I’d much prefer to see a property tax. This tax will hinder advancement. We want more robots and automation, not less. A property tax is inherently progressive because rich people live in expensive places, rich industry has expensive facilities and equipment. And property tax is a tax on wealth, which if we do it right means wealth will dwindle from the upper levels of society.

I wrote a short story once about a futuristic society where they’ve solved aging. Everyone lives forever and is young forever.

In the story a character commits a crime and kills another person. There is no longer life in jail as that would mean infinity and is considered cruel. So the solution there is to deny him access to anti-aging treatments and simply let him age and die “naturally”

Those techniques have already been taught to the AI. I’m using such tools right now. It’s still rough, but I have no doubt they’ll improve them greatly soon. We’re not quite at the point I’m describing but I think it’s coming soon.

I think what you’re missing is how do you drive the AI? It’s still a tool. A piece of software. You have to tell it what to do. And in order to tell it what to do, you need to know what you’re looking for.

Like technically speaking anyone can paint. Just take a brush and some oils and spread it on the canvas. But that won’t be very good. So you need to spend decades learning all sorts of art topics.

Now, an AI already knows that stuff. So you could technically tell it to just make you a painting. And for sure it’ll spit out a better painting than what you as an unskilled person can produce. And I’m sure it’ll look awesome to you. But how will you gauge if it’s actually good? You don’t know anything about painting. For all you know this could be trash.

Now if all you’re doing is making stuff for self-expression and just to make stuff then who cares. Knock yourself out.

But if you’re making a movie, or a video-game, or a comic book, etc, then it has to actually be good. People need to want to watch it. If you don’t know what you’re doing then all you’ll get is a messy pile that nobody wants to watch.

This happens all the time now too. They take some random director and producer that don’t know wtf they’re doing, give them a budget, and they make some POS movie that looks nice but falls completely flat. Then it fails at the box office, and they complain that the “haters” ruined it. No, they made a shit movie/game/whatever.

It’ll be the same thing here.

I’m not sure what you mean by this exactly.

What I’m saying is that eventually you’ll get tools powerful enough that an artist would be able to do several jobs. Instead of the job being so tedious that you need a separate artist for each part, one artist will be able to tackle the whole thing.

There’s a lot more to animating than being told what to do. It’s a field that’s over a hundred years old and has many techniques you have to master to make an effective animation.

All an AI can hope for is to randomly string together these techniques and get something that to a lay person would look like animation, but isn’t.

If an unknowing art director will just fall back on an AI for this, what they’ll get is a shitty movie.

Now what this does mean however is that animators will be able to do a heck of a lot more. In fact I think we’ll start to see a breakdown of specific art roles. Someone who’s interested in characters will be able to handle the entire character from beginning to end. The modeling, rigging, animation, everything.

This is extremely powerful and as an artist I can’t wait!