Gideon Lewis-Kraus

And one of the wonderful things that we've seen out of Hollywood in the last five years is the power of collective bargaining to assert labor rights.

But then the question is, well, even if they hold themselves to that standard,

to protect their industries.

How are they going to compete when some teenager in Chengdu can create a two-hour Mission Impossible movie?

I mean, they're obviously going to try to just enforce their copyright provisions, but I don't know.

I mean, that seems pretty wild.

I mean, that is the big question, right?

And so the, like,

At the very least, one can say that they're thinking about these problems, but they're also experiencing these problems.

That they have really seen themselves as kind of the canaries in the coal mine of this march of automation.

And it's not just a matter of kind of abstract concerns about, well, if we saw vast...

white collar employment shocks, would that lead to social instability?

I mean, they certainly have those concerns, but they also have very personal concerns that a lot of their reactions to over the course of just a year watching the proportion of code that they write themselves go to zero is a certain kind of mournfulness about this activity that they spent a long time being trained to do that

you know, they care about for its own sake because it gives them, you know, feelings of intellectual pleasure or competence that this has all been eroded so quickly that there's a kind of existential gloom where on the one hand they feel like, okay, yeah, this does seem like it's been great for productivity.

But on the other hand, like we are, you know, stripping ourselves of the human activities that like,

we spent our lives gearing ourselves up to do.

And there's feelings of sorrow and fear and resignation, and nobody quite knows how to deal with that kind of thing.

And, you know, the kind of optimistic scenario is, well, as we take away, like, certain tasks, we are going to add other tasks that, you know, a lot of these software engineers said, okay, well, I don't really write my code anymore, but I still do the design brief to think about how it should work overall.

And,

You know, now I'm effectively a manager because I'm managing an entire team of AIs who are writing code for me.