Mass Produced Creativity

Think about it.
We are passing through a rare economic shift, says Charles Hugh Smith. He summarizes Peter Drucker’s Post-Capitalist Society. Taking his thesis, you suddenly realize that we no longer need mass capital to advance technology and production of goods. The potential is there. Let’s assume for a moment you actually paid attention in high school. You can purchase some raw materials and go to any modern machine shop with information you found on the Internet and produce a custom made high technology firearm. Part of it can be produced in your own home on a 3D printer. It would cost you maybe a week’s wages, and the costs are falling precipitously. Pretty soon you won’t need the machine shop. What happens when you can print your own computer mother board at home, bake your own chips? What will it do to the telephone oligopoly when homemade cellphones can network spontaneously across long distances without towers? People are already writing the software for that.
We are just about there. Anyone could theoretically produce anything for the cost of materials and their own time.
What does that do to our society? It’s not just the economics, which Smith emphasizes in the opening to his investment seminar. He’ll get some suckers. People who can actually think realize the future of investing will change dramatically, and people like Smith will have to find some other way to make a living. Artificial Intelligence will obviate the need for that kind of knowledge.
The arrival of word processors and decent home printers has very nearly killed the paper publishing business. People still want stuff on paper, but one guy can do most of by himself, replacing a vast army of typesetting technicians and press operators. For less than the cost of a new car, you can purchase a fully self-contained printing shop that fits in your office. Meanwhile, more and more work is done without paper and really cheap used laptops can produce ebooks to current standards. The only people making money in that industry are the specialist middlemen, those who connect content producers with those who mass market to consumers.
Similar story with the drafting industry. CAD has killed that already. Software houses have been pairing engineering software with CAD. Only government regulation keeps us from having our own full engineering software package for home use so that any literate Joe Sixpack can design his own home. He can already order the pre-built modules delivered to the assembly site for far less than current home building costs. Same story with motor vehicles and a lot of other things people use every day. From spacecraft all the way down to subatomic particles, the engineering decisions based on known tolerances are just about farmed out to AI. I rather believe DNA engineering will take a little longer simply because we have way too far to go with learning the tolerances. That sort of thing reaches out and touches entirely too many other life forms in coexistence, but in theory, it’s there. Yet, medical AI is already running off and leaving physicians behind.
At what point can we rely on AI to extrapolate choices to which the human mind tends to be blind? I’m not sure I want to be around for some of it, but it’s coming nonetheless. It’s not Science Fiction any more. Did you ever wonder why Fantasy is eclipsing SF? I think it’s more than mere vagaries of fashion. Too much of what we dream up is on top of us as science fact, not fiction. We have to branch out into directions we cannot go to find entertainment. I wonder what fiction types will sell most when even some of the fantasy crap becomes possible.
Still, mankind will remain fallen and reality broken. Spiritual awareness is the one thing you can’t farm out to AI. That, brothers and sisters, is the future “market” for us.