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Apple Just Ended Audio Book Narration Jobs [1]

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Date: 2023-01-05

We are not ready for the future

Audiobooks narrated by a text-to-speech AI are now available via Apple’s Books service, in a move with potentially huge implications for the multi-billion dollar audiobook industry. Apple describes the new “digital narration” feature on its website as making “the creation of audiobooks more accessible to all,” by reducing “the cost and complexity” of producing them for authors and publishers. Apple Books quietly launches AI-narrated audiobooks - The Verge

There are limitations for now -- certain genres, only English, only a couple of voices. But the consensus seems to be that the voices are very good, certainly good enough for the majority of books. They do not yet have individual voices for characters, for example, but many audiobooks today do not do that. So while the headline is an exaggeration, it is likely an exaggeration in time, not in degree.

AI is moving up the intellectual job chain very rapidly. It is likely not going to be able to produce great work, but great work is not really necessary in capitalism. The translation industry has been gutted by poor machine level translations that are good enough for the price point. Why not audio books? Why not animation voice over? We are not ready for how fast this material is improving and how few jobs this will leave untouched.

The argument against being worried about automation has always been two-fold. First, it supposedly eliminated drudgery, dangerous work that we were better off not having people do. Even if it caused short term pain, it freed people form dangerous or limiting work and allowed them to move up the value chain and create, eventually, better lives for themselves. Historically, machines did not destroy jobs -- they created new work. You may not work the loom, but you could repair the machine that did, as a crude example. Human ingenuity and creativty would always have a place. It tirns out that neither are true, if they ever were.

A study from Duke University and the University of British Columbia found that routine physical jobs like forklift operators and welders were automated, as were “cognitive” white-collar tasks. “Think bank tellers being replaced by ATMs, and secretarial work being replaced by personal computers,” said Henry Siu of the University of British Columbia, the report’s co-author. “Historically these occupations rebounded,” said Siu. “But this time, they’re not coming back.” This helps explain why jobs aren’t snapping back after the recession, he says, and we may be ushering in a new labor landscape. national.deseretnews.com

We may have already begun to push automation so far up the job ladder that we have pushed some kinds of work permanently off it. If we are now completing with automation that can do creativity well enough, then we are looking at a kind of capitalism where there are only two kinds of jobs: those who control the capital and who have rare unique positions that automation cannot work in and those who have grunt jobs that are so unskilled that automation is too expensive for. In other words, a kind of inequality that makes the current second gilded age look like a socialist paradise.

We are not ready for the misery this new world is about to inflict upon us, possibly much sooner than we see coming. If we do not pivot away from capitalism to a form of techno-socialism, are future is going to be one of a form of feudalism or fascism driven by automation. And it is coming faster than you think.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/5/2145510/-Apple-Just-Ended-Audio-Book-Narration-Jobs

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