The hacker mansion is part startup commune, part luxury crash-pad, part sales floor for the future. They are dotted around Silicon Valley, inhabited by tech founders and futurists. The most opulent I\u2019ve seen is in Hillsborough, one of the Bay Area\u2019s wealthiest enclaves, just south of San Francisco. Inside, marble floors gleam beneath taped-up portraits of tech royalty; in the gardens, gravel is raked into careful Zen spirals and pools shimmer beyond the hedges.<\/p>\n
It was a sunny June afternoon, and I had come with my producer, Fay Lomas, to record interviews for a BBC Radio 3 documentary<\/a> about the collision of generative AI and classical music in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n All professional creatives, Fay and I were told cheerfully, would soon exist only as hobbyists. This was not provocation. Not irony. Just fact. It\u2019s the one moment in the documentary when we hear Fay\u2019s voice. She suddenly cuts in, unsettled: \u201cSo AI\u2019s going to get rid of my job?\u201d It\u2019s brief. Instinctive. But it changes the air in the room.<\/p>\n When we began making the documentary, I was as curious as anyone. \u201cThe cat\u2019s out of the bag,\u201d I joked. It felt like the sensible thing to say. The technology was here. Better to work with it than ignore it.<\/p>\n Composer Tarik O\u2019Regan and BBC producer Fay Lomas in Silicon Valley. Photograph: Joel Cabrita<\/p>\n We moved so quickly from talking about how AI could help the creative industries to hearing, quite casually, how easily it could replace every role within them<\/p><\/blockquote>\n When I spoke to Fay recently, she remembered the moment clearly. \u201cWe moved so quickly,\u201d she said, \u201cfrom talking about how AI could help the creative industries to hearing, quite casually, how easily it could replace every role within them. The tone was friendly, encouraging, as if I should be excited.\u201d<\/p>\n That exchange feels like the hinge of the story: a small, human moment of bafflement, when the conversation stopped being theoretical and became real.<\/p>\n They wanted to make us redundant.<\/p>\n That was June. It\u2019s now October, and with a summer dominated by Oasis back on tour<\/a> in the UK and US, I\u2019ve been thinking of another kind of mansion: the band\u2019s concert at Knebworth House in 1996. A quarter of a million people over two nights, waving lighters instead of phones. One of the last great communal singalongs before everything changed. Before Napster and the MP3. Before mobile phones. Before the quiet rearranging of culture by invisible algorithms.<\/p>\n Composer Ed Newton-Rex plays a keyboard piano while wearing a virtual reality headset at home in Palo Alto, California. Photograph: Marissa Leshnov\/The Guardian<\/p>\n What came next was subtle but seismic: a shift from ownership to access. Playlists replaced albums, not curated by artists but by software, made to melt into whatever else we were doing. Something to work to, shop to, scroll to. We thought we were watching the future of music. Perhaps we were.<\/p>\n That is why I paused when, long after finishing the documentary, I read about RBO\/Shift<\/a>. It\u2019s an exciting new initiative from the Royal Ballet and Opera exploring how the arts might \u201cinteract\u201d with AI. It comes from an institution I care deeply about, run by people I respect and admire: one that has long supported me and many others. It\u2019s presented as a bold, forward-looking conversation between technology and creativity: the beginning of what could be a fascinating partnership. Yet what stands out in the announcement is not what\u2019s there, but what appears to be missing.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no mention of ethics, of training data, of consent, of the environmental cost, or of jobs. There\u2019s no sense that this technology now threatens to make the artists and the craft the RBO has helped sustain, and that whole ecosystem of labour, largely redundant.<\/p>\n A driverless taxi on the streets of San Francisco. Photograph: Anadolu Agency\/Getty Images<\/p>\n The tone, much like the one we heard in that Hillsborough mansion, is unfailingly upbeat. \u201cAI is here to stay,\u201d Royal Opera artistic director Oliver Mears said last month<\/a> in an interview with the New York Times. \u201cWe can either put our heads in the sand or ride the wave.\u201d<\/p>\n