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Musicians wage war against evil robots (2012)
- DeWilde 4y agoHas there ever been a case when such movements successfully halted some technological progress?
- fullshark 4y agoMLB umpires calling balls/strikes instead of machines. Probably the most absurd situation as viewers at home can see clearly when they are wrong/right immediately. I'm sure there's lot of other (better) examples where unions are strong and/or experimental technology carries risk and the market is heavily regulated (e.g. healthcare).
- mjr00 4y ago> MLB umpires calling balls/strikes instead of machines. Hah true but this is more of a "spirit of the game" rule than anything. Same idea with football/soccer, there's certainly no technological barrier preventing the use of an accurate game clock to get an exact amount of stoppage time, or even pausing the clock during play, but they keep on out of tradition I guess.
- tremon 4y agoA predetermined game time is much easier for TV broadcasts: they don't have to schedule filler content for when the game ends earlier or later than anticipated. I've already been hearing complaints around the last World Cup that all the VAR-induced injury time was eating into the ad blocks.
- SoftTalker 4y agoWhy not have a pitching machine? And a hitting robot?
- fullshark 4y agoDo you watch baseball for the umps? To see them show their 99percentile talent at calling balls/strikes?
- williamcotton 4y agoJoe West thinks you do!
- WalterBright 4y agoHuman error just makes the game more interesting and less predictable.
- int_19h 4y agoHuman error in judgment doesn't.
- WalterBright 4y agoYeah, it does. F1 also has their disputes with rulings by their committee. All part of the game.
- throwaway675309 4y agoRidiculous. You're conflating human error as part of the skills in the game itself (failing to catch a pop fly) versus human error that results in inconsistencies of rules (marking a pitch as a strike when it is quantifiably outside the strike zone). One of these makes the game more interesting, the other one makes it more frustrating. Can you guess which one is which, or should I call for a ref?
- WalterBright 4y agoThe solution is to win by a wider margin. Or schmooze the refs!
- williamcotton 4y ago
- mitchbob 4y agoThe movement inspired by the book Silent Spring [1] is certainly one. [1] http://www.rachelcarson.org/SilentSpring.aspx http://www.rachelcarson.org/SilentSpring.aspx
- moffkalast 4y agoOkay, any examples where said 'technological progress' wasn't literally spraying everything with deadly poison and giving everyone cancer?
- jefftk 4y agoWhat about the anti-nuclear movement?
- moffkalast 4y agoMaybe? There are apparently ~430 active reactors worldwide today but the number has been practically constant since the 90s. https://www.statista.com/statistics/263945/number-of-nuclear-power-plants-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/263945/number-of-nuclear... Likely more to do with the massive expense of building them than any movement though.
- lofatdairy 4y agoIf I recall Germany's anti nuclear movement is very successful and got a few shut down after Fukushima and in recent history.
- fooooobarbaz 4y agoThe clipper chip comes to mind. Of course "progress" is a relative term, but NSA surely saw it as progress. Companies like Uber are now leaving some European cities[0] after facing a more adversarial political environment than they do in the states. I've also heard stories about places like Uruguay, which have laws that apparently protect some workers from automation and self-service (i.e. attended gas stations, etc.) 0: https://thenextweb.com/news/uber-forced-leave-brussels-what-happened-to-european-dream https://thenextweb.com/news/uber-forced-leave-brussels-what-...
- dragonwriter 4y ago> The clipper chip comes to mind. But...technological progress on cryptographic hardware didn’t stop just because that particular attempt to foist a precompromised system onto the market failed. (Neither did the social technology of the NSA manipulating the market to adopt their precompromised systems.) So how is that a movement stopping technological progress?
- thewebcount 4y agoIt’s not just Uruguay. I think both New Jersey and Oregon forbid drivers to pump their own gas. [0] [0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/states-where-you-cant-pump-your-own-gas https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/states-wher...
- EamonnMR 4y agoAntinuclear activism was incredibly successful. We may get there soon with infectious disease research. Also, we have (mostly) successfully enforced a convention against using CRISPR to create transhuman monster embryos.
- moffkalast 4y ago"Geneticists shouldn't make any superhuman embryos." "Geneticists should get to create one CRISPR monster, as a treat."
- throw892398 4y agoI spend 10 months locked up, because of infectious disease research. Is someone going to pay me $300 000 in damages? You do not need activists, just users!
- SyzygistSix 4y agoWhat's the story with this?
- asdff 4y agoAlso the anti GMO movement is normalized, which is scary because we need gmos to feed our species among countless other important things, especially as we are changing the climate faster than many populations are able to respond. So many products proudly wear that gmo free project label.
- rowan_mcd 4y agoTrain / metro conductor unions have successfully blocked automation, multiple times in multiple cities
- asdff 4y agoIt gets even worse when you consider nyc in particular. Not only do they have an operator, there is also the conductor. One actually drives the train, the other exists to point out a window for seemingly historical purposes and control the doors. In most other systems a train is operated by 1 person who is able to control the doors just fine, because that never needs to happen at the same time as driving and there are these things called mirrors.
- nitwit005 4y agoYes, but essentially always relating to safety or environmental damage. It's unsurprisingly much easier to make your case when there are hundreds of poisoned children, or when mining companies cause flooding that destroy people's homes.
- asdff 4y agoCar dealers certainly. Initially automakers did not have the ability to perform sales and service across the country and needed dealers to take on the risk of running these dealerships. That quickly changed as you can imagine, so car dealers were able to lobby for legislation that banned direct sales from automakers thus preserving their little fiefdoms long past their need.
- legerdemain 4y agoAnd it's true. Recoded music ravaged the ranks of movie organists and other accompanists to the point that providing incidental music has not been an occupation in many decades. In more recent decades, being a session musician for regional or mid-tier bands has stopped providing a living, following the huge consolidation in radio and music publishing in the 90s and 00s. There is far less live music today, at least in the US, than there has ever been in my lifetime.
- jnovek 4y ago“There is far less live music today” Subjectively it doesn’t feel like less than when I was in high school and college (late 90s early 2000s), it feels like substantially more. Especially as pandemic precautions have wound down, I can’t seem to walk into a bar without running into a live band. I think there’s quite a bit more studio music coming out, too, as people can self-release on Spotify, etc.
- GCA10 4y agoWe've probably made it easier for people to have "half a career" in music -- getting paid a modest amount of money on weekends, evenings, etc. to do what they love. In my own circle, I've got friends who earn $5,000 to $30,000 a year playing live music -- and then round out their earnings doing some amount of teaching, bookkeeping or whatever. Ditto for actors, writers, semi-pro athletes, etc. The more I think about these tradeoffs, the harder it is to see them as unilaterally good or evil. It's a second-best solution for dealing with the gap between what people love to do, and what pays the bills. Not sure if there is a first-best solution. Some countries have created "artists' cartels," which provide subsidized higher incomes for people in the club. That does make it easier to make a living as an approved artist. But the jockeying about who gets into the club, who pays the subsidies and what it takes to stay in -- argh! it all gets really protracted and ugly.
- jakelazaroff 4y agoIt’s not a silver bullet, but an expanded social safety net would make it significantly less risky to pursue art (or open source software or whatever) as more than just a “nights and weekends” thing.
- jansan 4y agoWho would have thought that musicians would become Luddites one day.
- SethMurphy 4y agoThere is no one type of musician. Many do it to carry on a tradition, while others do it to blaze their own path, for the next generation to carry on. I myself see the first as natural luddites, even with the younger generations, possibly more so.
- EamonnMR 4y agoWe're all going to be luddites at this rate.
- blondin 4y agowhat a fantastic piece of history! curious why there is no parallel with streaming music. streaming has changed music so much (for the worse in some cases) and yet, everyone seemed to have embraced it.
- SoftTalker 4y agoEveryone has embraced it now. That was certainly not the case early on.
- jefftk 4y agoStreaming was very controversial when it was introduced. For example: http://thetrichordist.com/2013/06/24/my-song-got-played-on-pandora-1-million-times-and-all-i-got-was-16-89-less-than-what-i-make-from-a-single-t-shirt-sale/ http://thetrichordist.com/2013/06/24/my-song-got-played-on-p...
- bitwize 4y agoI saw the title and thought "I'm KILROY! KILROY! KILROY! Kilroy."
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nuc1e0n 4y agoIn one of the quotes from this article "We think the public will tire of mechanical music and will want the real thing". It seems to me the public is now tiring of CGI explosions at the expense of character based stories in films. 3D was a fad also.
- rockemsockem 4y agoThere are many good movies that use CGI explosions. You can't just look at the movies that are bad and say that people don't like them because of the CGI. Also the public doesn't seem to tired of them based on how well marvel movies still do.
- nuc1e0n 4y agoTell me without looking it up, What was the name of the one after infinity war?
- rockemsockem 4y agoI'm not sure what this was supposed to prove. I said the Marvel movies do well, meaning they do well at the box office. I also said that there are great movies that use CGI explosions. I did *not* say that the Marvel movies are great. They most decidedly are not IMO. You don't have to go all Chris Nolan and blow things up for real to make a good movie. Although I do like a real explosion :)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ribosometronome 4y agoI think that the top grossing movies or 2022 are all CGI explosion type movies is better proof that there's still a pretty good appetite for CGI explosion type movies than that I remember it was Endgame.
- nuc1e0n 4y ago
- slyall 4y agoThe Podcast "One Year" had an Episode about the 1942–1944 musicians' strike. Most US musicians stopped recording music for nearly a year. Podcast: https://slate.com/podcasts/one-year/s4/1942/e3/recording-ban-1942-james-c-petrillo-the-american-federation-of-musicians-and-the-creation-of-bebop https://slate.com/podcasts/one-year/s4/1942/e3/recording-ban... Wikipedia Article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1942%E2%80%931944_musicians%27_strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1942%E2%80%931944_musicians%27...
- teddyh 4y agoI stand with Compressorhead.
- Animats 4y ago"The time is coming fast when the only living thing around a motion picture house will be the person who sells you your ticket. Everything else will be mechanical." Mission accomplished.
- thewebcount 4y agoIronically, I almost never buy a ticket from a human anymore. I either print it out at home or use the kiosk to get one. There is a person who takes the ticket, though.
- ed-209 4y agoAmusing and yet I worry it's a straw-man for the contemporary issue of automation replacing human workers more generally (which I find decidedly less amusing).
- jaggederest 4y agomusicians:phonograph::writers:gpt3 I think it's interesting that people are panicking now that it's beginning to intrude on "intellectual" pursuits, even though automation has already had a substantial effect on most other parts of society. I am not sure there's anything different, for better or worse, about "creative" professions.
- timoth3y 4y agoI'm kind of surprised that this article did not mention John Philip Sousa, who was both one of the most successful "recording artists" of that time and one of the most outspoken opponents of recorded music. (If you are American, you definitely know Sousa. Think of any patriotic march you've ever heard. Sousa probably wrote that.) Sousa was not so much worried about the economic effects, but about how the new technology would change the social function of music. It would change what music was. He worried that instead of people gathering around the family or neighborhood pianist and singing together, they would be alone in their own rooms passively listening. He worried that children would no longer gather on neighbourhood stoops to make up their own little songs and sing them together, but would all start passively consuming the same music as every one else in the country. Sousa was worried that recoding technology would change music from active social interactions where we create music together into isolated, passive consumption. Sousa was right.
- boredemployee 4y agoAnd that allowed us to move from a society in which only those who had money could make music and join groups, to a society that can express themselves artistically and musically in a much more democratic way, because many more people can have the means to produce music in their home. People can discover new music and share it in real time with their micro-communities online. Creating possibilities for artists who don't live in big cities to become world wide known. I'm glad he was right.
- zwkrt 4y agos/produce/replay Yes reproduction allowed the top .01% of musicians to gain world renown, but as GP stated it really made the activity of socially enjoying and creating music less accessible.
- boredemployee 4y ago>> it really made the activity of socially enjoying and creating music less accessible. Not sure if I agree, I still see people doing music together or gathering to listen to music, but maybe I'm biased by my environment.
- exact_string 4y agoMost of these historical disruptive technologies seem to affect only a relatively small group of professionals or then small part of human skills. Therefore there are not too many people complaining and also most of these people can find some new jobs, perhaps after retraining. On the contrary, AI could affect large groups of professionals and large (if not all) part of human skills. The protests opposing AI might then be completely different scale than the previous protests. Also the an individual losing their job would suffer more since there might be nothing they could do, even after retraining, that AI couldn't.
- PhileasNietzche 4y agoYes. It's so terrible what cinema did to music. Why can't we have a symphony in every theater? Oh wait. It probably has a bit to do with the ridiculous waste of space, not having nearly enough trained musicians to meet the demand of the billions of consumers on this planet, no chance in hell of paying them all a fair wage if there were, etc. Here is yet another example of wishing for "good old days" that will not be remotely possible to bring into modernity on the same scale without a culling of, oh, 75+% of the population.
- asdff 4y agoConsider these two hypothetical situations of a bar. In one, there is a jazz band. They play all night and get paid some money. If you go to New Orleans, there are dozens of bars like this, all with their own jazz band at the same time. Those are people who wouldn't have work in music otherwise without such opportunities being available. Meanwhile consider another bar, there is jazz music, some Duke Ellington song, but it is coming from spotify. Does Duke get paid here? No, he's dead. Do his grandkids? No, Sony owns the rights. Suddenly there are no musicians getting paid at all for jazz music to be played in this case, just ultra wealthy Sony getting slightly wealthier. That seems worse to me than the above. The idea that this wouldn't scale now that we have billions of people versus when it did scale fine when we had millions doesn't make too much sense to me. It's not like we all make an order of magnitude less money than our ancestors did generations ago, in fact, despite the population today being at the highest levels its been, we seem to all have more money and access to more resources and better technology. Maybe if somehow we lived in an alternate universe where no recorded music was invented, being a musician might be as common of a job as being a bartender today, and one where some people make a ton of money from tips perhaps. Maybe there would be levels to it, like you'd get a great and well paid in house musician if the restaurant was one to hire a well paid sommelier in addition to bartenders. Somehow though it seems like more people would be playing instruments at a given time in this alternative reality at the very least.
- 8bitsrule 4y agoTimely. 210 years ago today (Jan 2), 66 Luddites went on trial for destroying looms which had put 'half the population' (YMMV) out of work. The beef was legitimate then and still is. 'Advances' in tech (just as sound film did in 1927) can quickly create a lot of human pain (not that this forum needs a reminder) which may take a long time to moderate. "Why the Luddites Matter" [https://librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com/2018/01/18/why-the-luddites-matter/ https://librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com/2018/01/18/why-the-...]
- thewebcount 4y agoThis reminds me of what happened with the Fairlight CMI in the 80s[0]: > This radical eight-bit, eight-voice machine could sample only at 24kHz, but ushered in the sampling revolution that so alarmed the [Australian] Musicians’ Union it tried to ban its use in recording sessions. [0] https://musictech.com/reviews/studio-icons-fairlight-cmi/ https://musictech.com/reviews/studio-icons-fairlight-cmi/