Re: I QUIT.... Working for nothing.

Andy said:


When the cost of cloud editing storage comes down in cost this will also be a big blow.

India will take over the whole industry with extremely low rates that none of us will be able to compete with especialy when broadband fibre speed increases.

Were completely screwed

I myself had this epiphany almost ten years ago, came into the office looking like my dog had died, and nobody there really understood that we were seeing the oncoming mass extinction event of our industry. To this day, I can't really get people to accept what's coming.

Here is a little taste;

In under 12 years now, the Square Kilometer Array will be completed.
It is a network of radio telescopes that will cover the entire Southern hemisphere of the earth to make a virtual scope, the quivalent of a dish a square kilometer across. Tied together by new broadband connections, the SKA will be a bigger project than the current Big Daddy of science, the Higgs-hunting supercollider at CERN. It will see two orders of magnitude deeper into space and time than we now know.

From the day they flip the switch to get "first light" on the Square Kilometer Array, the SKA will begin to generate an exabyte of data, every day. That's a "1", with eighteen zeros after it.

Every day. Or put another way, about the daily traffic of our entire internet today, from one experiment. IBM is leading an international consortium to figure out how to record, move, store, and process this flood of data. The hardware to do it hasn't even been designed yet. But the clock is ticking down already.

In 12 years, they will have some way to deal with an exabyte a day, and that technology is going to be commercialized. We will be plankton swimming in a sea of data. Nothing ever need be erased again, ever, across the realm of human endeavor; storage will be that cheap and easy. The so-called "cloud" of today will fulfil the grandiouse promises being made today, and probably much more.

At that point, (and almost all of us here will be alive to see that day) is that it will cost no more for an edit to happen for you in Mumbai, than it does to have it happen in Milwaukee. Editors will chase the sun around the clock, editing stories and projects while we sleep.

Since the data infrastructure will have become so completely englobing and fundamental, cost for entry will be zero. With exabyte processing power, language translation will be effortless and real-time, we will all seem to speak the same language wherever we are.

So yes, you are going to have to adjust your day rate down when Rajeev there offers compositing for two rupees a day. Or you will have to quit and do something Rajeev cannot yet do. There won't be much. Or maybe, there will.

Because the first internet boom happened, when CERN worker Tim Berners Lee's little riff on hypertext markup language made web browsing of his tech documents practical, the web as WE understand it was born. With the billions of dollars' worth of companies, products, and services it generated. That's going to happen again.

The exabyte boom will also bring new industries and ways to make a living, in the same way as HTML did... and maybe some of our skills will be applicable to that new world, and thus worth a little more.

Heck, in twelve years, with exabyte tech, we might all be "living" digitally in the cloud oruselves, in what Ray Kurzweil refers to as the "Singularity". You may call it a consentual version of The Matrix.


And getting your day rate will be the smallest of your problems.

Where do you plan to be in 12 years? I will bet you won't be doing exactly what you're doing now. Do we all just quit? Or do we turn and face the strange ch-ch-ch-changes?