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.

There's a big difference.

Printing presses produce superior products.

A mediocre audiobook is certainly better than no audiobook at all, but it is an inferior product to a well produced audiobook.

> Printing presses produce superior products.

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.

Many (most, if not all) hand-made copies contained errors, which printed books did not. They were much closer to 1:1 copies.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_Bible

Usually, though, errors are corrected and every every printing has fewer errors than the previous one.

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.

Any interesting book gets a second print run - except if it was on purpose a limited edition with some exceptional quirk.

As a work of art, sure. But as books containing information, printing presses produced superior products.

I would say it is the perfect metaphor.

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.

What we have today is early gen "practical" AI.

Even current SOTA models would almost certainly be able to handle multiple speakers and pick-up on the intended tone and intonation.

Don't make the mistake of thinking what we have today is what we will still be working with in 5 or 10 years.

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.

I enjoy looking at illuminated manuscripts. Podcasts are bullshit and can die in a ditch.

I enjoy podcasts but I still hope illuminated manuscripts won’t die in a ditch so other people can enjoy content the way they prefer ;)

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.

Do you have a source for that? I don't think the printing press was the cause of religious wars any more than bullets were the cause of WWII

This is common enough knowledge that “read, like, any history” is an appropriate response. However, if you’re genuinely curious, here’s a random link:

https://ehne.fr/en/encyclopedia/themes/european-humanism/eur...

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).

Do you know Hussites? [1] The Hussite Wars (1419–1434) predate printing press and Luther told: "We are all Hussites without knowing it."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hussites

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.

I blame canned food and trains for solving the logistics problems that previously prevented massive wars.

Napoleonic wars beg to differ.

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.

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.

Those revolutions were ultimately positive. The alternative would be the continued rule by monarchs and a single powerful religion

See my second paragraph. It can be ultimately positive while still being civilization-ending.

No comfort to the millions who died though.

It's kind of wild to me that the future will look like the 80s imagined it all because AI killed the creative seed corn when retro-future 80s was the aesthetic.

We'll be ok lol, while it is a significant transition, it IS just a transition in the media landscape.

AI is big and significant, but we'll be ok. There is also no such "one" thing as "our civilisation". We're deeply interconnected extremely vast and complex interconnected networks of ever-changing relationships.

AI does indeed represent the commoditisation of things we used to really value like "craftsmanship in book narration" and "intelligence". But we've had commoditisations of similar media in the past.

Paper used to be extremely expensive, but as time went on, it became more and more commoditised.

Memory used to be extremely expensive (2000-3000 years ago, we needed to encode memory in _dance_, _stories_ and _plays_. Holy shit). Now you can purchase enough memory to store a billion books for maybe two hours of labor.

Most of these things don't really matter. What is happening is that the media landscape is significantly shifting, and that is a tale as old as history.

I do think the intellectual class will be affected the most. People who understand this shift stand to benefit enormously, while those who don't _might_ end up in a super awful super low class.

And yet, all of that doesn't really matter if you just move to, I dunno, Paramaribo or whatever. The people there are pragmatic and friendly. They don't care about AI too much. Or maybe New Zealand, or Iceland, or Peru, or Nepal or I don't know.

The world isn't ending. Civilisation isn't being destroyed at our core.

The media landscape is changing, classes are shifting, power-relationships are changing. I suggest you think deeply about where you want to live, what you stand for and what is most important to you in life.

I don't need money or tech to be happy. I am fine with just my cats, my closest friends and family and healthy food.

If it happens to be the case that I need to leave tech or that extremely high-end narrated audiobooks cease to exist? Then all I have to say is "oh no, anyway".

We'll be fine. One way or another.

Just different.

That sure is some naivety ya got there. But good luck on the move. Keep your friends and family close.