Your job is going to be replaced by a smartphone app

I recently read an interesting opinion column on The New York Times titled The Experience Economy. Below is a short passage:

Jared lives a much more intellectually diverse life than [his grandfather]. He loves Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia and his iPhone apps. But many of these things are produced outside the conventional monetized economy. Most of the products are produced by people working for free. They cost nothing to consume.

They don’t even create many jobs. […] The automobile industry produced millions of jobs, but Facebook employs about 2,000, Twitter 300 and eBay about 17,000. It takes only 14,000 employees to make and sell iPods, but that device also eliminates jobs for those people who make and distribute CDs, potentially leading to net job losses.

Then a few days ago, I found out about Artify, an iOS app that “transforms your photos into works of art — instantly.” Basically this app applies special effects to your snapped digital photos to make them look like impressionist paintings of Monet, Renoir or Degas.

Instantly.

Sure, Artify doesn’t create works of art that hangs in a museum, but let’s ponder about this for a minute. In the 1800’s, it took a painter months to create one of his works. A few years ago, if you want a personalized copy of your photos in the style of a famous painter, you might go to the internet to find a website like Your-Popart.com. These type of websites probably employ painters from third-world countries (i.e. low-cost) and they can hand-paint your photos in the art style you want in about a week for, maybe, $100.

But now… You take a photo with your iPhone, click a few buttons to start an app like Artify, and you get your instant-Monet — in a few seconds, for $0.99. In today’s reality, people don’t care that you can’t hang a digital photo on a wall because it’s more important that the photos are shareable on Facebook.