I was just sitting now, purportedly practising guitar, but evidently day dreaming, and started wondering about the whole question of machines (that is to say these day: computers) replacing humans in art, specifically music, as this is my sphere.
Obviously, in certain tasks computers have already superseded humans, for example few, if any, people are employed to copy sheet music today, nor have been for decades. Modern music type-setting programs such as Sibelius even include proof-reading features and algorithms that can (to a simplistic degree) arrange music for an ensemble when input in the correct fashion. All this is still reliant though on people to create and ultimately perform.
Machines that perform music have been around since the 19th century (e.g. the pianola). Evidently, the direction of progress in this department is greater variety and realism of timbre, accompanied by more convincing levels of expression. With a good MIDI sound set and some meticulous programming, some surprisingly musical results can today been achieved. Though, having said that, the plethora of painfully passionless performances given to banal backing tracks that brutally bludgeon once beautiful compositions demonstrates how little musicality is actually needed for this to satisfy some sadly philistine souls. Again though, a person is still a necessity for it to be a "performance" - otherwise one might as well put on a CD. (Or a 96kbps mp3 rip - who's going to know the difference?) Moreover, as far as I'm aware, there is yet to be a hit single composed by a robot (cynicism aside).
Suppose, to leap ahead a couple of decades (or probably more) in artificial intelligence, there were a program (or to physicalize it, a robot) capable of performing music with the interpretive expression of a human, or composing music with as much apparent "meaning". What ramifications would this have for people who desire to make a living doing these things, given that to date no computer has charged for its use, and furthermore computer programs can be resourcelessly replicated, almost instantaneously? What essentially just occurred to me, is that this would be of little consequence at all, because the true value of any performer or composer is their identity, and the difficulty of replicating it. A single program that could compose meaningful music would be an exciting artistic and philosophical landmark, but a thousand or a million such programs have the same significance as a thousand or a million Elvis impersonators: not only the impersonators, but also (sadly), by association, the original instance become rapidly tiresome and worthless.
So, my point is that the threat machines pose generally to humans, in terms of labour replacement, is their replicability, interchangeability and lack of identity. It is these qualities that make a machine cheaper and therefore more useful than a human, but crucially it is the absence of these qualities that give any artist their value. I suspect therefore we are safe.
