The man most commonly referred to as the ‘real-life Tony Stark’, Elon Musk, recently shared his thoughts about the concept of a universal basic income. A sum of money that would be paid out to every citizen to cover basic housing and food needs.
It’s a controversial idea that’s gained a lot of traction in recent years and Musk thinks it may be inevitable. “I think that there’s a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income, or something like that, due to automation,” he said, via Fortune.
Musk is a good person to ask about these sorts of things, since his companies are paving the way for an automated future. His self-driving Tesla cars could soon displace career truckers and even cab drivers and valets.
And it’s not just truck drivers who should be worried about their future career prospects. Automation threatens to basically put us as a species out of the job. Even medicine, once thought of as the most secure career path imaginable, will eventually remove humans from the equation.
As much as we hate to say this, being on Team Human and all, but we understand it. Businesses are a species unto themselves and their one task is maximising profit. Humans are good at what we do, but we cause issues by doing things like getting sick and expecting to be paid.
But there’s one career path that, while traditionally fraught with uncertainty and exploitation, may actually be the most insulated from automation, that of the artist. At least, that’s what we once thought.
After all, you can program a robot to drive boxes of pencils to a predetermined location and even program one to perform risky brain surgery without complications, but you can’t program a robot to feel. That’s kind of a contradiction in terms.
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Robots are incapable of feeling emotion and don’t really have a ‘need’ to express themselves. They just do what we program them to do. It’s we humans who are cursed with the burden of emotions and the desire to communicate them to others.
Could a robot really pen a song as heartfelt and moving as The Beatles’s ‘Yesterday’ or as catchy as ‘My Sharona’? Could a computer give you a performance as electrifying as Freddie Mercury at the peak of his showmanship and charisma?
Actually, yes.
Well, not quite, but we’re getting there. As The Verge reports, Adobe is currently working on an ‘audio Photoshop’ that lets you add words someone never said to a piece of audio. The software can mimic the tone, timbre, and cadence of a speaker and convincingly replicate their voice.
It needs about 20 minutes of recorded speech to do this. “…you can simply type in the word or words that you would like to change or insert into the voiceover. The algorithm does the rest and makes it sound like the original speaker said those words,” an Adobe statement reads.
The ramifications this has on music ought to be clear. Surely it’s only a matter of time until such software can replicate the voices of singers who are no longer with us. But hey, those are just vocals and any skilled audio editor can do that.
You can’t, say, recreate the magic of the Fab Four with a computer program. You need the synergy of having John, Paul, George, and Ringo in the same room together. But the Sony Computer Science Laboratory begs to differ.
As Reuters reports, Sony’s CSL is developing a system of algorithms which can create songs based on styles adapted from existing music. You input the variables and it spits out a song ‘performed’ (or rather generated) in that style.
Sure enough, the CSL created a song entitled ‘Daddy’s Car’, which was created in the style of The Beatles. The algorithm created the composition after analysing about 45 songs by the iconic group and the result is absolutely uncanny.
No, it’s not The Beatles, and there’s even something oddly un-human about ‘Daddy’s Car’, an ersatz Beatles tune created by 1s and 0s and not an inspired songwriter, but as is the way with technology, it’s only a matter of time until the product is more sophisticated.
“I’ve not heard the Beatles’ track that supposedly this wonderful thing has invented, but I suppose, as a musician, we don’t want it, do we? We don’t want to be put out of a job,” New Order and Joy Division bassist Peter Hook told Reuters.
Meanwhile, automated music in the live sphere is already mainstream. You’ll probably recall the time that Snoop Dogg brought out good friend Tupac Shakur at the 2012 Coachella festival, 16 years after the rapper’s death.
Whilst what was widely reported at the time as a ‘hologram’ was not in fact a real hologram but an optical 2D illusion, the crowd’s reaction was the same as though Shakur had been reincarnated and stood before them on the stage.
In Japan, where music fans are admittedly more in love with the figures of the music they consume than the music itself, virtual musicians are commonplace and in the case of holographic pop star Hatsune Miku, they routinely sell out stadiums.
And before you protest that this is simply another quirk of Japan’s culture, remember that one of the most eagerly anticipated upcoming reunions is the Gorillaz, a virtual band created by Blur frontman Damon Albarn and comic book illustrator Jamie Hewlett.
Of course, why bother even going to a stadium when virtual reality will soon mean you can experience the world’s greatest concerts and festivals from the comfort of your own home. And when we say greatest concerts, we mean of all time.
As The Wire recently reported, Swedish pop icons ABBA are making a ‘comeback’ through the use of our “new technological world”. It’s not quite clear what this will entail, but the band promise a new “virtual and live experience”.
Meanwhile, Canadian news reports that a Montreal graphics firm have created the world’s first interactive holographic pop star and she’s about to release her first single. Does being a musician still feel like it’s safe from automation?
Whilst most musicians and music fans will likely scoff at the idea of a music world that’s fuelled by compositions entirely generated by computers, it’s not all that dissimilar from labourers insisting no machine will ever be able to replace a human’s instinct or ability to improvise.
We love music and we love the people that make music, but when seemingly both can be replaced with a few lines of code it places the future of artistic pursuits into question. And it’s a question we might not want the answer to.
