The Future of Work and Steem

This is a video I stumbled across today which is basically a mash up of Mark Cuban and Andrew Yang talking about the future of work and the coming crisis of automation, technological advancement, AI, etc.

This is something I can personally relate to because in my work I deal with technology that is bleeding edge in it's lane and constantly evolving at what feels like an exponential rate.

I feel like people just don't get it.

Without getting to into technical jargon that will be unrelatable to most I want to try to keep this simple. Let's just deal with 3D textures.

Hopefully the images make this pretty self explanatory what 3D textures are. They are 2D images mapped to 3D objects in the computer to define information about their color, how they react to light, etc.

In video games, 20 years ago, these were all painted by hand. 10 years ago, they were mostly painted by hand, today, hand painting textures has almost been completely phased out in production. It's still needed for stylized games, but even those are being created "procedurally" now.

So I've posted some work demonstrating this workflow in the past.

This sort of workflow has quickly become the industry standard. It's a bit more involved, but I don't want to get too deep into the weeds and away from my initial point. In this workflow, I created this texture through a series of simple operations and parameters that are networked together in that wire mess in the second image. Instead of just painting the texture, I arrive at it via a "procedure". The benefit of this workflow is that each one of those nodes controls some parameter and each parameter is editable.

So for example, one of them is defining the base color as that green color. If I wanted the tiles to be blue instead of green, I can just tweak that parameter and the entire network will update and give me a new finished texture with a different color. For that matter, I can also change how dirty they are, how shiny they are, how many of them there are, and more.

A few years ago, if you wanted 5 variations on your textures, you had to paint 5 textures. At the macro level, what this means is if you need x amount of textures produced each day, and an artist can produce y textures, then you need to hire z artists so that you can hit your milestones.

As someone who has been doing this sort of thing for a long time, I can tell you that this is just one example, but in total, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say because of more powerful tools, I am probably at least 10x more productive than I could have been a decade or so ago.

So you might say, "Yaaay, that's great!", and on one level it is. It means a lot more can get made a lot faster, it means I as an individual artist can produce more and create more value, but at the macro scale. That little bit of math I did above. If I can do 10x the work, then whoever needs the work only needs 1 person where they used to need 10.

Again, this is good and bad, but I think it's catastrophic when it happens increasingly faster over a broad range of industries, and displaces workers at a rate never before experienced in human history, with no recourse on what all the millions of people will do when they suddenly have nothing the market wants.

This isn't actually where I start promoting UBI, although I am for it, it's only a band-aid.

I think we have to start thinking about how to redefine value, this is something I agree with Andrew Yang on, and I think we're sitting on the solution.

Steem facilitates the ability of the masses to express their perception of value in a practical and tangible way.

I've been consuming art online since there's been an online. I find it hugely valuable, but only now, via Steem do I actually have a mechanism to communicate that value perception directly to the individual that's providing it. This is a total paradigm shift from the way the entire world works right now.

I believe it's the solution the world needs. I believe we're embarking on a time where in the current system, suddenly millions of people will be deemed worthless, but I reject the notion that these people are worthless. The system is simply flawed and needs to evolve. I think Steem is that evolution.

You probably think I'm a crazy kool-aid drinking shill, but I wouldn't be here, spending my precious time and my hard earned money on something I just thought might go up in value. That's not why I'm here. I'm here because I legit think we're sitting on something that can CHANGE THE FUCKING WORLD.

I think there are a few of us here who see it, but not that many. Most people are looking one or two blocks up the street...look further. Imagine harder. It's more than blogs, more than videos, more than porn, more than games, and more than communities. Those are all branches, but the core, the core is empowering anyone willing to buy, or earn a stake, the ability to define value in a way that is actually useful to another human being. That is powerful.

Alright, I'll get off my soapbox for tonight. Thanks for looking/reading!