Even though back in the day I revered legendary country and soul singers like Johnny Cash, Hank Williams or Al Green, I couldn’t help but feeling silly trying to emulate some of their songs involving the lord. I had this very temporarily happening country band called The Cosmopolitan Cowboys so I really kinda had to, also. Despite my Italian heritage I was never baptised or took any catholic classes in my public primary school, way back in the 80s. There was a spiritual void forming for sure so when sometime in the late 90s I stumbled upon a documentary on Dutch television, proposing the concept of the singularity (basically meaning we will create a technological being that will be able to solve all of earthly problems) I was drawn in, given it was at least a more plausible path towards salvation. Fastforward to the 2010s when amidst the doom of the failed Arab Spring and more and more alarming climate change reports, seemingly out of nowhere the protagonist of that documentary Ray Kurzweil started to rise to prominence again, doubling down on his claim that human level AI would be reached by 2029 due to recent technological devolopments. Stories started coming in about a supercomputer beating humans at Jeopardy and all of Kurzweil’s computing power graphs only seemed to be rising higher and higher at a faster and faster speed as time progressed. It was in that context that I wrote a song called Supercomputer. If I listen back to it I now hear a gospel song with the traditional handclaps, vibrato dense organ and church bells around a Dylanesque cadence of words trying to summarize human progress in 2 verses culminating in eternal salvation by our supercomputational silicon lord solving all our problems. I was really proud of my achievement since it was the closest I could come to emulating the religious spirit of my country soul heroes as I could have. That might be why I was so adamant about releasing it as the follow up to the successful first single Fill My Life Up from my sophomore double album Hold Me Like the World Is Ending. It was a shame the song didn’t get picked up much (though I really pity those radio playlisters tasks wholeheartedly). Along with the song, the mid 2010s hype around technological progress dimmed down too due to from what I understand mostly certain practical problems causing a standstill and a realization they couldn’t really deliver on that promise of exponential progress. Really, until about a year ago when the whole world was jaw-drop-me floored by the human level capabilities of this novel chatbot that was set free (for free). And then a few days ago I ran into this story about Microsoft and Open AI investing 100 billion dollars into building a new supercomputer by 2028, one year prior to Kurzweil prediction and my mind started wondering again. Today I dropped off my six year old to robot camp. Curious to see what his future will look like…
“All of this has happened before and all this will happen again” (quote from Battlestar GalacticaI I borrowed near the end of the song, basically forecasting and maybe steering what will eventually go down)
