Some brief thoughts on why artificial intelligence will never replace the need for the human, and human labor:
To live, as human, is to work/build. You can hear this in music, the shapes, structures, and layers ascending and descending. Carl Nielsen said of his Fifth Symphony, “I roll a stone up a hill; use the energy I have in me to get the stone up to a high point. And there the stone lies still. The energy is tied up in it—until I give it a kick, and the same energy is released and the stone rolls down again.”
In the mechanical, electronic, and digital realms, no fully autonomous systems exist. All processes in the worldly experience start and/or end with a human.
There is a misconception that machines/non-carbon based entities are perfect and everlasting. On the contrary, they require care, oversight, and attention from humans. Which machine deployed two hundred years ago is still in operation today sans intervention? Physical infrastructure always degrades over time.
Similarly, information architecture is highly complex. Anyone who has worked in technology can attest to the massive hurdles to improvement. Deploying agents, or a set of agents, without some level of oversight is unrealistic. Starting fresh is not an option.
The law. Nearly all entities have some set of rules and regulations to comply with; these areas require judgement, balancing hard lines with gray areas.
Despite the constant movement towards referential experiences (e.g., from the physical to the digital), by and large the most important doings will always be analog. A bit is only a reference.
First there was the act, then someone told a story about it, then someone acted it out, then someone wrote it down, then someone recorded sound/image onto a medium, then someone converted these to bits, then a statistical model generated a synthetic representation of the act. At each step, the representation becomes less anchored to the origin. But the act will always remain.
Art is actually quite similar in reference-making. A painting refers to an object. A play to an event. Even a dance is representational, in the form of gesture. Pure music, however, does not refer beyond itself in the same way. It is not a description or a reenactment. It is a structured vibration, encountered directly; Celibidache called this the “cosmic vibration.” In this sense, music escapes the aforementioned chain of reference; indeed, it might even precede the act, something to be discovered or unearthed, as if drawn from a deeper order.