, without the logistical hassle of the multi-year apprenticeship demanded by the hand-loom and its brethren.

> As Brian Merchant documents in Blood in the Machine, his stunning, forthcoming history of the Luddites, the factory owners of the industrial revolution wanted machines so simple that children could work them, because that would let them pick over England’s orphanages, tricking young kids to come work in their factories for ten and twelve hour days.

> These children were indentured for a period of ten years, starved and mercilessly beaten when they missed quota. The machines routinely maimed or killed them. One of these children, Robert Blincoe, survived to write a bestselling memoir detailing the horrifying life of the factory owners’ child slaves, inspiring Dickens to write Oliver Twist.