D.I.Y.

In 1839, Paul Delaroche, a French portraitist and painter of historical scenes, saw some early examples of the daguerrotype, and is famously alleged to have declared, "From today, painting is dead" (except in French, obviously [1]). He was wrong, evidently, but you could see his point. The process of making lifelike representations of people and things in paint – until then pretty much the whole point and purpose of painting – requires genuine talent, skill, and a major investment of time and effort to achieve. Painting might have been regarded by its patrons as a trade, but it was a pretty exclusive one, and thus attracted a high price tag. The commissioning of, say, a portrait was something reserved for the very wealthy or major institutions: its very costliness was, in a way, the whole point. To see the prospect of this profitable, well-respected business de-skilled into a trivial, mechanical matter that any idiot capable of saying "watch the birdie!" could perform, with results of truly astonishing fidelity (and, worse, that could be turned round within a couple of days) would have been concerning, to say the least.

I was trying to think of what other mechanical innovations there have been that stand in the same disruptive, democratising relationship to some other hard-won craft or profession as photography does to representational art. That is, that, as a result of that invention, something that had previously required the services of an expensive professional had come within the grasp of everyone: you could now just do it yourself (or hire a much less expensive pro), often with even better results (assuming that, in the case of portraiture, an accurate likeness is the main measure of success). But most mechanisations I could think of have instead either replaced far humbler occupations – the vacuum cleaner, for example – or have industrialised some time-consuming, skill-based craft like making furniture. Although, ironically, many middle-class households do still employ someone else to operate their vacuum cleaner, and buying a flat-pack wardrobe from IKEA is really not the same as making it yourself (however much it can bloody well feel like it).

Printing suggests itself as an example – bye-bye, you scribes and scriveners – but that was hardly a DIY business, either: in fact, a whole new, even more highly-skilled profession had entered the scene. I also considered the typewriter, but that, too, merely ended up creating a new, more humble but still quite skilled occupation (can you touch-type seventy-five words per minute?). Back in the 1960s, a newspaper editorial office would resound with the clatter of typing, and be shaken by the thunder of hot-metal presses in the basement. But both, however, were supplanted by the advent and imposition of the personal computer and word-processing. Older, trade union-minded readers will still recall the ensuing period of industrial unrest in the mid-1980s, summarised by the one word, "Wapping".

I remember being the proud but somewhat perplexed recipient, in 1985, of the first PC to be unboxed in our university library [2]. There it is, I was told: see what it will do. What it did, of course, was to make redundant our entire typing pool. Which caused some upset, as "typist" was one of the few occupations compatible with the sort of part-time hours that suited the complex, multi-tasking lives of many women, then and now. The advent of the PC was nothing if not "disruptive" in the workplace. Suddenly, professionals had end-to-end control of their working lives. With the advent of the internet, email, spreadsheets, desktop publishing, and the Web, your entire focus, day in, day out, became the screen on your desk; no typing pool, no secretaries, a much-depleted mail room, and whole new ways of looking busy. But, again, with the exception of certain trades doomed by automation such as the typesetter and the draughtsman, the expensive professionals had not been replaced by some new-fangled DIY gizmo, just empowered to do more, with fewer support staff to pay.

One interesting innovation of recent years, though, which may bear some comparison with photography, is on-demand self-publishing. Just as any fool can take a photograph, so anyone can now design and "publish" their own book. That is, if "publish" is taken to mean putting in your hands a single book, with the somewhat illusory, but nonetheless real prospect of selling more via an online shopfront or even on Amazon. It's not vanity publishing – you don't pay thousands in order to end up with boxes of unsold and unsellable copies around the house – but it's not "publishing", either, in the traditional sense of a business model which includes editing, design, publicity, distribution, and production, with all the economies of scale. It's a genuinely new thing that meets a real demand. I don't suppose any publisher has said, on seeing the products of Blurb or Lulu, "from today, publishing is dead", but, like painting, the nature of publishing may yet be changed in unforeseen ways by these Web-based upstarts which cut out the middle-man.

However, the example that strikes me as most comparable with photography is machine translation, of which the most obvious example is Google Translate. A friend, knowing my interest in such things, pointed me at a recent article, by the eminent Douglas Hofstadter [3], in which he pooh-poohs the quality of Google Translate's efforts. Now, I know how difficult good translation is. I know all about the pitfalls, the "false friends", the tricky equivalence of idioms, the problems of inflection, tone, dialect, and voice. I have suffered a pedant's wrath for my failure to translate "Ger-doing!" and "Kerplunk!" into German. A good translator is a highly-skilled individual, with superb language skills backed up by a broad hinterland of appropriate technical and cultural knowledge that is kept bang up to date. I mean, jeepers creepers, you don't want your, like, business proposal or legislation to sound as if it were gabbled over the phone by some ditzy teen from the 1950s, or – oh, wow, heavy! – intoned by a prog-rock muso. Unless, of course, that's exactly what is required in, say, a novel. As a consequence, good translators are in demand, busy, and expensive.

But: if you've ever been abroad in a country whose language you can barely fathom, without a dictionary or a phrasebook [4] but in possession of a smartphone, you'll know how readily you can tolerate even a risibly poor translation of the menu or gallery guide in front of you, when it is offered free and on demand, right now, unlike the perfectly nuanced translation you might be able to purchase (with suitable advance notice) from a competent professional, perhaps with a bit of luck by close of business tomorrow afternoon. But I suggest the latter is about as likely as you deciding to commission a landscape painter to capture the enchanting view of the piazza immediately in front of you, rather than simply taking a photograph. Machine translation apps, these days, may not yet be perfect, but have improved massively, and are better than they have any right to be. Which is good enough, at least for the major European languages, if not all of the 100 on offer. As Voltaire once put it:

Dans ses écrits, un sage Italien
Dit que le mieux est l'ennemi du bien

Apparently, this is his version of an Italian proverb, le meglio è l'inimico del bene. Either of which I think you'll find Google Translate will make a decent, if not perfect job of rendering into English. For a fee, I could improve either or both for you, probably by close of business tomorrow afternoon, but I think you'll get the gist.

(The inscription reads, "This tablet left intentionally blank")

1. If you insist: "À partir d'aujourd'hui la peinture est morte". It's an interesting question whether an apocryphal quotation is more authentic when rendered in the language it was never actually said in, but might have been...
2. A twin-floppy drive machine, with no hard drive. Floppies were floppy in those days, vulnerably bendy 5.25" disks in a frail plastic housing. You booted up the PC with a bootable DOS floppy in the left-hand drive, took it out, replaced it with, say, a WordPerfect disk, fired that up with a command, and then put your data disk in the right-hand drive. The total RAM available was 640K... Ah, the sheer capaciousness, speed, and convenience of my first 32MB hard drive!
3. Author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, a book I have never read, but which has probably been pressed upon me more often than any other.
4. I was astonished to discover, before a visit to Barcelona last summer, that no Catalan phrasebook of acceptable quality exists. Això és increïble! (Thanks, Google Translate).