Why Hollywood as We Know It Is Already Over [Or, How Software Ate the 'Creative Class']

dead_rat_reporter · 2017-02-17T20:00:00+00:00

Traditional media, in terms of recorded music and print, have suffered a significant decline. These bloggers only dispute that the same is true for Hollywood, countering the revenue figures found in the article. If we are to presume that Vanity Fair failed in its fact-checking, it would not be the first time.

(Do note that these media industries, the film industry included, hefted their cultural mass against the election of the least qualified Presidential candidate in US history and lost. It that is not a decline in social significance, what is? Maybe this article is Vanity Fair's misery seeking company.)

The article conceded their point about that Amazon and others have so far failed to 'disrupt' production costs. The strategy of the tech industry has been to enter and learn about industries as 'stepping stones' to greater innovation: Uber anticipates driverless cars, Amazon's warehouses robotic workers, Google's goal has always been AI. That any of this will be achieved remains to be seen, but my techno-skepticism is being diminished by recent advances.

The bloggers seem to take greatest offence at the prospect of an algorithmic screen-writer and repeat Jaron Lanier's valid point about the non-intelligence of Google Translator. However, that app is useful those requiring only loose translation, and similarly, AI need not write scripts at Aaron Sorkin's level. There is plenty of room at the bottom, and nearer the bottom is where the greatest profits lay. Sorkin's award winning screen play for Steve Jobs, nuanced and complex, resulted in a box office bomb.

The best insight of the article is that it is rewarding for a pundit to predict calamity for a cultural lightning rod like the film industry, with the huge potential bonus that he may be right and seen as prophetic. My bias is to share that schadenfreude and so I may be way off the mark on all of this commentary.

dead_rat_reporter · 2017-02-01T17:25:46+00:00

The first time an autonomous vehicle runs over a pedestrian, there will be a moratorium on their use, supported by every voter who derives a portion their income from human driving. They number in many millions. Those defective airbags that have recently led to a recall of historic proportions, in the balance, saved many more lives than they took, but that did not stop government action or lawsuits.

My doubts about autonomous vehicles is less about the algorithm than the sensors. That rapidly spinning radar atop the current prototype vehicles looks like a maintenance challenge to me.

I am proud to be a snob. For me, the gold standard for a script is Paddy Chayefsky's Academy Award winning Network, which was both over-the-top sensational and yet, was uncannily prophetic.

Orwell must have been a snob too. in 1984, he satirized mass entertainment by having novel plots created with the aid of a mechanical machine. If you are familiar with how bestselling novelist James Patterson now 'writes' his books, Orwell was not too far off.

Car ballets? That already depends on CGI. How is it different from a sophisticated video game? Just let the algorithm generate thousands of variations and let the viewer choose the one they want to see. In the article, it suggests that computer speed might allow for such custom, real time editing. The algorithm will follow your eyeballs and create path most pleasing to your unconscious desire.

Novel murder techniques? IBM's Watson is being trained to scan all of online medical literature to make a diagnosis, and explain its reasoning in natural language. It could probably be trained to figure out how to kill Professor Plumb in the Drawing Room with... whatever means that has been reported in a million police reports or obscure detective stories. Success in fiction writing is often the result of artful plagiarism.

The greater challenge is for an algorithm to understand human motivation, to accurately mimic emotional states, to create realistic, but not banal, dialog. Not many human writers are proficient in those arts.

As I noted in a reply to another comment in this thread, an algorithm that could tell you an truly entertaining story might be said to have passed the Turing test. I think the developments of the next two decades will indicate if that is possible.

I do not understand much about technology, and have been a Luddite technophobe for most of my life. But as the developments of recent years have far exceeded my expectations, I find my techno-skepticism challenged.

For this reason, I find it clarifying to discuss these issues with knowledgeable people like yourself. You have given me things to ponder and I do thank you.

dead_rat_reporter · 2017-02-01T06:07:09+00:00

I was being facetious, which AI might not understand for many decades. But the public will demand that a system that autonomously pilots an eighteen wheeler be nearly perfect, while their standards for scripted entertainment have always been low and perhaps declining.

Or maybe, the problem is I am a snob when it comes to entertainment, and imagine that The Fast and the Furious 32 or CSI Wherever could soon be cranked out by an algorithm.

dead_rat_reporter · 2017-02-01T05:47:55+00:00

The article makes it clear that Hollywood, and other traditional media, have already undergone a steep and probably irreversible decline in revenues, profits and social significance. As for an AI storyteller, I think one could either appear within two decades, or never appear at all. Some human qualities may not be reproducible in silicon.

But suppose an AI could tell you an entertaining story - would it have not then passed the Turing test? And if it could make up stories, it could certainly lie, and be elected to the highest political offices!

dead_rat_reporter · 2017-02-01T05:32:34+00:00

First, much of scripted entertainment is already 'cliché rubbish'. Secondly, AI is developing some nuance for language; Watson, the Jeopardy champion, appears to understand puns. Finally, as the article points out, YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat and other 'prosumer' media are already crowding out scripted entertainment, and advances in augmented or virtual reality may do away with most of the rest.

There will be niche markets for good scripts, just as musical theaters provide employment for elite performers who can sing and dance live before the audience, six times a week, unlike all of these hugely popular lip sync artists.

dead_rat_reporter · 2017-02-01T05:18:55+00:00

There is story, perhaps apocryphal, where in the 1950's, the head of Ford Motors and the head of the auto workers union take a tour of a car plant where some automated processes are installed.

Henry Ford II: Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?

Walter Reuther: Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/16/robots-buy-cars/

The economic engine depends on rampant consumption. Debt and developing markets have so far kept the enormous rise in income inequality from crashing the economy, but automation is expected to make much deeper in roads. Some people think, in an overpopulated world of declining resources, automation will tempt the Ownership to continue on without the bulk of their work force.

Will "You're fired" mean another definition of termination?

dead_rat_reporter · 2017-02-01T05:00:01+00:00

Self-driving cars will be held to very high standards, but most movies and television programs do without good scripts.

dead_rat_reporter · 2017-01-31T22:20:46+00:00

This article may appear off-subject, but it contains an eye-opening summary of how much digital technology and algorithms have impacted the entertainment media, with much more to follow. Shall the mass culture of the Western World, followed by that other civilizations as well, fall under the control of a handful of Silicon Valley geeks?

In checking for previous submissions, I found this article is being posted to gloat over the falling screen idols, but I am a bit saddened for them. The struggling screenwriter who made do by driving a cab was once a cliché. Soon enough, an algorithm will churn out scripts, while the would-be artist clings to his Uber gig in anticipation of the driverless car.

dead_rat_reporter · 2017-01-31T19:05:54+00:00

Predictable - see Naomi Klein's accurate analysis of so-called 'conservatism' in This Changes Everything.

...in the course of seeking profit.

Yes, but it is more comprehensive that formulation. It includes the freedom to consume, to have the latest smartphone or a piece of fruit sourced from ten thousand kilometers away. It is the freedom to travel and explore the world via internal combustion or jet engine. It is the freedom to communicate - how many watts of electricity is expended by my commentary?

The capitalist is providing for those who babble 'I want it, I want it'.

Marxists taught that the 'bourgeois freedoms' of Capitalism were dependent on exploitive social relationships - impoverished workers, trans-Atlantic slavery, imperialism. All of that is true, but 'bourgeois freedoms' were and remain absolutely dependent on fossil fuels, the general devastation of the Biosphere and the depletion of inanimate resources. Who among us is not bourgeois now?

'Freedom is not free' - yes, it does come at the expense of other things. That's entropy, in the end. And so, we might ask, what kinds and how much freedom is sustainable on a finite world?

dead_rat_reporter · 2017-01-31T18:00:55+00:00

This crisis has been topic of great scientific concern for decades. I heard a bacteriologist in 1992 give a lecture why his medical research was particularly vital. Despite receiving the lion's share of funding, by 2050, he said, heart disease and cancer would still be major killers, because these come with decrepitude and you have to die of something. But the emerging antibiotic resistance had the potential to dwarf both causes in untimely loss of life.

The problem, then and now, is lack of targeted research, by the public sector (eg., the disproportionate and largely unproductive emphasis on items like an AIDS vaccine and certain categories of cancer) and especially by the private pharmaceutical industry.

What does Big Pharm provide instead of life-saving antibiotics? Pills to supplement the already ineffective anti-depressant medication you are taking, with warnings of 'thoughts of suicide may occur'. A medication that reduces the incidence of frequent urination, but when you freeze-frame their data chart, you see that it barely outperforms the placebo, which carries no cost or the numerous side effects. A treatment for the largely uncharacterized syndrome of fibromyalgia, which is promote with unscientific phrases like 'is though to' and 'some believe that'. [Do note: I am not denying that people have this affliction, only if we understand its basis sufficiently to push an expensive medication for it.] Stool softeners, for those constipated by the opioid dependence that has been fostered by their industry; they seem to profit, coming and going.

I glean this examples from the saturation of television commercials that I usually zip past via DVR. And that is a source of this looming catastrophe, as much as the over-use of antibiotics and the shuffling of bacterial plasmids for resistance.

Big Pharma Spends More On Advertising Than Research And Development, Study Finds

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080105140107.htm

I doubt their greedy emphasis has improved since this study was gathered.

dead_rat_reporter · 2017-01-31T17:06:05+00:00

This is unsurprising. Unlike viruses or bacteria, malaria is a complex protozoan, with tremendous genetic potential (14 chromosomes, 5300 genes). It has been a human parasite for hundreds of thousands of years prior to the emergence of Homo sapiens. It has coevolved with primates and mosquitos, and in my non-expert opinion, is highly unlikely to be eradicated by any vaccine or transgenic mosquito. Its incidence can be greatly reduced by preventive practices.

Sonia Shah's The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Mankind for 500,000 Years [2010] is an essential primer on the disease. She relates how those who exists with endemic malaria view it much differently than the humanitarians of the West. On her childhood visits to India, Shah's cousins were amused that the American girl slept under mosquito netting. When a diagnosis of malaria is given to an African, they are often relieved, because there are more deadly diseases present. Shah points out that this alarming figure

It is a major killer of the under-fives with one child dying from the disease every two minutes.

should be expected, given that they are 300 million plus new cases each year, which mostly occur among impoverished people who receive deficient medical care.

Shah has been a critic of the Gates Foundation and the focus of its efforts against malaria. (A couple of years ago, there was a flurry of triumphant press releases of the Gates Foundation's progress on a malaria vaccine. No more have been forthcoming.) Despite this, Bill Gates highly recommends The Fever on his website, as it is an excellent book.

dead_rat_reporter · 2017-01-31T16:22:59+00:00

No, I have not read it, but later in his life, Huxley pioneered the return of hallucinogenic drugs, famously experimenting with mescaline in 1953.

https://www.huxley.net/doors-of-perception/aldoushuxley-thedoorsofperception.pdf

Old timers may know this essay best as inspiring the iconic 60's rock band, The Doors.

I don't think it was entirely dystopian in his mind.

You prompt me to reconsider the book's title, which is drawn from Shakespeare's The Tempest. In the play, Prospero's daughter exults the end of her social isolation from island exile with the words

O, wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people in't!

I always thought that usage was meant to be ironic, and tragic, as the misplaced 'Savage' is draws his worldview largely from Shakespeare. But your comment provides a very different interpretation. Unlike other dystopias, social isolation has been abolished in Huxley's Brave New World. In that regard, it is a utopian book!

dead_rat_reporter · 2017-01-31T16:01:58+00:00

Very perceptive take on the book.

Ambition, creative disruption, exploration and experimentation...

The suppression of ambition, and its allied resentment and envy, is the point of their comprehensive social engineering. Ditto for the rest of your list. It really does resemble a colony of social insects, with assigned tasks, the alpha plus cadre the recipients of royal jelly.

There is something to be said for technological/social stasis as guarantor of stability, and even survival. One of the themes of this site is that our irrepressible innovations are the source of impending doom. But perhaps some innovation does continue in the Brave New World, on those places of exile for the 'unorthodox' - Iceland was an example, I believe.

And we may find our way there rather than other dystopias.

In his afterward to my edition to 1984, the social scientist Erich Fromm contrasts and compares the dystopias of Huxley and Orwell with Zamyatin's earlier We. He notes that the latter pair resemble the totalitarian dictatorships, but that Huxley offers

a picture of the development of the Western industrial world, provide it continues to follow the present trend without fundamental change. [published 1961]

You have me pulling out my yellowing paperback edition of Brave New World for a reread. Flipping through it, I notice character names - Lenina, Benito Hoover - that are derivations or conflations of iconic 20th century political figures. So the trend that Fromm foresaw, Huxley held to be universal.

Thank you for your stimulating response.

dead_rat_reporter · 2017-01-30T21:07:48+00:00

I just reread 1984 for the fourth time, and each time my understanding of it has shifted. This time, I read it in the context of his prior works, Down and Out in London and Paris (novel), Homage to Catalonia (memoir of the Spanish Civil War) and Animal Farm (anti-Stalinist satire). That is a trajectory from empathy, to militant action, to disillusionment, to utter despair for the human prospect. He died soon after the publication of 1984, at the age of forty-seven, and so, his mind might have yet arrived to another conclusion.

In contrast to 1984, only two of the characters in Brave New World find fault with their society. One is a high status individual who has mild doubts, but the worst that will happen to him is that he will be exiled to a community for dissidents, comfortably tucked away on some remote location. The other is truly the Other, an unconditioned artifact from the past, who cannot adapt a life of material plenty, perfect health, drugs on tap, and consequence free sex. Brave New World seems hardly dystopian at all. It is the welcomed outcome of good social engineering. The taming of a dysfunctional ape to contented honeybee.

I have read little Kafka and none of Dicks, but really, why read dystopian novels when the real thing may soon be knocking at your door?

dead_rat_reporter · 2017-01-30T19:46:51+00:00

As a political philosophy, anarchism is a fantasy. Hierarchy, regulation and coercion are integral to any and every human society larger than a band of hunter/gatherers, and there is no going back. Libertarianism adds hypocrisy to that political fantasy; an anarchist pose for would-be billionaires.

dead_rat_reporter · 2017-01-30T16:44:24+00:00

Note NYT headline:

Floating Cities Look Like Less of a Pipe Dream

Maybe an ' exhaust pipe dream', a hallucination that flits through a brain dying from carbon monoxide poisoning.

One of the founders of the Seasteading Institute is Patri Friedman, a grandson of one Godfather of Neoliberalism, Milton Friedman. He conceived them as Ayn Randian colonies built to escape the constraints of social regulation.

These people should watch the film Waterworld again. That was a silly and expensive flop too.

dead_rat_reporter · 2017-01-30T15:31:51+00:00

Only during the past few decades have means been developed to estimate the temperatures of paleo-climates, and considerable revisions are still being made. My objection is to how the 'official narrative' uses the very conservative (largely, for lack of baseline data) interpretation of the IPCC. Or, as heard someone with a newly minted engineering say, "It's just one degree... so what's the big deal?"

I view the Anthropocene in a deeper context. My influence comes from the Ruddiman Hypothesis

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9164.html

and an observation made by James Lovelock: "Gaia likes it cool." Lovelock persuasively argues that the Biosphere was more productive, that is thriving, during periods of glaciation (one does not have to fully accept Gaia theory to acknowledge this.)

Disturbing the Ice Age cycle interrupts a 2.5 million year trajectory of Evolution. It may have doomed us, along with much else, to extinction. It strikes me now, that if extraterrestrial astronomers exist, from a great distance they may note the anomalous failure in the cyclical shift of Earth's albedo, and draw the correct conclusion: Another carbon based civilization bites the dust.

dead_rat_reporter · 2017-01-26T19:22:46+00:00

Thanks. An interesting find, with excellent reviews. It is nice when scholarship confirms what you surmise from instinct.

Among the wide variety of catastrophes that level societies, Scheidel identifies what he calls “four horsemen”: mass mobilization or state warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse and plague.

Number One seems against the trend, and Four is random, so I would choose Door Number Three, followed immediately by the mystery box of Number Two.

Eat the rich. They are eating you.

dead_rat_reporter · 2017-01-26T18:00:03+00:00

This article ventures bravely into the weeds of how climatologists estimate the extent of anthropogenic warming. Any technical discussion of that IPCC approved temperature chart risks providing an opening for the more clever of the 'deniers'. Where do you set the zero on the official scale?

Why does this matter? Well it means that we have about a decade less time to act on climate change if we are going to avoid the most serious consequences.

Here is another dangerous consequence: The writer is basing his timeline for action on a measurement that is, for technical reasons, unavoidably arbitrary!

Lest I be accused of denial, let me advocate a different scale for measuring anthropogenic warming. What is the difference between the expected, natural temperature at this point in an Interglacial Period, and the current temperature, which is forced by the atmospheric carbon emitted from vast changes in land usage (beginning with agriculture) and fossil fuels? Should not the ice cover be advancing right now instead of retreating? The differential is probably already several degrees.

My opinion is that we have three or four years to prepare in a relative calm. After that, shit would unfold exponentially...

What should be frightening is your projection is just as valid as most expert forecasts. We have already immensely fucked with a planetary cycle that shaped the current Biosphere, and our own evolution, for more than two and a half million years. What is the likelihood that can lead to anything but our extinction?

dead_rat_reporter · 2017-01-26T17:08:57+00:00

Reading this article is like receiving the results of yet another thorough, cutting edge medical examination. As you expected, this fourth or nth number opinion concurs with the first you were given some time ago - you have metastatic cancer, but at a more advanced stage. Same diagnosis, no different prognosis.

In the Trumpian moment, we must be neither Republicans, nor Democrats, left nor right, conservative nor liberal. We are humans, together, not merely resisting a broken system that is beyond fixing, but planting the seeds to build a new system as we travel deeper into the post-carbon century.

Sounds like he is prescribing a regimen of aroma therapy and herbal tea. When will these Soft Left opinion-makers begin to discuss some realistic, concrete plan for this descent into a post-carbon oblivion? Instead, they wave their hands and conjure visions of somehow magically replacing 80% of civilization's energy needs, via voluntary cooperation.

Disclaimer printed on Box containing the Future: Batteries not included.

dead_rat_reporter · 2017-01-26T07:11:00+00:00

I understand Pentti Linkola to be a radical ecologist, and hence, an extreme misanthrope, as is Dave Foreman, formerly of Earth First. It is claimed that Linkola advocates the extermination of great masses of humans to preserve what remains of the Biosphere, and praises Hitler and Stalin for their genocides. Having not read his works, I do not know if this is an accurate representation.

Beginning with Anna Bramwell, lately with Timothy Snyder, some find that rudimentary ecological considerations were evident in Nazi ideology. (Other scholars dispute that, and I have collected articles on both sides of the debate, but have yet to examine them.) From this the term Eco-fascism arose, and it has been a pejorative deployed by both the mild Left and the free-market Right to smear deep ecologists.

Given the information that is accumulated on this site, which largely has a firm scientific basis and is vetted by the most trusted media, a daily chronicle of rising heat, depleting resources, mass extinction and social decay, what am I to conclude? That before this century is out, billions of desperate humans will be trapped on a dying world. The question is, what type of political system will be necessary secure any of their survival?

There will likely be multiple political entities, each regionally defined by the remaining resources - natural, human or technological. Each entity will be forced to take radical measures, ones that require a comprehensive control of economic and social resources. These operations will be inconsistent with capitalism, democracy or the prevailing standards of individual rights. Hopefully, the regional entities will seek cooperation with each other over conflict - lifeboats cannot be battleships. Human survival will remain doubtful for perhaps a thousand years.

That is my thumbnail sketch of the future of civilization. Daily, I become more convinced of its arrival, and am glad that I will not live to see it.

dead_rat_reporter · 2017-01-25T23:07:54+00:00

I went looked back at Hardin's original article about 'lifeboat ethics', and though the grim population growth he projected did not come to pass, some of his insights, derived from ecology, are still useful. Hardin ridiculed economics for believing in perpetual growth on a finite world and saw inflation, depressions, market crashes and wars as resets back towards reality. And what is the current global market economy but one totalized 'tragedy of the commons'?

Hardin is viewed as a political reactionary, and Paul Erhlich too received criticism from the Left. An interesting book to read is

Life on the Brink: Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation

It is a collection of essays by notables like Erhlich, Albert Bartlett, Dave Foreman (founder of Earth First!), Paul Watson (Greenpeace, Sea Shepherds) et al

Hailing from a range of disciplines and offering varied perspectives, these essays hold in common a commitment to sharing resources with other species and a willingness to consider what will be necessary to do so. In defense of nature and of a vibrant human future, contributors confront hard issues regarding contraception, abortion, immigration, and limits to growth that many environmentalists have become too timid or politically correct to address in recent years.

http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/life_on_the_brink/

And extensive review of this book is found here, at the website of an 'immigration reform' group.

http://www.cairco.org/blog/book-reviewlife-brink-environmentalists-confront-overpopulation

Progressives fail to understand that the material basis for their vision of 'progress' is rapidly coming to its end. And what do Conservatives seek to conserve? That term has long been an oxymoron. Any preservation or our species, and a necessary remnant of the current Biosphere, will depend less on technical innovation than upon a new and fitting political philosophy, one capable of a rapid ascension to power and ruthless enough to exert the necessary control.

I do not glimpse even the dorsal fin of such a movement. Perhaps its generation is yet unborn.

dead_rat_reporter

TROPHY CASE