In June 2023, Paul Skye Lehrman and his partner Linnea Sage were driving near their home in New York City, listening to a podcast about the ongoing strikes in Hollywood and how artificial intelligence (AI) could affect the industry.
The episode was of interest because the couple are voice-over performers and - like many other creatives - fear that human-sounding voice generators could soon be used to replace them.
This particular podcast had a unique hook – they interviewed an AI-powered chat bot, equipped with text-to-speech software, to ask how it thought the use of AI would affect jobs in Hollywood.
But, when it spoke, it sounded just like Mr Lehrman.
That night they spent hours online, searching for clues until they came across the site of text-to-speech platform Lovo. Once there, Ms Sage said she found a copy of her voice as well.
They have now filed a lawsuit against Lovo. The firm has not yet responded to that or the BBC’s requests for comment.
Automation is taking the creative jobs and leaving us with the dirty, dangerous, and low paid jobs.
It was supposed to be the other way around!
That’s not even close to true though, it just makes it obvious you’ve never been on a building site, in a mine, smelting works, factory or pretty much any traditionally dangerous job.
Creative jobs aren’t widely displaced yet, there’s the hint of that in the future but as of now it’s still an increasing field, especially in content creation and marketing. Manufacturing jobs have been getting replaced rapidly, when my parents were kids a whistle would blow and machinists would flood out the two factories and fill the pubs and streets, now both factories have closed because one factory can make and transport them far cheaper with a thousandth of the workforce. We do have factories in this areas still, they make much more complex things but the majority of their workforce is in the offices because CNC and CV assisted QC replaced the need for people to lug heavy things or twiddle control knobs all day.
I have friends that fucked their back up in their twenties carrying bricks up ladders, this job was common twenty five years ago but is virtually nonexistent now because of automation (largely factory based automation allowing prefab pieces and labour saving tools to out compete people working for minimum wage)
Yes it’s a fun and funny thing to say and I understand the sentiment but look at old pathe news reels showing how farming happens and compare them to a modern farm, automation has been helping people avoid backbreaking labour for decades - they don’t even drive the tractors on a lot of farms these days.
I get what you’re saying. I did bristle a bit at first over the “traditionally dangerous job” bit because I very much did a dangerous job. But you’re right that I didn’t grow up in a manufacturing town or work a factory job. So it would seem automation has already hit the dirty jobs sector pretty hard, it’s just coming for the creative and professional class now. So our thinking about how it’s supposed to work is just behind by a generation.
I wonder how much of our current “affordability” crisis has to do with half the factories and 99% of the workforce being replaced but not necessarily compensated out of the increased productivity? Sure some people were able to step up to higher paying jobs controlling the automation but it’s a rule in economics that not everyone can be promoted or get higher paying jobs. It follows in some schools of thought that workers losing a job through no fault of their own should be compensated.
Think of coal mining as a prime example. People in mining towns will grasp at anything in their desperation for jobs, usually environmental protection, without seeming to understand the long term drop in industry employment from automation is the dominant factor. That, and when a mine plays out, the mining company employs elsewhere
It’s a super complex situation, a large part of our economic crisis is actually because traditionally impoverished nations which we used to exploit freely now have growing economies, education, and workers protections so we’re not able to import raw materials so cheaply - even places like C.A.R., Bangladesh and similar have effective government polices focused on improving workers rights and fighting outside corruption - CAR for example has already implemented strong regulation on most it’s lithium mines and ongoing processes are tightening up conditions in the remaining areas.
This isn’t something we really like to address but it’s very significant in global economics and western markets, the math of it all is complex because while we’re not able to exploit these areas freely new economies allows for more trade however our western advantage is also now fading so where we once had huge auto markets, monopolies on high-end computer tech and even good steel this just not true anymore as advances in once 3rd world economies and tech makes it possible for world class manifacturing to happen almost anywhere.
Factory automation is actually what’s saving us from far worse economic effects of this global rug pull, it used to take several man hours to make products we can now produce in a fraction of a man second. I’ll draw some diagrams if you want but a key metric is production potential per capita which is the amount of things that can be made per person, if it takes ten people a day to make one thing then that thing should cost about ten days labour to buy that thing - of course also including the time taken to pack, transport, and all the other requires steps, and each step has its own costs that must be split into the cost, a truck or train journey adds not just the journey but the fraction of the cost of the vehicle and its many parts when split between its lifetime utility…
It’s even more complex math when we try to think of the best choice, a real traveling salesman problem, a very expensive train will reduce time and cost per journey so if in its lifetime it gets a lot of use then it’ll pay itself back but it it doesn’t then we’re never recapturing the initial cost. Manufacturing has been churning on this problem for the last few decades, it’s the same problem we get when deciding when to launch a trip to the nearest star - the first ship to launch will likely get overtaken by a far more advanced one launched 100 years later. Do you automate now or wait for the next gen tools that cost half as much to install and run?
So to go back to where we were, our easily exploited 3rd world labour force is drying up and so is our access to cheap resources and so is our high-value and luxury goods market - if we weren’t able to upgrade our tooling at the same time these markets evolved then it’d take a lot of people just to dig the coal needed to smelt the steel for a car engine and each car, tractor, delivery van would have to reflect that in its price and availability - even in pure communism without inequity the math simply doesn’t allow everyone to live well.
Automation has allowed us to drastically lower the time it takes to create things which means someone acting as a worker in that chain should be able to afford a far larger amount of things produced In that economy, if one person can supervise machines making a million resistors a day rather than making one per day by hand then every step in the economy that requires a resistor has the cost of that piece cut to one millionth.
There’s a number of reasons this isn’t very obvious in our lived experience beside the fact it’s offsetting the loss of exploitable poor people, rising living standards is a big one - even just the foods we regularly eat or have the option to eat are wild compared to fifty years ago. We rely on things that are hugely advanced like mobile phones, social media, public transport when previously the only option was to not talk to people or go places unless you’re super rich.
There is of course a other obvious reason and that’s the abaurd levels of inequality that we accept as normal, not just private jets and yachts but our whole society is structured to afford pointless luxury to some while others have to scrabble just to be alive, this is a form of stratification based on power which happens all through history and often causes old orders to collapse. The people with some economic power use it to exploit those without, in our economy things like increasing property portfolios by using money earned in rent to purchase more rental properties and that sort of behavior but also the increasing focus on luxury goods as that’s where the profit is, why make a business targeting poor people when tailoring it to rich people will earn you more? Hence so many absurd and pointless industries have huge budgets but poor people things don’t even get tried - those industries benefit from the work of everyone but only benefit the affluent.
I’ve already written too much but I will say if people learned how amazing open source is and could be then we could solve so.much of the inequality here and globally which would help us poors to enjoy the real benefit of automated manufacturing.
Well ideally the resulting wealth would be shared and no one would live in poverty.
But that’s not happening either.
It kinda is a bit if you really look at quality of life changes in the last hundred years, even the last fifty - yes people feel like food is more expensive but a large part of that is diets are far better and more diverse for poor people. We have access to far higher quality stuff and this is a trend that’s been going strong since the start of the industrial revolution, do you know anyone that wears the same jute shirt every day? If so its a weird style choice not because they can’t spend less than an hours minimum wage to get a new shirt. Want to learn about house flys or rocket engines? I can point you to huge amounts of amazing free resources, it’s not too long ago you’d have to walk to the library to get a paragraph in an encyclopedia.
Sure it doesn’t feel amazing because we all want more, we want what the current rich have but actually look not that far back in time and we have access to far better things than the wealthy in terms of food, entertainment, and so many things. The rich also have far less power, again its easy to overlook but computer tools have eroded their control of media and government considerably which ironically is part of the reason we’re so aware of the existing inequities.
The 2nd part is plain wrong. GAFAM and a handful of others basically control the media now, both journalistic and entertainment media, it’s not a true ecosystem anymore, not to mention control of the economy. Who controls the algorithms and decide what will be shown, what will get viral, and what will not get shown, what will be shown but remain marginal, who earns money through their channel is the one who controls the media and public square. USA’s Government is still a one-party pro-corporation pro-imperialism dual institution, that is smart enough to allow a handful of not too dissonant outsiders to show around but vetoing them when actually necessary. Dissonant voices and opposition already existed before, it’s not because they still exist or maybe are more known that control has diminished.
And the first part is historically wrong and dangerous for the future. The start of the industrial revolution did not lead to an increase in quality of life, people were mass emigrating away FROM europe (where most of the industry was) TO get to USA, Canada, Australia, Latin America (less or little or no industry, but where they could obtain a piece of LAND, and live off agriculture, in a largely pre industrial way until the early 20th century). Life expectancy was lower in cities than in rural areas until the advent of modern medicine in the 20th century inverted the paradigm. Likewise, there is no ‘natural rule’ that innovation will lead to increase in quality of life for everyone everywhere, and a lot of that increase in quality came not from companies and bosses, but from worker movements that through blood and disruption managed to bargain and establish welfare laws, in a time where the bourgeoisie actually needed those workers to make the large sums of money. That is not really the case today, see automation and offshoring eroding those levers of power.
When polled what most people consistently want is to provide for their family without feeling like they’re struggling to do so. That standard varies by income class but for most people it simply means food, shelter, a night out with friends once a week, a night out with family once a week, and a vacation once a year. (It doesn’t need to be international or Disneyland)
You’re right that we’ve come a long way since the industrial revolution. However there’s two things you’re missing. The industrial revolution actually represented a lower standard of living for the workers moving into the cities, which is why we see the great statesmen of the 18th and 19th centuries begin to push for policies about sick pay, healthcare, unemployment insurance, and basic standards. They weren’t pro worker so much as they were trying to head unionization off by providing benefits the union speakers promised. Many of these people had times in living memory that they worked half the time and were able to drink at the pub and provide for their family. The top down benefits scheme of leaders like Bismarck didn’t work though because the owners were the ones setting the system up and they tried to give just enough to keep people quiescent. Not actually engage in the system with good faith.
So we fought literal shadow wars over the right to unionize and once we won that right things began to actually improve for workers. That brings us to point 2; we’ve seen how well we can share out the profits without going communist. We had a high water mark in the 1960’s and 1970’s of being able to pay for stuff with the fewest hours worked since workers had to move to the cities a couple hundred years prior. Since then though it has been a grinding degradation of purchasing power in the lower half of the economy. It doesn’t just feel like everything is more expensive, it actually is. The mode of income, (data point that appears the most in a set of data, in this case the income bucket that has the most people) sits around $30k a year. The household median is around $70k a year. Ideally we’d be clustered around that median except for outliers. In reality it seems that the dataset is relatively spare between those two numbers and then it has a more normal distribution after the median.
That means that all of our calculations based on the median don’t account for this group that’s stuck at half that number for some reason. The 70k-100k group might be saving less for retirement with the current inflation problems, but the 30k group is literally getting evicted. Recent studies show that homeless people are generally from the area that they’re homeless in, do not have a drug habit or picked one up only after becoming homeless, and they worked full time in the 12 months before becoming homeless.
We do live in a time of marvels. Which is why it’s so galling that we’re actively leaving people behind.
Says who?
Everyone that doesn’t belong in a ditch biting a live grenade.