Does technological progress create social progress?

Great Debates
21

Union base scale pay is pretty damn good compared to game developer salaries. Game Developer Magazine does a yearly salary review for the industry. You can’t access the info on their site without paying, but this site has the 2004 numbers.

A Lead programmer with more than 6 years of experience makes an average of $93,064.

Here are the weekly minimum salaries for camera operators from 2003 guaranteed by their union and what that translates to in a yearly salary:

DP: $3,239/wk - $168,428
Operator: $2,039/wk – 106,028
1st AC: $1683/wk - $87,516
2nd AC: $1552/wk - $80,704

So the minimum for a Cameraman is higher than the average for a Lead Programmer. The minimum for a Director of Photography is almost double the average for a Programming Lead and $60,000 more than the average for a Technical Director. And these are union guaranteed minimums. There are certainly DPs making millions per picture, but there aren’t any technical or creative talent making millions in games.

(These numbers aren’t a straight one to one comparison because movie people often don’t work year round, but I think this is balanced by the fact that most game industry are incorrectly labeled Exempt employees and then regularly forced to 50-80 hour weeks without being paid for any of the overtime).

Also notice that the highest salary reported industry wide (up to Executive Producer) is $225,000 dollars. For a top end salary in almost any industry, this is a pittance. You could find restaurant mangers and hair stylists making more than that, not to mention doctors, lawyers, and accountants. You note that only top end talent in movies and TV get the big bucks, but there is no top end talent in the games industry in terms of compensation.

The only people making BIG money in games are owners of developers who sell their companies to large publishers like EA and Activision (or entertainment Conglomerates like Vivendi) or the upper echelon executives of those big publishers. The way to make money in the software industry is not by making software.

22

Dumbguy:

I honestly know nothing about the economics of the game industry or Hollywood. I thinking about all of society over large time scales–the big picture. Now you were saying that my comparison wasn’t valid because I was comparing skilled workers to unskilled ones. But the net effect of increasing technology is that a society needs more skilled workers to create, operate, and maintain that technology. Technology typically replaces jobs that were formerly done by manual labor. Thus, as technology becomes more common, the percentage of the population doing unskilled work decreases. That’s an inevitable consequence.

With communications technology, the end effect from the user’s perspective depends on the nature of the technology. Television is an anti-democratic medium. You have a small number of producers, directors, and writers deciding what shows get produced, and a huge audience watching passively. Censorious public moralists had better luck controlling TV in 1950 than they had controlling the newpapers fifty years earlier. I think it’s no coincidence that the decade when TV first hit the bigtime was a decade that’s now synonymous with social conformity.

The internet, on the other hand, is very democratic. The government has no possibility of controlling what gets said. Anybody who has a connection can produce the content.

23

I’m not denying game programmers are oppressed. That’s pretty clear. The big difference is the union. I dpn’t know the difference between union and non-union camera jobs, but there is a big difference between union and non-union acting jobs. Not to mention you can be assured of getting paid in a timely fashion in union jobs.

The one thing you’re missing is that it is not easy to get one of these jobs. The son of a friend of ours dated George Romero’s daughter, and got to be an assistant (and an extra) in a film, but was totally unable to break into the union as an apprentice despite very good connections. It is much easier to become a programmer, and to become a lead one if you have talent.

I am a computer scientist, and my daughter was a SAG member and child actor, so I’ve got direct experience in both these areas. My observation is that it is much easier to make a decent living in software, but you can hit it much bigger in a creative field - but you can also starve much more easily.

24

But its an enabler - and it enables bad information, or lazy people, or kooks, as easily (perhaps more so) than traditional means of dispersing information. “I read it on the internet” is not exactly the epitome of varacity. Any kook can set up a website - it used to be difficult for kooks to get published (they did, but it wasn’t the free flow of information from the place where the sky is chartruse that it is now).

Conspiracy theorist used to have to put some effort into finding each other to discover who shot Kennedy - now its easy to discover a variety of “facts” about the topic - and without giving people the tools to evaluate them, we may not have done ourselves any favors.

25

It’s always been like this. During Colonial and early Federal times there were scads of papers and broadsheets that would make Fox News look trustworthy. The conspiracy theorists and saucer nuts communicated just fine before the net. Yeah, it is easier to find their stuff, but also easier to debunk it.

It’s said that the first successful application of any new communications technology is porn. Perhaps the second is kookdom.

26

But I believe the technology provides three changes to “the way its always been” One, while broadsheets where distributed, they were localized. The internet is not localized. Two, it was easier to tell bullshit in earlier eras. The wealth of infomation and opinions technology gives us access to makes it more difficult to filter - and while there have always been intellegent articulate kooks, you now get more exposure to them (the General Questions thread on tax protesters - the tax protester web sites are facinating - I KNOW its crap, but in some cases, its such persuasive crap at first read). Three, there is the reproducability of electronic data. Want to give your friend a copy of a broadsheet in 1880 - good luck. Want to forward him the latest email you got that says Bill Gates is giving away his fortune if you just forward this email - that’s easy (or forward him a link to the tax protester website).

27

Oh? I offer as counterexamples the Moon hoax that Poe exposed and the War of the Worlds panic. I think in both our time and their time, there is a lot people don’t know about or are uncomfortable with, and that’s the area rife for hoaxes.

Things go faster now, that I’ll agree with. We get more stuff true, but we give less attention to each email we get. They had Ponzi schemes, we have Nigerian scams. It’s true that the Nigerian scammers can send out more emails, but their success rate is a lot lower than those doing Ponzi schemes. Remember, the Nigerian racket isn’t new - it’s been running, under different names, for centuries.

28

Not true. A few thousand terrorists are managing to make major dents in the developed world. Those same terrorists kicked the USSR out of Afghanistan and are starting to kick the US out of Iraq. So small people can still have major impacts when armed modern technology. That is what the whole invasion of Iraq was supposedly about, to prevent WMD from getting into the hands of terrorists.

29

Another reason social progress and tech. progress may be linked is because of economics. A society that is misogynistic, racist and classist will exclude 80% of the public from any kind of job that can contribute to the economy in a meaningful way. A technological society is one that has to spend a good deal of money on science (the developed world spends roughly 3% of GDP on science) and we need an educated workforce to contribute to science and work in jobs that are based on scientific & engineering ideas. With virtually no one to fill the scientific research jobs or educated jobs that would cause economic collapse. It is also unrealistic to think that you can give a person a 90k a year job and a Ph.D. and still expect them to think they are an inferior specimin because the bible/koran/old ways of doing things say they are. At the very least they’d be less likely to think it than if they were illiterate and mildly retarded. The Nazis kicked many qualified scientists out of their country who then went to work for the Allies. The USSR murdered most of their best generals and many of their scientists. A country that does that can’t expect to keep up with more liberal countries. Esp. when you consider that an oppressive country probably spends more money on their military. The developed liberal world spends about 3-4% of GDP on the military. Places like North Korea or the USSR spent about 20-25% of GDP. That is money that cannot go into education or research and that puts them at a disadvantage economically. The oppressive, backwards countries get left behind. Tons of people are excluded from educated jobs and many of those who get the jobs want to leave and live in another country that is less oppressive.

Plus as technology increases you get to see better worlds than the one you occupy. This is one of the reasons for dissent in N. Korea. In N. Korea people smuggle in videos from South Korea and people get to see what life is like on the ouside. They get to see the freedoms and human rights and most people want access to these things over dictatorship and oppression or classism.

All in all it still seems that virtually every right and responsibility has gone up in conjunction with technology. The welfare state, international responsibility, international intervention in human rights, animal rights, environmental rights, minority rights, religious rights, gender rights, lifestyle rights, representative government, humane prisons and police forces, etc all seem to be going up.

30

I disagree. There is a greater demand for highly skilled people to develop the technology, but the trend has always been to use technology to automate and quantify procedures so you don’t need highly skilled workers to do the work.

Compare the technical expertise required to design a car vs the level expertise of manufactuing one on an assembly line. You can train just about anyone to run the various assembly line machines. Every part does not need to be hand crafted by a highly trained (and expensive) machinest anymore. That wasn’t always the case.