#236: Stop Saying 'Never'. Practice Saying 'What If...?'
Welcome to the last IEX for 2024
I read this excellent piece by Doug Shapiro analysing the impact of AI on hollywood. It was triggered by Ben Affleck suggesting in an interview that AI would be a sustaining innovation for Hollywood. Shapiro argues otherwise, pointing out that it could be deeply disruptive. Not just in terms of how Hollywood makes movies, but the potential impact on Hollywood as a industrial film making hub itself.
One of the most interesting things that jumped out at me is this statement - which appears in a number of forms. Affleck says AI can’t create art or replace actors. Even Shapiro repeats this sentiment ‘Can GenAI replace emotive actors? Not yet and potentially never.’ It’s that last piece that I have a problem with. Never is a very long time. But why don’t we go back, say just 10 years? Imagine we were having this conversation in 2014, enjoying a coffee at street-side cafe. If I told you any of the following things, how many would you take seriously?
All of these seemed to come out of the blue, but take a closer look and almost all of them have been building up, they come after years of effort by many teams of scientists, or they are predictable socio political events that have their roots in the context of the world. Which means that as we speak, each one of these things and hundreds of other potential game changing tech and events are evolving and changing, driven by the efforts of scientists, engineers, politicians and also bad actors. Generative AI is really only 2 years old. What will it look like when its 10? 20? What else could surprise us this dramatically? Dramatically humanoid robots? Cures for incurable diseases? New political theories? What if the next pandemic is a digital one with a self generating virus that has the intelligence to evolve at speed?
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The bottom line is that as technology evolution (especially AI) accelerates along with the accompanying energy transition and computational biology, our world will become increasingly unpredictable in good and bad ways. Most of us are impacted by confirmation bias and the rooting effect, so despite all the changes, we really struggle to think of how something we think of as fundamental might change. I also find that most of us (including myself) identify with this statement: while AI can do a lot of things, what I do can’t be done by AI. I think this is a dangerous position to take, for the same reasons above.
As we get ready to step into a new year, therefore, maybe the mind-shift we need to make, is to stop saying ‘this will never happen’ and start asking ourselves ‘what if it did happen’? So instead of saying “AI will never replace actors” let’s ask ‘what if it did?’ - what would we do? How would we react as film makers, or film watchers? What if AI could replace teachers? Doctors? Lawyers? Managers? CEOs? (As an interesting aside, the Shapiro article also points out that some of the biggest hits of the year actually don’t involve human faces in key roles (Deadpool & Wolverine / Planet of the Apes / Inside Out2 / Beetlejuice/ Kung Fu Panda/ Godzilla & Kong)
My futurist colleagues always say that you can’t predict the future, but you can rehearse versions of it to stay better prepared for whatever comes to pass. Because it’s not just the thing itself that catches us by surprise when it happens, it’s that we’re underprepared for all the knock on and network effects of the change. AI may never replace all actors, but if it did become a part of the options and some movies used AI actors, it wouldn’t just impact a few actors, it would also create new agencies, new jobs, new contracts, while possibly adversely affecting some make up artists, coaches, agents, and acting schools. A new range of films might be produced, and entirely new forms of creativity might be unleashed.
So once again, lets welcome 2025 with less of ‘never’ and more of ‘what if?’