Bryan Cranston Tells Bob Iger ‘Our Jobs Will Not Be Taken Away’ by AI in Rousing Speech: You Will Not ‘Take Away Our Dignity’
By Joe Otterson
Bryan Cranston delivered a fiery speech at a SAG-AFTRA strike rally in Times Square on Tuesday, which included a message directed at Disney head Bob Iger. “We’ve got a message for Mr. Iger,” Cranston said from the stage of the “Rock the City for a Fair Contract” rally. “I know, sir, that you look [at] things through a different lens. We don’t expect you to understand who we are. But we ask you to hear us, and beyond that to listen to us when we tell you we will not be having our jobs taken away and given to robots. We will not have you take away our right to work and earn a decent living. And lastly, and most importantly, we will not allow you to take away our dignity! We are union through and through, all the way to the end!”
Watch an excerpt from the speech below Cranston began his remarks by saying that there is one thing that all the guilds and the AMPTP fundamentally agree on: “Our industry has changed exponentially.” “We are not in the same business model we were even 10 years ago,” he said. “And yet, even though they admit that is the truth in today’s economy, they are fighting us tooth and nail to stick to the same economic system that is outmoded, outdated! They want us to step back in time. We cannot and we will not do that.” Cranston was one of a number of stars who took the stage to address a crowd of hundreds of SAG-AFTRA members and union supporters at the rally, with others including Steve Buscemi, Wendell Pierce, Christian Slater, Christine Baranski, Stephen Lang, and Titus Burgess. They were joined onstage by fellow actors Michael Shannon, BD Wong, Brendan Fraser, Jessica Chastain, Matt Bomer, Chloë Grace Moretz, and Corey Stoll, and more. Burgess decided to forego a speech, instead singing a section of the song “Take Me to the World” from “Sondheim On Sondheim.” Baranski told the crowd “We will not live under corporate feudalism” while also praising the background actors on shows like “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight,” saying that she attended the rally to speak for them and demand they get fair treatment under any new contract. Slater then spoke about how his father, a fellow SAG member, received support from the union after mental illness and later cancer left him unable to work. Later on in the rally, “The Bear” star Liza Colón-Zayas told the audience that she has been a union member since 1994 and “struggled for 30 years to finally get here, only to find that my residuals have dwindled exponentially.” She then paraphrased Snoop Dogg by saying “We the artists, our gripe is that we deliver in high numbers, in major numbers. And yet, where the f— is my money?”
But isn’t trying to forbid those kind of deals doomed to fail? What if the digital actor doesn’t look like anybody? What if they scan actors from other countries?
I’m not arguing about the benefits of unionization, my question was about what happens when a machine becomes more efficient than a human worker. Do you think a union could have saved the switchboard operators? How is it any different from this scenario?
I don’t think it’s inevitable that a technology that has an advantage to business is destined to succeed. We’ve been able to ban a number of technologies that are ultimately more harmful in the long run, CFCs, engineered stone, asbestos and even recently the EU banned facial recognition AI. We just need to help people recognise the harmfulness of a technology.
Do you have an example of a technology that is more efficient than human labor, doesn’t have those side effects and was successfully held back just to keep jobs?
I feel facial recognition is more efficient than human labour. But the dangers of its misuse were too high for the EU to stomach. Seems like a similar issue here, but it’s the unions stepping up to force regulation because the government is too weak and stupid to do it itself.
The misuse of unfettered AI actors does pose real danger of unintended side effects not just to jobs but to society as a whole.
The union negotiations could include in the contract that AI generated actors are not allowed when SAG is involved.
That doesn’t completely stop AI, since they could try to use non union actors or no actors at all.
The issue with AI is that it is software, and software can scale very quickly. So large amounts of jobs could very quickly get automated without allowing workers and the economy to slowly adjust over time. Switchboard operator was just a single job in a single industry.
It will also lead to more consolidation of wealth since existing bussinesses stand to make great savings getting rid of people, and the AI itself is privately owned. Funny enough, this could also blow up in their face since that creates inventive for people to vote.
Ok, but if they want to ban all forms of AI then we are no longer just talking about the morally reprehensible example of a studio buying an actor’s likeness in perpetuity. They want AI gone even when it’s used in a more sensible way which is understandable from their point of view but less so for the rest of us.