Will artificial intelligence replace Hildegard von Bingen?

Soon, robots will take people's jobs.

Or that's what a lot of people say. Whether it's actually going to happen any time soon seems uncertain.

Today I googled will robots take peoples jobs and read a few long articles explaining why that's actually not happening (yet). At least not in the sense that leaders in Silicon Valley talk about. As some jobs disappear, new ones are being created. And often those new jobs are just more mindless and oppressive than the old ones. In Amazon warehouses, robots are such monstrously efficient managers that it takes a lot of humans to keep up with their pace, and those humans quickly become completely overstressed, sick and exhausted.

At the moment, the demand for human labour doesn't seem to be decreasing. All of this is actually a real bummer to me. I really think that the world would be a better place if people worked less.

I understand that for a lot of people, having a job is the very thing that brings some sense of purpose into life. At the same time, most of us would probably agree that many jobs are rather empty meaning-wise, and that for a lot people, the need to "make a living" is an unfortunate obligation that distracts one from other things that one actually cares about on a deeper level.

The fact that people's working lives are increasingly digital is also making work more stressful and cognitively unhealthy than ever. I really don't think that anyone should have to get used to the idea that human life = an endless stream of emails and notifications that you have to react to.

But let's be hopeful. Let's assume that sooner or later, robots ((combined with universal basic income and some means to make sure that all the machines aren't owned by some small group of people who just get richer and richer and richer at the expense of everyone else)) will actually help to create a situation where human beings won't have to work so much anymore.

The interesting question is, of course: if and when machines start taking care of the smooth functioning of society, what are humans supposed to do with all their free time?

This question seems to make a lot of people panic. When people start thinking about this, most seem to automatically imagine a dystopian scenario where humans will spend 100% of their waking hours totally addicted to superstimulating virtual reality games.

As if Paid Work and Extreme Video Game Addiction were the only conceivable options for Homo sapiens. Give Homo sapiens some credit, man. "Paid work" is a relatively new phenomenon. Hunter-gatherers didn't have jobs, and yet they lived lives that were incredibly rich in terms of meaning.

Also, I think that it's important to understand that there are areas of human life and society that can't be "automated". Some roles can only be played by Homo sapiens. I've had some serious health scares, and those experiences taught me what a gigantic difference it makes whether or not the people taking care of you have time to listen to you. Knowing that you're "being held" in the mind of another person who understands your situation (and cares about it and sees you as a feeling, thinking, competent human) is magic. It's an antidote to fear and powerlessness. Really, the value of that can't be overstated.

For people who are physically or mentally broken, or old, or lonely, or dying, good-quality communication with real humans is the most miraculous thing there is.

At the moment, most doctors and nurses and social workers (etc.) feel like they don't have enough time and resources to do their jobs as well as they'd like to. And yet what they're doing is the opposite of a "bullshit job". Actually, one of the main reasons why I've (sort of) been looking forward to a robot revolution is the faint hope that it could relieve humans to do stuff like this properly. If people didn't have to worry about "making a living", maybe they could start doing things because those things are intrinsically rewarding and meaningful. There's nothing as rewarding and meaningful as helping others.

Another area where humans are necessary is education. I know that there are people who are really excited about the "personalized learning journeys" that robot teachers may be able to provide in the future... However, ideally, education is also a deeply "soulbuilding" or "soulmaking" process; if you want to make souls, you need beings who actually understand the complexities of what it's like to have a soul. A robot can teach grammar, but grammar is only a relatively small part of what writing is about.

A third example of an area where humanity is more or less irreplaceable: art.

Saying this is "controversial". There are thinkers who see no reason why, in the long run, artificial intelligence couldn't replace humans as artists.

I mean, why not? Computers can already compose instrumental music. Maybe one day they'll even learn to build complex, believable narratives. (Although that still remains theoretical. As someone with some writing experience, I know that writing a novel requires such intuitive, experiential understanding of the world, on so many levels, that I understand what a feat it would be for a computer to learn to fake it.)

The latest example of this "Why wouldn't artificial intelligence make human artists obsolete?" line of thought is this essay that I stumbled upon some days ago. In it, scientist/novelist Erik Hoel talks about the "semantic apocalypse" that may happen when machines learn to imitate human creativity.

What happens when things like art and journalism are authored by entities that are incapable of meaning anything by their creations? When thinking is replaced by stuff that just looks like thinking?

The essay's soulful and beautifully written. However, it suffers from the same problem that these essays always suffer from.

They always answer this question: could artificial intelligence eventually become smart enough to imitate art created by humans so well that its "art" would be indistinguishable from art created by real humans? (And the answer is Maybe. I don't see any reason why that would be impossible, in the long run.)

What these essays are less interested in answering is this question: to what extent would people be interested in consuming these imitations?

Hoel actually does ask this question in his essay:

How much will it really matter if there is a “certified human” sticker on a script or a song or a painting?

And in a way, he does also answer the question when he discusses his relationship to the music of the medieval genius Hildegard von Bingen:

When I listen to the work of Hildegard von Bingen, the Benedictine abbess who composed liturgies a thousand years ago, her music comes across those centuries with a clarity of meaning so great one aches upon hearing it. The meaning is one of longing. She saw visions all her life, and surely that’s what this longing is for — a world seen in a vision.
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So then what, exactly, is the semantic content of an AI-produced work of Hildegard von Bingen? It is a “deep fake” of meaning. Such a work points to nothing, signifies nothing, embodies no spiritual longing. It is pure syntax.

Then he just moves on, as if he doesn't notice that he just gave a rather compelling answer to his question.

The same weird thing happens in Yuval Noah Harari's book Homo Deus, which I read last summer.

In the book, Harari talks about a scientist who taught an artificial intelligence to imitate the styles of famous classical composers. Then he played these computer-generated imitations to a human audience, presenting them as forgotten gems by the great composers. (Or something like that... I don't have the book here.)

Initially, the audience described the pieces of music as beautiful, soulful, very powerful. However, when it was revealed to them that the music had actually been composed by a computer, the audience became pissed off and felt bad and cheated. The compositions immediately became empty and meaningless to them.

What's the conclusion here? Harari's conclusion is that there's nothing stopping machines from replacing humans as artists.

But is that really the lesson of that story?

Of course, it can be argued that maybe people are just scared of new things. Maybe they'll come around to AI art eventually. They just have to get used to it.

But my question is: why do people listen to classical music? Is it because they just have a deep need to hear "sounds like that"? And as long as that need is satisfied, it doesn't matter where those sounds came from?

In his essay, Hoel claims that art is "meant to be imbibed". Art is an experience that you consume – so as long as it's beautiful or interesting, why would it matter whether it was created by a thinking being or not?

Well. I think that it's helpful to differentiate between art and entertainment here.

Entertainment is what you consume when you want moments of your boring life to pass as easily and pleasantly as possible. Who cares who or what it is that's helping you do that? You just want nice things to happen in front of your face. If an AI can design a video game or a TV show or a hit song in a way that makes the product more addictive, it's hard to imagine people saying "What? The addictiveness of this game was created by an artificial intelligence?! I thought a human did it! Now I'm not gonna play anymore!"

Entertainment is meant to be "imbibed". That's for sure. But I think that when it comes to art, things get more complicated.

Lately I've been reading Infinite Jest for the first time. For many years already, David Foster Wallace has been one of the ghosts that frequent my life, but for some reason, until now, I've avoided his Most Famous Book. The reading experience of Infinite Jest is... well, sometimes it's definitely fun. There are sections that are absolutely captivating and beautiful. But then there are also a lot of clunky, obscure parts whose surrealism just makes me wonder what their point is.

If I knew with 100% certainty that there was no point – that these hundreds and hundreds of pages were just a collection of words and phrases and sentence structures mechanically copied out of immense sets of data and put together by an unconscious machine, would I be interested in giving so much time and energy to this craziness?

No.

I don't read Infinite Jest because I just really need to see words arranged in that particular order, but because I know that somebody meant something by those arrangements. Very often, art is an extension of the human need to spend time with other humans and communicate and be communicated to. When we engage with art, there's usually an expectation that the artist has processed the experience of being alive and sentient in this world exceptionally deeply, and therefore has something insightful or important to say about it. Art is like meeting someone and having a conversation with them, but the encounter happens in a "sacred" space where the world is slowed down and things are brought into greater focus and given more meaning. You're not just numbing the pain and escaping the world. You're confronting the pain, confronting the world. Letting somebody help you look at those things.

Of course, beauty doesn't have to be created by Homo sapiens to be beautiful. Many things in nature are breathtakingly beautiful to us, and they haven't been designed by us. I can imagine "AI art" producing similar feelings of awe in the future. Besides, I've already encountered some AI art, and its creepy weirdness and accidental insights can be exhilarating in their own way. But often we just need to know that we're really communicating with another thinking, feeling consciousness.

Learning about the ideas and experiences of others, and comparing those to our own ideas and experiences, is our primary way of dealing with and making sense of human existence, this strange and stressful thing. (For some reason, when I read "this strange and stressful thing", I automatically "hear" it in David Foster Wallace's voice... I guess he said "thing" a lot.) That's what we're hardwired to do, and that's the world of experience that resonates with us.

Even when artificial intelligence starts taking care of many things in our world, humans will continue to be interested in how other humans feel about living in such a world. That's the main point of art.

And if humans turn into cyborgs at some point in the future, then those cyborgs will want to learn about the thoughts and feelings of other beings who know what it's like to be a cyborg.

.......

This doesn't mean that we shouldn't worry about technology. I think that a more realistic threat to art – and thinking, and all slower, deeper quests for meaning – is the possibility that the technology and entertainment industries will become so omnipresent and so good at exploiting the psychological vulnerabilities of humans that they'll completely "swallow" every aspect and moment of people's lives.

So when people panic about the idea that in the future, human beings will be reduced to tragic creatures with the depth of a pancake who spend their whole lives masturbating in extremely addictive virtual reality worlds, that fear is not unfounded.

The only problem I have with that fear is the assumption that that scenario is somehow inevitable. The future of humanity could be profoundly meaningful and beautiful and creative, intellectually and spiritually ambitious and diverse – but we have to fight for it.

We have to stop being so naive about the technology industry. We have to force it to change its addiction- and distraction-based business model. And it would also be a good thing to start paying critical attention to our beliefs and assumptions about humans. If you build society and its institutions (such as schools) around the assumption that unless there's some kind of boss telling people exactly what to do (and rewarding them for obeying), people will be completely helpless and unmotivated to do anything but be entertained by various equivalents of slot machines, then that's the kind of people you're probably going to get.