I honestly think making a living off being a reasonably successful creative is hard. I know of great bands with huge fan followings who still struggle to quit their day jobs. Some have opened music schools, some restaurants, some joined creative agencies. Some just quit the world altogether, leaving it as just a hobby.
When I was in college I was a dreamer. I was in a band and loved playing original compositions because I thought it would take us places. And I often thought of going back to that dream, but seeing great bands struggle, I have now re-thought my passion for excel sheets.
But here is a thought. With AI, any job that can be replaced by an algorithm and machine learning will be replaced.
The easiest ones first - like anything which has a clear input-output relation. Like a chatbot, or even the common physician that asks you for symptoms and deduces you have a cold or a viral. Imagine a doctor's job going to AI. What chance do most other professions have
You know bots can beat humans at chess and at poker. You must be wondering about poker being way too complex, but ask any seasoned pro and he will tell you his heavy reliance on data for decision making. He uses probability and math to arrive at the best decision way too often.
Who is more likely to use probability well? Humans or bots? Seems like all data-driven decision making will move to the realm of bots & AI.
And if you look at the copious amounts of data-driven decisions taken by management. Oops me replaceable, eventually.
Unless you are a man of gut & creativity. The jobs that will go the last (if they go at all) are the jobs of creatives. A bot analysing what makes human's laugh and cry and then creating an ad that does that. Hmmmmmm. Tough. Creating the next blockbuster hit movie, writing the script for it. No way...
The world has been unfair to creatives, the people who analyse data and take decisions have been rewarded. But what if bots do the job better, which they have proven they can do, even with rapidly fluctuating data points like while playing poker.
Creating, on the other hand, is still far too complex to standardise. Ask the startup world who tried a copy-paste model for creating startups & therefore creating wealth. And how that fared.
In a world of AI, the creatives who rely on gut, instinct and human behaviour might well have the last laugh. And it might just be about time they won...
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Ishwar Sundararaman is Co-Founder & CEO of an Interior Design + VR Platform called Furdo.com. Yes he operates in the creative space and is therefore heaving a sigh of relief…