It Does Rattle My Cage a Little, But Austrian Economics Saves the Day IMO

So, suppose AI soon becomes capable of writing all the things, as Michael Munger ponders at Reason and I riff on at the Garrison Center.

Maybe I have to seek other work.

Or maybe the "text singularity" is accompanied shortly thereafter by all kinds of "post-scarcity" developments that fix me up with, essentially, a "universal basic income" where my material needs (and everyone else's) are seen to by benevolent AI masters and I can just sit around all day munching on free chocolate-covered pork rinds and watching (AI-generated, of course) music videos and (deepfake) porn.

Or maybe there's a third possibility.

Enter Carl Menger:

Value is thus nothing inherent in goods, no property of them, nor an independent thing existing by itself. It is a judgment economizing men make about the importance of the goods at their disposal for the maintenance of their lives and well-being. Hence value does not exist outside the consciousness of men.

Value subjectivism suggests that at least some people may judge the "human touch" versus AI output as important to "the maintenance of their lives and well-being," at least as regards maximizing their interest and happiness.

Actual experience supports the theory.

How many people prefer hearing humans (especially live, but also recorded) perform music to simply plugging some sheet music into a synthesizer and listening to the output? I suspect that the quality and abilities of that synthesizer are only marginally relevant to the preference.

How many people go out of their way to buy -- and pay more for -- bespoke "hand-made" products instead of mass-produced versions that, even if not necessarily superior, are standardized such that one is less likely to get a "lemon?"

This is actually not my first "human vs. algorithm" job situation.

Over the last couple of decades, news web sites and email newsletters have become increasingly automated. A script searches the web for certain topics, finds material on those topics, and shows that content to readers with little if any intervention. If I had to guess, I'd guess that that's 90% of market share (see e.g. Google News, Bing News, et al.).

Rational Review News Digest, on the other hand, consists entirely of human-selected, human-curated, human-formatted material. That's something I don't usually belabor, but whenever I've mentioned it I've received a reader note or three saying that that's one of the things people really like about it.

So even if ChatGPT and friends are able to write Tom Knapp stuff faster and better than Tom Knapp can (a recent test says "not yet, anyway"), Tom Knapp will probably just keep writing Tom Knapp stuff himself and emphasize the "hand-made, not automated" aspect. Maybe readers and supporters will prefer that. Maybe not. But the latter is not the obvious foreordained outcome.