Last week I had a jarring conversation with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley.
Me: I wish more kids were learning to be musicians.
He: In 10 years computers will be able to use a combination of artificial intelligence and massed data from the Internet to generate music better than human musicians. We can already use these techniques to choose hit songs more accurately than record executives. Musicianship will be an obsolete profession by the time today's kids grow up. There might be good reasons to teach kids music, but creating a new generation of professional musicians is not one of them.This was one of those moments when I wondered at what's become of computer culture. The remark was the kind of thing Marvin Minsky, the legendary MIT professor and one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, used to say to me when I was a young researcher to piss me off and make me think. But there were unmistakable layers of humor and irony in Marvin's provocations. Many of today's Silicon Valley thought leaders seem to have embraced what used to be speculations as certainties, without the spirit of unbounded curiousity that originally gave rise to them.
Ideas that used to be tucked away in the obscure world of artificial intelligence labs have gone mainstream in tech culture. The basic tenet of this new culture is that all of reality, including humans, is one big information system.
[etc.; very interesting piece, explicitly discussing the "tightrope walk" between "a crowd of ravenous faux robotic nerds on one side and a gaggle of sentimental antiquarians on the other." He doesn't identify his "misguided colleague," but I'm wondering if it is RK or another singulartarian type.]
1 comment:
I read this yesterday. What did you think of it?
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