AS I SUGGESTED EARLIER, AI WILL HIT THE “CREATIVE CLASS” HARDER THAN THE WORKING CLASS: “Our exaggerated reverence for the creative impulse derives from the romantics of the early 19th century… and filtered through from intellectual bohemia to the upper middle classes…. Now, quite banal instances of human creativity are preposterously overvalued. Witness the often conceited superiority of those in only tangentially creative professions. Why should a newspaper columnist or an advertising copywriter feel himself to be more interesting than a banker or a cleaner? I have lawyer friends who complain of the rictus countenances and slipping eye-contact they get from artistic types at parties. But I know those parties. And I know my lawyers are the most interesting people in the room…. AI should disillusion us of the spurious glamour of creativity. It will be good for those who have suffered the social condescension of ‘creatives.'”

Not least because the creative work of recent decades is mostly rather bad — and in the case of expensive public art, often spectacularly bad.