I recently attended my company’s holiday party. Like many companies, ours is planning to close their office permanently at the end of the month as all workers are now fully remote.

It’s a little sad because this office is freaking awesome. It’s on the 34th floor so it has an amazing view of downtown San Francisco.

I love elevated views of cities. There’s something so enchanting about being in a tall building in a city. The blinking lights. The hills in the distance. The amazing backdrop of the ocean and the Bay and the bridges and the vaulted sheer cliffs of Marin shooting out of the water. It’s a lovely feeling, day or night to be in a skyscraper. It feels powerful.

And then you see all the people in all the buildings, going about their duties. People upon people upon people. Floors upon floors, stories upon stories. And all those machines. Desks and chairs. Lamps. Piles and piles of telephones and staplers and printers and computers. Ephemera.

I’m reminded of a wonderful poem by Philip Larkin.

“Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices...”

Of course, Larkin was talking about death, and he does so masterfully.

“That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will...”

Brilliant. The final phone call… the one call you can’t ignore. Ha.

And now we are faced with the death of our offices. Appropriate.

What will happen to our downtowns and business districts, now that so many employers are choosing to support a remote work style? There’s so much potential. So much infrastructure.

Could it be that this is a phase? Maybe people will choose to come back, request to work from an office. I certainly like going in occasionally… just not everyday 😊 But it does provide an appreciable degree of focus, outside all the trappings of your house and living quarters.

How far away are we from artificially intelligent artists replacing human artists? It’s within our lifetimes, for sure. Some say it’s as close as five years.

Google’s Project Magenta proved that machine learning/artificial intelligence can study Bach fugues and compose music so similar, musicologists can’t distinguish them from actual Bach fugues. The project has effectively proved that machine learning can study and then replicate the compositional patterns of even the most intricate and learned composers, with a high degree of sophistication.

Startups like Authentic Artists are creating AI-powered, virtual artists, armed with AI-generated music that they can control and that listeners can interact with in virtual environments.

“We are very intentionally not trying to create a digital facsimile of what already exists... We want to use new tools to create new art, new experiences, new culture. The appeal is that these artists can really be vehicles for collaboration with the audience, so that [audience members] can selectively shape the live show.”

— Chris McGarry, Authentic Artists

I’m all for new creative and artistic experiences. My worry is that once people can’t tell the difference between music created by a human and that created by a machine, it’s a slippery slope to cutting them out of the process altogether.

Think about the fact that Spotify effectively eliminated thousands of working artists’ careers, virtually overnight, by replacing the royalties paradigm with the streaming paradigm.

Think about the fact that the CEO of Spotify, Daniel Ek, is paid more per year than all the fees the company pays to artists annually—combined. And that Spotify, at 155 million paying subscribers at time of writing, is still losing money most quarters.

I don’t mean to pick on Spotify here (and I hate that I probably sound like that guy from Metallica). I’m simply making the point that if profit and convenience are the driving factors pushing in the music industry forward today—and they certainly seem to have been from the Napster era onward—it’s a very small step to simply pushing those artist fees to an emerging company like Authentic Artists to replicate the style and sound of every original artist out there.

How many fans would actually care? I hope a great many would… but you never know.

Sidenote: jump to the 1 hour mark of this Mylar Melodies interview with BT for a detailed discussion of this topic - with some potential solutions.

Perhaps music will continue to be a hobby for humans in the future—something we like to amuse ourselves with. But commercially, can humans compete with AI? It remains to be seen. Without a doubt, the era of AI musicians is upon us.

I’d love to be wrong about this, but I don’t think I am.

Goodbye, Office

The last generation of human musicians