The day will come where movie actors and celebs become CGI intellectual property, without unions, dressing rooms, personal problems off-set, etc. He's right to have this concern, it's happening now.
You need physical actors because you need someone relatable for the audience. Despite experiments like Tamagoshi, showing that computers can provide occupation of mind, I believe love can still only be provided by humans, no matter how faulty they are.
Sofia and Hatsune Miku have shown that you can have a relatable, non-human persona. Combined with the K-pop model/marketing machinery and performance capture by replaceable gig-work session actors/contractors, I can easily see a host of virtual performers who are celebrities in their own right, but with Jet Li's martial art prowess as part of their library, and fully owned by corporations.
What's not to like, no ever-increasing salary demands, multiple scenes with the same "actors" can be filmed simultaneously, the celebrity never ages, and the non-celebrity human performers behind the scenes are easily replaceable cogs: there will be huge cost savings.
I don't see how that is a problem. If a computer can do an equal or better job then it makes little sense to keep such a heap of actors around. "real" actors in movies should then just become a curiosity just like still see horse carriages around as curiosity.
I would negotiate a different contract, depending on how my work would be used. Being paid is only half the story. Like software licenses: you can use this for free if you release your own code as GPL, but we’ll come to a different agreement if you want to use it differently. Different terms for different use cases.
Because he might be one of those people where life didn’t hand him shit. In other words, he fought against competition at every step of the game, so he seriously considers the nature of competition and the implications.
It’s like a rich person that grew up poor, they are constantly saving money. Of course they don’t really have to at this point, but that was their experience. All Jet Li might know is competition (just off the top of my head, he is under the shadow of Bruce Lee, similar to Jackie Chan, and the whole Hong Kong scene is second to America).
> It’s like a rich person that grew up poor, they are constantly saving money. Of course they don’t really have to at this point, but that was their experience.
Is the implication that people don't learn new things from new situations/environments and are forever stuck modeling the world the way they did when they were young teenagers/adults?
People certainly learn new things, but habits are a real thing. It's a natural tendency to keep doing what you are already doing, sometimes even if there are terrible consequences. See cigarette addicts for an example.
I wouldn’t disagree, but I would question how widely applicable this is across cultures and socio-economic strata.
In particular it would be interesting to compare the commonly accepted folk wisdom (e.g. “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”) with a more objective analysis (if such a thing exists).
Depends on how strong the systemic models were from the past. Thorough experience dealing with, say, people and how they interact competitively, will have a outsized reverberation later in life. You never ever want to be wrong about people.
A soda drinking habit you can’t kick? You’ll mostly kick it once you get serious. The other stuff is probably going to take life changing events to alter.
There are a ton of stories about incredibly successful people in the entertainment industry who end up bankrupt. Sure, that comes along with stories of wasting money. But it seems like the ones who make the most money are both lucky and really care about IP. I don't think Jet Li should ignore concerns about IP just because he's rich.