// Part 1

This is a lucigraph. In the not so distant past of my childhood of the 1980s, these were used by graphic designers to project an image onto a glass surface. You could enlarge or shrink the image, adjust the aperture, put your tracing paper on top of the light box and get to work. When computers and photoshop came around, these started gathering dust and currently only show up infrequently in Reddit threads of people asking “what is this?”.

How is this relevant to AI and our current times? Well we are at another paradigm shift where tools of the present will significantly change. Jobs will be lost and new jobs will be created. My mom owned a small advertising agency when we were growing up, we had a lucigraph in our basement that I used to play with.

When personal computers became popular, I found my calling and spent my high school years teaching myself graphic design and programming. Major client’s bought computers, trained internal teams and brought the projects my mom relied on in house. My mom could not compete and ended up becoming a teacher.

Throughout history there are examples of advancements in technology and automation changing the way people work. Not knowing what the future jobs will be causes uncertainty, but look to the lucigraph to see jobs of the past are equally hard to imagine with the tools we use today.

@benedictevans uses the Jevons Paradox to illustrate this:“In the 19th century the British navy ran on coal. Britain had a lot of coal (it was the Saudi Arabia of the steam age) but people worried what would happen when the coal ran out. Ah, said the engineers: don’t worry, because steam engines keep getting more efficient, so we’ll use less coal.

No, said Jevons: if we make steam engines more efficient, then they will be cheaper to run, and we will use more of them and use them for new and different things, and so we will use more coal. Innovation can connect to price elasticity.”

In simple terms: “New technology generally makes it cheaper and easier to do something, but that might mean you do the same with fewer people, or you might do much more with the same people.”

Go automate the jobs and make more jobs! Be optimistic and excited to learn, that is the best recipe for long term success with uncertainty on the horizon.

@benedictevans wrote about all of this far more eloquently than I could ever hope to. Highly recommend you take the time to read his thoughts. ben-evans.com/bened…