Just like printing presses killed the profession of copying books by hand, eliminating the training pathway for illuminated manuscripts. Death of civilization itself I say, damn those printing presses.
That seems like a highly dubitable statement. Many hand illuminated manuscripts are masterpieces of art. The advantage of the printing press was chiefly economical making the cost of a copy dramatically less, not an increase in quality (especially so by the aesthetical standards of the time).
Indeed. Even Gutenberg had his Bibles touched up by artists after they were printed (illuminated capital letters and so on) because even he believed his printed copies were inferior to the hand-made ones.
I love audiobooks but at this point, most of what I want to listen to is stuff that would not sell enough to bother having someone read.
There are also many voice actors who I simply don't like the way they read.
A future that I can pick a voice that I like for any PDF is a huge upgrade.
I think a problem people have is if on the young side, maybe didn't expect the future to change like this.
No one I knew went on the internet when I graduated high school. Change like this is all par for the course. The only advice I got in high school from a guidance counselor was that I had a nice voice for radio. Books on tape was not exactly a career option at the time. The culture will survive the death of a career path that didn't even really exist when I was a senior in high school.
If the mistake happened in the typesetting stage, printed books could spread errors much more efficiently, as in the infamous "wicked bible" of 1631, where a typesetting error made the ten commandments contain the amusing phrase "Thou shalt commit adultery". Surviving copies are quite the collectors' item as most were destroyed.
What percentage of books get a second print run on a printing press? And what's the process for that? Do they have to reset each word for the second run? I genuinely don't know how a physical process like typesetting can result in increased accuracy on each print.
Some people will learn to use these AIs to make top-quality audiobooks (and books, movies, TV shows, comics...). It will be a more manual process than pressing a button, but still orders of magnitude less than what it took before. As a result there will be a tsunami or high-quality content.
There will be curation and specialization. Previously ignored niches now will be economically profitable. It will be a Renaissance of creativity, and millions of jobs will be created.
If you see podcasts as useless in modern society as illuminated manuscripts, no big loss I suppose, but I do enjoy the human made ones and would be sad to see them go extinct as the manuscripts did. And the same thing is happening to other entry-level creative roles, some of which you may personally regret the loss of too.
Actually I think illuminated manuscripts had more value, insofar as they were art, than podcasts (99% of which are vapid timewasters and/or friend simulators.) The good podcasts are those view which involve interviewing interesting people, and AI isn't replacing those.
There's a lot more to be said for the value of audio books, but the accessibility gains of proliferated auto-generated audiobooks outweigh the downside of losing a small number of expertly produced audio books.
For context, I listen to audio books a lot, and for years I have listened to traditional TTS readings of books too. Better voice generation for books without audiobooks is a great win for society.
Given that the printing press was the root cause for the century of religious wars that soaked Europe with blood, and was key in the revolutions that overthrown absolute monarchies all over Europe, I don't think it's as good as an example as you think it is.
Death of a civilization doesn't mean disappearance of mankind or even overall regression on the long term.
Have you heard of the Protestant Reformation and the following 120 years of war? The entire Protestant <> Catholic blow up that consumed Europe was pretty directly attributable to the printing press.
(To be clear, nothing is solely and exclusively caused by any one thing. Causality is a very fuzzy concept. But sans printing press, those wars certainly wouldn’t have happened when/where/how they did, if they ever happened at all).
Easy access to the Bible text instead of being only read to, hence high literacy of the faithful, was one of the core tenets of some branches of Protestantism.
An interesting one I read was public schools and their creation of a national identity. Before public schools there weren't really standardized languages forced upon an entire nation, etc. The countryside was more one country/people/language morphing into the next, not clean delineated lines where country/language switched instantly. It was also said borders were much more open/abstract before the resultant shift as well.
While they didn't have trains, the Napoleanic wars did feature the first use of canned food to aid in logistical supply of armies. You could argue that the lack of trains (and can openers) probably meant that they jumped the gun on starting giant wars. We Americans fixed that in the Civil War, to great and deadly effect.
Appertization was invented in 1804 but Appert did not sell his technology to the French army before 1810 so it's fair to say that most of the Napoleonic wars were run before canned food was even a thing. Maybe it has seen mainstream use in the Grande Armée in the end of his reign, but it was definitely not a deciding factor in Napoleon's logistics for most of his campaigns.
Without trains, the logistics of canned food isn't much better than the logistics of any bread-based food you give to your soldiers. It doesn't solve the weight problem which is the key problem with preindustrial army logistical issue.
