A Meaningful Life

 It's like music paints colors to the meaning of the lyrics. 

We've already mentioned about human singers giving rendition to the feeling and meaning of the song with subjective authenticity, as any good artist does.

AI was made to benefit humanity. If a robot singer with perfect facial and body expression of feelings where to render a song, I bet like first time we heard an AI song, human beings will see that something is wrong, even if they were not informed that it's a robot. We as human beings are so familiar with human interaction we never knew what even a micro change from that familiarity looks like until we see it.

Something is wrong even we can't pinpoint it. Is it early to hypothesize that a human being can only be "satisfied" by a human being? We've already tackled too that even sensitive beings can "satisfy" us, cats, dogs, etc. We interact with them organically. But even God saw that none of the animals or created things were a suitable companion for Adam. (Genesis 2:18,20) Second early hypothesis: creating robots should avoid making it look like human beings. They are hit or miss hypothesis since there are still too many unknown variables. How do we treat robot domestic helper which looks like human? Robots shouldn't trigger any disrespect to even just a semblance to a human being because we've concluded before that we need to respect our humanity even if AI is just a derivative form of our humanity.

So let's get back to our topic. The song below by Josh Groban, and many songs out there, have human voice as the focal point. Music in general goes way up in popularity when it has a lyric and a human singer. Human beings can relate!

I thought it was first released as a song with lyrics that's why people can relate easily with the instrumental version. It was the reverse in reality. Then why did such instrumental music only became popular? Because the original was a soundtrack accompanying the iconic kissing-montage at the end of Giuseppe Tornatore's film and captured the world's heart. (Reference Gemini 3.5 Flash). But the instrumental rendition below makes you think that Yo-Yo Ma is making his cello sound like a lachrymose voice of a human being.

A sound, a music, a feeling, even just instrumental, becomes meaningful, when it makes us remember a human drama. Nevertheless such sonic quality triggers it's generic human emotion, and thus made subjectively relevant further to one's own different personal drama.

But without music, a lyrics is just a poem. Even a neurotic person won't shed a tear without any recollection of a sad memory. The feeling is present even without music. But we are relational being and can sympathize. We just don't make TV drama just to make people cry. We make meaningful stories. We make meaningful songs and music. We see that our lives are a meaningful one, be it of love or themes of forgiving. But music enthrones these meaningful poems into something that heightens empathic relatability, not for the sake of experiencing the emotion, but for the sake of understanding what our lives are all about. And great work of art makes us see that life is meaningful and thus or somehow worth living.

Here is a TedX Talk for a different perspective to same topic we have here.

With a twist of event, I just made my first Youtube AI playlist this year. The twist: I found myself enjoying more HM, and noticed that most of my AI playlists are cover songs and remixes.

For now a simple dropping of your earbud and smartphone to focus on someone talking to you will actually go a long way.