525
Spotify is going to clone podcasters’ voices — and translate them to other languages
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
525 points (96.3% liked)
Technology
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It seems easy to take this position as a native English speaker, but what if you aren’t proficient in English, perhaps only in a smaller regional language that doesn’t have the same nearly infinite pool of content? This is a potential game changer for that, allowing you to listen to thousands of podcasts you never could before. No jobs were lost because there was never anyone doing the translations in the first place. When viewed this way, it’s an accessibility feature.
Bing bang boom.
I think people are totally steeped in capitalist rhetoric and are completely used to living it. I 100% support creative work and I will die paying humans cold hard cash for their artistic output. But everything else should 100% be automated where it can be with the expectation that humans no longer HAVE to work to be comfortable.
This is the same thing to me as worrying about accountants and HR when a bunch of them got displaced with computers. It disproportionately takes away jobs without equivalent replacements from people that are trained and educated with this specialization in mind, but it also moves us toward a world where we don't have to sell our waking moments to someone else.
It absolutely sucks ass that we aren't already preparing for a post-capitalist or semi-post-capitalist world and people are stressed, hungry, and unsheltered. But every time I see something like this, it feels like we're making some kind of progress toward that because not only does it remove a space for humans to be exploited for labor, but it enables previously-unfathomable levels of accessibility that has been locked behind economic barriers (e.g. hiring people to translate Ologies into Pidgin languages would be totally unprofitable and therefore would almost never happen).
/rant
It makes sense and is good from a technological standpoint, humans have always wanted to advance. But that means we must be even more politically active to save ourselves from exploitation in the future.