Originally Posted By: Bass Thumper
I don’t think you fully understand the hypothetical scenario I constructed as it has 2 criteria.

Lack of understanding is rather a lot to read into the wee observation I offered about the Melodist. My point was just that the Age of Instant Music is already upon us, perhaps less hypothetical than might be thought.

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Another point of interest for me here is the “conflict” between two very basic human needs; the need to be creative vs the need to build tools. As a race we are tool builders and find joy and expression in creating. In fact, isn’t it true that building tools can be creative?

OK, here I don't understand what the conflict is supposed to be, and I see no one denying that the software developers who create all our plugins are creative (which would be really silly.)

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So was Joe Novice musically creative? Do we even care if he was creative? He certainly didn’t pay his musical dues, he just bought technology and spoke.

You might ask the same regarding Bach's patrons. There's a sliding scale between doing everything yourself and simply paying somebody else to do everything for you, a hierarchy that's been around for millennia. In this case, I would say that Joe is being rather aggressively UN-creative, and so gets zero creativity points, but presumably there are creative individuals in the hierarchy of contractors and subcontractors he commands. Some will be human, some will be automata; let's give credit where credit is due without ontological prejudice. Some of that creativity will be in the present production process, in the supervision of automata, and some of it will be in the past development of those tools. The most interesting question may be how much of this creativity isn't human any more.

Last edited by Mark Hayes; 03/11/22 06:45 AM.