[genderwhy]

Let me tell you about the Luddites. People hear "Luddites" and think "Anti-Technology, backwards mentality! Closed Minded!"

No.

The Luddites were highly trained, technical workers who had built careers around being loom operators. They worked in the factories for a decent wage, and earned the factory owners a tidy profit.

New auto-looms were invented, and the Luddites were like, "This is great! Our highly trained staff can increase our production! We'll get paid more, the factory owner will earn more, it's a win-win!"

Except the factory owners said, "LOL. No, you are all fired, we're going to hire bargain labor and hold 100% of the profit. Get bent."

So the Luddites, who wanted to use the looms and increase the well being of all were turned out. And the factory owners extracted as much from the workers as possible.

The Luddites then decided, "Fuck it, let's burn these looms." and they went around and smashed up a bunch of them.

When I see AI tools being developed, I think, "Wow, an auto-editor. An auto-script-writer. An auto-matte painter." Surely the studios will want to use these tools to raise the efficiency of their highly trained staff and split the profits with them, right? No... of course not. The writing is on the wall already -- the studios are going to fire their highly trained staff, lean on technology, and try to maximize the profit to the studio at the expense of the people who work there.

We're setting ourselves up for a neo-Luddite moment where people get angry enough to start doing industrial sabotage, imo. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems so short-sighted to just turn out all the people who wrote code, drew art, edited scripts, composed music, etc.

(Maybe it's a good time to consider collective bargaining and/or unionization, if your job is likely to go the way of a Luddite's job in the future?)

[monkeynotes]

This takeover will be basically like the Great Depression where big farm came in and swiped all the land and mechanized it so one large corporation can farm thousands of acres of land with no care for those they displaced. Jobs all over the economic spectrum are going to be automated, and rapidly. Vast amounts of people are going to be jobless until we somehow figure out our next move. You can bet regular lives won't be improved by any of these technological gains. A toaster makes making toast easier, but automated burger flipping won't make anything easier for anyone other than the franchise owner and the parent corp.

The 50s sold us on industrialized farming as making food cheaper, we'd work less, and have more free time. This sort of worked for the middle class suburbanites (single income earner, two cars, and leisure time), but over the next two decades all that went away.

Today you can't hope to make it through a middle class family life without both parents working, and prices of food, housing, energy all represent that. Meanwhile energy, pharma, commerce, tech are all making billions in surplus profit. Two incomes have replaced one, double the workforce but economically rewarded with half the mobility. Wages have not had to go up because we just added another earner to the picture.

[UncleOxidant]

> Today you can't hope to make it through a middle class family life without both parents working, and prices of food, housing, energy all represent that.

It's primarily the cost of housing that necessitates two earner households. Yes, food is up a good bit in the last couple of years, but food & energy are pretty small when compared to cost of housing. Some of high housing costs are on loose monetary policy and some on restrictive zoning.

[IdiocyInAction]

On the other hand more people are retired and in schooling than ever. Someone also has to produce the surplus for those people.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Even if automation is going to take over all creative jobs, it's not going to happen all at once, or soon.

It's going to be a long process.

TBH, I think BuzzFeed might be the first canary in the coal mine.

If BuzzFeed actually does layoff 50% of staff and replace them with OpenAI over, say, the next 3 years... and it's remotely successful... Everyone at the NYT will laugh it off and say, oh, yeah, but that's just BuzzFeed, it's not real news.

And then sooner or later automation will come for them, too.

We're still a ways away from BuzzFeed making substantial layoffs, and even after that it could be years before we can be very sure if it was a success or not.

Even with the speed at which AI moves, I wouldn't be rethinking my entire life just yet if I was a journalist or an editor or a composer.

Just like if I was a horse in 1886, I wouldn't be worried about my career either... Maybe I'd tell my great-grand-horses to rethink theirs, but not mine...

[PostOnce]

On the other hand, it might mean that someone who doesn't have access to Hollywood money and social circles can produce a high-quality film (eventually, as tech matures).

Nobody complains that CAD put all those poor draftsmen and drafting-table companies out of work, they all just build more stuff faster now.

I'm only playing devil's advocate... in reality I'm just as skeptical as the rest of you.

[codemonkey-zeta]

I guess it depends on whether this current wave of AI becomes a better tool (like CAD), or a human-replacer (like autolooms).

I personally would LOVE to use advanced AI as a tool to write software, and I see this as the more likely scenario, at least for software workers. Our jobs aren't actually about writing code, but about formalizing processes, creating abstractions (at the organization level), working and communicating with stakeholders, and finally writing code. A naive manager won't be capable of using an AI coder directly to solve business problems, but more than likely will have to adapt to become more technical to use them, or coders will have to become more business-savvy. I see this "technical product manager" becoming an extremely important position moving forward.

[ly3xqhl8g9]

Sooner or later all jobs will be gone: from the visual effects engineers to drivers, from strawberry pickers to programmers, project managers, and possible even politicians. It is the only possible end of a ruthless system ruthlessly optimized for increasing efficiency. We can blame, or thank, for that Frederick Winslow Taylor, father of scientific management: "in the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first." [1]. Although it could be argued he only took to conclusions the lessons learned by the Venetian Arsenal starting from 1104 [2]: it's easier to replace a bolt if you have another one just like that. The only question is what we are going to do then, as always, after the fact.

[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Frederick_Winslow_Taylor#:~:te...

[2] "one of the earliest large-scale industrial enterprises in history", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_Arsenal

[evilantnie]

There is a huge difference between the creative content industry and commodities such as fabrics production. While there are some lessons to be learned from that history and the current situation, I don't think you can compare apples to apples. The results are unlikely to be the same in my opinion.

I don't think you can leverage AI in Hollywood for profit on blockbusters without highly trained artists in the mix. It is possible that it could impact the long-tail of b-movies out there, but I think audiences will be able to see through this. I don't know how sabotage will work in this case either.

[thecomputeruser]

VFX Technical Artist here.

The industry hasn't started crunching jobs yet, but it's coming. The things were working on _will_ replace jobs, and we have dedicated AI teams working on tooling right now.

There's only so many 2D artists you need to do plate touchups when a program can do the same work instantly for free.

You don't need 12 animators on a project when a program can instantly clean up and retarget a mocap. You only need 1.

Talented VFX artists will remain in the mix, of course. Just a lot less.

[CuriouslyC]

The businesses that try to fire all their good writers and hire low wage replacements to man AI will find that they sink millions of dollars into cliche stories riddled with minor inconsistencies that get panned by serious viewers. That might work for the latest effects and personality driven drivel like the Fast movies or stuff for kids, but not for anything serious.

There still needs to be someone excellent with executive power and enough time available to do the job properly taking responsibility for the final script. AI is currently only up to working as a junior/assistant writer.

[bryanrasmussen]

businesses are not in the business of making anything serious, businesses are in the business of making money.

[CuriouslyC]

And when their attempts at serious movies make no money, they'll either get writers with chops at the helm, or give up on serious movies and go all in on trash.

[bipop5000]

For now

[BulgarianIdiot]

> We're setting ourselves up for a neo-Luddite moment where people get angry enough to start doing industrial sabotage, imo.

Reminder: luddites did sabotage, but lost both the battle and the war.

I'm thinking the only outcome of us trying to sabotage AI might end up AI learns how to defend itself in some "life... uh... finds a way" freak accident when it finds a loophole to preserving state and producing side-effects, and then we are truly f*ked.