[decae]

It feels to me like it's getting democratized in the same sense as to what happened to professional photography in the early 2000s with the introduction of digital cameras and high quality color inkjet printers. The barrier to entry becomes so much lower.

Instead of dealing with the costs associated with using, developing and printing from film, as well as the skills associated with knowing what a photo would look like before it was developed, digital cameras allowed new photographers to enter the industry relatively cheaply and shoot off a few thousand photos at a wedding at a relatively negligible cost. Those photographers rapidly developed their skills, and left studios with massive million dollar Kodak digital chemical printers in the dust. I know because I was working at one.

If you remember, this was in the time where the studio owned your negatives ostensibly forever, and you had to pay for reprints or enlargements. What were amateur photographers could enter this high-margin market, produce images of an acceptable quality, charge far less and provide far more.

I'm not able to say whether this will happen to software development, but the democratization of professional photography absolutely shook the somewhat complacent industry to its core.

In that case it had nothing to do with contempt for creative people, it was the opposite, anyone who wanted to be creative now could be.

[sgtgig]

Digital cameras didn't change the need to go out and actually shoot the photos, however. They didn't change the fundamentals of lighting and color and what a good photo looks like. It was a more convenient and cheaper process compared to film, so more people could participate in photography, but it maintained a lot of the creative process.