Sometimes the world writes your follow-up for you.
Just as I had published “I’ve Seen This Before,” an Irish director used ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 to generate a photorealistic action scene — Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt on a crumbling rooftop, sweeping camera angles, stunt choreography, crisp sound, haunting music — from a two-sentence prompt. Hollywood’s major organizations condemned it almost immediately.
In the essay, I argued that AI breaks the pattern of previous disruptions because it doesn’t just replace routine tasks — it replaces the capacity. Judgment, analysis, creative synthesis. The top rungs of the value chain, not the bottom.
A fifteen-second clip just demonstrated that argument more vividly than 4,000 words could. What Seedance produced would have required a director, a stunt team, a VFX department, sound designers, a cinematographer, and a post-production pipeline. Now it requires a prompt.
And the people who will feel this first aren’t the established directors and A-list actors. It’s the production assistants, the junior VFX artists, the assistant editors — the entry-level workers who were supposed to climb that ladder into a career. The same pattern I described in tech, in finance, in law. The bottom rung gets sawed off, and a generation never gets on the ladder at all.
WG - you’ve captured the essence of the AI problem. AI may alleviate some routine tasks or even dangerous tasks from human labor, it will likely decimate huge swaths of other work performed by thousands of people.
The lofty promises of curing cancer and removing drudgery or dangerous jobs ignore the potential of wide-scale job loss with no safety net contemplated.
Very interesting read. I got here via your comment on the New York Times article, by the way.
Obviously, you’re tackling a lot of different subjects. Part of what you’re commenting on, as many have, is the idea that AI replacing jobs takes away people’s purpose, their sense of meaning.
I’d argue AI is really exposing a loss of meaning that’s been going on for a long time. Maybe it was highlighted by Nietzsche, but it’s been going on since before that. If you presume there’s no God (as I do, to be clear.) then what is giving purpose to your actions? Some people might say to create something, art, etc. but when you think about it, why is that really a purpose? Especially when most art falls by the way side historically.
We’ve been looking to jobs to give us this purpose, but it’s not really clear why they should.
Maybe the real terror here is that of existential meaninglessness.
Thank you for this essay, and your previous analysis. I try to be optimistic about change and new tech but AI is not something I can be optimistic about, given the humans at the wheel. All I see are dystopian outcomes. Humanity so rarely heeds warnings from Cassandras (see the current US political situation).
Sometimes the world writes your follow-up for you.
Just as I had published “I’ve Seen This Before,” an Irish director used ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 to generate a photorealistic action scene — Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt on a crumbling rooftop, sweeping camera angles, stunt choreography, crisp sound, haunting music — from a two-sentence prompt. Hollywood’s major organizations condemned it almost immediately.
In the essay, I argued that AI breaks the pattern of previous disruptions because it doesn’t just replace routine tasks — it replaces the capacity. Judgment, analysis, creative synthesis. The top rungs of the value chain, not the bottom.
A fifteen-second clip just demonstrated that argument more vividly than 4,000 words could. What Seedance produced would have required a director, a stunt team, a VFX department, sound designers, a cinematographer, and a post-production pipeline. Now it requires a prompt.
And the people who will feel this first aren’t the established directors and A-list actors. It’s the production assistants, the junior VFX artists, the assistant editors — the entry-level workers who were supposed to climb that ladder into a career. The same pattern I described in tech, in finance, in law. The bottom rung gets sawed off, and a generation never gets on the ladder at all.
The Ruhr Valley at internet speed.
Very powerful essay, as many people as possible should read this. Thank you Werner
A very interesting NPR podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fresh-air/id214089682?i=1000750354611
WG - you’ve captured the essence of the AI problem. AI may alleviate some routine tasks or even dangerous tasks from human labor, it will likely decimate huge swaths of other work performed by thousands of people.
The lofty promises of curing cancer and removing drudgery or dangerous jobs ignore the potential of wide-scale job loss with no safety net contemplated.
Very interesting read. I got here via your comment on the New York Times article, by the way.
Obviously, you’re tackling a lot of different subjects. Part of what you’re commenting on, as many have, is the idea that AI replacing jobs takes away people’s purpose, their sense of meaning.
I’d argue AI is really exposing a loss of meaning that’s been going on for a long time. Maybe it was highlighted by Nietzsche, but it’s been going on since before that. If you presume there’s no God (as I do, to be clear.) then what is giving purpose to your actions? Some people might say to create something, art, etc. but when you think about it, why is that really a purpose? Especially when most art falls by the way side historically.
We’ve been looking to jobs to give us this purpose, but it’s not really clear why they should.
Maybe the real terror here is that of existential meaninglessness.
I am with you and would ask: why isn’t it enough to be kind and compassionate human being.
Thank you for this essay, and your previous analysis. I try to be optimistic about change and new tech but AI is not something I can be optimistic about, given the humans at the wheel. All I see are dystopian outcomes. Humanity so rarely heeds warnings from Cassandras (see the current US political situation).
Humanity so rarely heeds warnings from Cassandras (see the current US political situation) ——- you are sooo right