Does the future need us?

A few years back, Bill Joy wrote a disturbing and interesting piece for Wired Magazine, called "Does the future need us?". And more recently the Luminous Landscape forum had a worried thread about humanity being reduced to just another machine.

As far as I'm concerned, if mankind comes up with a machine that's kinder, more compassionate, more empathic and more loving than humans, great. What's not to like?

As for taking photographs, composing music, playing chess, playing tennis, speaking foreign languages or any of the other things in which I take an interest, I know with 99.999999999% certainty that at age 53, I will never do any of them well enough to rank in the top 1000 in my country, let alone in the world. There are more than 6.8 BILLION humans out there, and the number is growing and my chances of getting near the top of any field of activity are shrinking.

So for me, whether the entities that do those activities better than me are humans or machines makes not a lot of difference. What matters for me is the experience of doing those things, and interacting with others as I do them.

As for the products of machines compared with the products of humans, similar considerations apply. What counts for me is whether a photograph, or a piece of music or a piece of writing connects with me. If a machine has produced it, then that's amazing.

The strange attraction of Early Music

I've become very partial to what's known as "Early Music", which means stuff written up to around 1760 - Bach and before. I guess it helps that my piano teacher Sophie Yates is a specialist in that era and her husband - a former rock musician - is a lute player.

Some of that early music sounds strangely modern - not in an MTV, Indie way - and some of it evokes Elizabethan drama, Spanish grandees and the like.

Anyway, at last Friday's piano lesson I was just relishing getting my ten thumbs round a particularly pleasing couple of bars and I wondered out loud what it was about music from 350 years ago that was getting to me. And Sophie said it's just music from another place, except that it's also from another place in time. Which seemed to hit the nail on the head for me.