Ask Lemmygrad

I don't think I understand this question. Do mean like Tom Kenny deserves retirement from playing SpongeBob and that necessarily means changing SpongeBob's voice actor, which the audience wouldn't like?

We are not being revolutionaries for ourselves but for our descendants and anyone who comes after us. Being a revolutionary merely to reap the benefits of it is fundamentally selfish.

TTS and voice cloning, whether one likes it or not, is already on track to be able to replace VAs, at least to a degree.

But if you just use the VA example to say "what if it's something where we can't reduce the labor time", basically the way I see it, either the labor would not get done if it's not essential and people don't want to be bothered (which is fine if people's needs are getting met regardless) or the labor would be more evenly distributed and, importantly, less coercive. But this is largely a speculative area, as far as I'm aware. We've seen socialist states in practice, but we haven't seen millions in an industrial society with developed communism after the state has withered away.

I would emphasize that I don't think the point of such communism is that everyone does identical work all the time and nobody ever goes out of their way for anybody. It's more like, if class stratification is gone, the coercive, exploitative element of it is gone with it. If you can labor on a thing like VA for a game that people don't really need, maybe under communism you're doing it because you want to see people smile, when you have the time and energy for it. Instead of having to sell yourself, compete with other VAs, push yourself even when you're weak or sick, have an agent, build a brand, do interviews, and so on.

People can be positively motivated to work on things without fear of abandonment being put into them at every turn. Like some people put lots of labor into hobbies that don't make them any money. But as soon as the capitalism machine of it gets involved, it tends to suck the joy out of the process and it tends to expect more out of people than they really have to give.

Does that make sense or am I off on some different tack?

Simple: human voice acting will be a hobby, not a job. Someday the majority of voices you hear will be computer generated while our precious and finite human voices will be turned to artistic and social pursuits. This can not be done yet, but in a century? Absolutely.

How do communists address the fact that time will remain scarce under communism and that VAs are entitled to a life?

The question answers itself, no? Communism won't magically mean we have an infinity of every imaginable thing, but that resources and labour will be allocated to provide for the workers. Those resourced and that labour (time) will still be limited, the "post-scarcity" just comes from the fact we already have the technological capabilities to fulfil everyone's needs. Voice actors have the same limited time as any other worker, so they'd get about as much "right to live" as any other worker.

I'm a bit appalled that people in this forum are jumping straight to "everything will be AI and it'll solve everything" or "voice acting will be a hobby", as though artistic labour shouldn't exist. Hopefully its not controversial to think workers should be compensated for voice acting in games.

I think it's the other way around, even approaching post scarcity you'd want to regulate that certain sectors or jobs must be done by humans to a percentage. Just because humans like doing certain things or would prefer services from a human.

I always imagined something like carpentry and making furniture. But any kind of acting or performance art probably falls in that category. Maybe things like cooking / food preparation / serving if get like help with robots preparing and cleaning up.

Ideally the line between hobby and job would blur.