There is a pattern in how civilisations respond to mass displacement of labour.
When Rome's conquests flooded the republic with enslaved workers, free citizens were displaced from the trades. The response was the Colosseum. Stories and the arena. Bread and circuses. Not as a failure of civilisation, but as its rational adaptation. A newly idle population that still needed to feel something together.
The industrial revolution displaced physical labour. The 20th century was built on what followed: cinema, radio, television, recorded music, professional sport. An entire civilisation of surplus attention, looking for stories to inhabit.
AI is now displacing cognitive labour. The pattern will repeat, faster and at greater scale. By most audience metrics, only a small minority of produced content becomes truly loved or culturally relevant.
Which means that the question of what makes a story genuinely compelling, not technically competent, not adequately structured, but truly compelling, becomes one of the most important questions of the coming decades.
And it is a question that storytelling, as a field, has not yet formally answered.
I think the world of music has already figured out this structure, which visual narrative has yet to. https://blog.quanten.co/is-there-a-musical-scale-equivalent-for-story-st...
