A super full day of work on the We Robot album. It seems that with each doubling of energy, half the progress is made, but I'm making progress for certain.
I started with refinements to Silicon Carbon Genesis. The vocals for the song, which sounds remarkably Kate Bush-like, didn't quite fit the timing of the melody. This is because I played it all on piano first, imagining the words, then sang it later. That, plus the fact that the words, true to my new style and method, do not fit a simple meter. They were chosen poetically instead, which I like and prefer. This meant that the lines of the second verse overlapped the music and became to awry. So, I decided to extend the piano part there. I had to guess where the third line came in, made a gap, then recorded a few new notes at the right time, all in MIDI. I added the result to the song but it still didn't fit, so it took 4 or 5 edits and little movements left and right, but I got there in the end. Then it was a matter of re-converting the string arrangement, then adding (and refining) the synth brass.
Overall, this tiny change almost took as long as the rest of the song to date, but that's the way with changes. It's good enough now and sticks in my mind in a nice way. I'm almost tempted to record more work in the Kate Bush Kick Inside style... still among my favourite albums. I had a fantasy phone conversation with Kate, telling her about Prometheus, and her old Phoenix demos.
Then, a little more work on the 'I Think' vocals, but only basic balancing, they are generally fine. Then work on 'Someone Else's A.I.'. I recorded a new longer intro, because the charge right into the first line was too explosion-like, making the first words hard to make out. I also added a new, slower, 'baby' line, and added more to the unfinished 'solo' part in the middle, though nothing was played live. I did add some of the new DEC speech too ('li-kin-ay-ai'). The irony of this song, and the album itself, is that no A.I. was used at all, only manual/traditional techniques. Even the DEC speech, perhaps the most artificial sounding part of all of it, was made painstakingly note-by-note and syllable-by-syllable, as I've previously stated.
That track is an epilogue, a fun ending like the Beatles' Her Majesty. The last word is actually Silicon Carbon Genesis, a song about the peaceful fusion of man and machine. A rare example in sci-fi of peace and brotherhood between man and artificial intelligence.
Speaking of which, I've been watching The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski, the first two episodes of which have been repeated by the BBC. An amazing programme, astonishingly good. His insight that war was carefully organised theft rather than anything animalistic was a revelation (though some wars are pre-emptive strikes against potential thieves), but more-so that people fear technology because they fear that the subordinate animals that they have trained to serve them will revolt and steal their amassed resources.
So, fear of A.I. is no different than the fear of steam, the weaving loom, of the mill-stone, of sheep. Is such a fear an inherent part of intelligence? Perhaps A.I., as it will be designed to emulate humans, will not help answer this question. The answer depends on what is meant by 'intelligence'. Most intelligent people are not avaricious and do not submit to fears. Emotional control is a good measure of the relative intelligence of humans, and control over fear is the most direct example.
