Some encouraging news, if you think about player pianos and music!
Here's a gift article from The Atlantic by Adam Ozimek
AI Isn’t Coming for Everyone’s JobThe rise and fall of the player piano indicates a robust demand for human labor that machines cannot replace.
This article tries to find comfort in the rise and fall of player pianos and how they never did replace the human desire for live music (even bad live music!).
We have little musical ability in my family, so my mom did have a player piano for a while, and a bunch of piano rolls. I think the article makes a decent case, within limits. Player pianos may have died out, but vinyl records, CDs, and now streaming music, is very much still in play. Neil Young even prefers the analog feel of vinyl to the "perfection" of digital music.
Folks did make similar arguments when photography appeared and Impressionism and expressivism came forth (I feature an expressivist artists and very much gestural painter on my Boese Galleries site, https://www.chrisboese.photo).
So then people will cite Victor Hugo about cathedrals and books, "Ceci tuera cela" or "This will kill that." Just another way of saying "Video killed the radio star." Or did it?
That comes back to the idea of a zero sum game, a pie divided into smaller and smaller pieces, what I call the "scarcity model" of value. It carries the day most of the time.
EXCEPT at times when you can grow a bigger pie!
That's what weaker desktop computers did to the centralized mainframe world. That's what weaker HTML and javascript and Python did to C++ and other sophisticated and hard-to-learn programming languages.
Marshal McLuhan would say the "media ratios" just shift. Art didn't go away with the rise of photography. Music didn't go away with the rise of player pianos. Radio didn't go away with the rise of TV. Books didn't go away with the rise of the great Library of the Internet. But something important DID go away.
They can't even give away pianos these days. Art projects use them for community installations in parks, where folks can sit and play them, where they get rained on and face the elements.
There are fewer realistic portrait artists and landscape artists because of photography. There are fewer professional photographers because of smart phone cameras.
And books? Don't get me started on books. I wrote a whole dissertation on this topic, one of the first interactive digital dissertations to be accepted in the world (http://www.nutball.com/dissertion). Yes, there is more access to books and language than ever before. And yet long form reading (with the critical thinking fostered by it) is dying. Ask any writing professor (and I was one).
Plato was very very upset, once upon a time (in a book about Socrates called "The Phaedrus." You can read it, or "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," to think these thoughts). What was bugging Plato?
WRITING. You know, on parchment, with letters that made words and stuff. He called those letters and words DRAGON TEETH. Why?!
Greeks could memorize all of Homer and recite it! They had amazing memories in an oral culture. Socrates never wrote a word in his life. People gave speeches in the law courts and the agora, and they memorized them all. The entire Greek cultures was built around these phenomenal feats of MEMORY.
Writing meant the end of Greek memory skills, to Plato, the end of civilization. People would not be able to think great thoughts in their heads if they wrote things down instead of just remembering them. Sure, do we really need to remember grocery lists and chariot tech specs forever? Why not just write that down?
McLuhan saw it another way entirely. He saw extensions. The wheel is an extension of your foot. The parchments where Plato WROTE his Socratic dialogues were extensions of mind, of memory. What would he make of the Internet? All the texts hoovered into LLM training data, basically the Library of Alexandria, in instantaneously searchable form (you don't know how long it took me to look up the correct spelling of "Ceci tuera cela" tho!).
So our sense ratios (in the McLuhan sense) are shifting again. Will we lose our memory completely this time, to inane AI lookups? Will we outsource our reasoning, our aesthetics (I love Arthelper.AI's Art Analysis Spark!), our ethics, our epistemologies, our ontologies?
OR (and this is the really scary part), will carbon-based life and silicon-based life MERGE into a SINGULARITY of ONE MIND (to rule them all)? A guy named Ray Kurzweil thinks so, and he thinks he can calculate the date this will happen. I have his book right here.
Told you it was scary.
Join this conversation! No subject is too silly. No fear too irrational. Artists and writers have been having this conversation since Plato. Since Victor Hugo. Since Ray Kurzweil.
I'm Chris. You'll see me around here. I chat sometimes in the weekly calls too. Say hi!