Musicians wage war against evil robots (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Musicians wage war against evil robots (2012)

smithsonianmag.com

120 pointsscifibestfi167 comments

I'm kind of surprised that this article did not mention John Philip Sousa, who was both one of the most successful "recording artists" of that time and one of the most outspoken opponents of recorded music.

(If you are American, you definitely know Sousa. Think of any patriotic march you've ever heard. Sousa probably wrote that.)

Sousa was not so much worried about the economic effects, but about how the new technology would change the social function of music. It would change what music was. He worried that instead of people gathering around the family or neighborhood pianist and singing together, they would be alone in their own rooms passively listening.

He worried that children would no longer gather on neighbourhood stoops to make up their own little songs and sing them together, but would all start passively consuming the same music as every one else in the country.

Sousa was worried that recoding technology would change music from active social interactions where we create music together into isolated, passive consumption.

Sousa was right.

And that allowed us to move from a society in which only those who had money could make music and join groups, to a society that can express themselves artistically and musically in a much more democratic way, because many more people can have the means to produce music in their home. People can discover new music and share it in real time with their micro-communities online. Creating possibilities for artists who don't live in big cities to become world wide known. I'm glad he was right.

s/produce/replay

Yes reproduction allowed the top .01% of musicians to gain world renown, but as GP stated it really made the activity of socially enjoying and creating music less accessible.

>> it really made the activity of socially enjoying and creating music less accessible.

Not sure if I agree, I still see people doing music together or gathering to listen to music, but maybe I'm biased by my environment.

If you want a social activity that revolves around music, join a dance club. You'll enjoy the music a lot more by adding the physical movement to it.

Are there pop punk dance clubs?

I don't know. I go to partner dances. It's not something you can do at home.

I think the statement that "You'll enjoy the music a lot more by adding the physical movement to it" is unlikely to apply to everyone, and may not even apply to a majority of people. Not because humans don't have a natural inclination to "move to the beat" (they might), but because a dance club may be much more intimidating for many people than, say, a music circle.

> is unlikely to apply to everyone

Me: "Humans are bipedal"

You: "Some humans have only one leg"

I have both legs, I love music (our home has several musical instruments), and I'd never join a dance club. Glad it works for you but I just wanted to offer another perspective.

Also, nitpicking, but you can dance even with just one leg, as the first (or one of the very first) verses in "Moving to Florida" by the Butthole Surfers shows ;)

> I'd never join a dance club

What you're missing:

https://www.pinterest.de/pin/547117054706266836/

To be fair, you're also likely to be missing that if you do join a dance club.

Source: I play for dance clubs as a musician (they usually use recorded music, but will hire a band for an event such as their annual ball).

Depends on which ones you go to. If you go to one where the crowd are people who have taken lessons, yes, you do see the stuff in the picture. If you take lessons, yes you can dance like that. There's always a shortage of men at these functions, so if you make the effort to learn it, you can dance with excellent partners, and your rear will never touch a chair.

The costumes in the pictures you'll only see at a competition event, but people still dress up for the club dances.

The community of these people is not large, and they know each other, and will network to find a venue to meet up at.

It's really too bad more people don't do it. The barrier of learning it is rather high, as there's a long awkward stage, and few are willing to put in the effort. But the payoff is lifelong, and as I wrote, it really dials up the pleasure from music.

Not too different from my experiences with playing in bands, including the high learning curve and the lifetime payoff.

If you think back then that only those who had money made music and formed groups, you must have no concept of folk music. Slaves were forming bands and writing songs we still sing today (e.g. "Follow the Drinking Gourd" or "Where did you sleep last night" that Nirvana went on to cover); money wasn't a limiting factor like it is today with the need to market yourself and the prices of musical equipment.

I'm glad I'm not some mook like Sousa was, contributing to the nationalism of a country like the United States of America while harboring the futile wish that evolution would just stop with my preferences.

> Sousa was right.

He was partially right, which means he was partially wrong too. Yeah, a lot of isolated music listening (I'm not going with consumption, sorry) did happen. I can definitely attest to that as someone from the "Walkman generation".

But all the kids forming "bands" all over the world show that the active social interaction of music didn't go away. Or maybe I'm just lucky, as on a weekly basis I stumble upon the sound of people jamming while taking random walks in my city.

I read "they would be alone in their own rooms passively listening" and think of Björk's song headphones ("my headphones, they saved my life") and just awe at the seemingly infinite range of human thought and emotion ...

People were forming bands long before recording artists were popular. It wouldn't look like the beatles though. It would be you on accordion and your friend on upright bass taking turns singing polka songs for weddings, funerals, in bars, at war, or anything really. If you wanted music back then you needed a musician, which probably meant there were more musician jobs overall. Maybe in some ways, back before the rockstar era, it might have been more realistic to set out and make a career as a musician in a band.

These days though, you don't need a couple musicians in each and every bar in town every night for drinking music, you just open spotify, and if you actually do hire a local musician to play the drinking music you are something of an anomaly.

> These days though, you don't need a couple musicians in each and every bar in town every night for drinking music... if you actually do hire a local musician to play the drinking music you are something of an anomaly.

Maybe where I am (London) is an outlier, but it's not hard _at all_ to find a free neighbourhood pub open mic night on any day of the week, not to mention full on live music venues.

I'd say its an outlier. There are places like that in the U.S. of course but the vast majority of bars and clubs just play a playlist off of some workers phone who is on the clock that night.

Yeah, regarding your comment about people playing music together before, I’m reading “Men, Women, and Pianos” after seeing it mentioned here on HN and it’s a great read about that (obviously centered on keyboard instruments).

And regarding your comment about bars and musicians, I was reminded about a scene from “El Mariachi” in which the guy walks into a bar trying to get a job and is faced with the bartender saying “why would I need a mariachi when I can get the full band”, followed by the demo from a digital keyboard :)

So yeah, the point I tried to make was that despite the changes brought about by technology, the social aspect to music still lives on, and I personally love the private side of it that came thanks to technology. Not going to argue about the difficulty of making a living as a musician, but life is all about change and careers come and go.

>Sousa was right.

Sure, but so was Thamus [0]. The invention of the written word was met with the same skepticism. People feared the loss of oral tradition. No more bards memorizing epic tales to be passed down from generation to generation, just passive consumers reading the thoughts of others and mistaking it for wisdom.

But ultimately new technologies unlock potential that can't possibly be dreamed of at their inception. Beware the one-eyed prophet who sees any technological innovation as strictly good or bad.

[0] https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sept12/2012/09/30/what-was-the-j...

I play a sousaphone :)

And it's true. Recoded music ravaged the ranks of movie organists and other accompanists to the point that providing incidental music has not been an occupation in many decades. In more recent decades, being a session musician for regional or mid-tier bands has stopped providing a living, following the huge consolidation in radio and music publishing in the 90s and 00s. There is far less live music today, at least in the US, than there has ever been in my lifetime.

“There is far less live music today”

Subjectively it doesn’t feel like less than when I was in high school and college (late 90s early 2000s), it feels like substantially more. Especially as pandemic precautions have wound down, I can’t seem to walk into a bar without running into a live band.

I think there’s quite a bit more studio music coming out, too, as people can self-release on Spotify, etc.

We've probably made it easier for people to have "half a career" in music -- getting paid a modest amount of money on weekends, evenings, etc. to do what they love. In my own circle, I've got friends who earn $5,000 to $30,000 a year playing live music -- and then round out their earnings doing some amount of teaching, bookkeeping or whatever. Ditto for actors, writers, semi-pro athletes, etc.

The more I think about these tradeoffs, the harder it is to see them as unilaterally good or evil. It's a second-best solution for dealing with the gap between what people love to do, and what pays the bills.

Not sure if there is a first-best solution. Some countries have created "artists' cartels," which provide subsidized higher incomes for people in the club. That does make it easier to make a living as an approved artist. But the jockeying about who gets into the club, who pays the subsidies and what it takes to stay in -- argh! it all gets really protracted and ugly.

It’s not a silver bullet, but an expanded social safety net would make it significantly less risky to pursue art (or open source software or whatever) as more than just a “nights and weekends” thing.

> an expanded social safety net would make it significantly less risky to pursue art

Paraphrased: workers should be taxed so that we can 100% subsidise some other people’s dreams.

Fuck that.

I accept our society should subsidise some: art (I do like the BBC, especially so because I don’t pay for it), or music (I like CreativeNZ videos), or sports, or hobbies (HAM radio spectrum), or open source (yayyy), or even subsidise sitting around doing nothing (society should not demand all our time just for us to survive).

But the idea that society should subsidise everyone to follow their dreams is simply unworkable. And if you want to start ranking which dreams are worthwhile, well, society ends up with systems such as we already have.

Some of our greatest scientific achievement come from aristocratic or independently wealthy folks who don't need to earn a living.

So I wouldn't knock these subsidies.

I think we could rearrange society to provide such subsidies on a sustainable basis if we choose to.

That’s not an accurate paraphrasing; many social programs actually cost less than the alternative.

Sounds like you live in the UK, so maybe you take the NHS for granted. It would be a vast improvement from what we have in the US, where we have amongst the most expensive health care system in the world with far from the best outcomes. Group insurance is generally negotiated by employers; access to affordable healthcare is a huge obstacle to pursuing anything other than a traditional job.

Even loftier goals like ending homelessness don’t turn out to require the financial tradeoffs you’re talking about. Study after study, we’ve seen that simply giving people homes is costs less than shelters, police raids and a Kafkaesque system of requirements to prevent people who Don’t Deserve Help from getting it.

Consider that US workers are taxed in order to subsidize the dreams of the second wealthiest man in the world, for not one but two of his businesses. Would SpaceX or Tesla have succeeded without government handouts? We’re never asked to question that, but as soon as we suggest that people be able to make art without worrying about medical bankruptcy or homelessness, people start looking at the balance sheet with a magnifying glass.

You appear to be introducing three new tangential topics, and I don’t think you are addressing the point you originally raised.

Your original comment says that we should take a system that is there to provide insurance for the unfortunate (social safety net) and use that system to fund people’s desires (art, open source, or whatever).

I very strongly disagree with that idea: different systems have different purposes and commingling a safety net with creative goals will likely lead to very unfair outcomes.

That’s not really what I meant, but I suppose I can see why you’d infer it. I’m saying that a social safety net decreases the risk of pursuing art rather than a more traditional job, not that we should repurpose it to give people additional income to fund specifically artistic goals.

So I’m not really introducing any tangential topics. In the US, medicine and healthcare are expensive and usually tied to employment; by providing those to everyone for free or cheap as part of a social safety net, it becomes less risky to dedicate your time to producing art.

Ahhhh, that makes more sense. I did jump to the conclusion you meant UBI, or full-time “welfare” benefits for artists (à la https://wikipedia.org/wiki/UB40 — the eight musicians formed a band, deciding on the name 'UB40' after a friend suggested it was an appropriate name given the unemployed status of all of the band members).

But you are still implying some cost to the rest of society to support creatives in their cups. And I am saying that many people who are working don’t like that. Plenty of people think artists should have to worry about their own balance sheet and society provides them plenty already, as opposed to your special-status-for-artists comment “people be able to make art without worrying about medical bankruptcy or homelessness”.

Instead, Western society’s usual deal is supposed to be: work 40 hours a week and you get your needs met, plus some disposable money to use as you wish, and the rest of your week (evenings, weekends) to do whatever you wish (art, open source, whatever). Alternatively society provides ways to monetise your interests. Those deals actually work in some countries, and don’t work in many others. I understand why you feel that the 40-hour deal might be broken in the USA. Many people from other countries look at the deal given to the median American with envy, and that is perfectly reasonable too.

I have multiple artistic and musician friends where the jobs-for-money deal seems to work for them and they mostly own their own homes (however I am a ~50 year old in New Zealand and the majority of my artistic friends are 40 or over). I also have arty friends that get government benefits!

And yeah, the USA medical system is rather perverse: hopefully you guys can fix that for all of yourselves (not just artists etcetera).

To be honest, I would support some form of UBI, but I think there are many more modest reforms we can talk about before we get there.

> But you are still implying some cost to the rest of society to support creatives in their cups. And I am saying that many people who are working don’t like that.

You’re inferring this, but I’m not implying it. Let me try to be a little clearer:

Public services do not necessarily cost taxpayers more than the alternatives. Again, with healthcare we have a concrete example of privatized systems costing more and delivering worse outcomes than universal public ones. Many people who are working might prefer the former so they don’t have to subsidize others, but ultimately they themselves receive worse care (on average) as a result of this; they are cutting off their noses to spite their faces.

Relatedly, a significant amount of US taxpayer money subsidizes the business ventures of billionaires like Elon Musk. There are plenty of other examples, like the almost eight trillion USD we give to the military every decade. This doesn’t directly address your point, but I do wonder why we only start talking about these tradeoffs when it’s the poorest receiving subsidies from the government, rather than the most powerful.

I feel like I am repeating myself, both those situations are irrelevant to your original point. I agree we can try to make things more efficient, and society can improve how it redistributes wealth.

You seem to be saying we should distribute any gains to artists. I am saying that we distribute those gains to working people, and let the artists do their thing in their free time.

If we start getting to the point where there is not enough “work” to go around, then we can follow the scandi practice of reducing everyone’s working hours. Although admittedly that doesn’t address the problem that there is an unlimited need for highly skilled people (the drive behind the power law of income distribution and why the more highly paid professionals have no spare time).

UBI is a lovely concept, but unfortunately in the very major examples I have already seen of UBI (retirement being the biggest example), I don’t see much return in scientific or creative output.

PS: this is a fantastic read about the US health system: https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-o...

The U.S. used to in fact commingle the social safety net with creative goals during the WPA era. There would be funding provided to employ artists, musicians, writers, actors, stage hands, etc. I think this is one of the many great ideas from the progressive era that could use reinstatement today. What a shame so many of our excellent social programs were cut during WWII as we shifted to a centrally planned war economy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration#...

> Paraphrased: workers should be taxed [...]

No, the richest people should be taking most of the tax burden.

Yeah, I would like to have phrased it better. However I am struggling to think of a clear alternative.

If we assume that the rich get their wealth from the workers, then taxing the rich is now just indirectly taxing the workers.

If we talk about taxing everyone in society, then how do we tax an artist or anybody else spending time on their dream? How do we measure an artist’s contribution to society? Should we pay anyone highly if they contribute great artistic wealth to society? Should we pay someone whose art or hobby has no merit to society? Do we treat a rich artist like you seem to want to treat a financially rich person - tax the value of their art until they are “equal”? If someone has worldwide status or high renown, should we somehow share that wealth of status with the less fortunate? What if some high art is immensely valuable to a small number of people - how do you fairly manage that?

Our society has a huge variety of different means to deal with the conflicting goals above. One of those is money which often equalises competing unmeasurable needs so that as individuals we get to value incomparable things (catching polio vs. a Van Gogh vs. an apricot vs. playing Mario Brothers vs. reading a book vs. a massage).

We all have huge disagreements about how the wealth of society should be divided - and our society has many radically different solutions for that problem. Should the average wage of a US citizen be allowed to be radically higher than a citizen of Haiti? What about an artist in Haiti?

Any kind of "measuring contribution to society" becomes hopelessly politicized. UBI is the way to go.

Thank you.

It feels like lately more and more people somehow believe it's a societal/structural failure that achieving their dream life isn't easier.

Maybe it has something to do with a generation raised on endless immediate gratification via free (you're the product) digital products. FOMO, whatever.

Then again, maybe it has something to do with me getting old.

Anyway thanks for some sanity today!

I think it's more that most current employment is awful - you're either doing something useful and paid peanuts or a cog in the machine making the (you're the product) type products. There's terribly few jobs available that are ethical, useful, and well compensated.

People aren't unwilling to do a hard days work, they're unwilling to do it for less than a living wage, which is the current offer for a lot of people right now, especially young people.

And to your first sentence _YES_, society should of course be set so that people can achieve their dreams as much as possible! That's the point! I understand that doing this via wealth redistribution is touchy but you're acting like wanting things to be easier is a stupid goal in general.

Survival has always been awful. Hunting and gathering aren't glamourous activies, they're simply necessary. Dreams are mostly just that, dreams.

I'm all for helping dreams become reality. Pursuit of happiness and all that.

But there is real injustice and inequality in the world. Real human suffering. Lets find solutions to those problems first, before we focus the resources of society on solving the problems of struggling musicians.

Almost every job right now is so far abstracted from survival that it barely makes any sense. My job (that pays very well) involves taking an existing product and shuffling the UI around so people think it's a different product.

Even people with useful jobs like baristas and janitors aren't really helping anyone survive they're just making it nice for everyone else.

So few people are in farming, or medicine, where you can really say that. This is a societal problem imo, people really want/need to feel useful and we haven't been able to come up with 8 billion useful things to do

Also, yes there is injustice around the world, sure lets solve that, it sounds great. I feel like the solution is pretty similar to how we solve what's happening to poor people in our own country

> Almost every job right now is so far abstracted from survival that it barely makes any sense

We are hyper-specialized, hyper-optimized, hyper-focused cogs in the massive survival machine that is the world economy. So much so that we can no longer see the forest for the trees. But I firmly believe the forest is still there.

Supply chain problems of the last few years continue to show us just how fragile of a world we live in. Jobs we've never heard about, performed by poor villagers from places we don't care about, are arguably more important to our survival than musicians and baristas.

It doesn't seem fair to ask the people providing goods/services necessary to our survival to support the chosen others who get to follow their dreams. Where do I sign up?

I think you're spot on with your comment about finding 8 billion useful things to do. A barista may not be helping us survive, but at least they're making the place a bit nicer for the rest of us. The musician will trade his time/music for a nice cup of coffee. It may not be survival, but it improves the overall human experience. We're all in it together.

We're going to reach a point where there isn't anything more people can do to make things nicer. Automation will eventually lead to a crisis, where people no longer have any useful value, and simply breed and consume everything around them in ever larger amounts.

A world where everyone is free to pursue their dreams doesn't seem like a utopia to me. Humans free from all constraints sounds like hell to me. Devil will find work for idle hands etc. Must be a really good sci-fi novel in here somewhere.

oh, I agree with almost everything in this ^, sorry if I came off as confrontational earlier. Your first post read to me like the typical "there is no injustice because I, a well paid software engineer, is willing to work unlike those lazy poors" which reading this was clearly not your point.

To me, the problem is exactly what you identified, that the value is created by jobs we haven't heard about and poor villagers. And also baristas and musicians who are also routinely underpaid. And that value is mostly exploited by whoever the current elite is (currently shareholders and to a lesser extent, software ppl, and lesser still anyone in 1st world countries etc. etc.)

So I think the only difference is a boring semantic problem :p I was defining 'pursuing dreams' as what it means to me specifically - ie. my dream is to do something cool and respected and get paid well for it, which I think jives with why musicians want to be musicians. Making things nicer for people is a major part of it.

All the baristas I know say they like baristaing, the sucky part is that it's every single day and the managers suck, and you have to deal with some awful customers with a smile and you're never doing anything else. But freed from all of that they like making people nice coffee and feeling good about making things better. I hate my job because I'm fiddling with code that (to my understanding) is of no benefit to anyone and is only sustained by mooching off the government and tricking people into things they don't need. Doesn't hurt that we bought all the competition. Pay is nice though.

I think with something like UBI we will be closer to that. Free from exploitation because if the job conditions suck you can quit. But I really believe that most people really do want to be useful and respected and will continue to make value for the world for the pure joy of it. Anyone who is a teacher right now is intentionally giving up almost all possible earnings for the ability to do something directly useful. WWOOFers volunteer on farms. If farmers were respected people would like doing it more. Lots of people volunteer, edit wikipedia, make and share art, etc.

And, of course, ideally this would include all the people in other countries whose sweatshop labor is funding the world economy. I'm rooting for them too. If we can't solve this is our own country it seems unlikely we can solve it for the whole world though, but no reason not to try. I think both fights can (and kinda must) be happening at the same time.

I mostly agree with everything you're saying. And share your goals. I also absolutely don't think my place in the totem pole is special, I worked hard to get here, but I'm absolutely replaceable.

I'm more pessimistic though on outcomes. I don't think UBI solves anything, just kicks the can down the road a little bit longer.

Money exists because of scarcity, there isn't enough for everyone. Money helps us decide who gets what, prices are relative and fluctuate as supply and demand change, that's a very good thing. If I think I can get a better deal elsewhere, I'll take my ball and go home. If I want it bad enough, I'll work harder (or sacrifice elsewhere) so I can afford to get it.

Baristas aren't paid well because anyone can grind and brew their own coffee. Or just buy a Keurig which costs less overall. Contrast that to say, a surgeon who is paid well precisely because most people don't want to operate on themselves.

The issue I have with UBI is that you still have the same number of people chasing the same number of scarce resources/houses/products. So prices will rise accordingly. Pretty soon it becomes "UBI doesn't let me be a musician and live the lifestyle I want/deserve". Complaints that UBI doesn't pay well enough, big business, etc.

I'm 100% for a better social net to catch those who have stumbled/fallen. But the arguments elsewhere in this thread conflate that with being able to pursue the life of your dreams free of consequence. That's the heart of the distinction I'm making here.

To me, you can't chase your dream without asking yourself "How hard am I willing to work to get what I really want?" Achievement is more satisfying when it's earned then when it's handed to you. A well lived life is about playing the hand you were dealt well, rather than complaining that you weren't dealt a better hand. I think that's the difference between having the "right to pursue happiness" versus the "right to happiness".

I think you're right yea -

A lot of the stuff UBI would pay for is (imo) not that scarce or shouldn't be. Food, water, most medicine, etc. we can absolutely just provide to everyone. We have the resources to give everyone a decent life (ie. not struggling to stay alive, not made artificially awful etc.).

I am quite sure of this for America given the current level of offshore exploitation not changing. I think but am not entirely convinced this is possible globally. Certainly there is some amount of population that is simply too much for the earth to sustainably handle but I have no real idea what exactly that number is.

Stuff that is inherently not scalable then .. yea .. ubi cant fix that. Not everyone can get a mansion, or 1918 wines, or even maybe suburban houses really. Not sure exactly where the lines are but there ARE unique things and it's wrong to discount that.

But the current system is set up so that you have to grind hours doing miserable things largely unrelated to survival to get enough money to _not die_. I feel like UBI is just the simplest most reasonable safety net for that. Certainly there are other options but they add bureaucracy and complications that don't seem worth it to me. It's like everyone has a house they can crash at indefinitely if they need or want to.

But it's not the only option ofc. Just seems to me like a decent combination of simple + politically viable + solves many problems of exploitative work. Healthcare-for-all would be huge step forwards even without UBI so it's not the only goal either.

& as for "right to happiness" - I really believe that most people will still want to be useful and make cool things people like, even if given the option to not. Open Source software etc. is already run this way on weekends. Making something useful for other people will still be an achievement people strive for, and would be rewarded on top of UBI.

> you have to grind hours doing miserable things largely unrelated to survival to get enough money to _not die_.

Working to not die, isn't that the definition of survival? Or, as Rick Sanchez might say, grinding at your job is just surviving with extra steps.

> I really believe that most people will still want to be useful and make cool things people like

I really want to believe this, and it's true there are a lot of us that will do just that.

The issue is that there are a lot of traps and vices people can fall into. Alcoholism, drug use, even seemingly benign stuff like chasing digital approval are very ugly when taken to extremes. What snaps most people out of this stuff and keeps us in check is the fear of hitting rock bottom -- that is, you know that if you don't change you're likely going to lose everything / die / etc.

I've seen it in numerous lives, its only when they hit rock bottom that they decide something needs to change (that something being them). I know a former heroin user that destroyed every relationship in his life (including family) to get his hands on the stuff, and only changed when he decided that being homeless and waking up naked in a crack house was enough.

UBI takes away rock bottom. What's to stop a drug addict when there is no downside to staying high all the time?

As much as I would like to believe in UBI helping people, I would wager that there is a positive correlation between the people that UBI could help the most and people most susceptible to addiction. Maybe that's my pessimism leaking through, but I don't think UBI is a solution for them.

Again, I'm ALL for having better social safety nets etc. It's just hard to define what better is. You can meet a man's physical needs and still starve his soul.

yeah, its the unrelated to survival that gets me i'd be fine working equally hard on something meaningful to not die. im not happy with shuffling paperwork for the same thing. maybe this is a personal problem

For me personally at least, why I really want UBI is for soul-starving needs specifically. My job I fully believe is either net-neutral or hurting the world, and after some amount of looking have not been able to find one that's both clearly positive and not exploited. If I was given UBI I would quit, maybe volunteer to teach one class a day in a high school, or help run a boardgame cafe or makerspace. There would be no worry of putting people out a job since they'd be getting UBI too.

Right now I feel souless. I'm living well but through some glitch in the system that rewards people for writing useless code on a project that I'm expecting will get canned (the last two were thrown away) and spending time on hackernews. I want to be doing the useful things that currently don't pay well enough to be live without anxiety.

I think a lot of people working exploited jobs would also benefit, for the reasons you already know if you want a general safety net. Being able to quit without fear is a lot of leverage and would make things a lot more equal between employer / employee. Current unemployment benefits don't give anything if you quit (instead of fired) and a UBI style no-questions-asked solves this.

Addictions / vices are certainly a problem, and could definitely be worse with UBI perpetually enabling. I don't really have a great answer to this. The current system does not seem very kind to addicts without external support either, so I'm not sure how much worse this would be either way but definitely something to think about. Hadn't really considered that angle before.

Either way, I'm not 100% convinced UBI is the best way to add a safety net. I do think it would have some pretty profound effects on what work people would be wiling to do, most of which would be positive. It's a pretty simple / meme-able demand the same way 'fight for 15' or 'healthcare for all' is, that's really all the pitch i have for it tbh

What sort of changes are you hoping for?

(edit: is there a comment reply limit? if this is the end im happy to give an email or phone # to continue somewhere else. legit this is the only pleasant hackernews comment thread i've been a part of on this or my alt so thank you very much <3)

Feel free to reach out to me, my email can be found on manfreda.org

In the meantime I understand the struggle. I'm on the other side of it now. My answers work for me, that's enough.

Gotta accept the world the way it is, you can't change it, but you can change you. I've found that stoicism helps a lot. [1] Absurdism helps me a lot as well. [2]

A few books I found helpful along the way

Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl [3]

Ride the Tiger by Julius Evola [4]

Finally, if you can get through all of it, I found this book extremely profound when looked at from a 10,000 ft. view. This combined with Absurdism largely explains my worldview.

Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard [5]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27s_Search_for_Meaning

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Ride-Tiger-Survival-Manual-Aristocrat...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

I’m not really talking about achieving your dreams; I’m talking about even having a shot at them.

Let me put it this way:

I am okay with someone not getting a chance to play at Carnegie Hall because they preferred to watch TV or go out instead of dedicating themselves to their craft.

I am not okay with someone not getting that chance because, instead of being able to practice, they were forced to keep a 9–5 job so that the insurance could pay for their prohibitively expensive insulin.

The former is a personal failing, but the second is indeed a societal/structural failing.

I agree, I wish things were fairer. Trust me, you get old enough and you get your fill of injustice.

But as I said in another comment, there are much greater injustices in the world worthy of our attention. I just feel like we should start solving those first before we discuss how to help those with regular day jobs get a bit more out of life.

That's not at all what the parent said. No where did they say anything about people being 100% subsidized to follow their dreams. You are attacking a strawman.

That just mean that you don't make a living making art since the safety net provide a living for you.

So much so that it's actually kind of a trope in the UK music industry [1]. A lot of the most famous British musicians from the 70s and 80s were "on the dole" receiving welfare before they made it big.

[1] https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/horace-trubridge/class-and-...

Probably, UBI is the best first solution. In the sense that it acts as a collective bargaining system for all citizens who are forced to trade their time for income.

This is of course not scientific, but my observation has been just the opposite. It seems like in the past it was possible to be an artist who supported themselves working 9 to 5 as a waiter. I don't see how that would be possible with the skyrocketing cost of living even before the inflation spike. Lots of people have multiple jobs just to make ends meet.

Some popular artists over the years have funded their initial studio time with some ill gotten gains.

I'm one of those musicians, though my day job as a scientist has produced an ever increasing share of my income. I'm a double bassist, and I play mostly jazz.

Even full time musicians need multiple income streams. Teaching classical music to children is not a half bad occupation, but you have to enjoy it and live in a fairly affluent town. A violin teacher makes more per hour than I make playing gigs.

There are things that you can't do if you're not full time, such as traveling to perform. I'm pretty much limited to a 40 mile radius around my home.

Recording is possible of course, but I don't do it. It's not something that I really enjoy, and it's not easy or free even with modern tools. And getting paid for it is difficult. The musicians I know who actually make money from their recordings, sell CD's at their performances.

I think part of the situation with music is that we face competition from non musical forms of entertainment, that are extremely sophisticated. Perhaps at the top of the food chain is televised sports. It's very hard to put together a musical performance that's as exciting or entertaining as a major league sports broadcast.

What live musicians depend on is the audience that's actually interested in the experience of live music per se. And it's no longer the music of their youth. The jazz era is 100 years old. The majority of the jazz audience grew up listening to rock 'n' roll.

> Recoded music ravaged the ranks of movie organists and other accompanists to the point that providing incidental music has not been an occupation in many decades. In more recent decades, being a session musician for regional or mid-tier bands has stopped providing a living, following the huge consolidation in radio and music publishing in the 90s and 00s.

And yet it's never been easier for a musician to share their music on Soundcloud, use Bandcamp for album sales, put their music on Spotify/Beatport/etc and collect streaming royalties, and set up a Patreon to get recurring revenue from fans.

Musicians who refuse to adapt won't succeed, and those who do thrive. Would you feel bad for a software developer who learned Visual FoxPro in the 90s, refused to learn any new tools, then complained that their occupation was no longer relevant?

> There is far less live music today, at least in the US, than there has ever been in my lifetime.

Is there any data to support this? I would be shocked if this were true outside of the COVID years. There's certainly more music readily available to people now than at any point in history.

> And yet it's never been easier for a musician to share their music on Soundcloud, use Bandcamp for album sales, put their music on Spotify/Beatport/etc and collect streaming royalties, and set up a Patreon to get recurring revenue from fans.

This just means that it is far more complex to be far less likely to make a living.

People love to say stuff like this, but having gone through that grind myself, it's not nearly as easy or accessible as you describe. These platforms also make it easier than ever for artists to face things like copyright strikes and takedowns, which people are more than happy to abuse.

Additionally, streaming royalties pay peanuts for the vast, vast majority of artists and they get to determine how artists are paid based on calculations they determine. For example, Spotify pays artists by calculating their "stream-share", not a fixed amount per stream.[0]

Sure, it's easier to platform your music, but that doesn't necessarily make it any easier to generate meaningful income, particularly when you need the service to be priced as cheaply as possible in order to get reach. In the long run, I think this is going to further incentivize entertainment that is created passively and augmented by things like AI, which I'm personally not that excited about.

0: https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2022/10/22/how-much-per-...

> For example, Spotify pays artists by calculating their "stream-share", not a fixed amount per stream.

Well, obviously. I don't pay Spotify per stream, I pay them per month. So my $10 must get split up across every song I've listened to that month. No other model is possible given a monthly subscription.

Your money goes to the most played music on that platform. The artist you played may get nothing.

> The Pro Rata model, currently used by all major streaming platforms, means that monthly revenue from premium subscription costs and advertisement revenues is collected into one pool of money. Spotify takes 30% of that revenue and distributes the rest based on artist’s total listening numbers, rather than the listening times of individual users. Meaning that, even if a user never listens to the most streamed artists on the platform, a percentage of the money they pay will be given to the most streamed artists.

https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2019/10/a-breakdown-of-music...

This is outrageous.

What's the difference between whether my money is individually given to the artists I personally listened to and similarly for all other subscribers, or whether all subscribers' money is pooled and then re-apportioned out based on the cumulative listening tallies of all subscribers? Aren't these the same results in the end?

Imagine we are the only two subscribers:

* You spend an hour a day listening to A during your commute

* I spend 9 hours a day, my whole workday, listening to B.

In the current system, B gets 90% and A gets 10%, but some people would prefer to see a system in which they each get 50%.

Additionally, I believe they use total streaming time and not total streaming time for paid subscribers. So an artist who is popular among paid subscribers doesn't earn any more than an artist who is popular only among free subscribers.

I don’t get why this is always the talking point. The least streamed artists are also getting money from the listeners who only listen to the most streamed artists.

I can’t tell if this is sarcasm.

It isn't. It would be impossible for Spotify to guarantee any kind of fixed payment per stream, since customers don't pay per stream.

I guess they could pay based off the theoretical maximum a user could stream. So if the cost of a subscription is $10/month and an artist's song is 3 minutes long, then Spotify could pay ($10 / (31 * 24 * 60/3)) per stream. Thus guaranteeing that if a user streams an artist's song for the entire month, the artist gets the user's entire $10 subscription fee. But that's $0.00067 per stream, which is much less than they currently pay.

An opportunity for musicians to get paid is to seek out video authors that get taken down for incidental copyright violation of the music in it. Offer to make a custom tune for them at a nominal cost.

Sort of like "send me your slide deck and preferred music style, and I'll compose for it an intro and outrow soundtrack for $XX."

Sounds like a machine learning job. :-/

But I would hazard to say that the quality of well written likable music that will stand the test of time and keeps people interested has nose dived with the progression you outlined.

Or at least, what is popular doesn't highlight the good music any longer.

Being easier to write, produce and release didn't seem to have made music better from what I can see and what I have read.

I'm sure there is still good stuff being produced, but by Jebs, it's very hard to find now.

Edit. Quality isn't just my measure. As mentioned, I've read about the topic a few times as well articles and studies showing what music gets listened to the most, the complexity of music, how the simpler music gets the less it remains in listenership for long periods etc etc etc. Even playlists show that music pre 2010s, maybe 2000s can't remember now, is preferred by even people in their 20 to 30 year olds with some questioned stating new music is too simple or is rubbish.

And by no means does it mean all modern pop music is bad, this is not a blanket statement. There is still good stuff, it's probably just getting drowned out by the weekly flavour changes.

How do you measure “quality”, though? To my ear there’s a ton of great new music being made today, rivaling music from basically any point in recording history.

As for whether it will stand the test of time, well, only time can tell that. But most people are forever stuck waiting for more music that sounds like it did when they were in high school and college, which is a mindset destined for disappointment.

As I mentioned, good music is out there. But finding it seems to be harder now as a lot of it doesn't make it into the charts and stays hidden except to those who know about it.

The charts are still there, though? And only a fraction of good music has ever made it onto them. To be honest, I’m not quite sure what exactly you think has changed.

Unlike the great music that was produced when you were aged between 12 and 22 ?

Personally I like music regardless of when it was made. If it sounds good then I like it. Time has nothing to do with it.

And I can't remember exactly what dates the studies focused on as there have been a few I've read. One was over the last 60 years of music if I remember right and across all age brackets in 2022

Except that autotuned singing is inferior.

> But I would hazard to say that the quality of well written likable music that will stand the test of time and keeps people interested has nose dived with the progression you outlined.

People have felt this way since time immemorial: the music they grew up listening to in their formative years was just better than whatever exists now.

Your dad's dad, or his dad depending on your age, thought that Led Zeppelin was just a bunch of talentless idiots making noise.

People probably have, but now it seems to be getting some backing by statistics.

This isn't me just saying something random, it's something I've read about recently and had come out of studies of changes in music over the last 60 years.

Unless those studies have managed to verifiably predict the future and quantifiably measure how a particular album would affect the industry decades down the road, I wouldn't put much salt into those "studies". And if they have somehow managed to successfuly accomplish that, I think that only raises way more questions.

There have been quite a few examples of albums that were bombed on release by both critics and the audience, but then ended up as critically (+publicly) acclaimed and massively influential (+still standing the test of time) many many years later just from the past 2 decades. That alone tells me that whoever claims they have a method to predict the future influence and "standing the test of time" on aggregate is just playing around.

Yeah exactly, two examples that immediately come to mind during my lifetime are My Chemical Romance - Welcome to the Black Parade (the song more than the album) and Green Day - American Idiot. At the time they were released, many people saw them as emo-pop dreck, a complete departure from "real" punk-rock music of the 80s and 90s into something far too watered down and palatable for the masses. Now if you look at YouTube comment sections for those songs, it's full of people wistfully remembering the good ol' days when people played real music with real instruments.

Hell, even Limp Bizkit, Limp fucking Bizkit, has been widely retconned into being a charmingly nostalgic relic of music at the turn of the millennium instead of just, you know... bad.

A study in 2022 saying that most people say music from before 2010 was better is meaningless, because a study in 2032 will show that music from before 2020 was better.

careful looking for truth in youtube comments. how many of those people are bots? or just idiots?

those albums you mentioned ARE dreck ;)

Grandpa?? When did you sign up for HN?

In my day... Green Day was on the same label as Operation Ivy!

And coming from a completely different genre, 808's and Heartbreak by Kanye from 2008. Hated on release by everyone (both critics and the audience), it wasn't "rap enough", people weren't thrilled by electronic tons and sadboy singing.

Less than half the decade later, the critical and public opinion took a full 180, with plenty of new major artists (like Brockhampton) claiming they owe their entire music career to that album. You could easily hear the influence of that album pretty much all over other artists' works.

Disclaimer: yes, I am aware that over the past few years Kanye had become a person doing things that are hard to defend in any way, but that's not something I am trying to do here at all. A lot of those actions are pretty much indefensible. However, his personal behavior doesn't change the impact of his music from 2008 on the industry and music as a whole.

Rubbish. I have many friends who play instruments. Paying to hear certain sounds is the aberration of history.

What exactly are you even saying? What is "rubbish" and what do you mean by "certain sounds"?

People have been paying for live performances of music, i.e., "certain sounds", throughout all of recorded history. So it's the opposite of an aberration. "Paying to hear certain sounds" is a time-honored human tradition. If we broaden our definition of "paying" to include barter, I would guess it goes back to the invention of musical instruments.

I meant that the idea there is little live music any more. Historically people have paid for the time of musicians, not for music. If you want to hear more live music, pay for someone to play at your venue. If you want to be heard as a musician yourself, take your instrument down the pub or onto the street and just start playing.

>Would you feel bad for a software developer who learned Visual FoxPro in the 90s, refused to learn any new tools, then complained that their occupation was no longer relevant?

Indeed I wouldn't

>Is there any data to support this? I would be shocked if this were true outside of the COVID years. There's certainly more music readily available to people now than at any point in history.

It’s hyperbolic BS, as per usual when it comes to emotionally charged arguments with no basis in reality. According to every statistic I can find, live entertainment and concert ticket sales have been on a steady uptrend until (as you mentioned) 2020. Here’s one source:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/306065/concert-ticket-sa...

Concert tickets represent a small slice of the music scene. Parties, bars, etc don’t pay that well, but there are vastly more people at the bottom of the music pyramid making near minimum wage than superstars.

To be fair the modern concert experience can be very not-live

If they're dancing, they're lib-syncing.

Are these statistics considering what the musician gets payed or what ticketmaster gets payed? I wonder if it takes a larger show to make the same inflation adjusted take today as it did 25 years ago.

>Musicians who refuse to adapt won't succeed, and those who do thrive.

tautological - anyone who is thriving has adapted, if they aren't thriving obviously they have refused to adapt.

Probably more likely that many have adapted to the situation but still making less money than they would under the old system, perhaps to the point of not being able to have music be their primary employment.

It’s true that it’s possible to reach a wider audience than was every possible, but now a handful of musicians take up all of the listening time. My parents are both blue collar musicians and use to make good money. before recorded music was as popular as it is now, being a musician was a viable career path because anytime anyone wanted music at the wedding or the holiday party, or any party really, there needed to be a band. Now it’s more common to hire a DJ or just make a Spotify playlist and hear recordings of the tiny minority of top musicians.

But, conversely, how many more people got easy access to music in form of "canned music", where previously they had none at all because they couldn't afford to regularly hire live players?

>There is far less live music today, at least in the US, than there has ever been in my lifetime.

Objectively, this is a complete fabrication (barring Covid).

https://www.statista.com/statistics/306065/concert-ticket-sa...

Concert ticket sales represents a tiny slice of the total number of paid musicians.

A band playing at bars and bar mitzvah’s are just as much live music as someone playing in front of 50,000 fans at a major venue.

Is this sufficient to call it a "complete fabrication"? Climbing concert revenue is plausibly consistent with a disappearance of lower-overhead non-ticketed live music, like at a bar. In fact, those two are very compatible with each other: where I live now, it 's harder to see live music casually, so my bar for whether I want to go to a ticketed concert is lower.

I would bet that increase in revenue has much more to do with the skyrocketing ticket prices than actual attendance.

For example, U2 ticket prices have gone from $17 in 1985 to around $130 today. That's way more than can be accounted for by inflation (if inflation alone were responsible, you'd expect ticket prices around $44).

https://gametime.co/blog/how-u2-concert-ticket-prices-have-c...

I know I rarely go nowadays, and that's entirely due to the outrageous ticket prices.

Personally, there’s just rarely any shows I want to go to. A large majority of stuff seem to be cover bands, or just something I’m not that much a fan of. Venues have also been falling off, I know at least one local place I’ve been to hear had to shut down because of covid. And then, at the last show I went to, they charged you for goddamn cups of water at the bar.

You could make the same argument for the the organists themselves though - theatre organs were designed to take the place of an entire orchestra, needing only one musician instead of 30.

> In more recent decades, being a session musician for regional or mid-tier bands has stopped providing a living, following the huge consolidation in radio and music publishing in the 90s and 00s.

How is this a problem of recorded music being a thing rather than of mindless consolidation that has affected many, many industries since that time? This is like blaming recent consolidation among publishers on the invention of the printing press.

Timely. 210 years ago today (Jan 2), 66 Luddites went on trial for destroying looms which had put 'half the population' (YMMV) out of work.

The beef was legitimate then and still is. 'Advances' in tech (just as sound film did in 1927) can quickly create a lot of human pain (not that this forum needs a reminder) which may take a long time to moderate.

"Why the Luddites Matter" [https://librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com/2018/01/18/why-the-...]

The Podcast "One Year" had an Episode about the 1942–1944 musicians' strike.

Most US musicians stopped recording music for nearly a year.

Podcast: https://slate.com/podcasts/one-year/s4/1942/e3/recording-ban...

Wikipedia Article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1942%E2%80%931944_musicians%27...

Yes. It's so terrible what cinema did to music. Why can't we have a symphony in every theater?

Oh wait. It probably has a bit to do with the ridiculous waste of space, not having nearly enough trained musicians to meet the demand of the billions of consumers on this planet, no chance in hell of paying them all a fair wage if there were, etc.

Here is yet another example of wishing for "good old days" that will not be remotely possible to bring into modernity on the same scale without a culling of, oh, 75+% of the population.

Consider these two hypothetical situations of a bar. In one, there is a jazz band. They play all night and get paid some money. If you go to New Orleans, there are dozens of bars like this, all with their own jazz band at the same time. Those are people who wouldn't have work in music otherwise without such opportunities being available.

Meanwhile consider another bar, there is jazz music, some Duke Ellington song, but it is coming from spotify. Does Duke get paid here? No, he's dead. Do his grandkids? No, Sony owns the rights. Suddenly there are no musicians getting paid at all for jazz music to be played in this case, just ultra wealthy Sony getting slightly wealthier. That seems worse to me than the above.

The idea that this wouldn't scale now that we have billions of people versus when it did scale fine when we had millions doesn't make too much sense to me. It's not like we all make an order of magnitude less money than our ancestors did generations ago, in fact, despite the population today being at the highest levels its been, we seem to all have more money and access to more resources and better technology. Maybe if somehow we lived in an alternate universe where no recorded music was invented, being a musician might be as common of a job as being a bartender today, and one where some people make a ton of money from tips perhaps. Maybe there would be levels to it, like you'd get a great and well paid in house musician if the restaurant was one to hire a well paid sommelier in addition to bartenders. Somehow though it seems like more people would be playing instruments at a given time in this alternative reality at the very least.

Has there ever been a case when such movements successfully halted some technological progress?

MLB umpires calling balls/strikes instead of machines. Probably the most absurd situation as viewers at home can see clearly when they are wrong/right immediately.

I'm sure there's lot of other (better) examples where unions are strong and/or experimental technology carries risk and the market is heavily regulated (e.g. healthcare).

> MLB umpires calling balls/strikes instead of machines.

Hah true but this is more of a "spirit of the game" rule than anything. Same idea with football/soccer, there's certainly no technological barrier preventing the use of an accurate game clock to get an exact amount of stoppage time, or even pausing the clock during play, but they keep on out of tradition I guess.

A predetermined game time is much easier for TV broadcasts: they don't have to schedule filler content for when the game ends earlier or later than anticipated. I've already been hearing complaints around the last World Cup that all the VAR-induced injury time was eating into the ad blocks.

Why not have a pitching machine? And a hitting robot?

Or a robot crowd? Or a robot watching the game at a robot bar? Or a robot talking about the good old days of human umpires in the comment section of a tech blog for robots?

This sounds like a scene from Futurama.

Do you watch baseball for the umps? To see them show their 99percentile talent at calling balls/strikes?

Joe West thinks you do!

Human error just makes the game more interesting and less predictable.

Human error in judgment doesn't.

Yeah, it does.

F1 also has their disputes with rulings by their committee. All part of the game.

Ridiculous. You're conflating human error as part of the skills in the game itself (failing to catch a pop fly) versus human error that results in inconsistencies of rules (marking a pitch as a strike when it is quantifiably outside the strike zone). One of these makes the game more interesting, the other one makes it more frustrating.

Can you guess which one is which, or should I call for a ref?

The solution is to win by a wider margin. Or schmooze the refs!

Right. The same goes for other sports. I'm sure one could build a machine that would bowl strikes all day long, and if bowling were part of an industrial manufacturing process, that would be awesome. But it isn't... bowling is a sport. The whole point of sports is the challenge. No challenge, no sport.

Except nobody plays or watches sports for the refs. They are a necessity because that’s been the only possible way to enforce rules.

I play a sport at a pretty competitive level and would love it if we didn’t have a human ref. Refs can be assholes and they make bad calls all the time. It can really ruin a game. Having a machine make the calls removes a lot of the bias (and genuine mistakes) in those calls.

Formula 1 racing has lots and lots of wild, random things happening that totally change who wins vs who "deserves" to win. For example, a rookie driver might pop a tire and take out the race leader. These things happen all the time, and make the game more interesting rather than a completely predictable sure thing.

That has nothing to do with what is being talked about or is there, in F1, some commit which decides whose tire will pop today?

The movement inspired by the book Silent Spring [1] is certainly one.

[1] http://www.rachelcarson.org/SilentSpring.aspx

Okay, any examples where said 'technological progress' wasn't literally spraying everything with deadly poison and giving everyone cancer?

What about the anti-nuclear movement?

Maybe? There are apparently ~430 active reactors worldwide today but the number has been practically constant since the 90s. https://www.statista.com/statistics/263945/number-of-nuclear...

Likely more to do with the massive expense of building them than any movement though.

If I recall Germany's anti nuclear movement is very successful and got a few shut down after Fukushima and in recent history.

The clipper chip comes to mind. Of course "progress" is a relative term, but NSA surely saw it as progress. Companies like Uber are now leaving some European cities[0] after facing a more adversarial political environment than they do in the states.

I've also heard stories about places like Uruguay, which have laws that apparently protect some workers from automation and self-service (i.e. attended gas stations, etc.)

0: https://thenextweb.com/news/uber-forced-leave-brussels-what-...

> The clipper chip comes to mind.

But...technological progress on cryptographic hardware didn’t stop just because that particular attempt to foist a precompromised system onto the market failed. (Neither did the social technology of the NSA manipulating the market to adopt their precompromised systems.)

So how is that a movement stopping technological progress?

It’s not just Uruguay. I think both New Jersey and Oregon forbid drivers to pump their own gas. [0]

[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/states-wher...

Antinuclear activism was incredibly successful. We may get there soon with infectious disease research. Also, we have (mostly) successfully enforced a convention against using CRISPR to create transhuman monster embryos.

"Geneticists shouldn't make any superhuman embryos."

"Geneticists should get to create one CRISPR monster, as a treat."

I spend 10 months locked up, because of infectious disease research. Is someone going to pay me $300 000 in damages?

You do not need activists, just users!

What's the story with this?

Also the anti GMO movement is normalized, which is scary because we need gmos to feed our species among countless other important things, especially as we are changing the climate faster than many populations are able to respond. So many products proudly wear that gmo free project label.

Train / metro conductor unions have successfully blocked automation, multiple times in multiple cities

It gets even worse when you consider nyc in particular. Not only do they have an operator, there is also the conductor. One actually drives the train, the other exists to point out a window for seemingly historical purposes and control the doors. In most other systems a train is operated by 1 person who is able to control the doors just fine, because that never needs to happen at the same time as driving and there are these things called mirrors.

Yes, but essentially always relating to safety or environmental damage.

It's unsurprisingly much easier to make your case when there are hundreds of poisoned children, or when mining companies cause flooding that destroy people's homes.

Car dealers certainly. Initially automakers did not have the ability to perform sales and service across the country and needed dealers to take on the risk of running these dealerships. That quickly changed as you can imagine, so car dealers were able to lobby for legislation that banned direct sales from automakers thus preserving their little fiefdoms long past their need.

"The time is coming fast when the only living thing around a motion picture house will be the person who sells you your ticket. Everything else will be mechanical."

Mission accomplished.

Ironically, I almost never buy a ticket from a human anymore. I either print it out at home or use the kiosk to get one. There is a person who takes the ticket, though.

In one of the quotes from this article "We think the public will tire of mechanical music and will want the real thing". It seems to me the public is now tiring of CGI explosions at the expense of character based stories in films. 3D was a fad also.

There are many good movies that use CGI explosions. You can't just look at the movies that are bad and say that people don't like them because of the CGI. Also the public doesn't seem to tired of them based on how well marvel movies still do.

Tell me without looking it up, What was the name of the one after infinity war?

I think that the top grossing movies or 2022 are all CGI explosion type movies is better proof that there's still a pretty good appetite for CGI explosion type movies than that I remember it was Endgame.

The fact they were doesn't mean there's much appetite for them in particular. It may just mean they're cheaper to produce. Also, it wasn't endgame. It was "Ant-Man and the Wasp"

I'm not sure what this was supposed to prove. I said the Marvel movies do well, meaning they do well at the box office. I also said that there are great movies that use CGI explosions. I did *not* say that the Marvel movies are great. They most decidedly are not IMO. You don't have to go all Chris Nolan and blow things up for real to make a good movie. Although I do like a real explosion :)

>It seems to me…

I have no doubt that it “seems to you”, but do you have any actual evidence?

I don't really care enough to gather it. Even if I did it would likely be suppressed. Do a straw poll of some random teenagers near you and ask them to tell a story of how they've been wowwed at the movies. Or perhaps the last time they paid to see one at the cinema even?

Most of these historical disruptive technologies seem to affect only a relatively small group of professionals or then small part of human skills. Therefore there are not too many people complaining and also most of these people can find some new jobs, perhaps after retraining.

On the contrary, AI could affect large groups of professionals and large (if not all) part of human skills. The protests opposing AI might then be completely different scale than the previous protests.

Also the an individual losing their job would suffer more since there might be nothing they could do, even after retraining, that AI couldn't.

what a fantastic piece of history! curious why there is no parallel with streaming music. streaming has changed music so much (for the worse in some cases) and yet, everyone seemed to have embraced it.

Everyone has embraced it now. That was certainly not the case early on.

Streaming was very controversial when it was introduced. For example: http://thetrichordist.com/2013/06/24/my-song-got-played-on-p...

This reminds me of what happened with the Fairlight CMI in the 80s[0]:

> This radical eight-bit, eight-voice machine could sample only at 24kHz, but ushered in the sampling revolution that so alarmed the [Australian] Musicians’ Union it tried to ban its use in recording sessions.

[0] https://musictech.com/reviews/studio-icons-fairlight-cmi/

Amusing and yet I worry it's a straw-man for the contemporary issue of automation replacing human workers more generally (which I find decidedly less amusing).

I stand with Compressorhead.

I saw the title and thought "I'm KILROY! KILROY! KILROY! Kilroy."

musicians:phonograph::writers:gpt3

I think it's interesting that people are panicking now that it's beginning to intrude on "intellectual" pursuits, even though automation has already had a substantial effect on most other parts of society. I am not sure there's anything different, for better or worse, about "creative" professions.

Who would have thought that musicians would become Luddites one day.

There is no one type of musician. Many do it to carry on a tradition, while others do it to blaze their own path, for the next generation to carry on. I myself see the first as natural luddites, even with the younger generations, possibly more so.

We're all going to be luddites at this rate.

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