[thom]

I think there will always be a premium for human-sourced media. People are going to love being able to tweak the cast and narrator for their favourite audiobooks, but there will always be a market for your favourite celebrity's reading as well. People will swear they can tell the difference between a human versus a machine rendition, and debates will rage the same way they do with audio- and oenophiles.

Either way, we'll see within a decade, I expect. I would argue it's much, much simpler than self-driving cars - the text models of today already understand (or at least can classify) a great deal of subtext and sentiment, and the actual audio rendering has become extremely listenable on short texts.