Books took exactly the same amount of time to write before and after the printing press— they just became easier to reproduce. Making it easier to copy human-made work and removing the humanity from work are not even conceptually similar purposes.
But my thought was that the printing press made the printed work much cheaper and accessible, and many many more people became writers than had been before, including of new kinds of media (newspapers). The quality of text in these new papers was of course sloppier than in the old expensive books, and also derivative...
We have probably greatly increased quality volume since then, but not 100x or 1 billion x.
> It all started going wrong with the printing press.
Nah. We hit a tipping point with social media, and it's all downhill from here, with everything tending towards slop.
Would we be better off?
I doubt it.
It’s definitely not better for the general public. Designers can’t even be replaced by AI as effectively as authors. They make things sorta ’look designed’ to people that don’t understand design, but have none of the communication and usability benefits that make designers useful. The result is slicker-looking, but probably less usable than if it was cobbled together with default bootstrap widgets, which is how it would have been done 2+ years ago. If an app needs a designer enough to not be feasible without one, AI isn’t going to replace the designer in that process. It just makes the author feel cool.
Well you're not going to build a web application if you're a designer, at best you can contribute to one.
Of course that's changing in their favour with AI too - and it's fantastic if they can execute their vision themselves without being held back because they didn't pursue a different field or career choice, without having to go on a long sidequest to acquire that knowledge.
