I just watched documentary filmmakers Aaron and Melissa Dykes’ new short-doco We're Already Living in an Alien Invasion Movie, about where we’re at with AI and its impact on humanity. It’s thought provoking, very disturbing and also entertaining (you can watch it here). I’ve written about the issue around AI and art before (here), also citing another of the Dykes’ films on this topic, and over time, the same concerns around creativity, imagination, critical thinking, language and research skills keep coming up. Basically, there is a serious erosion of people’s abilities in these areas who use AI regularly, and aren’t discerning in their use of it. I’m kind of over the hype around it, while acknowledging, this is an epic problem. But when I hear tech tycoons like Jeff Bezos say he’s disinterested in music of any kind; or Elon Musk say he thinks empathy is Western civilization’s fundamental weakness; or Sam Altman say intelligence should be a utility like electricity that OpenAI will sell to its customers, and horrifyingly when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei goes on a podcast tour trying to justify and also shift responsibility for Claude (AI) being used by the Israeli/US military to target the Minab school in Iran killing around 110 children at the beginning of the Iran/Israel/US war this year (around 168 civilians in total), a war crime, frankly, I question these people and their humanity.
Stories, music and art have been foundational for my life. Being creative, using my imagination is like breathing. Thinking, researching and writing is what I do every day. It’s about living, being fulfilled and purposeful. Recently I listened to Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem in D minor. My father trained as a classical pianist, and while he didn’t pursue a performance career, he passed on his love of classical and jazz music to me. The story of the Requiem is that Mozart composed it on his deathbed, passing away before the composition could be completed. The mass was commissioned by Count Franz von Walsegg for a requiem service to commemorate the first anniversary of his wife’s death. The composition was completed however by composer and conductor, Franz Xaver Süssmayr. I’m including here the performance of the movement from the Requiem, the Lacrimosa, by the Berliner Philharmoniker and conducted by Claudio Abbado (1999) in Salzburg Cathedral. Music that can bring you to tears while simultaneously being uplifting, and composed by an ill, impoverished, flawed and brilliant man who created a masterpiece that in my opinion, bridges the human with the divine. A true gift to humanity.