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.
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.