Computering

Lots of my in-person conversations of late have usually involved some ranting about the incursion of computing in everything and everyone. The more I think out loud about AI the more I become more blasé or cynical about it. I had thought perhaps I might use it as a way to generate rhythm tracks when I get an idea while playing around on a guitar. What you want ultimately is to use the smaller tools (apps, etc.) in order to use the bigger tools (all instruments together). The goal is to be able to make something with minimal involvement of a computer--otherwise the computer is going to drive the entire process. I'm not against convergent creativity using computers, but they begin to become the computer's ideas. 

Why should creativity be automated--even throughout the process? If the payoff is that it helps you to be more prolific, what is the value of being more prolific? If we like a piece of music, the criteria for liking it isn't the speed and efficiency by which it was written. We don't like Stravinsky more because he had more output. If more things are automated in your life, then it frees time for creativity. But when we say that creativity has all the drudgery of washing a sink full of dishes or scrubbing clothes on a rock on a river, and we automate it like a dishwasher, what else is there to do?

I've heard more than once that engaging in creative projects is selfish. Perhaps. Then perhaps that is a use for automation: have the computer do your selfishness, and you can work on being a better human being. This does have some resonance. What artists should do then is to create generative environments where art and music emerge as they do in nature by sets of rules. Perhaps the artists of the future are rather cyberneticists. Why would we be satisfied with that? A part of it is the sheer laziness of not having to put any effort into practicing an instrument for proficiency. The direct hands-on work being creative should be on the medium itself, not using another medium such as programming to computer (program) it.

(I am using Neil Postman's idea about "computering" from his early 90s book Technopoly. He made the interesting point that people that use computers as their instrument are not "computerers", in the same way that there are writers or composers.)