I don’t understand this. It reminds me of the Go player who announced he was giving up the game after AlphaGo’s success. To me that’s exactly the same as saying you’re going to give up running, hiking, or walking because horses or cars are faster. That has nothing to do with human meaning, and thinking it does is making a really obvious category error.
The more computers and machines and institutions take that over, the fewer opportunities there are to do that, and the more doing that kind of thing feels forced, or even like an indulgence of the person providing the "service" and an imposition on those served.
Vonnegut wrote quite a bit about this phenomenon in the arts—how recording, broadcast, and mechanical reproduction vastly diminished the social and even economic value of small-time artistic talent. Uncle Bob's storytelling can't compete with Walt Disney Corporation. Grandma's piano playing stopped mattering much when we began turning on the radio instead of having sing-alongs around the upright. Nobody wants your cousin's quite good (but not excellent) sketches of them, or of any other subject—you're doing him a favor if you sit for him, and when you pretend to give a shit about the results. Aunt Gertrude's quilt-making is still kinda cool and you don't mind receiving a quilt from her, but you always feel kinda bad that she spent dozens of hours making something when you could have had a functional equivalent for perhaps $20. It's a nice gesture, and you may appreciate it, but she needed to give it more than you needed to receive it.
Meanwhile, social shifts shrink the set of people for whom any of this might even apply, for most of us. I dunno, maybe online spaces partially replace that, but most of that, especially the creative spaces, seem full of fake-feeling positivity and obligatory engagement, not the same thing at all as meeting another person you know's actual needs or desires.
That's the kind of thing I mean.
The areas where this isn't true are mostly ones that machines and markets are having trouble automating, so they're still expensive relative to the effort to do it yourself. Cooking's a notable one. The last part of our pre-industrial social animal to go extinct may well be meal-focused major holidays.
This is not intrinsic, though. It is a cultural imperative, so perhaps we need to revisit that?
My probably perverse takeaway is that Barbara Streisand might have been wrong: people who need people (to appreciate their work) may not be the luckiest people in the world. One can enjoy one’s accomplishments without needing to have everyone else appreciate them. Or you can find other people with similar interests, and enjoy shared appreciation.
In the extreme, the need for external validation seems to lead to people like Trump and Musk. Perhaps a shift in how we view this would be beneficial for society?
I don't mean this in a "people love work, actually", hooray-capitalism sense (LOL, god no), but the sense that humans tend to be happier and more content when they're helpful to those around them. It used to be a lot easier to provide that kind of value through creative and self-expressive efforts, than it is now. Any true need for artists and creative work (and, for the most part, craftspeople) at the scale of friend & family circles or towns or whatever, is all but completely gone.