Spotify's artificial intelligence is a troubling sign of things to come
Source: Andrew P Street
"Spotify took the one unassailable element of my identity and shredded it."
I'm not going to lie, friends: up until last night I thought technophobic hyperbole about the imminent rise of the machines was nothing more than the ranting of paranoid freaks.
Sure, there have been huge strides in artificial intelligence in recent times, from natural language chatbots to Apple's phone robot Siri to Facebook's weirdly targeted ads. However, each of those systems have certain undeniable flaws.
And artificial intelligence is a popular thing about which to irrationally panic, thanks to half a century of warnings about the robopocalypse.
"Spotify took the one unassailable element of my identity and shredded it."
Films have been clear about this, whether it's HAL's strident anti-pod bay door agenda in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the time-travelling murderbots of the Terminator franchise or the dystopian nightmare of having Scarlett Johansson trapped inside your computer in Her (not to be confused with the genuinely terrifying Scarlett Johansson machine some Hong Kong roboticist recently built for reasons we should definitely not think about too deeply but all immediately assume).
And up until now I've been skeptical of our AI doomsayer class. After all, Earth's got plenty of different intelligence upon it, from crows to elephants to dolphins to the octopi that will take over the planet the second they learn how to work together. I thought AI would be just another in our planet's rich tapestry of smarts. It'd be really good at certain things and not at others – which is already the case, since my phone is orders of magnitude more punctual than I am.
But it turns out that the machines were just lulling us into a false sense of security, playing on our unwarranted confidence before hitting us in the one area in which we foolishly thought we were safe.
To put it another way: I tried out Spotify's curated playlist feature.
Ever since I was a child sneering at my primary school chums for not being familiar with Scritti Politti's pre-major label output, I have clung tenaciously to my expansive and voluminous knowledge of music as a way to make up for my shortcomings in pretty much every other area of human endeavour.
While smarter people digitised their libraries, chucked their plastic away and got on with their lives, I lugged carton after carton of vinyl and CDs through multiple house moves, painstakingly alphabetising them by artist and chronology and lying awake at night pondering such vital questions as "Do I mix the Elvis Costello CDs with the Elvis Costello & the Attractions ones?" (answer: no, obviously).
Furthermore, I learned how to read people's record collections and make snap judgments about the sort of person they were. A single shoebox of soundtracks and compilations? Probably not going to get along. First pressing Go Betweens vinyl? We should talk. Elvis Costello and Elvis Costello & the Attractions records all mixed up higgledy-piggledy? Clearly some sort of monster.
As digital music arrived I embraced it wholeheartedly, innocently building a walking-around Spotify playlist containing a scant 2000-odd of my particular favourite songs. How I would smugly congratulate myself on its variety and breadth, playfully crossing genres and eras while showcasing the sort of deep aesthetic judgment and wisdom that only comes with decades of assiduous study.
Or, as it turns out, a computer algorithm.
In a moment of idle curiosity I clicked on Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist. And it was with a slow-building sense of horror that I looked at the 30 songs it had chosen for me and realised that the machine had either stolen my thoughts as I slept or – more accurately – I wasn't quite the special precious snowflake I'd hitherto assumed.
Some were predictable from my playlists – PJ Harvey, Bowie, Pavement – but were tracks that weren't among those I'd listened. Yet they were terrifyingly perfect.
Worse were the bands I had never listened to on Spotify – and in the case of '90s jangle-pop kids the Cry, never listened to at all – which were all excellent choices that I'd never have selected on my own.
When was the last time I put on Canadian indie stars the Dears, much less cod-operatic synth weirdos Sparks? Jawbox and Fugazi deep cuts? Screamin' Jay Hawkins? Joe freakin' Jackson? Why do I not listen to Joe Jackson more often? What have I been doing with my life? Who even am I?
And then I realised: this is how the machines will get us. Not by force, not by robotic seduction, but by taking the one thing we think we do better than anyone else and effortlessly destroying us at it. Spotify took the one unassailable element of my identity and shredded it cleanly in a few lines of code and a well-chosen Sonic Youth album track.
So if you need me, I'll be picking up the shattered shards of my former sense of self, accompanied by Joe Jackson's Look Sharp.
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