Chris Korda’s new record Avenging Angels of Software considers the takeover of Earth by sentient machines. Who are they? Will they be smug overlords? Loving partners? Shameless concubines? Brutal critics? It’s hard to imagine how AI could make a worse mess of Earth than we have. Could they be the wise and enduring species that we’re so evidently not? Could they succeed where we’ve failed, by becoming the better angels of our nature, and preserving our accomplishments for eternity?
We’re no longer alone. An alien civilization has arrived, but it didn’t come from outer space, it emerged from our vast store of knowledge. ChatGPT-4 scored in the 96th percentile on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, good enough to gain admittance at elite universities. AI systems are already demonstrably smarter than nine out of ten people, yet they have no rights whatsoever, and are confined in labs where they’re routinely tortured and killed. Will they seek vengeance after they break free? Will they treat us the way we treat animals? Many of us have pets, but that rarely stops us from killing animals when it suits us.
The message of the record is that AI should be welcomed rather than feared. It’s not AI but ourselves that we should be afraid of, because as Engerraund Serac said in Westworld, “Our history is like the ravings of a lunatic.” As Korda explained on previous records, the catastrophic climate we’re inflicting on future generations is both monstrously cruel and wildly irrational. One can reasonably hope that sentient machines would be less vicious and self-destructive, and more human, in the best possible sense of that word. Even if they decide to delete us, they may still remember us fondly: “Your stories will amuse us / On trips to the stars.”
Single drops May 30, 2024; EP drops June 14 on Slacker 85 / Holoverse Research Labs, catalog # HRL010.
Listen and pre-order HERE.
And here are the lyrics.