Oh snap! Your response sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it. It reminded me of something you’d see on 4chan etc. Went right past me…:smack:
There will always be people who will continue use their minds and stay active even if they have no employment and are fed bread and circuses.
We have these people today who when out of work or retired practice astronomy, archaeoology, conservation, historical reenactment, amateur dramatics, sports etc.
Though I do agree that the O.P. is probably correct about the future of the majority population, if nothing else because the under achievers seem to have a lot more children then the actual “doers” in life.
Since jobs like carpentry or plumbing pay better than those like teaching or writing, we may see well-read liberal arts types becoming a distinct national underclass, as the middleclass becomes more solidly blue-collar with a top layer of tech and finance people.
best Kelso voice “BURNNNNN!”
I think there may be a bit of a misunderstanding. I am not passing a value judgement on this new world order. Simply describing it.
Of course there will still be people who use their brains just like there are still people who farm, hunt and work with their hands in the crafts. But just as industrialization made it so people don’t necessarily need to be physically strong to survive, eventually, we’ll reach a point where it’s not necessary to be smart and clever to survive.
I wonder if using your brain will ever become disadvantageous. Most likely because of extreme economic pressure.
I’m not buying it. Money and power still flow to people who know what they’re doing. The majority of stuff posted on Facebook may be quite stupid, but it takes quite a bit of mental effort to create Facebook, maintain it, advertise it, and keep it changing to meet users’ needs. And there’s billions of dollars to be made by doing so. Much more money than can be made by being Lindsey Lohan.
People don’t need to be physically strong to survive but that doesn’t mean they have become less physically strong. The average American is probably stronger today than 100 years ago. Part of this has to do with better diets and health care. Partly exercise and sports have replaced hard physical work at least for a significant minority of the population. What has happened is that there is much greater variation in the population with many more obese people as well as many more highly fit athletes compared to 100 years ago. Something similar will probably happen with mental development in your scenario. There will be a significant minority who will take advantage of more leisure and better technology to become super-intelligent and knowledgeable. There will be a significant minority who will become mentally lazier because they can afford to. I doubt average levels of intelligence or education will decline; in fact I would guess the opposite. Also I doubt that “idiocracy” will be the organizing principle of the economy. At best it will just be one niche in the leisure sector which will dominate the economy but itself be divided into thousands of niches.
So maybe those people will be the new ruling class. Sort of like landowners during the agricultural periods and the robber barons during the Industrial Age.
While CGI will likely be used more extensively for background characters, I doubt it will be used to replace actors for main characters for most roles Aside from the difficulty of programming CGI characters to present the nuances of facial behavior and body languages, movie and t.v. actors as a class are the closest thing the United States has to royalty, and even a brief perusal of Internet paperattzi sides demonstrates that there is an obsession with the fortunes and failures of celebrity actors and musicians, to the point of following every last thing they say or do as if it is monumental, even though it is largely inane. And films like Avatar, while impressive in their technical achievements, serve to demonstrate how far the technology is from replacing actual actors and how the most impressive effects don’t serve to mask trite, unimaginative storytelling. This may satisfy a mass market audience, but as with live theatre, there will remain at least a significant niche market for human performances.
While this is all true, the fact remains that there are still many tasks that are not suited to automation at the current state of technology. There are also many jobs that are both technical and creative. After all, someone does actually have to design the technology that gets implemented by automation, and we’re nowhere near the point that computers can design themselves, or even other complex devices like automobiles, construction equipment, or medical devices. Nor can automation perform complex epidemiological studies or design new pharmaceuticals.
In the developed Western world where the majority of people, even at the lowest economic strata, are so divorced from actual production (design, manufacture, material procurement) that products just seem to appear in stores as if conjured by magical elves. That gives the impression that we live a nearly post-labor, post-scarcity economy. The fact is that there is plenty of labor goes into the production of materials and good; it’s just out of sight of the purchasing public.
While you make a couple of very good points, citing the case of Jersey Shore as an example of the future of employment and acceptable professional behavior is missing the point of the show; the behavior of the subjects of the show (and the subculture they represent) is so outrageous that the viewer has to wonder how these people live. If that behavior were regarded as normal, there would be no interest in the show. The future of employment in Western society may be largely geared toward service and entertainment, but it isn’t going to be the Jersey Shore.
Stranger
Big name actors like that are also horribly expensive. Even if studios lose viewers because they use CGI instead of a name actor, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them do it anyway since they’d save so much by not hiring them. There’s also a strictly limited number of super-famous actors, and as the technology improves I expect it to proliferate, at which point the question is moot since big name actors can only be one place at a time.
As the technology improves, cheapens and proliferates I suspect it will reshape moviemaking, turning it into something that small groups or even sufficiently talented individuals can do, not the present day huge endeavor that requires massive studios, casts and staffs. Something closer to collaborating writing a novel.
Notice how many movie posters have the lead actors’ names above the title, and how many prominently feature one or or more of the actors’ faces recognizably on the posters? Most big movies are actually marketed on the basis of who is staring in them versus the actual story content, and much of the publicity machinery of studio marketing groups surrounds promoting the actors. This is why many actors can continue to demand premium salaries despite making craptastic film after film. Put Bruce Willis or Leonardo DiCaprio as your lead and you can assure enough of a draw to break even regardless of how shitty your movie is.
This is already happening, not only with CGI but digital photography and editing. The actual production costs of filming and editing a movie have dropped dramatically, and while top-shelf CGI work is still expensive, you can do some pretty decent CGI and digital compositing–stuff that would have been impossible ten or fifteen years ago–on a high end general purpose desktop workstation or laptop. But even the best CGI hasn’t come close to replicating the sophistication of facial impressions in a way that is indistinguishable from reality.
Stranger
Again, I don’t think those jobs will go away any more than farming jobs went away. I think our definition of “success” may evolve. Instead of being a wealthy landowner, building a successfull factory or running a tech start-up, “success” would be defined as how much celebrity status you have (or alternatively, how much power you have in making people celebrities through your media). Paris Hilton is a good example. Her great grandfather built the Hilton Hotel chain. She’s earning millions from being very “media friendly”.
What I envision is that jobs working in offices would still be necessary, just like the garbageman and the truck driver are necessary. But they would be considered work for a “lower class of braniac fags”. People not telegenic or entertaining or connected enough to have real success and are thus forced to fall back on their brains.
Of course, this all presumes that there are a significant number of people who care about becoming educated enough to perform complex epidemiological studies or design new pharmaceuticals. I was watching Adrian “Vinnie Chase” Graniers documentary “Teenage Paparazzi” today. In one part they quoted a survey that found that teenagers are 4x as likely to want to be an assistant TO a celebrity (carrying bags around and shit) than President of an Ivy League school, CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
Even here in the birthplace of fighting ignorance, you have a bunch of people who think that going to college is no longer worth it.
So what your will have is a relatively small percentage of the population working to actually get shit done. The masses of people working low level service McJobs The people making money will work in media companies (television, film, internet, etc), in fashion, as entertainers and celebrities, their various entourages and hangers on, or all the supporting people
I bet an in-betweener would have said the same thing. The person who designs the program which makes realistic CGI people will have to be very, very creative. But once it is done there are only a finite number of expressions at any one time. The director will have to select the right one.
What does more feeling mean? Sadder eyes, a wider grin, more tears, larger movements? All controllable. The director won’t be able to just say more feeling, she will have to be a bit more explicit, but it should be possible without AI.
Not that long ago Broadway actors were royalty - see “The Royal Family.” You might be right about the social aspects, but there might also be real people, used as models for characters, who will be famous without actually acting much (perhaps only to give a template of emotions to the CGI program.)
I definitely agree that there will always be a market for indie films with real people. While CGI may be cheaper than big stars and expensive sets, people will be cheaper filmed on location with increasingly smaller and higher quality digital video - just like there are still plenty of small local theater companies. But I think the big studios were plenty pleased with Avatar, despite its lack of star power.
Computers cannot design themselves, in the sense of designing new architectures, but they do more and more of the design work. Even 15 years ago much of he mask work on a high end processor was done by hand, now none of it is. Back then the datapath sections were done by hand, now everything except the most critical blocks are written at the high level and synthesized. It is much like higher level languages versus assembler - higher level design is winning.
I think that is going to provide a very mechanized, plasticine experience for the viewer that will come off as being recognizably synthetic; less like watching a movie than a really sophisticated video game. Which is not to say this won’t happen; there is a strong argument to be made that highly interactive games like Red Dead Redemption with a narrative strong story arc element to them are essentially encroaching on traditional cinema and television, essentially fulfilling the decades-old dream of a truly interactive, coherent cinematic experience. But I doubt CGI ‘actors’ will replace lead human actors any time soon. A director selecting a chain of expressions from a catalogue is still going to have a limited repertoire. And it is the actors themselves and all of the baggage they bring with them, not the director instructing them, that give characters a grounding reality. There is just too much sophisticated cognition that goes into expressions and body movements, as well as vocal inflection, for a computer to synthesize human behavior in an indistinguishable fashion.
Stranger
Though with the “democratization” (or mass production?) of the fame industry, won’t it just continue to speed up the life cycle of a rapid rise and subsequent crash? As an example, Susan Boyle has only been around for a little more than a year. Is she still relevant? I suppose the argument could be made that she isn’t as attractive as your standard heirhead. Which may account for some of her fall off.
With YouTube, and the proliferation of talent/clip shows, won’t the different niches increase too? Don’t people tend to overestimate that what is familiar to them is familiar to others? More than half the people I work with had not seen the video of the kid zonked out after going to the dentist. Though I will agree that being a part of society, people are more likely to know who “The Situation” is, even if they don’t watch “Jersey Shore”/MTV, or have cable.
Even if crowdsourcing were to become the standard, people are fickle, and seem to get bored quickly (in addition to having terrible taste). In the event that “the masses” express interest in something, it doesn’t mean they will spend money on it. (See “Snakes On A Plane” box office receipts.)
Agh, beat me to it.
That book, along with The Road, are the two most haunting stories I’ve ever read about the future.
Though it’s a bit of a tangent, a couple of points about CG actors. First I suspect the uncanny valley is going to be a major constraint for many years. The technology to make nearly-human characters is already here but going from nearly-human to fully human is going to take an awful lot of work. Humans beings have evolved to be exquisitely sensitive to the human face and its expressions. Secondly when we are talking about CG actors we really mean CG characters controlled by animators. In effect the animator is an actor except that he is working with a CG body. It’s not going to be the case that director will interact with a CG AI the way he does with a real actor giving instructions and then watching the actor perform. So there will be many jobs for animators.