Especially if we're talking about jobs in creative industries that require customers with the means to support and consume their output.
Besides, an overabundance of surplus labor, if properly managed, is as likely to lead to a better world than a worse one. There's no ironclad rule that everyone, or even the majority, need to work to live or live to work to be happy. And many creatives, in particular, would be happy and productive working on personal and noncommercial projects if funding were no longer an issue.
When you consider that this conversation assumes we are talking about the US and not the rest of the world? It is sobering.
The AI bet hinges entirely on the new types of work that arise from it.
Of course there is. Permanently replacing labor is quite obviously and quite literally the point of AI. No previous tech shifts are comparable.
That's why the tall bank buildings that dot ~every small town (and plenty of big ones) in the US are full of bankers tending to paper ledgers, and with a secretary in front of every office. We still get milk delivered every day, as well as a block of river ice from last winter every 2 or 3 days (or more often if it's been particularly hot). We dig our ditches by hand, with hand-made shovels and pickaxes. The material for the clothes on our backs was woven on manual looms, from cotton that was harvested by hand, and carded by hand, and spun into thread by hand. We wear them in homes made with iron nails that were cut by hand, from ores that were mined by hand and smelted the only way we know how: With charcoal, in clay furnaces that were made with hands and that are stoked by hand.
Technology progresses. You're playing to an end-state of AI that assumes labor disappears entirely because you have yet to see what the new labor system looks like.
Oh please, do tell.
You people realize businesses used to have rooms full of humans who clacked away at typewriters right?
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...
They have had 200 million in judgements against them by investors this year, and are filing Chapter 11 to reorganize debt and go private.
In other words, nothing to do with AI.
https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/what-re...
It is changing the economy. It is changing how work is done. We are not going back, even if the emphasis in the workplace and role it performs matures.
I'm not making a serious prediction that it will go away! I'm making an anti-prediction against the reflexive assumption of a massive increase in importance, to say that for all any would-be oracle knows, we could get the opposite, just as easily as their fortune-telling.
Economists (including but not limited to Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers and Arthur Levitt) also spent a decade arguing against Brooksley Born's 1998 warnings that unregulated over-the-counter derivatives would inevitably lead to a financial crisis.
Economists can be spectacularly wrong and short-sighted (and blinded by prior assumptions of how things work) until suddenly the thing that should have been obvious the whole time is no longer ignorable.
The supposed massive GDP growth and jobs losses just aren’t there at this time, whatever the future may bring.
Beyond that, my hobby is film and I know tons of people in the industry. I've made indie films with them.
All the jobs have gone to Europe. It's simply cheaper to film there now. Amazon and Netflix built infrastructure and taught local crews how during the pandemic content wars.
Looking at my Gen Z wife, all the eyeballs have gone to TikTok.
There's the answer.
When I was growing up movies were watched in cinemas. It was a big event and we saw maybe 5 a year.
Over time more start appearing on TV, but those tended to be a bit older, but also cherry picked the good ones. (I don't live in the US).
PayTV didn't appear until mid 80s. They had more movies, but again tended to cherry pick. VHS meant we recorded the ones we wanted to see. All these things together meant we tended to watch "good" movies.
Hollywood of course were making lots and lots of movies we never saw, or had and way to see. The bad stuff simply didn't have a channel to the world.
The arrival of Video Stores changed that. Suddenly the mediocre (and worse) had an outlet. And trust me, there was plenty of rubbish in there. But there was still a cost to distribute.
Today, distribution cost is zero. If Netflix commission a movie it'll get onto Netflix. Regardless of the result. Some really good stuff, most mediocre, lots of real rubbish.
Repeat for Amazon, Disney, Hulu, et al.
Overall movies haven't gotten worse. Objectively production values are higher. But your access to mediocre and bad movies has increased.
Judging past output though introduces survivor bias, which in turn makes comparison to today misleading.
The scene workers have gotten better though. And there are a lot of good movies being made still, but not by the mainstream industry that used to really deliver.
1. Beverly Hills Cop
2. Ghostbusters
3. The Terminator
4. Gremlins
5. A Nightmare on Elm Street
6. Police Academy
7. Dune
8. Repo Man
9. The NeverEnding Story
10. Karate Kid
11. Romancing the Stone
12. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Or pretty much any year from the 1980s and 1990s.
At some point we lost good writing in favor of silly jokes and narrative in favor of spectacle.
For a while in the oughts I taught a film history class, though, and even 2 decades ago the kiddos thought anything in black and white, much less with no sound or with subtitles, was literally unwatchable. I'm okay with the idea that the students' tastes in media are legitimate, though I have my own tastes and think they are differently-informed.
And further, I dunno if "silly jokes and narrative in favor of spectacle" are new. Think Keystone Cops and Busby Berkley.
I like Battleship Potemptkin and Citizen Kane as much as the next person, but that's not all of what was popular.
Paring the thousands of films from the 80s down to a list of 10 does a lot of work to make that looks like it was better, when in fact I was in middle school and I could literally go see a movie for 75c. I remember some really bad ones, and I am certain I've forgotten a lot of bad ones.
I also have problems making a list of good films from the last decade, but I think that's because I got burnt out and stopped watching long-form video mediums when I left my PhD program. I am not sure I have seen 10 long form narrative works in the last 5 years.
Funnily enough, those happen to be two movies I didn't enjoy beyond their historic relevance.
I'm not saying that spectacle and one-liners are bad - movies like that are included in my list for 1984. It is when you substitute good writing with funny lines and have spectacle instead of a compelling narrative that I see a problem.
...No wait, to be fair, they're very good at influencing. They can influence like no previous generation ever could.
As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, CA's labor-pool's own hostility to the film industry (via strikes) also played a big role. They gave the studios the finger, then are surprised that the studios took their ball and went elsewhere.
Also, I see this anti-union sentiment a lot on HackerNews: Whenever unions strike, there is near universal rejection as a strategy. The anti-union sentiment on HN is tiring, especially from the US and UK. Those big strikes in Los Angeles resulted in large pay increases and/or expansion of territory (better payouts for streaming, etc.) for those union members. In short, it worked.
It's akin to the auto worker's unions, but without the same degree of government backstopping for the industry. The auto workers unions are an anchor around the necks of the auto industry, while government bailout dollars are a lifejacket - it's clear California (and more broadly the US) doesn't see the same need to subsidize the unions in TV and film.
If we think about it, AI can be seen as dumping cheap products below cost and disrupting the domestic market.
I mean the real cost of production is unknown due to skirting of copyright laws in many cases and even if we discount that, it is well known that AI is being pushed far below the actual costs for providers. There are disruptive technologies, yes but this is not the same if the real cost is hidden or deferred and it doesn't compare with horses/cars or whatever analogy that comes up often.
In the physical world, this is called dumping isn't it? Just because tech is involved it doesn't change the fact. Countries already have anti dumping laws.
Copyright laws themselves are not completely "real", not in the sense that digging coal out of the ground is. They were once tailored for Disney to maximize its profit; now that Disney is no longer the juggernaut it once was, they may be re-tailored to maximize the profits of the new juggernauts.
That's what AI companies are doing to cut costs dramatically, but since it's domestic, there's a sudden apathy towards the original claims.
Which(if any of this ever fucking mattered at all) would undermine the years long campaign of china-hate that at it's core, was large Capital holders being upset their outsourcing plan backfired once China was no longer a captive third-world backwater.
So here in the "west" we created our own machine to speed up the Chinese "Shanzai" and pretend like it's suddenly innovation instead of theft.
This whole situation is why one should never, ever trust the rich man's opinion on foreigners, as it's always always always just to line their pockets.
Anyway what I’m trying to say is that I think COVID and its aftermath is a much bigger factor here than AI, especially when it comes to “live / performing” art