Post Human Era: Music For The Singularity
For the past five years, I have been researching primarily two subjects: The increasing rate at which technology advances; and the changing music industry. Ideas slowly started to form during this research, and it hasn’t been until now that I have felt like I fully understood how they might work together in unison. I am a multi-instrumentalist producer first and foremost, and my projects Post Human Era and Ancient Lasers (with Daniel Anderson of Idiot Pilot) strive to close the gaps between these two areas of research.
I was thinking about this: Why do people pay money to download music?
Music is almost free whether you like it or not. It no longer costs thousands of dollars to make a good record, just knowledge and good software. Trying to fight music piracy and stomp out torrent sites will only make you look like a dick – people are trying to download your music, so why try to stop them?
So I came up with a new way to monetize the music industry, and I’m using this new method for the upcoming Post Human Era album. You might call it the Help Me Help You Method. Here’s how it works:
Let’s say I give you the option to download my music for free. The money stays in your pocket, I don’t get any, and the economy is relatively unaffected by the transaction. No harm done. Yet on a grand scale, there is no way that the music industry would be able to survive in its current iteration for more than a few more years.
Now what if I told you that, based on the research I’ve done over the years, it is very likely that this generation of humanity could conceivably live forever through the implementation of technology into our biological systems. This is obviously assuming we avoid a large number of civilization-ending cataclysms. Does that excite you? If you want to know exactly what I mean, I like using a simple example. Computer size. Since the 1970’s, computers have been growing in computational power and shrinking in size and price at a fairly consistent rate. Extrapolate that out into the future and you have computers the size of red blood cells floating around in our blood stream, reversing the process of aging, even backing our consciousness up onto a hard drive so that it never fades away. See? Living forever.
The way this ties into the Help Me Help You Method is that I am proposing a certain percentage of music revenue be distributed to organizations that are conducting this kind of research, like Singularity University, Lifeboat Foundation, and Singularity Symposium to name a few. Imagine rerouting all that revenue away from monetary dead ends like major record labels, towards these research organizations. You, as a consumer, would have a direct effect on how fast these life-extending changes would take place. The reason I suggest these organization over others like Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders is because of artificial intelligence. Once we have computers that are more intelligent than human beings, they will be able to solve global problems millions of times faster than they are solved today. This is why we must make the construction of these machines the top priority – because if we build these machines successfully, everything that follows will be like nothing we have ever seen before in human history.
Enter the Post Human Era.
About the Author:
Daniel Finfer is a multi-instrumentalist producer for the groups Post Human Era and Ancient Lasers, and is also a graphic artist, writer, video producer, clam linguine expert, and time travel enthusiast.
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