Hollywood in the 60s and the Good AI Future — Joel Dueck / Opcraft

Joel DueckOpcraft

I was in a discussion today with other CTOs about how AI is changing our work. It’s<br>apparent that, over the long term, none of us see any technical reason why a frontier<br>AI could not fulfill the responsibilities of most C-level positions, including ours.<br>We’re building the foundations of the systems that will one day replace us. It’s a<br>simple extrapolation: we’re already able to deliver much more, much more quickly —<br>almost too quickly! — by ourselves, without having to hire teams. It seems silly to<br>think that transformation won’t keep spreading.

Many of us, myself included, think that this could actually be great. There is an<br>optimism for the “Star Trek” outcome — abundance, autonomy, and meaningful work by<br>choice — felt by people doing the work now, not just futurists and fiction<br>authors.

But good outcomes from technological displacement have never been the default.<br>Historically, in most cases, capital owners capture the gains and displaced workers<br>absorb the losses.

Enter 1960s Hollywood

In the 1960s, actors and screenwriters faced the same structural problem we are<br>facing with AI. For them it was television. An actor would work in a movie, which<br>would be recorded and later rebroadcast on TV. That is, the new technology<br>(television) was creating new value for work they had already completed — and they<br>were having to compete with their own past work!

Let’s say you get hired to act in a film. Basically, the person hiring you is<br>taking the risk. They’re paying you your salary, and in return, they own that<br>product. So, what SAG [the Screen Actors’ Guild] was saying was, You can play<br>that film anywhere in the world, you can play it in Italy, you can have it dubbed —<br>but when you put it on television, that’s a new revenue stream. Also, the<br>argument was that that is taking work away from other actors. Because if you have<br>this movie on, that time slot is no longer available for working actors.

On the other side, the head of 20th Century Fox [Spyros Skouras], his argument<br>was very simple: Why should I pay you twice for the same job? I’ve already paid you<br>for this job. I own this at this point. And that was basically the position of all<br>of these studio owners. At the beginning of the strike, they were like, We’re not<br>even going to talk about residuals. It’s a nonstarter. And Reagan said, We’re<br>“trying to negotiate for the right to negotiate.” That’s how far apart they were. It<br>was so foreign to these guys that they would have to share their revenues with<br>actors after they’d already paid the actors.

— Wayne Federman, in a<br>2023 interview for Slate

So the Screen Actors’ Guild — led by Ronald Reagan, a fierce individualist — voted<br>on a strike. The vote went 6,399 to 259 and the strike went forward. The actors gained<br>something previously unthinkable: a continuous cut of all the ongoing value created by<br>their work being used in new technology, and a one-time payout to fund health<br>insurance and a pension that is still active today. (Read more in the 2011 Atlantic<br>article What Reagan Did for<br>Hollywood).

Important to note: the idea of actors being owed ongoing residuals for their work<br>is not a moral axiom of the universe. It was, and is, purely a matter of perspective<br>and opinion. It had to be negotiated for. Today we accept it as the default. But<br>simply going along with industry and tech trends would have forfeited an entire<br>infrastructure of baseline financial security for working performers.

Fast forward

The parallel to tech workers today is tighter than it might seem. AI models are<br>trained on our code, our documentation, our architectural patterns, our websites: all<br>the accumulated and ongoing output of our professional lives. Actors compete against<br>recordings of their own performances; we compete against models trained on our own<br>work.

To be clear: I’m not prescribing strikes and residual payments. I am saying<br>that SAG demonstrated that we don’t have to accept default industry outcomes when<br>rapid tech changes reshape everything. We can envision and champion policies that<br>create better starting defaults for more people. But no one’s going to do it for us —<br>and we can’t do it by acting individually.

We can bring our optimism to bear in envisioning the future we want and in building<br>it. Not just by building good products and systems for individual businesses, but by<br>building good social and legal policies to create a playing field built for humans.<br>The opportunity is here now; it won’t last forever.