Music Video Lesson: Will AI & The Singularity Transform Music? Ray Kurzweil's Vision

Hi, I'm Robert Estrin. You're watching LivingPianos.com.

Today is a weighty subject.

The relationship between keyboards and the singularity. The singularity! Now what's this all about? Well, we've got a really lively discussion we're going to get going here today.

And the central figure in our discussion is a man by the name of Ray Kurzweil. How many of you have heard of Kurzweil keyboards and Kurzweil pianos? Well, this is very close to me because back in the 1980s, I had in my recording studio a cutting -edge digital audio workstation, the Kurzweil K250. This was a keyboard with 88 wooden keys that could sound like a grand piano, could sound like a whole orchestra. It was one of a breed of digital audio workstations, some of them ultra -expensive like Fairlight, which was well into five figures, and the Sinclair II system, New England Digitals, made in New England, over $100,000 for a full -blown system. Now what made these so expensive? Well, back before the MIDI interface, that is musical instrument digital interface, if you wanted to have a computer hooked to music, you had to have a whole integrated system. So for digital sampling and multitrack recording and music printing and all of these fantastic features, it came at a very steep price. And Kurzweil was one of the leaders in this technology. Now how did this ever come to be? Well, the man that I'm trying to talk about today, Ray Kurzweil, was a great inventor and still is in the cutting edge. And back in 1975, he came up with a reader for the blind. That is, it was a text recognition program that could take written text and read it aloud to people with visual impairment.

And one of the people who appreciated this so much was a man by the name of Stevie Wonder. And he said to Ray, you should come up with a keyboard that can sound like any instrument, including the piano. And wouldn't you know it, but Ray did it. And that's where the Kurzweil was invented.

Now Ray has been known as a futurist, and if it was anyone else who made these kind of predictions, I would scoff at them. So I opened the show talking about the singularity. Now what is this all about? Well, there are different definitions of the singularity. One of them is where machines become more intelligent than humans. Once that happens, all bets are off. No one really knows what will happen. Some people think it may be a utopia. Other people may think it may be a dystopia. You know, there's no way to really know. There's a lot of fears about it. Now a lot of people are talking about this because of artificial intelligence. Right now we have things like ChatGPT, which can pass the bar exam and is aiding doctors and writing papers, and even can write code, computer code. It can write computer code. It can analyze spreadsheets. And you know, there are other programs, stable diffusion and DALL-E, that can, from text, output works of art, and even photorealistic pictures. It's pretty remarkable what's happening. And believe it or not, there's even music, composition, AI, and all of this is in its infancy, and it's very exciting. But the type of AI I'm talking about is artificial general intelligence. And instead of just a specific task, it's really like what humans are able to do. Now what does Ray have to do with this? Well, Ray Kurzweil has been predicting this singularity, and his vision of singularity goes even one step beyond where man and machine emerge. It seems like a scary concept. And there are hints of this out there with things like Neuralink, of Elon Musk's company. And this can have great ramifications for people who have lost limbs and being able to use their thought to control prosthetic devices. And already there are some types of progress being made in this direction.

But the idea of the singularity where your mind is like hooked to the internet, imagine having, instead of being able to pick up your phone to have all this information, your electrical impulses for your brain are directly connected to everything. Now this is somewhat of a frightening concept and an exciting one all at the same time. And of course I'm very interested in all of your opinions. I'm sure there's very strong feelings about this on both sides.

But what Ray has, who has been a futurist for years, and if it was anyone else, I would scoff at the notion, but he claims that by 2030, which is around the corner, this singularity will occur such that there will be nanobots going through your body repairing cells. So that for every year that you age, there will be a year of repair, eventually reaching a state of immortality where you're aging at the same rate at which your body is being repaired by these nanobots. Now this sounds like science fiction and we all hope that Ray is right. He's been corrected so many times before, but this is a wild assertion naturally. So I just thought I'd get this discussion going about AI in general, how it's impacting music, and whether you feel that we'll replace musicians or perhaps more likely there'll be tools that musicians can use as bouncing off points for inspiration, much like chatGPT is for text for people who are writers, being able to rough out ideas that they can refine further.

So here at livingpianos.com and YouTube, let's hear from all of you. I'm interested in if you think Ray Kurzweil is a nut or do you think there's some validity to what he's saying? And in general, how you feel about AI and music and the whole direction things are going in the creative fields. Who would have thought that artificial intelligence would be taking over the creative fields before anything else? It's pretty wild stuff, isn't it? Once again, I'm Robert Estrin. This is livingpianos.com, your online piano resource. If you like these kinds of discussions, let me know and you can subscribe, ring the bell, the thumbs up, and I appreciate all of that. We'll see you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/will-ai-the-singularity-transform-music-ray-kurzweils-vision/

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