5 ms·
We wanted the singularity, but all we got was more unemployed artists.
by mensetmanusman 3y ago
We wanted the singularity, but all we got was more unemployed artists.
- justinjlynn 3y agoPerhaps the problem is people needing to be employed to justify their existence or as a proxy measure to their ongoing contribution to society and its degree?
- fnordpiglet 3y agoI’m a firm believer in a post toil to survive reality. The end of employment is godliness would be a great thing. I’d rather see artists create art than work in artist hamster wheels for the health insurance.
- justinjlynn 3y ago“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” ― Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoI generally agree, but the specific premise here is vile. Some megacorp gets rights to your digital puppet that they can exploit to their pleasure, while the actors get almost nothing? Yikes. Even if we didn't need to justify our existence, a lot of actors would probably still like to & want to act.
- justinjlynn 3y agoOh, I agree. The concept of being capable of being coerced into signing away your likeness in perpetuity is absolutely vile. In a real sense it's the only thing you own that can't be separated from you. These contracts should be illegal just in the way signing a contract to endenture yourself is illegal.
- mitchdoogle 3y agoI don't understand the likeness thing. We can reliably generate faces of all kinds. Why pay anyone for it when it can just be generated? Are they worried the generated one will look like a real person and open them to liability?
- thedailymail 3y agoIt could be quite useful/profitable for a Hollywood studio to acquire the rights-in-perpetuity to a young actor's image in 2023 for $200, if that same actor then goes on to become a superstar.
- justinjlynn 3y agoWell, they're not buying the 'likeness' in most cases as much as they're buying the actor's 'star power' - i.e. their ability to trade on their own name and performance independently of any one media product. That is, simply having their name attached to something makes that thing more likely to do well financially. This is what they're buying - and why casting "unknowns" in a "big budget" production is rather unusual. It's more risky than simply paying, say, Chris Pratt or Scarlett Johansson to perform. As you might imagine, investors don't like risk except the kind that guarantees them returns.
- revelio 3y agoNot for background roles though. There are no stars in that world.
- supertimor 3y agoHow do you think a lot of actors start their career?
- justinjlynn 3y agoPrecisely this.
- Pxtl 3y agoHow did we end up in a future where the robots get to write and paint but I still have to do my own laundry?
- juanani 3y agowell are you doing your laundry by hand? I'm going to praise our washing machines here, glorious immobile 1-2 function robot.
- satvikpendem 3y agoYeah, I don't understand either, hardware advances have made it such that, unlike when I was a child washing each and every piece of clothing by hand, I can now just chuck em into machines and it comes out perfectly each time.
- ronsor 3y agoBecause software is easy, but robotics hardware is actually very difficult.
- antisthenes 3y agoIf you owned the robots that write and paint, you could afford servants that do your laundry. This is the future that hardcore anti-communists wanted. It's come true.
- worrycue 3y agoAnd unemployed support people. Harbinger of things to come. AI will come for us all eventually. It’s unnerving that everyone is so enthusiastic about advancing AI but put zero effort into figuring how society is going to function with significant unemployment.
- civilitty 3y ago> It’s unnerving that everyone is so enthusiastic about advancing AI but put zero effort into figuring how society is going to function with significant unemployment. We know exactly what happens next. It was laid out in Soylent Green and Day After Tomorrow
- CharlesW 3y agoArtists are on alert now, but after spending a few weeks rewriting a project using a new-to-me framework and language with our current "Model T" generative AI as my pair programmer, I'm reasonably confident that software and hardware engineers are going to be in the middle of their own existential crisis soon.
- rich_sasha 3y agoI suppose, if we ever get to the point where humans don't have to work, this is how the start of it looks like. Also the start of terrible dystopias... But first we'll see AI chip away at jobs. More and more revenues will flow into AI and their owners and less into the hands of everyone else. Eventually AI would be the only game in town, plus an army of unemployed people. The only thing to do then would be to tax or socialise the profits of the AI and feed the masses with the proceeds. Or see enormous inequality and a repeat of the French revolution. How apt to write this on Bastille day! In fact, I think there is little difference between the AI hegemony and the landowner one on 18th century. Back then you had a tiny slither of population own all the land, most of everyone else was doing menial underpaid jobs.
- polishdude20 3y agoBack then though, there was less surveillance , less of a feeling of alienation among your countrymen. Nowadays, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone willing to join some revolution