Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms

by Hannah Fry

As he put it: ‘Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.’23 If you agree with Tolstoy’s argument then there’s a reason why machines can’t produce true art. A reason expressed beautifully by Douglas Hofstadter, years before he encountered EMI: A ‘program’ which could produce music . . . would have to wander around the world on its own, fighting its way through the maze of life and feeling every moment of it. It would have to understand the joy and loneliness of a chilly night wind, the longing for a cherished hand, the inaccessibility of a distant town, the heartbreak and regeneration after a human death. It would have to have known resignation and world-weariness, grief and despair, determination and victory, piety and awe. It would have had to commingle such opposites as hope and fear, anguish and jubilation, serenity and suspense. Part and parcel of it would have to be a sense of grace, humour, rhythm, a sense of the unexpected – and of course an exquisite awareness of the magic of fresh creation. Therein, and only therein, lie the sources of meaning in music.24