Last week I had a jarring conversation with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley. Me: I wish more kids were learning to be musicians. He: In 10 years computers will be able to use a combination of artificial intelligence and massed data from the Internet to generate music better than human musicians. We can already use these techniques to choose hit songs more accurately than record executives. Musicianship will be an obsolete profession by the time today's kids grow up. There might be good reasons to teach kids music, but creating a new generation of professional musicians is not one of them.
This was one of those moments when I wondered at what's become of computer culture. The remark was the kind of thing Marvin Minsky, the legendary MIT professor and one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, used to say to me when I was a ...
