This sounds, in English:
Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a gloomy wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.
As we move further into this metaphorical “wood”, an impervious territory still largely to be explored opens up before us, with all its unknowns, its promises, and its obscure threats, in which we feel increasingly lost, at the mercy of a phenomenon that seems to transcend our own possibilities of understanding and control. However, we are still at the beginning of the story, and how this new challenge can actually take place will largely depend on us, and on how we want, and know how, to approach it. And, no, it doesn’t necessarily mean it will be hell.
Of course, at the time of writing, as we are still at the very beginning of this huge techno-cultural process, we cannot in all honesty know where it will take us, and in what time frame.
However, I already feel like imagining possible scenarios, based on what we are already able to know about it.
– We know that the sector is experiencing very rapid and tumultuous growth, after a few years of hidden quiet maturation – understood or even just intuited by very few of us.
– We know that this sudden quantitative “explosion” is already placing heavy sustainability burdens: computing facilities are voraciously hungry for energy, space, security, basic raw materials (processors and memory chips above all).
– We also know that the energy global demand of these systems is already exceptionally high, with very significant environmental and therefore global warming burdens – especially at this moment, in which we find ourselves very likely in front of the last “time window” available to hope no longer certainly to stop, but at least slow down a bit the course of the global events unleashed.
– But, what we get from it, intuitively, is that this process, tumultuous and apparently unstoppable, already contains within itself the seed, not of its failure, but at least of its substantial containment.
I could say, with a somewhat trivial joke: “It’s Entropy, baby…”
In fact, even Artificial Intelligence, however “intelligent” and omniscient it may be, cannot do much to avoid submitting to the iron and omnipresent Second Law of Thermodynamics, which on the intellectual, social and cultural environment can have much more rapid and unpredictable effects than those of the physics, because in this case it is linked to the most unstable and unpredictable machine in the universe: the human mind.
In other words, it could be its own success that leads it more or less quickly to a “saturation”, to becoming something so obvious and pervasive that it no longer represents an excitant novelty, let alone a challenge, or a trend.
“La donna è mobile” (Woman is fickle), man more so, the social masses even more, and after a solemn hangover, with consequent migraine, nausea and vomiting, satiety and glut would set in and, likely, even a greater or lesser measure of intolerance.
After all, it has already happened in the past to witness other cultural or technological “hangovers”, and we know that usually humanity is capable of producing antibodies for its own protection.
Will it happen this time too?
To give a marginal example, rather inappropriate but in some ways significant in this context, I recall here the time in which the eBook made its debut, a phenomenon that had thrilled many, and alarmed others (fewer, but still in considerable numbers), fearing the disappearance of the book as an object, printed on paper, and consequently of printers, publishing houses, bookshops, and even writers.
Well, it is true that bookshops, especially local and small ones, have had to face a serious crisis, which has led to the downsizing and even the disappearance of many of them, as specialized commercial businesses. However, if we look closely, this crisis, which actually occurred at least in a relevant part, was not caused at all by the advent of the eBook, but by other market factors, like massive transfers of distribution and sales locations towards large distribution chains and online (read Amazon). The book as an object in itself, a technology almost 600 years old, is not “dead” at all, not for now, indeed if ever it has experienced a certain expansion, demonstrating that humankind is never passively and completely prone to what technology offers, or, worse, tries to impose on, in particular when this involves profound emotional experiences: it is clear that the printed volume, with its weight, its physicality, its concreteness, its convenience, its prodigious durability and stability over time represents, as a support and storage for the cultural memories of peoples, still something much more powerful than the “digital book”, affected by all its impalpability, its inherent evanescence, its exposure to the rapid obsolescence of the devices, and finally to its dependence on external and distant publishing systems, concentrated in the hands of a few global organizations, in no way controllable by the final reader, nor by the authors themselves, either individually or collectively.
In the end, we simply found the right balance, or rather the most advantageous one for us, between the instrumental convenience of the e-Book (the possibility of having dozens, hundreds of volumes with you in a few grams, always available – as long as the battery is healthy and charged – and the great durability of the “traditional” – printed – book, which still fills the shelves of our libraries, always ready to be read, to be browsed, annotated, and, why not, lovingly collected.
Returning to the heart of the matter as far as we are directly concerned, all this does not mean that this phase will pass without damage: on the contrary, the risk that the entire sector could be wiped out (a bit like Blockbuster was wiped out by Netflix – see article #06) is real and more and more likely.
OK, this particular technology could “wear out” until it finally disappears, like others in the past, but after leaving behind how much and what rubble?
And here’s the point: evidently “opposing” technological (and economic) progress is unrealistic and probably sterile. But in any case, to put it very bluntly and frankly, many of us will lose our jobs during the transition.
In one of his first essays, published for the first time in 1965, Umberto Eco, (Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator – and eventually my Professor in Bologna), expressed in a title that became proverbial (even beyond his own intentions) the two antithetical positions that an intellectual (writer, philosopher, artist) could take towards certain epochal changes that already then seemed (and in fact were) destined to overwhelm every institution, the costumes, culture and economy of the society of the time: the title in Italian sounds “Apocalittici e Integrati” (Apocalyptic and Integrated). That is: on the one hand those who predicted a total catastrophe, “apocalyptic” indeed, such as to renew History through its destruction; and on the other those (“Integrated”) who considered these mutations not only physiological in the system, but also completely positive and ultimately productive for the “bright destiny of Progress and Future”.
The essay highlighted how both these extreme positions were in reality not only inadequate to predict the possible developments of an ongoing historical path, but also unable to provide an intelligible description that could be used prospectively in the in the contemporary debate of ideas.
Today, returning to our specific field of interest, we find ourselves faced with the same dichotomy, a crossroads that appears to us to be very neat and mutually incompatible between those who place themselves in a position of clear denial, a refusal to accept the very legitimacy of the process, and those who see in it a totally brand-new opportunity for development and growth more or less “without costs”, and therefore resulting in a definitely positive final balance.
Even in this case, both positions appear to us not only – eliding each other – conceptually unproductive, but also devoid of perspective, both stopping at the current “moment”, incapable of developing a path aimed forward, towards the future, and not held back by ballast of the past, of what has “already happened”. The first due to the inability to grasp the stimulus that this challenge can trigger in the human mind, with consequent growth and development of individual and collective consciousness; the second because it is incapable of evaluating the costs in terms of knowledge, memory and culture, as well as mere jobs, human resources, which this systemic change could cause if not kept effectively under control.
What is certain, as I said above, is that this time the mutation could devastate the field down to its roots, and leave a large harvest of human resources on the ground. Therefore we certainly cannot remain passive and inactive in the face of these upheavals, otherwise we would seriously risk seeing ourselves overwhelmed by events and much likely cut off. Without prejudice to the fact that none of us – as individuals or as a collective – will be able to oppose and I won’t say stop, but not even divert the course of history, however, we still have the possibility, and indeed the duty, to implement a form of ACTIVE RESISTANCE against this drift, with all our abilities, skills, knowledge, experience and strengths.
I really mean “resistance”, because now what is at stake is not only our professionalism, our jobs, our wages, our role in production hierarchies, but also – and perhaps above all, at this stage – our very integrity, artistic, cultural – and, dare I say, even ethical.
And the only way we have to try to make this “resistance” effective and factual is to increase the value, the originality, the irreplaceability of the human factor present in the equation. That “x factor” that by definition generative AI systems will never be able to replace. That is, to define our true role in the production machine, and possibly make it irreplaceable.
Well, so far, in these first two introductory chapters, I have tried to carry out a bird’s eye examination, with as broad a perspective as possible, both from a historical, cultural and, finally, industrial point of view, on the territory of our profession as animators and artists of the image in motion.
Below, in the next chapters, I will try, even in a more practical and illustrative way, to delve specifically into the heart of the profession itself, its work tools, its sources, its cultural roots, its industrial and commercial relevance, and its real chances for further evolution and future development.
I will start by trying to illustrate what in my opinion are the three fundamental pillars that support our profession, or “vocation”, as we like to define it:
Movement, Acting, StoryTelling.
11 – Chapter III – Advancing Back To The Foundations: “Casuality”