Yes, yes, I say modestly. I had a brief career in the movie business. That is to say, in a movie-adjacent support occupation. Nothing I did ever appeared on screen; my name isn’t in any list of credits (though I have a couple IMDb listings). I was a production script translator. That’s a title I invented myself, because nobody cared enough to give it a name. Historical background: Around the turn of the 21st century, Scandinavian cinema enjoyed a flourishing moment. Some breakout films had drawn international attention. In Norway in particular, the government, awash in oil money, offered cultural and artistic grants to ambitious production companies. Many of those companies calculated that they could increase their market potential through partnering with companies in England and America. To make that work, they needed their Norwegian scripts translated into English. And later on, when some of the projects actually went into production, the English-speaking participants would need those same scripts in hand. That’s why they called for our services. (It should be noted that our translations never made their way into subtitles. Subtitling is a jealously guarded fiefdom all its own.) In a Norwegian-American Facebook group, a woman in Oslo inquired whether anybody out there was a good English translator of Norwegian text. She was doing script translation, she said, and needed help. I am a good English translator of Norwegian text. I responded, and we began a profitable association. It was part-time work, never threatening to make me rich, but it made for a nice side income. Beyond that, it was fun. I’m a fiction writer; I know how to make words sing. I also relish the challenge of translation, the sheer sport of an exercise something like disassembling a grand piano, passing the pieces through a suspended iron ring, and reconstructing the whole instrument on the other side. Then came artificial intelligence. At first my boss employed it for preliminary drafts. She’d send me an AI translation, and I’d compare it with the original script and iron the howlers out. We kept our chins up. “It’s just a tool,” we said. “It makes our job easier, increases our productivity.” (RELATED: The Serpent’s New Promise) Within a year, nobody was sending us scripts anymore. I’d seen the technology evolve in real time — AI was getting better and better. Not great. Not as good as my own work. But adequate. AI had become entirely adequate, and adequate is just fine for work destined for the trash bin anyway. Our services got pared out of budgets, with no visible loss. I sit here as sort of a miniature Norma Desmond, telling the world, “I am good. It’s the pictures that got adequate.” The conventional wisdom is that technology destroys jobs, but creates more. The old Luddites smashed steam-powered looms, because those machines usurped what had been a hard-mastered craft and handed it over to soulless automata. But the soulless machines themselves went on to create new jobs. Now humans would tend the steam looms, or assemble them, or build and maintain the power plants that kept them running. There were more jobs in the long run. However far downstream the mechanization spread, there always came a point where humans were necessary. Only people could think. Only people could walk about and manipulate objects. (RELATED: Would the Whiff of AI Have Panicked Harold Ross?) Then came AI. Where will the consumer acquire purchasing power, when both manual and mental labor have been automated? It seems to me (prejudiced as I am) that artificial intelligence represents a whole different species of automation. The old model targeted drudge work (in fact, it killed slavery. Nobody really got serious about the obvious evils of that ancient institution until the industrial revolution was well underway. We began noticing the injustice only after we’d found alternative means of getting the scut work done). The dream of automation became one of freeing mankind from the curse of mindless labor. (RELATED: When Effort Becomes Optional) But from what does artificial intelligence free us? The curse of mindful labor? As a novelist, I now find myself competing for readership with books churned out in seconds by AI mills. Ever since the printing press was invented, there’s been a market for cheap, mindless literature, but now we’ve refined the process to a point where the mindlessness is literal. Lowbrow literature was once a training field for authors who sometimes transcended their genres — Hammett and Chandler and Bradbury come to mind. Today, actual writers (like production script translators) are a discretionary entry in the bookkeeping. (RELATED: The Peril and Promise of AI) There’s a whole realm of life that belongs to the Adequate. Good enough for the general public. That’s the realm where most of us live, and where skilled workers used to learn their crafts. In the AI future, infinite goods will be produced, but who will buy those goods? Where will the consumer acquire purchasing power, when both manual and mental labor have been automated? At what point will our AI masters decide that the human being, like Ned Ludd the weaver or Lars the script translator, is a downward drag on the bottom line? It may be true that there will always be work for geniuses. Those who can afford the best will still be happy to shell out for prestige goods. But what about the common people, the people who shop at Walmart and read thrillers and romance novels, the “all men” affirmed by our founding documents as being created equal? What work is there for them (us), when AI overruns the realm of the Adequate? How many of us are really better than Adequate? I can picture the finest ballerina on earth. She is exquisite in beauty, elegant in motion. She’s dancing in an empty hall, before a hundred cameras, artificial intelligence recording and analyzing her every movement. Perhaps even AI can never match her art. But where is the second-best ballerina? The 100th best? Lars Walker is a novelist, Norwegian translator, and lecturer. His 7-volume historical fantasy epic, The Saga of Erling Skjalgsson, begins with The Year of the Warrior and ends with The Baldur Game. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.