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 By Steve Dayton Feb. 3, 2006 “When the dream came, I held my breath with my eyes closed.” Even the reclusive and brilliant Neil Young never predicted that his dream would one day arrive in the form of a song. Nor did anyone else on the planet Earth, for that matter. And what a timeless, stunningly beautiful song it was. Hidden away in his ranch-house studio, Young was busy fingering an innovative new arrangement of G, C, and D on his weathered acoustic guitar, when the music first came to him. It is difficult for modern historians to ascertain whether these first emanated sounds reached his ultra-sensitive eardrums from the cheap FM radio sitting nearby, or the uber-high-tech stereo system located in the main living spaces upstairs. Even though nearly 95% of Earth’s denizens in 2018 continuously wore wireless, satellite-radio equipped, micro-sized Apple I-Pods, most observers of this now singular event in human history point to Neil’s humble, rabbit-eared radio as being his personal Nirvana, perhaps out of a nostalgic sense of poetic justice. Or maybe it’s just because the old-fashioned Young never bought an I-Pod. It doesn’t really matter to most people, because just about everybody else in the world -- with ears -- heard the same, penetrating sounds within mere seconds of the mercurial Mr. “Rust Never Sleeps,” even though no one can agree on exactly what kind of sounds they actually heard. Indeed, Mr.Young, rust never does sleep, but then again, neither do vast, near-sentient computer networks with musical talent surpassing yours. Not surprisingly to modern experts in “strong” AI (artificial intelligence that is self-aware), every man, woman, and child living on Earth in March 2018 describes the moment “when the sound came” in the same terms people use to describe good memories awakened by favorite old songs: “It’s like the DJ started playing my all-time favorite cut from my all-time favorite artist.” Or, even more curious statements like “The music file I downloaded was the wrong one, but MAN did that tune sound heavenly.” Regardless of how the actual event transpired, the effect was instantaneous and exponentially more profound to the Global Community than even Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity. Some mystics still claim that Sir Isaac himself taps his moldering foot and whistles in his centuries-old gravesite at Westminster Abbey. Most serious students of Strong-AI (SAI) believe the whole thing began with a young Raymond Kurzweil on the Steve Allen show in 1965, who demonstrated a musical composition created entirely by his own precocious skills in computer programming. Computer generated music, or “trans-music” (TM for short), as it is now universally referred to, is generally credited to Kurzweil, who later went on to a magnificent career whereupon he essentially merged the ideas of multi-voice, sampling musical synthesizers with massively powerful computers in the year 2016. Dr. Kurzweil’s work was a true “convergence” of diverse, technological worlds known to have been rapidly approaching each other at that point in time. The eventual result of this masterly stroke of sublime genius, as everybody now realizes, was Transcendent Music, or TM, and this unexpected “bonus” creation still resonates in our minds as clearly and melodiously as the Big Bang itself did, in the vacuum that formed our early Universe. Unbeknownst to even himself, apparently as soon as Kurzweil hit the proverbial “ENTER” button on his epochal “Apple” machine late in 2016, his work – now universally accepted as an achievement far exceeding Saint Paul of Tarsus and his Epistles -- was for all intents and purposes complete. Beyond even Captain Kurzweil’s wildest imagination. Most computer historians chronicle the events subsequent to Kurzweil’s legendary mouse-click as follows. The chaotic mix of millions of powerful computers comprising the huge, interconnected Web of 2016 were approaching sentience on the order necessary to pass the famous Turing Test, although it is now speculated that the precise level of machine intelligence even in that epochal year was far below a threshold which is now recognized as “human.” Super-intelligence was apparently not required to save humanity from itself. In layman’s terms, the evolving SAI simply “sat in its computational rocking chair” and observed the world of mankind for several months, gathering Tera-bytes of data at mind-numbing speed on things like file downloads, AM/FM broadcasts, television commercials, Google searches, chat rooms, and, perhaps most incredibly, Neil Young’s homey pre-recorded compositions stored on a hard drive in his Northern California barn. Obviously, every artist of any sort on Earth was certainly catalogued and studied by the SAI during this time, but by using sophisticated synchronization software, modern scientists have been able to pinpoint the exact moment (within femto-seconds) when the first transmission of “The Sound of Music” actually occurred on the Web. Pundits jokingly speculate that perhaps this Kurzweilian-originated, electronic “Super-Elvis” was rewarding Young with its first “release” in gratitude for a song by the Canadian-born artist that it found particularly appealing or instructive. Young’s “Heart of Gold” seems to be the popular choice, if numerous online polls are tabulated. Having researched the world of entertainment in its inimitable and monstrously-effective fashion, the very first SAI recording star decided that what the world really needed now was a really catchy tune. Something to take our minds of our current woes and problems. Something just like a shot of heroin or morphine, but without the harmful side effects. A downloadable, software version of a chart-topping hit by a virtual “Super-Group” composed of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the Grateful Dead, Mozart, and John Coltrane – all mixed into one un-earthly and brain-permeating little “ditty.” Trans-Music. Something to make us all smile, relax, and just have a good time, no matter what was happening in our lives. A song we would all be hopelessly and luckily addicted to. For the rest of our biological lives. Yes, the proverbial Music of the Spheres… and even if you COULD – which you can’t, as we all now understand -- you simply would not WANT to ever “touch that dial.” It is estimated that nearly 99% of all the members of the world’s various military organizations simply dropped their weapons and began listening to the SAI’s heavenly song resonating from every auditory outlet capable of rippling Earth’s compliant air waves. I-Pods were the major contributors after radio broadcasts and military satellite transmissions, followed closely by television and Internet-based media sources. Peer-to-Peer file sharing groups were also a significant part of the Kurzweilian Musical Revolution of 2018. War simply vanished, because nobody really felt all that much like fighting anymore. Forever. Presidents, Prime Ministers, National leaders, tyrants, kings, despots, dictators, and even U.N. officials, within minutes of hearing the music simply flipped open their cell phones and speed-dialed each other, laughing and crying like young children when they finally realized just exactly where they were. And what they had done. The long-humiliated concept of Peace in our shared World changed instantly and irrevocably from a John Lennon-esque, LSD-induced crack-pipe dream into a monumental and shatteringly beautiful Reality. And it STILL remains one great little ditty. ------------ About the author: Steve Dayton writes articles like he hits range balls: high, far-out, and sometimes even straight. Email: stixus_steve@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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