This may not answer the copyright question, but I argue that actors are certainly not going away altogether.

[tags]jar jar binks, gollum, king kong, andy serkis, ahmed best[/tags]

In 1955 Miller received the Hugo Award for his novelette ‘The Darfsteller’ in which a theatre has substituted human actors with life-sized dolls, controlled by the Maestro, also a machine. The protagonist is a former actor, now working at the theatre as a janitor. He secretly takes the place of a doll, planning to give his last great performance. Inside this simple story frame Miller probed the question of human creativity and hazards of mass production of art. “…Whatever you specialize in, another specialty will either gobble you, or find a way to replace you. If you get what looks like a secure niche, somebody’ll come along and wall you up in it and write your epitaph on it. And the more specialized a society gets, the more dangerous it is for the pure specialist. You think an electronic engineer in any safer than an actor? Or a ditch-digger?”

[tags]Walter M Miller Jr, Walter Miller, The Darfsteller, science fiction, future workplace, job security[/tags]