AI and the future of music

if it [AI] “creates” something pleasing: So what?

One thing I appreciate about music is that it came from another human person. They are communicating something to me.

Consider a world where one does not have actual friends; they have a robot that pleases them. They wind up "pleased" but do they wind up "human"?

I don’t think so. Not where I want to go.

Music is mathematics.

Music is analyzable as mathematics.

It’s also analyzable as physics. As emotion. As gesture. As language.

Reducing it to mathematics is one choice of how to deal with the phenomenon of music. But just one choice of many others.

And even if mathematics -- someone has to do the analyzing, write the algorithms, etc.

Here's what I would be on board with: AI arranging proteins to simulate pork, beef, etc. so we can stop causing so much suffering.

+3 @baylinor 

Problem is that kind of knowledge was given instead of learned. Big difference. Meaning any one can act as knowledgeable as any other but without doing any of the real work to get there. And in the end it always shows in the quality of the work that is undertaken.

I love this. It demonstrates the very point it's making. Baylinor had to think through the issue -- and THAT, to me, is the indispensable difference in everything. "Output" is a machine term; it only points to one phase of a sequence that begins with a human need, put in terms of a question.

I'd modify the old saying, "The only way out is through" as "The only way through is through." To quote one of my favorite philosophers: the nectar is in the journey. 

A slime network can solve complex optimization problem with no brain... Do you know that ?

To my way of thinking, something is a "problem" if it is defined as a problem. Two clouds are trying to pass by one another and they partially mix on the edge. Did they just solve a "problem"? Without defining something as a problem -- meaningful, to human beings, connected to their future, it is not a problem.

This applies to A.I. It does not solve problems unless those problems have been defined by humans who decide what matters. Could A.I. "clean up" an old recording? Even "clean up" is a shorthand for "clean up for human beings who will tell it what they want to hear, what is meaningful in the outcome."

In other words, the difference between "sound" and "music" is meaning, and only humans make meaning.

The difference between "processing" and "intelligence" is meaning, and only humans make meaning.

Because we’re the ones with a meaningful future worth having.

When we worry, as some counsel (rightly), to worry about A.I., it's because it could take us on a runaway train away from meaning.