Of course. Very few positions have ever outright been eliminated by new technology. They have been morphed and, over time, require a fundamentally different skill set. What is ubiquitous with new productivity-enhancing equipment being added to the job market is that there are fewer and fewer of those jobs available. Perfect “for instance”, executive assistants. For decades nearly every middle manager and up at anywhere doing large amounts of business needed an executive assistant to manage calendars, screen communication, filter incoming mail, and gatekeep access to the manager. With the advent of email, the mail filtering role became less and less prevalent, and now with AI/3rd party answering services, Calendly, and several other tools, most of the classic roles that executive assistants filled are automated away, meaning that either single assistants are being used for serve several managers in the remaining duties, or only high-level executives get them. Has the executive assistant job been eliminated, no. Has the number of available positions been truncated by a non-trivial number, absolutely.
The same has happened with the VFX industry. Rotoscoping (the process of cutting actors from the backgrounds for compositing) used to be the primary entry point to the industry for people wanting a compositing career. Big VFX houses needed on the order of 30 or 40 of them at any given time. A few years back Adobe and others started getting automated algorithms down for the process and now only a handful of artists are needed to check shots and clean up problem shots, and usually the task falls to the compositors themselves rather than an entry-level employee. Roto jobs still exist, but are much less in demand and an entire entry-level rung to the industry’s ladder has been made inaccessible to incoming artists.
The AI addition to the toolset for graphic artists, environment artists, and others is not going to eliminate the job, instead, it will make it so companies can get more done with fewer staff.
That’s a capitalism problem. In a socialised system we’d all be getting paid UBI and able to contribute our free time to learning these skill sets and contributing to the development of related products out of sheer interest alone without needing to append the yoke of exploitation required to rustle up a profit for someone else so we can have crumbs to eat instead of recieving fair value for our work. Or since we cant magic society into social advancement… we can make use of these FOSS tools that utilise these systems to give the power to create back to the normal person who can now use these tools (as I do) to enhance their already existing workflows to improve their capacity to earn value from their own merit and ability without taking anything from those who have contributed. It’s a shift in dynamic and people are naturally resistant to change, I don’t hold such adamant perceptions of ownership of knowledge even if one can have ownership of a product.
Capitalist structures will always under every single circumstance try to maximise efficiency, maximise output, and minimise cost. Be that labour cost or materials cost or production cost. This is why Capitalism is unsustainable, the one directional flow of wealth and value from all of the technological contributions of everyone in humanity into the hands of the few. And don’t even try to tell me “Oh but people need to get paid their fair share for their contributions” yes, yes they damn well do, but that can’t happen under a corporation because for a profit margin to exist the worker must be exploited to create something of more value than they are offered in return, so expecting fairness in an unfair system is barking up the wrong tree and has no bearing on the value given back to the artist by FOSS tools that fools would fight against and burn to the ground only to the benefit of the very corporate slave owners who prevent their artistic capacity from being viable for income generation. Guess who can afford to pay the artists when the pool of data gets poisoned? Not the people, not the producers, not the individual artist. Nope. But the Corporation can, and when they have to they will. Fuck the rest of us. These people in the article are capitalist cyber terrorists, but fear of “AI” blinds the ignorant, and the masses will suffer for it, and their art will gain no more value because it has not gained any more practical merit, except to those willing to pay enough to exploit them some more, just to gatekeep their own perceived position in their perceived hierarchy of value.
I wholeheartedly agree. I don’t use self-checkout lanes, I don’t deal with AI customer support, and I don’t tolerate corporations that view labor as an expense to eliminate. I’m not afraid of AI or automation, in fact, I do both as two of my favorite hobbies. Unfortunately, that gives me a very real and salient perspective on the future of this world and it does not look good for the base majority of us. There is basically not an I industry that won’t be directly affected by this wave of technology. Essentially all of the “poor people jobs” are going to evaporate in the next 10 to 15 years. Amazon will be eliminating the staff as a whole from their distribution centers on the next 5 years, and that is something like half a million people out of the job. The trucking industry is moving ever faster towards fully autonomous vehicles for long-haul trucking. That’s another ~2.2 million jobs according to the DoL. Toss in the call centers, fast food industry, and sectors of retail and you are talking about an easy 5M people out of work because jobs vanish. That is >1% of the US population, and that isn’t even scratching the surface.
A UBI is literally the only way forward at this point. And I mean a true UBI which all individuals can actually live off of without supplemental income.
I live in Australia where we thankfully have better democratic voting systems and as a result lean far further into social benefit and developed social services, but we’re already struggling with underemployment where efficiency is outstripping the demand for bodies. The one benefit we have is one of the best unemployment support systems in the world, but we still have issues where the capitalists that are exploiting us for all their profit don’t want to use that money to pay for those social services that keep the society that supports them healthy, and I dare say they’ll want to pay even less when they have less employees doing the same work. I agree that UBI needs to be implemented, and some of the Nordic countries have already successfully trialled both UBI and further reduced working hours for same pay with the 4 day work week and the 32 hour full time week. The only real issue is that the one entity that needs to be aware that these things exist and are beneficial is the social consciousness, and it’s stupid, we don’t spend enough on education even here to make the social consciousness cognizant enough to act. People like to think they are individual and I fear American individuality has been weaponised against the populace for so long that the tide can’t turn without blood. The strikes are starting, the people are unionising, we’ll see how far the people can push before the corporations kick back and make them bleed, then we’ll see if the American social consciousness is resilient enough to fight back and start claiming significant workers rights or whether they’ll reel back covering their bloody mouth with their shackled hands. I fear they will fight for more than they have but not for what they deserve.
