| Sunday, 24 March 2024 |
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Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
Dear reader, welcome to another edition of First Principles, filed on a hot, still, and sunny Saturday in Bengaluru.
Remember our discussion a few weeks ago about how fleeting our spring seasons were becoming? Scientists studying India’s seasons (all the way back from 1970) are noting the gradual disappearance of Spring too. 🙁
But we can enjoy summer, can’t we? I’m thrilled to report that the White Water Apple in our (tiny) backyard has flowered prodigiously this year. I expect a bumper harvest of at least 500+ fruits. Alas, it’s a fruit cursed with three key features—it bruises easily; is best eaten the same day it’s picked (very high water content); and is only mildly sweet.
I hope to share some pictures of its fruiting in April with you all. But let’s begin with a question: what makes us human?
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the word “human” and what it means of late. A big reason is the dramatic evolution and adoption of Gen AI in virtually all aspects of our life. And regardless of what its proponents say, the end goal is to use AI to progressively replace everything that human beings do.
Buying and selling stocks. Making art. Diagnosing and treating illnesses. Driving vehicles. Analyzing news events. Designing websites. Writing news stories.
Thus, my question about what makes us human.
My (yet evolving) hypothesis is that certain aspects of human skill and endeavour will become simultaneously rarer and more valuable in a world where most things will be machine-generated.
For instance, in this Rolling Stone profile of Gen AI music startup Suno, I came across this ridiculous assertion from one of its founders.
“Suno appears to be cracking the code to AI music, and its founders’ ambitions are nearly limitless — they imagine a world of wildly democratized music making. The most vocal of the co-founders, Mikey Shulman, a boyishly charming, backpack-toting 37-year-old with a Harvard Ph.D. in physics, envisions a billion people worldwide paying 10 bucks a month to create songs with Suno. The fact that music listeners so vastly outnumber music-makers at the moment is “so lopsided,” he argues, seeing Suno as poised to fix that perceived imbalance.”
Let’s for a minute assume he is right. A billion people are generating, consuming, and remixing AI-generated regurgitations.
What does that mean for the value of truly human-generated music? Not just popular greats like, say, The Beatles or Taylor Swift, but truly talented musicians who might be less famous?
There is no easy answer. I was discussing a version of this quandary this Friday with Amod Malviya, the former CTO of Flipkart and co-founder of Udaan.
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Chairman and MD, InvAscent
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CEO and Co-Founder, Razorpay
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Executive Chairperson, Biocon Limited
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Co-founder and CEO, Obvious Ventures