Bradford opera festival<\/a> telling parallel stories of AI and the luddites. With a libretto by Kamal Kaan, it will premiere in venues around Yorkshire in November.<\/p>\nAs we grapple with difficult questions around AI we should look back to the luddites, said Crick, who was born in Huddersfield and has early 90s memories of being taught about them at school.<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember being marched into a hall and teachers wheeling a television in for us all to watch a mockumentary,\u201d he said. \u201cI remember us being taken to the Tolson Museum in Huddersfield where they have the hammers from Marsden they used.\u201d<\/p>\n
People had misconceptions about the luddites, said Crick. They often remember them only as violent machine-smashers. Today, calling someone a \u201cluddite\u201d often means they are thought of as being anti-progress and anti-technology.<\/p>\n
\u2018What [the luddites] were trying to do was stop the monopoly of the wealth that technology created being in the hands of a few people.\u2019 Photograph: Mary Evans Picture Library\/Alamy<\/p>\n
\u201cThe luddites knew technology was coming,\u201d said Crick. \u201cThey knew they couldn\u2019t stop it. \u201cFirst of all they petitioned parliament. Then they asked the mill owners to set up a poor fund that would support the people forced out by this technology.<\/p>\n
\u201cUltimately they said: \u2018We only want to prevent the implementation of technology as it is harmful, as it is injurious to the working man.\u2019 So they weren\u2019t trying to stop technology. What they were trying to do was stop the monopoly of the wealth that technology created being in the hands of a few people. There was this massive divide in society with mill owners, unbelievably wealthy and the populace starving.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis idea that they\u2019re just backward-thinking people that tried to stop the inevitable march of progress is nonsense. It\u2019s not right. They tried every other avenue. When that didn\u2019t work, some of them ultimately did turn to violence. But my argument is that if we address those concerns before that point, we can stop the descent to violence. It could have been stopped.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are approaching a pinch point now, I personally feel, where we need to ask similar questions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Crick said the opera may not have all the answers, but it asks important questions including: will progress be humanity\u2019s salvation or its downfall?<\/p>\n
Like many artists Crick is concerned about what AI may mean for him and his peers. Will it be writing operas audiences want to see? \u201cAI is here,\u201d he said. \u201cWe can\u2019t stop it. We shouldn\u2019t want to stop it.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I am worried. I know that I, as a composer, I\u2019m fully aware of what Bach did and what Mozart did and what Brahms did and Britten and Stravinsky and that all brings us creatively to a point where we create something.<\/p>\n
\u201cA great part of our work is an amalgamation of previous generations and that\u2019s what AI is doing. So as it only gets better over the next 100 years, 150 years, it is doing the same process that the human artists are doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
One aim of the opera and the festival is to entice new audiences to the art form. Crick firmly believes opera should be topical, that \u201cit should be creating works that are relevant, not trying to repurpose works from the past all the time\u201d.<\/p>\n
The opera will tell two parallel stories: one set in 2030 focusing on a tech entrepreneur who has created a humanoid AI, the other set in 1813 telling the story of the luddite leader, George Mellor, as he faces the gallows.<\/p>\n
The Last Machine Breaker, An Opera<\/a> on Luddites, AI and Revolution, runs from 10-16 November<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you ask artificial intelligence when in history we can learn lessons about the global challenges of AI…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":473553,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-473552","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-technology","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115315939911459846","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=473552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473552\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/473553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=473552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=473552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=473552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}