I think there's still a lot of room for optimism, despite all of the pessimism in the media, and I'm not even talking about AI. There are a ton of other things which have benefitted enormously from ubiquitous, efficient, and powerful computing that hardly get talked about anymore, we've come to take it all for granted.
Perhaps it's just me, but modern documentaries are rather dumbed down?
As a side note: Quite ironic that he ends up pointing to a rocket propelled mostly by solid fuels.
My fear is that this is also being reshaped with ai, mostly for good now but I feel like the personal touch and passion of these creators is being diluted with the advent of generated content.
Maybe we are in a valley of the uncanny valley and the ai tools will become so good that they can successfully translate someone’s passionate vision faithfully, then it could be another renaissance.
It's not just you. Most modern TV documentaries, especially series, are dumbed down and sped up. Fast cuts, lots of woo, not too much to challenge your brain, don't want it to get strained.
Gone are the days where someone conveyed the information calmly while not driving a car somewhere irrelevant. No more lingering shots allowing you to process what you just saw and heard.
https://archive.org/details/bbc-connections-1978/Connections...
It still holds up for the most part, though of course some of the takes, being almost 50 years old, may seem a bit quaint. It's certainly worth watching the first series at least start to finish. Burke is an interesting guy.
I also want to speak up for the BBC history documentary team that worked with Michael Wood: _In Search of the Trojan War_, _In Search of the Dark Ages_, _The Story of England_, _The Story of India_ they were also a staple of American PBS and informed my understanding of the world.
1: My go to example for this is imagine you walk into the Pantheon in 1000 AD: no one on your entire continent has known how to build a dome like that in 500 years, and won't again for another 500 years. The fundamental way you understand the world has to be completely different from the "newer is better" baseline that we have understood the world by for the past 150 years.
Also note that there is a book: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Connections/James-Bur...
https://archive.org/details/connections0000burk/page/n7/mode...
So he nailed a 13 second countdown. Who cares? Newscasters do this at every commercial break. Sports announcers do this without a script and they still nail the cut to commercial almost every time. Yes, there's a talent to timing your speech to a countdown in your ear, but it's a talent that people do thousands of times a day around the world on far less preparation than Burke had here.
The fact that this article calls a simple cut a "sleight of hand" just terrifies me. Does the public really not know what editing is?