What disappears when everything is made at the push of a button

A friend of mine is a sound engineer. Was a sound engineer. He spent thirty years setting up microphones, measuring rooms, hearing frequencies that others can’t hear. He could read a room and know how it would sound. Not calculate. Read. Like a chef who smells an ingredient and knows what’s missing.

He doesn’t do that anymore. His contracts dried up, the prices dropped, the clients got younger. They don’t need a sound engineer anymore. They need software.

This is sold as progress. AI can now produce films without sets, without camera crews, without actors. It generates images, voices, music. What used to require a studio full of people now requires a prompt and a few minutes. Democratization, they call it. Everyone can now create content. The barriers are falling.

The barriers are falling. True. And with them fall professions, skills, entire ecosystems of human collaboration.

A film set isn’t just a place where a product gets made. It’s a place where people with different abilities work together. The cameraman sees something the director didn’t see. The makeup artist understands the character differently than the writer. The sound engineer hears the room. Everyone brings a perception that the others don’t have. The result isn’t the sum of its parts. It’s something none of them could have made alone.

When one person at a laptop replaces the entire process, something gets made. But it gets made differently. It comes from a single perspective, amplified by a machine that’s very good at meeting expectations. The output looks professional. It sounds right. It works. But it’s missing the friction. It’s missing the moment when someone says: That’s not right. Let’s do that again.

Craft is a particular kind of knowledge. It doesn’t live in the head. It lives in the hands, in the ears, in the eyes. It takes years to develop, and it can’t be put into words. A carpenter feels the wood and knows whether it will warp. A musician hears whether a room carries the sound or swallows it. A photographer sees a light that will be gone in two minutes.

This knowledge comes through repetition, through mistakes, through a thousand hours where nothing special happens. It’s the opposite of efficiency. And it produces something that optimized outputs don’t produce: character.

The AI discussion revolves around scaling. More content, faster, cheaper. That’s an economic argument and it’s correct. But it leaves out what disappears from the equation. Not just jobs. Also the kind of knowledge that was tied to those jobs.

When nobody hears a room anymore, that hearing is lost. Not as one person’s skill. As a culture’s skill. There’s nobody left who notices the difference. And when nobody notices the difference, it ceases to exist.

That’s the strange thing about this loss: It’s invisible. You don’t notice what’s missing if you never knew it was there. You listen to an AI-generated soundtrack and it sounds good. You look at a generated image and it looks professional. You have no comparison anymore, because the people who could have provided one are doing something else now.

My friend does consulting now. He advises companies on acoustics. It’s going well. He’s missing something, he says. Not the money. Working with his hands. The moment when he could walk into a room and say: The microphone goes here. Nobody needs that knowledge anymore.

What disappears when everything is made at the push of a button? Not the content. There’s more of that than ever. What disappears is the way it was made. And with it, a form of human knowledge that we can’t store in any database.