Or this: Morgan Freeman reads you all of your audiobooks from now on and they sound so much more profound and relaxing now.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

How long would it take, do you suppose, for ~~Disney~~ $ProductionCompany to simply get rid of the voice actor altogether. Now there's another person without work.

I always find this argument bizzare.

I don't want to live in a world where people are doing jobs that provide no value but only exist because "everyone needs a job". I would literally prefer we give them the money and they do no work than forcing people to do a useless job just for the sake of them working.

Do people really want their jobs to be the equivalent Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill aimlessly everyday? There's a reason why this is seen as a divine punishment in the myth.

I personally don't want someone to clone my voice without my permission and then use it to make money. I imagine many people feel the same way.

I agree that I would prefer to move to a society where we don't have to work, but do you honestly think we're moving in that direction? We'll get the "there's no work" part, but not the "and here's some money" part.

I'm not advocating for a world where we don't have to work, more for a world where we only work on stuff that produces value.

I wouldn't worry about that work not existing. At the very least, with the population declining we'll need people to take care of the elderly and I don't think we're anywhere close to automating health care providers. Humans always seem to find more work to do.

You could create a lot of jobs by banning the wheel.

Or the voice actor could license their profile to {{ProductionCompany}}, and not even have to go to the recording studio anymore unless it's a project they're personally interested in or where the production team wants to pay extra for a custom performance.

A high school friend of mine did that and became the voice of the "pronounce this name" feature on Facebook.

Flip it around and it works too. Anyone who wants to could potentially set all of the text-to-speech systems they use (their phone/house's voice interaction, listening to audiobooks, warning messages from their car/plane, etc.) to whichever voice profile they like best. Basically what TTS has been trying to do since the 70s or 80s, but with an infinite number of natural-sounding voices.

Maybe pick a couple of different ones for context-aware messages. Something familiar/reassuring for most messages, something less comfortable for "terrain!"-type alerts. If the model supports it, it could even morph between the two as the criticality of the message escalates.