Note that we still have not solved cameras or even cars.

The biggest lesson I am learning recently is that technologists will bend over backwards to gaslight the public to excuse their own myopia.

>We, as humans, have missed out on a lot of art because of the invention of the camera.

I so severely doubt this to the point I'd say this statement is false.

As we go toward the past art was expensive and rare. Better quality landscape/portraits were exceptionally rare and really only commissioned by those with money, which again was a smaller portion of the population in the time before cameras. It's likely there are more high quality paintings now per capita than there were ever in the past, and the issue is not production, but exposure to the high quality ones. Maybe this is what you mean by 'miss out'?

In addition the general increase in wealth coupled with the cost of art supplies dropping this opens up a massive room for lower quality art to fill the gap. In the past canvas was typically more expensive so sucky pictures would get painted over.

The footgun cameras had was exposure time.

1826 - The Heliograph - 8+ hours

1839 - The Daguerreotype - 15–30 Mins

1841 - The Calotype - 1–2 Mins

1851 - Wet Plate Collodion - 2–20 Secs

1871 - The Dry Plate - < 1 Second.

So it took 45 years to perfect the process so you could take an instant image. Yet we complain after 4 years of LLMs that they're not good enough.

Photography’s rapid commercialisation [21] meant that many painters – or prospective painters – were tempted to take up photography instead of, or in addition to, their painting careers. Most of these new photographers produced portraits. As these were far cheaper and easier to produce than painted portraits, portraits ceased to be the privilege of the well-off and, in a sense, became democratised [22].

Some commentators dismissed this trend towards photography as simply a beneficial weeding out of second-raters. For example, the writer Louis Figuier commented that photography did art a service by putting mediocre artists out of business, for their only goal was exact imitation. Similarly, Baudelaire described photography as the “refuge of failed painters with too little talent”. In his view, art was derived from imagination, judgment and feeling but photography was mere reproduction which cheapened the products of the beautiful [23].

https://www.artinsociety.com/pt-1-initial-impacts.html#:~:te...

Cameras have not replaced paintings, assuming this is the inference.

You wouldn't have known that, going by all the bellyaching and whining from the artists of the day.

Guess what, they got over it. You will too.

people still make clay pots and paint landscapes

Art history. It's how we ended up with Impressionism, for instance.

People felt (wrongly) that traditional representational forms like portraiture were threatened by photography. Happily, instead of killing any existing genres, we got some interesting new ones.