The Robots Are Coming!

by Andres Oppenheimer

  FACTORY WORK DESERVES MORE RESPECT

  How can we solve this problem? In the United States, as we saw in the chapter on education, the government is already trying to copy the German system of training and vocational schools, and other countries are creating tech-based high schools like the Seoul Robotics High School in South Korea. But there won’t be any great leaps forward in vocational and technical schools until young people see technicians as role models, or at least as people whose jobs are not boring. The study Manpower conducted suggests that it might take a TV series glorifying their work, like what CSI: Crime Scene Investigation did for forensic investigators. That show sparked a huge increase in enrollment at schools that offer degrees in forensic science, and these investigators do a job that’s not nearly as glamorous as a manufacturing technician in real life.

  “Perhaps the ideal situation would be to develop a glamorous fictional movie about tech careers and show it to middle schoolers. Whatever the specific method used to overcome these cultural barriers, it is important to recognize that they exist. We will not see North American students flocking to these important tech jobs—and getting the preparation they need to perform them successfully—without dealing with current stereotypes about manufacturing and jobs in it,” the study concludes.

  IT WILL BE HARDER TO TELL BOSSES FROM WORKERS

  The factory workers of the future will be doing the kind of work that won’t require getting their hands dirty. Factories will be needing designers and mechanics specializing in virtual reality so that engineers are able to check products and train workers remotely. In the not-so-distant future, engineers at a factory in China or Mexico will be able to work together to solve a technical problem by handling the same object through their virtual reality headsets, saving companies a lot of time and money in travel expenses. Expert technicians will be needed to install and maintain the VR equipment so that this new mode of long-distance work can take place.

  There will be a need for technicians to program and repair robots, and specialists in 3-D printers to maintain these machines, and know which materials they should use and how. One of the great upcoming revolutions in engineering will be the creation of multimaterials—combinations of different materials—that 3-D printers will be using to create all sorts of new objects. There will also be self-repairing materials, which will patch themselves up if they’re damaged, like the metallic armor and flesh in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator films, which can melt down and build themselves back up after taking a direct hit from a shotgun.

  With the expanding Internet of Things, which allows machines to communicate with one another online, there will be a growing demand for programmers and experts in sensor technology, who will be needed to monitor the interactions between various machines. Factories will increasingly have their machines connected and communicating with one another through sensors and Internet messages, which will allow them to let others know when to start or finish a production cycle. But the machines will need human specialists who know how to monitor the sensors, repair them when they break down, and make sure that everything is coordinated to perfection.

  That’s why as manufacturing plants become increasingly automated, they will need qualified technicians who are much more highly trained than the workers of the past. It will be harder to tell the bosses from the workers, since most will be doing similar jobs overseeing the machines. Everyone will be side by side, monitoring the rows of robots and 3-D printers, solving problems and thinking up new products or more efficient production processes. The humans who will be working on the factory floors, coexisting with the robots, will not be there to do manual work, but to do mental work.

  9

  THEY’RE COMING FOR ENTERTAINERS!

  THE FUTURE OF THE ACTING, MUSIC, SPORTS, AND LEISURE INDUSTRIES

  NEW YORK

  Until recently, having a child actor, musician, athlete, or tour guide wasn’t much of a cause for celebration for parents who had followed more traditional career paths. The most desirable occupations were lawyers, doctors, and business executives, just as they had been for centuries. But all this could be changing soon. With so much work being automated, people will find themselves with more and more free time, and they’ll need growing numbers of actors, musicians, writers, visual artists, and tour guides to entertain them. And while there is an oversupply of labor in parts of the entertainment industry, creative endeavors may well be entering a golden age.

  In most countries, the number of hours in the workweek has been falling for centuries. In ancient times, there was only one day of rest per week—Shabbat for the Jews, Friday for the Muslims, and Sunday for the Christians. Peasants worked from sunrise to sunset, roughly eighty hours a week. But as we transitioned from agricultural societies to industrial ones, and most recently to service-oriented ones, working hours have fallen by nearly 50 percent in the industrialized world. In 1870, the average workweek in the United States, Germany, and Sweden was nearly 70 hours per week. By 2015, it had dropped to 38.6 hours per week in the United States and 35 hours in Germany and Sweden. There is a clear world trend toward shorter workweeks.

  THE CREATIVE INDUSTRIES ARE GROWING AT A DIZZYING RATE

  Creative or cultural industries—including film, television, visual arts, music, and literature—already employ 29.5 million people worldwide, according to a study by the consulting firm EY. That figure is higher than the number of people working in the automotive industry in the United States, Europe, and Japan combined. Activities that were previously considered mere sources of entertainment or spiritual growth are now being seen as engines of economic growth. Bilbao, in Spain’s Basque country, became a center for world tourism when the Guggenheim Museum opened a branch there, reviving the city’s economy. Something similar happened with the Cannes Film Festival, the Art Basel fair in Miami, the Guadalajara International Book Fair, the Hollywood film industry, and hundreds of other cultural ventures that gave a big boost to local economies. According to Irina Bokova, the former director-general of UNESCO, “the cultural and creative industries are major drivers of the economies of developed as well as developing countries. Indeed, they are among the most rapidly growing sectors worldwide. It influences income generation, job creation and export earnings. It can forge a better future for many countries around the globe.”

  THE FILM AND TV INDUSTRIES WILL ALSO LOSE JOBS TO AUTOMATION

  Of course, the boom in the movie and television industries will not prevent some of its workers from losing their jobs to automation. The huge crowds of extras who worked on the great Hollywood blockbusters of the past have largely been replaced by computer-generated images. For several years now, film studios have been using computer effects to create stadiums filled with virtual crowds or massive armies with tens of thousands of virtual soldiers. The 1982 film Gandhi used 300,000 human beings in its scenes of the Indian independence hero’s funeral. But today a similar scene could be done digitally with a few dozen extras whose images are duplicated and differentiated with computer programming. And technology is ready to go a step further: replacing the movie stars themselves with digital facsimiles and doing so without viewers even realizing that what they’re seeing isn’t an actor but a virtual image of one.

  The best-known example of this is the case of Paul Walker, star of The Fast and the Furious series of films, who continued to act after his death—metaphorically speaking, of course—thanks to the digitization of his face.*1 Walker died in a car accident while filming the seventh installment of The Fast and the Furious. After a time of mourning and some legal consultations, the producers finished the project using a digital replica of Walker. What’s most amazing about this is that most people—if they hadn’t read about the case—didn’t even notice. Walker’s virtual stand-in performance raised a question that remains a hot topic of conversation in Hollywood to this day: Will flesh-and-blood actors eventually be replaced by digital ones? It’s
no trivial matter: big studios could be eager to use computer-generated images of dead movie stars because virtual actors would be much cheaper, and significantly easier to work with, than many Hollywood celebrities.

  PAUL WALKER AND THE CASE OF DIGITIZED ACTORS

  Walker died on November 30, 2013, in the Porsche Carrera GT sports car driven by a friend who crashed it into a utility pole. The accident occurred at 3:30 P.M. in Santa Clara, California, when the two were returning from a charity event. The police found no traces of alcohol or drugs at the scene, but investigators determined that the car was traveling at more than 100 miles an hour on a road with a 45-mile-an-hour speed limit.

  At the time of Walker’s death, Universal Studios had already invested a significant part of the film’s $190 million budget. Facing the possibility of adding a massive economic loss to the tragic loss of Walker’s life, Universal decided to finish the movie with digitized images of the late actor. Similar visual effects had been used for years to Photoshop the faces of Hollywood stars over those of their stunt doubles in high-risk action sequences, but most of those had been fleeting scenes shot from a distance. In this case, Universal set out to finish the film with a computerized version of Walker and hired the New Zealand visual effects studio Weta Digital to digitize his face. Walker’s two brothers were also brought in to film physical movements similar to those of the late actor. At least 350 additional scenes were filmed with Walker’s simulated voice and image.

  According to Variety magazine, the producers could have digitally put Walker’s face on another actor’s body, but they didn’t do so because many moviegoers had learned of the actor’s death and might have noticed the trick. Using digital imagery, the filmmakers achieved an amazing virtual performance in which movements, gestures, and even the small marks on the late actor’s face seemed real. Joe Letteri, one of Weta Digital’s visual effects managers, told Variety that the technology for producing virtual actors had advanced so quickly that the prospect of replacing Walker would have been impossible five years earlier. “It was barely possible last year when we did it,” Letteri said. The film premiered in 2015, and became one of the biggest box-office hits of all time, grossing $1.5 billion that year.

  PRINCESS LEIA OF STAR WARS ALSO PERFORMED AFTER HER DEATH

  The 2016 movie Rogue One: A Star Wars Story had used digital doubles to film scenes of late actor Peter Cushing, who had played the role of Grand Moff Tarkin in the first Star Wars trilogy, and also of late actress Carrie Fisher, who had played the role of Princess Leia in the original movie. The plot of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story recounted a story that preceded the original 1977 Star Wars movie, and producers faced the problem that the two actors had since died. Technology took care of the problem. Welcome to the world of virtual actors.

  The only reason why the virtual performances in Furious 7 and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story didn’t result in an actors’ strike or major protests in Hollywood was that they coincided with a boom in the movie and TV industries. The success of Netflix, Amazon, HBO, and other new companies producing shows like Game of Thrones had created thousands of new jobs in the film business. However, virtual doubles will most likely be an increasingly common phenomenon in Hollywood movies, and that could make movie stars lose some jobs. Thanks to new computing programs such as Light Stage, film studios are already digitizing the faces of Angelina Jolie, Tom Cruise, and Brad Pitt, enabling them to act well beyond their deaths.

  Light Stage photographs every millimeter of a movie star’s face. It does so from various angles, using about twenty high-definition cameras while the actor makes fifty-odd facial expressions, such as smiling, crying, or showing concern. Then the Light Stage program reconstructs those faces in 3-D and uses that as the model for digitally inserting the actor into a movie. It’s possible that by the time this book hits the shelves, there will be movies that will have been shot entirely with virtual actors. The big studios may prefer to buy the digital use rights to Hollywood stars instead of having them perform in person. And the actors in turn may want to grant studios the rights to their images in order to guarantee an income for their children and grandchildren for many years to come.

  Skeptics argue that digital re-creations of late actors and actresses won’t become the norm because audiences would eventually get bored. After all, Hollywood feeds on big headlines focusing on the sexual adventures and political passions of its stars, and dead actors don’t generate juicy news stories. But few industry insiders doubt that film studios will be using this resource to at the very least resolve scheduling conflicts. Many performers concurrently work in more than one movie at a time or have other commitments that overlap with their film contracts. So movie stars may record only close-up scenes, leaving the rest of their performances to be handled by virtual doubles. Although, in the future, the new technologies will make it hard to prevent digital pirates from making their own films with images of their favorite stars or—perhaps even worse—political figures. How will we know if they’re real or fictitious?

  EVERY ACTOR YOU SEE JUMPING BETWEEN BUILDINGS IS DIGITAL

  Carlos Arguello, a Hollywood visual effects director who worked on the Fast and Furious series, and who was nominated for an Oscar for his work on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, told me in an interview that Hollywood studios started using increasingly more computer-generated imagery (CGI) since scoring big hits in the early 1990s with Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Jurassic Park. CGI has replaced what was formerly known as special effects. In the past, if moviemakers wanted to simulate a castle, they filmed a model of a castle and would later enlarge it on the screen to make it look real. Or if they wanted to film an action hero jumping from one building to another, they would use a stuntman suspended from ropes that viewers would not see on the screen. But now these effects are done much faster and cheaper on a computer, he explained.

  “At first movies had maybe thirty or forty special effects. That quickly grew to fifteen hundred or two thousand, to the point where a ninety-minute movie today has a special effect about every three seconds,” Arguello told me. “Now, every time you see a hero running and jumping off a building, like in Captain America, it’s all being done on a computer.” And this has turned visual effects into a huge industry in itself. Up until the early 1990s, Hollywood studios produced their own special effects, but today they most often subcontract to companies in Britain, Canada, and New Zealand, among others.

  “When we did The Chronicles of Narnia back in 2005, we started by making visual effects for the same scene in different places,” Arguello said. “We did the castle in Guatemala with Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), the eagle was done in San Francisco with Lucasfilm, and the lion was done in Los Angeles by a company called Rhythm & Hues. We merged all of that together later, to put the castle, the eagle, and the lion together in one shot.”

  He added, “The visual effects industry has really been globalized. Now there’s a company that is known to make the best castles, another company that is known to do the best birds, another company that does the best dragons, and then everything is put together.” And the CGI companies that are in the highest demand are those that can create digital crowds, like armies or stadiums filled with spectators, he added.

  FROM 300,000 EXTRAS TO A FEW DOZEN

  Before large crowds could be simulated digitally, Hollywood studios had to spend fortunes to hire huge numbers of extras and pay them daily stipends, as well as providing costumes, transportation, and food for them. The 1956 film The Ten Commandments, which told the story of the Jewish people’s exodus from Egypt, used 14,000 extras and 15,000 animals, including goats, cows, and camels. Ben Hur, in 1959, used 15,000 extras. And as was mentioned earlier, Gandhi employed a grand total of 300,000 extras. For the funeral scene, the studio hired some 100,000 extras, but another 200,000 onlookers showed up at the scene and were filmed as part of the crowd.

  A great technolog
ical leap took place in 2001 with the launch of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Director Peter Jackson used a computer program from New Zealand called Massive that utilized artificial intelligence to create battle scenes involving thousands of digital warriors. And from that point on, all you needed to film a war was a few actors or extras who could be digitally multiplied and turned into huge armies.

  With 2004’s Troy, Warner Brothers wanted to re-create one of the greatest battles of all time. To do so, the studio created its own digital simulation with an artificial intelligence program nicknamed Emily, for M.L.E., or Motion Library Editor. Instead of hiring hundreds of thousands of extras, a mere ten programmers were used to create the digital battles. According to a description of the production, the process began with three weeks of motion capturing of about ninety different movements that were carried out by the actors. These movements were then stored in a database of around 1,000 clips, which were then mixed together to create 100,000 different combinations. At first, Troy’s producers had planned on digital war scenes pitting 50,000 Greeks against 25,000 Trojans. But thanks to Emily, they were able to add as many soldiers as they wanted and ended up with some shots featuring as many as 150,000 soldiers.

  Since the filming of Troy, even fewer actors or extras are needed to shoot action sequences that are later turned into massive virtual armies. “With twenty or thirty actors, you can build an entire army of thousands of people, complete with spears and horses. Just about everything can be done on a computer,” Arguello told me. “You film a scene with a couple of soldiers that have some good interaction between them, and then you multiply it by five hundred. The software can change each of the soldiers’ outfits. It can make each of the fighters wear a different leather skirt or armor, and put a sword or a spear or a club in their hands.”