I mean, I freaking love how AI is advancing, but I also think unions are basically a requirement for all workers at this point.
Besides, hasn’t the point of machines always been to reduce the workload on people?
I welcome some kind of UBI, or maybe a post-money society that uses AI to handle most jobs and lets people pursue what they want to do with their lives.
Besides, hasn’t the point of machines always been to reduce the workload on people?
Which takes us to the ages-old capital-labor contradiction. Technological advancement is good, but because technology under capitalism primarily comes under the ownership of capitalists, workers aren’t guaranteed to enjoy its benefits, and will be thrown under the bus unless there’s they’re strongly unionized.
That’d be the only sensible reading of Hollywood imaging the text-to-images technology will save their sequence-of-images business from the tyranny of paying people for text.
But I’m not sure “sensible” applies. The same zeal was applied to multiple stages of crypto bullshit. Some tech-bros just latch onto the newest thing, as a cargo cult, and sell people on what they imagine it could do.
Meanwhile I’m kinda hyped for AI because I’ve seen all the weird shit it can do, and I am excited for clever applications of what weird shit. I’d been kicking around ways to make animation as approachable as comics. Motion-vector continuation for complex details that don’t need constant repainting. Image-space wireframe manipulation. Deferred pipelines for smooth rainbow-colored doodles that take detail and lighting automatically. I haven’t touched any of it in two years. What’s the point? I can’t know which parts will go from jawdropping to underwhelming, within months.
That said it’s not like cutting-edge AI companies are doing things sensibly. Sora should not be spitting out jump-cuts. What you want are whole takes. Leave the editing to humans, because it’s a crucial part of conveying meaning through the footage. And the fact it’s limited to short clips anyway means they’re still spitting out the whole damn thing at once, instead of generating the next frame based on previous frames, or tweening frames out of adjacent frames. Will that limited-scope approach have issues? Sure. But going from thirty seconds of footage to forty won’t require a new generation of video cards.
The middle paragraph is hand-waving some software I either never published or never wrote. One concept involved drawing a map for copying pixels from each frame to the next, preserving details as they’re added. Another concept involved drawing fake 3D boxes over an image to then warp parts of it in ways that move like 3D models. Another concept involved having people animate “normal passes” to allow later projection of patterns, texture, shading, and shadows, onto parts of the animation.
Pursuing any of these to the point of being a tool usable by normal people (and artists) would take years. I had been toying with prototypes and avoiding commitment until suddenly some neural-network curiosities from Two Minute Papers became a tool for instant pornography with almost the right number of fingers. Those acts of wizardry still suck at movement, but Sora proves we’re headed the right direction in a hurry. There will be tools that let you sketch at 1 FPS and get television-quality cartoon. Or not-quite-CGI. Or shockingly plausible “live action.” The timeline for that is months, not decades. I am looking forward to all the weird shit people can do with it. Hollywood should not be. They are in deep shit.
… oh, I did miss the word “seconds.” Lemme fix that.
A religion for AI might be humanities future either way. Just finished reading "Everything is Fucked" by Mark Manson - highly recommend and this subject is one of the last things he discusses.
You should have already read his book "The subtle art of not giving a fuck" just for your own sake.
He's a bit dramatic on the title which I don't care for. The first book he wrote is more accurately "deciding what to actually give a fuck about" but I guess that's not as catchy?
100%. Of course people losing their jobs is unfortunate and we should support them in finding new ways to work or even using the immense capital surplus to support them in other ways.
Automation itself also isn't the problem. Replacing human workers with machines has always been a good thing, if the workers are taken care of. That's the problem, the workers are expendable for a lower cost solution. It also doesn't help that at least in the US we have a Puritan view of work, where someone is classified by what they do to survive and not the person themselves.
Yes that’s basically the problem. Consumption always has a base level. People need to eat even if they can’t afford to. There’s no base level income to ensure that it is possible.
The problem with uncurbed capitalism is that it doesn’t solve this issue. Eventually people won’t be able to afford the products and the only solution for capalism is to cut costs further, spiraling endlessly.
This is also why government subsidies to companies do not work. The money ought to be given to the consumers instead.
Add comment