“I told you this was going to happen”
If you’re a music fan and haven’t been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of Rick Beato. The endearing music nerd, whose “dad vibes” and YouTuber capabilities lend a multigenerational appeal to his song analyses and musician interviews, provides what can at times be a breath of fresh air in the mostly bleak landscape of today’s popular music culture. I find myself returning somewhat frequently to his YouTube channel. There aren’t many places to go to find back-to-back discussions on Allan Holdsworth, My Bloody Valentine, and John Dowland. I’ll admit I also stay for the indulgently cynical takes on Spotify top songs lists. There’s one thing Beato has been tracking recently that I’ve paid particular attention to, which is the rise of AI technology in music. He’s specifically been sounding the alarm about the threat that this emerging trend poses for musicians, and for human creativity in general.
In a video released a few weeks ago, Beato makes a frightening and somewhat obvious prediction: very soon people will self-generate the music content they wish to consume by entering prompts into AI engines. With such tools at your fingertips, you’ll be able to “make a copy of the stuff that you already like. Why won’t people do that? They will,” he says.
“Wait, what’s wrong with that?”, you might ask. Well, potentially all sorts of things. Watching this video got me thinking again about the “cultural morphology” of the West, so before I spell out the problems I’m alluding to here, I’d like to pick up where I left off with my previous article and furthermore loop Rudolf Steiner into the equation. Leveraging some key insights from Steiner, it will become apparent how AI places humankind at a critical juncture.
Materialism and the unfolding of the ‘I’
Over a century ago, Rudolf Steiner made a very interesting observation about modernity and the scientific worldview. He noted, perhaps counterintuitively, that since the inception of the Modern era broadly conceived (since around the middle of the 15th century), the thought life of human beings has in a certain sense grown increasingly spiritualized. Steiner’s usage of the word “spiritual” here is slightly unusual, meant not in the sense of divinized or of the spiritual world per se, but rather, de-corporealized — untethered from the immediate data of embodied experience and spun more and more from the fabric of man’s own cognition, from his world of concepts.1 The type of thinking engendered by our scientific culture is in this regard highly rarefied. Like I mentioned in my last article, this thinking cuts the world up into manifold categories and traces physical phenomena with rigorously precise contours. But as this thinking is cut more and more from the cloth of our very thinking itself, in the manner of a feedback loop, it has become increasingly abstract and detached from the physical world that it purports to describe. Again, this is what Steiner meant when he spoke of the increasing “spiritualization” of human thought life — a world picture increasingly built upon activity issuing forth from within the human being, from man’s creative soul activity.
In reflecting upon the worldview of the scientific paradigm, we must recall that the precision, clarity, and intense degree of granularity it brings to thought are all residues of the domain from which it springs, namely the physical realm, or world of mineral phenomena. Science per se takes its entire world of concepts from the physical-mineral level of existence. Over the past few centuries, this approach has of course blossomed into an extremely useful enterprise for understanding and transforming physical things. A generalized scientific mindset, however, casts its net out beyond its proper limits, extending its physical-mineral concepts into all domains, including not only cosmology, biology, and psychology, but also politics, art, and metaphysics. But the world of physical, mineral processes is a fundamentally entropic world in a constant state of decay, in terms of its relationship to life. (When a human being dies, for instance, that which is purely physical — what is subject purely to physical laws — is what we see in the decaying remains left behind.) Therefore, in a scientifically-derived worldview, concepts based on what is dead, decaying, and impermanent are used to account for all things, such that what is living and enduring is dragged down into the ground, so to speak.
Hence, in our modern world we arrive at a conundrum: mineralized thinking increasingly turning to its own concepts for further development has become highly thinned-out and incorporeal. Man’s description of the world is based more and more on his own exceedingly abstract thought life, which is all the while still shot through with the death and decay of the purely physical, sense realm. “Into the most spiritual element possible for the human being, he only absorbed the concept of materiality,” says Steiner.2 The resulting paradoxical situation and attending general disposition is what is otherwise known as scientific materialism. Atheism, which Steiner characterized as a literal disease,3 and the falling away from religion and soul-spiritual realities, have been the seemingly inevitable outgrowth of this state of affairs. (“Seemingly,” because scientific thinking is not in principle at odds with religion, although it arguably does require extra spiritual fortification of those who wish to tend equally to both).
However, Steiner was a great optimist. He saw hidden within the rarefied thought life of contemporary human beings a latent and even historically unprecedented potential for true spiritualization on a collective scale. The conceptually sharpened human being need only learn to connect the precise contours of his thinking back to the living, substantial forces of Divine reality in order for a kind of redemption of scientific consciousness to come to pass. This redemption, moreover, would simultaneously open up to a full flowering of the free human ‘I’ and offer a new chance for humanity to alter its course.
This unfolding of the ‘I’ — that component of the human being by which he is a completely free and unique personal creature — is another thing I mentioned in my previous article, in connection with the rise of the Enlightenment in the West. There I described this phenomenon as the emergence of the “atomized individual” and discussed the tight connection between this historical process and the coincident development of the rarefied life of thought I’ve been discussing here. Also integrally bound up in this mix is the rise of global culture. Through the proliferation of ever faster and more powerful communication methods, the boundaries of space and time that separate human beings into distinct groups have become ever thinner. As we’re pulled closer to each other, we are simultaneously rendered more individually separate and distinct. In the single, all-connected human family, each person becomes an island unto himself, to be approached and assessed less on the assumed characteristics of an assigned set of group identities, and more on the basis of his unique essence and situation.
To be sure, this milieu of isolated individuals in a sprawling web of technological artifacts is not the means by which the ‘I’ unfolds; rather, it’s simply the picture of the particular trajectory humans have taken on this journey — the specific manner in which we have realized this unfolding, with all our achievements and many missteps frozen into the landscape, so to speak.
We see that through increasing individuation, whether of the “atomized” variety set in motion by the Enlightenment or some more Providentially-aligned alternative, the human person is less and less predefined by external factors. Gradually he moves away from everything that is of a group nature, away from the dictates, for instance, of the nation, state, or tribe upon his individuality. Not that he simply renounces these identities (certainly he could and often does, but that’s a subject for another time); rather, they simply cease to have a compulsory effect on him. They apply to him less automatically. The duties and habits associated with these identities impinge on him less and less as given and perfunctory, and increasingly become choices to be made in full freedom and assent. What were formerly external laws to blindly follow are now his to discover within, to consciously trace with the activity of his own inner forces of thinking, feeling, and willing. For instance, an Italian behaves in a certain way not simply because he is Italian and can’t do otherwise, or because he is a Montague and his family has always done things a certain way. These elements still inform and color his behavior, but he consults his personal center and that of others first and foremost, arranging the additional identities around this free and reasoning locus. So arranged, and further directed toward the true Center, these identities can participate fully and beautifully in his movement through the world.
Hence we arrive at a basic sketch, somewhat reinterpreted by me, of Steiner’s notion of the unfolding human ‘I.’ To be clear, though we’re dealing with a temporal process in history, this is not to be understood as the development of a new faculty, but a movement toward ever greater expression of an inborn endowment. The human being “possesses the ‘I’” to begin with; he is, of course, fully a person from the start. The development Steiner is referring to is a permeation of man’s entire being with the core forces of his personhood, of his free, personal activity (which, to point out again, as modern man he has thus far approached gropingly and in a manner far from spiritually ideal).
Contrast this characterization of human individuality to, say, the situation of animals. A human being has a life story, but an individual animal’s story is simply the generic story of the group — the species, albeit with minor variations (barring domesticated animals, who experience the effects of human personhood on their nature). It acts at all times in accordance with the strictures of the species and cannot do otherwise. An individual wolf carries out the activities of wolfhood and can at no time perform an action that goes beyond these constraints. For these reasons, we’d say that animals are unfree. They are wholly compelled and propelled by their innate drives, instincts, and urges. Man on the other hand is free. Through his creative intellect, every individual human being can reflect on the purposes of his actions, act in ways no human being ever has before, and even choose to act contrarily to his nature. Thus man is able to move beyond the confines of generic humanness. Though a kind of animal, the human being is oriented beyond the flesh to the realm of purposes, forms, and essences, i.e. toward the spirit. Man can, however, descend into animality, if he allows his drives, instincts, and urges to exercise control over him. He is then rendered unfree. Steiner makes the point, in many places throughout his work, that human collectivities have a similar effect on the individual human as species do on particular animals. Insofar as group structures like nations, tribes, cliques, and even family lineages, prescribe automatic ways of thinking, acting, and responding to other human beings, they at least potentially limit human freedom and by extension the full realization of personhood, as well as the ability to recognize the personal dignity of another.
It’s not difficult, then, to see that in the centuries-long movement toward human individuation and the flowering of the ‘I’, an opportunity is presented for man to become more connected to his humanity. Clearly this new situation is a great responsibility, and not without many dangers. It is in many respects, a double-edged sword. On the one side, we see how man has jettisoned the religious and spiritual dimension of life by way of the very set of tools used to arrive at his current rarefied state of mind and heightened individuality. He now stands poised and ready to hurl himself into the Pool of Narcissus, as I described in a semi-recent article. Mankind has chosen a path toward the ‘I’ which puts him dangerously at risk of becoming trapped within mere humanity.
Though the ‘I’ unfolds regardless of the route taken — for humanity as a whole is a kind of dynamically unfolding organism, claims Steiner4 — the particular path we have chosen has led us not to the actual spiritual world but to a thinned-out, sense-bound, conceptual shadow of it. He reminds us that the actual spiritual world is not only the world of intellect, but of life-giving moral forces.5 Moreover, he goes onto explain how this moral order is inextricably linked to and inseparable from the “Mystery of Golgotha,” or the entrance of Christ the Logos into the temporal stream of world history. Therefore, the bridge away from the shadowy, mineralized thought world of materialistic culture must involve particularly the West’s, but also all the world’s rediscovery and return to Christianity. The great catholicizer of Steiner, Valentin Tomberg, furthermore clarified the central importance of the Church in this mission.6 In recent years, the Roman Catholic Church has expounded its own position on personhood, offering a baptized expression, if you will, of the modern developments in the subject in its official Catechism7 and very recently in its latest doctrinal declaration on the infinite dignity of the human being. Absent in the Church’s assessment is the notion of an unfolding ‘I’, but arguably the recent theological crystallization of these notions is itself evidence of a kind of unfolding.
AI and personhood
At this point, I’m led back to the subject of AI. Like any other tool, it’s intrinsically neither good nor bad. Good and bad come from what humans make of these creations. But, some tools are undoubtedly more dangerous than others. In assessing such danger, one needs to consider a tool’s intended purpose. A rifle, for instance, is specifically designed to cause physical damage. The rifle itself is still neutral; physical damage can be used in service of good and worthy ends. However, special care and caution are needed when operating a rifle and in entrusting individuals with its use, lest the physical damage intended in the rifle’s design be met inappropriately upon a creature or thing.
So is AI dangerous? What’s it’s intended purpose? The answer to the latter question is clearly found in the name itself: artificial intelligence. In basically all cases, artificial intelligence is meant to make life easier by offloading man’s cognitive load onto mechanized processes. Automated systems are set up so that man no longer needs to think, reason, or exercise his creativity in certain situations. Clearly there are many benefits to this. For instance, it allows human beings to direct their efforts and energy away from mindless, rote tasks, and toward potentially more important things. But at the same time, it carries enormous potential for becoming a crutch (the 2008 Disney film Wall-E got this spot on and was prescient in regard to AI). And since it’s thinking, reasoning, and creative decision making we’re talking about here, this is a potential crutch in the very domain which makes human beings truly human. Lean too heavy on that crutch, and one risks a chain reaction leading ultimately to the erosion of freedom and an atrophy of personhood. Man loosens the grip of his conscious, soul-spiritual activity on the world and again becomes reliant upon and beholden to external forces. AI tells him not only how to solve mundane problems, but how to think, what to like, and ultimately how to move through the world. Life then becomes prescribed, and mechanism controls what used to be freely self-determined. The individual loses touch with his unique life story and in turn becomes generic, and debased. And all this under the illusion of greater choice and freedom!
Focusing in on the particular AI music creation tool Beato is commenting on in his video, the program called Udio, produces convincingly “realistic”-sounding new songs from simple, largely genre-related prompts. The user enters in a string of keywords, like “singer-songwriter,” “country rock,” and “male vocalist,” and perhaps a few moods like “longing” and “sentimental.” The AI’s advanced algorithm then connects to its database, presumably trained on countless other songs indexed with the same tags, and outputs an original piece of music mostly living up to popular expectations for a new song fitting the given description.
In this mechanized production and consumption process, the technology has trained itself both on musical-poetic patterns and on the human drives and passions those patterns are an expression of. The consumer (and I’m using this word deliberately) then tells the program what he wants, and the AI spits his preferred and anticipated drives and passions back out to him. This in itself might not be a complete moral disaster, depending on a person’s taste and proclivities. Completely absent from this equation, however, is the mark of the person or persons whose free and creative activity sculpted the sonic experience with specific intentions in mind. Recorded music is already one step removed from such an intentional, interpersonal experience, in which space exists for creative emotional exchange and, at least in principle, for higher forms of artistry. Even in so-called electronic music, at least somebody is pushing the buttons! In completely mechanized music, instead of a person-to-person encounter, one’s soul reaches for an Other only to connect with a completely impersonal empty space, where the soul is invited to retrace the processes of a lifeless machine algorithm.
First we mechanized the world by extending our sharpened sense-based thinking out across all domains of life and thought. But, as I’ve repeatedly remarked, the quasi-spiritualization or de-corporealizing of our thought life was at least still achieved through our own free activity, and hence was still connected to the unfolding human ‘I.’ We have now begun to turn the impulse toward mechanization onto the source of our free activity itself. Creativity shall now be mineralized, dragged down into the ground, into the realm of the lifeless.
The atomized individual confronted with AI, therefore, sits at a crucial juncture. As opposed to atomization, a healthy unfolding of the ‘I’ involves the recognition that the ‘I’ is fundamentally interpersonal, finding true and full expression in the other, in selflessness and love. A completely atomized individual is a person entirely shut up within himself. He thinks he is becoming ever freer, but in reality his freedom is increasingly relegated to a pool of pre-selected inputs, as he wallows in an ever more bootstrapped flow of passions and drives. In a sense, mechanized music is to feeling as materialistic science is to thinking — both are self-enclosed feedback loops, where the outputs become the inputs, blocked off from living fructification from spheres beyond their own reach. Materialistic science closes itself off to heavenly worlds. Mechanized creativity further closes itself off even to the incarnate personal world. Personhood is the true vehicle of freedom, and it’s personhood that things like AI music tools potentially put in jeopardy.
Is losing our humanity to AI a foregone conclusion, then? Certainly not. But one can imagine the gargantuan effort it will take to remain spiritually stable and healthy in the midst of this technology. I guess I’ll conclude by assuring you (and myself) that, like Rick Beato, I don’t plan to put down my guitar anytime soon.
Steiner discussed this idea in many different works and lectures. See, for example, “Materialism and the Task of Anthroposophy", Lecture IX. 24 April 1921, Dornach. Trans. Maria St. Goar. Reproduced and digitally hosted at rsarchive.org.
The particular usage of the word “spiritual” here is characteristic of certain 19th and early 20th century philosophical currents.
Ibid.
See, for example, “The Mission of the Archangel Michael,” Lecture IV: The Culture of the Mysteries and the Michael Impulse: Self-knowledge and its Permeation in the Three Strata of Consciousness. 28 November 1919, Dornach. Trans. unknown. Reproduced and digitally hosted at rsarchive.org.
See, for example, “Knowledge Pervaded with the Experience of Love,” lecture. 18 February 1923, Dornach. Trans. Sabine H. Seiler.
See, for example, “The Spiritual Development of Man,” Lecture II: The Physical World and the Moral-Spiritual Impulses. 21 April 1923, Dornach. Trans. unknown. Reproduced and digitally hosted at rsarchive.org.
See, for example, “Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism,” particularly ch. 8: Justice. Trans. Robert Powell. Jeremy P. Tarcher / Penguin, 2002 (originally published in English in 1985 by Amity House). Note: Tomberg published this book anonymously.
See particularly Part 3, Section 1