Pick Any One

I'm not a romantic. So I'm not in the target demographic for romantic comedies. So the Netflix movie Choose Love was not at all on my radar until NPR's Linda Holmes wrote an article about it. As I understand it, the idea here is that the viewer can determine which of three men the female lead, Cami, ends up with. As Ms. Holmes describes it, she made a dozen or so choices over the course of the movie, and those choices were dutifully reflected in the on-screen actions of the characters, even down to Cami's final choice of partner.

Ms. Holmes hated it. I could go into the reasons why, but I think that all of them were really beside her main point: that she was aggrieved on behalf of actors and writers, due to the fact that the "bespoke, AI-generated movie that I order up like a pizza" would put them out of work were the model to take off. In other words, this specific potential change to the motion picture and television landscape comes with consequences she's not in favor of, and so the products of that change are bad.

While I understand the sentiment, I don't know that it's a workable way to speak about these things. Lots of technological advances have come with the trade-off of allowing the public at large to lead materially better lives; at the cost of rendering the skills that people put years into making obsolete. Which, in turn consigns those people to low-wage jobs or long-term unemployment. And there is, in my opinion, nothing wrong with saying that we should slow, or even halt, the development of certain technologies for that reason. (Not, mind you, that anyone would listen.) But that's a different argument than saying that the products of those technologies are of lesser quality.

Technology marches on, mainly because it offers benefits to enough people that the people who end up paying the price for those benefits are seen as acceptable prices to pay. It's possible that we'll arrive at a point where that's no longer true, and the adoption of certain tech stalls, not because the technology isn't useful, but because the social cost seems too high. I don't know if that's what society will say to itself about such technology. But I think that we'll all be better off if it does.