An embalming tech for our dying civilization.
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.
Death of a civilization doesn't mean disappearance of mankind or even overall regression on the long term.
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.
This stance always reminds me of the Profession, a 1957 novella by Isaac Asimov that depicts pretty much the future where there are only top performers and the ignorant crowd.
The "top-enders" are the privileged who need to have some of their gains for their intelligence redistributed to others. The alternative is "survival of the smartest", which is de-facto what we have today and what Young was trying to warn us about.
