Month: May 2017

Art in the Age of AI

Let’s start with a little challenge: which of the following tunes was composed by an AI, and which by an HI (Human Intelligence)?

I’ll tell you at the end of the answer which tune was composed by an AI and which by an HI. For now, if you’re like most people, you’re probably unsure. Both pieces of music are pleasing to the ear. Both have good rhythm. Both could be part of the soundtrack of a Hollywood film, and you would never know that one was composed by an AI.

And this is just the beginning.

In recent years, AI has managed to –

  • Compose a piece of music (Transits – Into an Abyss) that was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and received praise from reviewers. [source: you can hear the performance in this link]
  • Identify emotions in photographs of people, and create an abstract painting that conveys these emotions to the viewer. The AI can even analyze the painting as it is being created, and decide whether it’s achieving its objectives [source: Rise of the Robots].
  • Write a short novel that almost won a literary prize in Japan.
  • Create a movie trailer (it’s actually pretty good – watch it here).

Now, don’t get me wrong: most of these achievements don’t even come close to the level of an experienced human artist. But AI has something that humans don’t: it’s capable of training itself on millions of samples, and constantly improve itself. That’s how Alpha Go, the AI that recently wiped the floor with Go’s most proficient players, got so good at the game: it played a few million games against itself, and discovered new strategies and best moves. It acquired an intuition for the game, and kept rapidly evolving to improve itself.

And there’s no reason that AI won’t be able to do that in art as well.

In the next decade, we’ll see AI composing music and even poems, drawing abstract paintings, and writing books and movie scripts. And it’ll get better at it all the time.

So what happens to art, when AI can create it just as easily as human beings do?

For starters, we all benefit. In the future, when you’ll upload your new YouTube clip, you’ll be able to have the AI add original music to it, which will fit the clip perfectly. The AI will also write your autobiography just by going over your Facebook and Gmail history, and if you want – will turn it into a movie script and direct it too. It’ll create new comic books easily and automatically – both the script and the drawing and coloring part – and what’s more, it’ll fit each story to the themes that you like. You want to see Superman fighting the Furry Triple-Breasted Slot Machines of Pandora? You got it.

That’s what happens when you take a task that humans need to invest decades to become really good at, and let computers perform it quickly and efficiently. And as a result, even poor people will be able to have a flock of AI artists at their beck and call.

What Will the Artists Do?

At this point you may ask yourselves what all the human artists will do at that future. Well, the bad news is that obviously, we won’t need as many human artists. The good news is that those few human artists who are left, will make a fortune by leveraging their skills.

Let me explain what I mean by that. Homer is one of the earliest poets we know of. He was probably dirt poor. Why? Because he had to wander from inn to inn, and could only recite his work aloud for audiences of a few dozen people at the time, at most. Shakespeare was much more succesful: he could have his plays performed in front of hundreds of people at the same time. And Justin Bieber is a millionnaire, because he leverages his art with technology: once he produces a great song, everyone gets is immediately via YouTube or by paying for and downloading the song on iTunes.

Great composers will still exist in the future, and they will work at creating new kinds of music – and then having the AI create variations on that theme, and earning revenue from it. Great painters will redefine drawing and painting, and they will teach the AI to paint accordingly. Great script writers will create new styles of stories, whereas the old AI could only produce the ‘old style’.

And of course, every time a new art style is invented, it’ll only take AI a few years – or maybe just a few days – to teach itself that new style. But the human creative, crazy, charismatic artists who created that new style, will have earned the status of artistic super-stars by then: the people who changed our definitions of what is beautiful, ugly, true or false. They will be the people who really create art, instead of just making boring variations on a theme.

The truly best artists, the ones who can change our outlook about life and impact our thinking in completely unexpected ways, will still be here even a hundred years into the future.

Oh, and as for the two tunes? The first one was composed by a human being and performed by Morten Faerestrand in his YouTube clip – 3 JUICY jazz guitar improv tools. The second was composed by the Algorithmic Music Composer and demonstrated in the YouTube clip – Computer-Generated Jazz Improvisation.

Did you get it right?

This post was originally written as an answer at Quora

Inequality in the US

Here’s a fascinating quote from Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots:

“Surveys have shown that most Americans vastly underestimate the existing extent of inequality, and when asked to select an “ideal” national distribution of income, they make a choice that, in the real world, exists only in Scandinavian social democracies.”

The amazing thing is that most people simply don’t realize just how bad things are. Human beings have a tendency to compare their life quality with that of their neighbors and relatives, not with the millionaires and billionaires.

Surveys show that Americans generally believe that the top 20% of wealthy Americans possess just 59 percent of wealth [source]. Or that the bottom 40% possess 9 percent of wealth. This is nowhere near the truth (actually, the top 20% possess 84 percent of wealth, and the bottom 40% possess only 0.3 percent of wealth)[source].

Here’s How Bad Things Actually Are:

  • Between the years 1983 – 2009, Americans became more wealthy as a whole. But the bottom 80 percent of income earners saw a net decrease in their wealth. At the same time, the top 1 percent of income earners got more than 40 percent of the nation’s wealth increase.[source].
  • Overall, the earnings of the top 1 percent rose by 278 percent between 1979 and 2007. At the same time, the earnings of the median people (that’s probably you and me) only increased by 35 percent [source – The Second Machine Age].
  • Inequality (as measured by the CIA according to the GINI index) in the US is far more extreme than it is in places like Egypt, Croatia, Vietnam or Greece [source].
  • Between the years 2009 – 2012, 95 percent of total income gains went to the wealthiest 1 percent [source].
  • Economic mobility in the US – i.e. whether people can rise (or sink) from one economic class to another, is significantly lower in comparison to many European countries. If you were born to a family in the bottom 20% of income, you have a 42 percent chance of staying in that income level as an adult. Compare that to Denmark (25 percent chance) or even Britain (30 percent chance) [source]. That means that the American dream of achieving success through hard work is much more practical if you’re living in a Nordic country or even in the freaking monarchy of the United Kingdom.
  • Inequality also has implications for your life expectancy. Geographic inequality in life expectancy has increased between 1980 and 2014. Some counties in the US have a life expectancy lower by 20 years than the highest counties. Yes, you read that right. The average person in eastern Kentucky and southwestern West Virginia basically has twenty years less than a person in, say, central Colorado. And the disparity between the US counties shows no sign of stopping anytime soon [source].

What It All Means

Reading these statistics, you may say that inequality is just a symptom of the times and of technological progress, and there’s definitely some evidence for that.

You may highlight the fact that the ‘water rises for everyone’, and indeed – that’s true as well. Some may rise more rapidly than others, but in general over the last one hundred years, the average American’s life quality has risen.

You may even say that some billionaires, like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, are giving back their wealth to society. The data shows that the incredibly wealthy donate around 10% of their net worth over their lifetime. And again, that’s correct (and incredibly admirable).

The only problem is, all of these explanations doesn’t matter in the end. Because inequality still exists, and it has some unfortunate side effects: people may not realize exactly how bad it is, but they still feel it’s pretty bad. They realize that the rich keep on getting richer. They understand that the rich and wealthy have a large influence on the US congress and senate [source].

In short, they understand that the system is skewed, and not in their favor.

And so, they demand change. Any kind of change – just something that will shake the system upside down, and make the wealthy elites rethink everything they know. Populist politicians (and occasionally ones who really do want to make a difference) then use these yearnings to get elected.

Indeed, when you check out the candidate quality that mattered the most to voters in the 2016 US elections, you can see that the ability to bring about change is more important by far than other traits like “good judgement”, “experience” or even “cares about me”. And there you have it: from rampant inequality to the Trump regime.

Now, things may not be as bleak as they seem. Maybe Trump will work towards minimizing inequality. But even if he won’t (or can’t), I would like to think that the politicial system in the US has learned its lesson, and that the Democratic Party realized that in the next elections cycle they need to put inequality on their agenda, and find ways to fight it.

Do you think I’m hoping for too much?

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Cover image from the Economist