11. Creators could move to countries with very cheap cost of living (outsource themselves).
12. Creators could invest in machine learning to lower the marginal cost of generating content. GPT-# will probably work well on music and video. It's mostly a matter of model size and training set size.
13. The U.S. could greatly increase funding for the national endowment for the arts.
The fundamental problem with entertainment as a career is that it's a zero-sum game. People have finite time, can rarely consume more than one piece of entertainment at a time, and most have a fixed budget for entertainment per month.
About the only thing that's been unexplored on a large scale is participatory entertainment which is the only growth space left and is slightly positive-sum; if the entertainment coexists with economy then it can grow a bit bigger. The best example I can think of is dance/music festivals (Dickens Fair as an example in the bay area) where entertainers are paid directly by ticket proceeds and a temporary market exists creating additional value for anyone willing to participate: In theory it's open to a large number of participant-vendors who can sell their own goods and service and be entertained. Any sort of community entertainment economy can benefit like this by creating value in both directions between entertainers and the entertained.
What would that look like on a large scale? I have no idea. But all the giant Internet media markets are very unidirectional. Cash flows to the market via advertisers (also zero-sum without external growth in the economy) and purchases/subscriptions and some passes on to the entertainers. Any value creation in the other direction has to be made in separate markets.
I think what the article doesn't address is that for the middle class to exist it has to create a significant amount of value; at least as much as it consumes. If it can't, then it requires UBI to continue to exist (which is suggested as option 9 in the article). But most of what the middle class consumes isn't produced by the rest of the middle class, unbalancing the economics.
12. Creators could invest in machine learning to lower the marginal cost of generating content. GPT-# will probably work well on music and video. It's mostly a matter of model size and training set size.
13. The U.S. could greatly increase funding for the national endowment for the arts.
The fundamental problem with entertainment as a career is that it's a zero-sum game. People have finite time, can rarely consume more than one piece of entertainment at a time, and most have a fixed budget for entertainment per month.
About the only thing that's been unexplored on a large scale is participatory entertainment which is the only growth space left and is slightly positive-sum; if the entertainment coexists with economy then it can grow a bit bigger. The best example I can think of is dance/music festivals (Dickens Fair as an example in the bay area) where entertainers are paid directly by ticket proceeds and a temporary market exists creating additional value for anyone willing to participate: In theory it's open to a large number of participant-vendors who can sell their own goods and service and be entertained. Any sort of community entertainment economy can benefit like this by creating value in both directions between entertainers and the entertained.
What would that look like on a large scale? I have no idea. But all the giant Internet media markets are very unidirectional. Cash flows to the market via advertisers (also zero-sum without external growth in the economy) and purchases/subscriptions and some passes on to the entertainers. Any value creation in the other direction has to be made in separate markets.
I think what the article doesn't address is that for the middle class to exist it has to create a significant amount of value; at least as much as it consumes. If it can't, then it requires UBI to continue to exist (which is suggested as option 9 in the article). But most of what the middle class consumes isn't produced by the rest of the middle class, unbalancing the economics.