A hundred years ago, my great-grandfather ran a transport business in a small English village. He wasn’t a taxi driver as we’d know it today. He was a carrier. With a team of horses and carts, he transported people, parcels and goods between his village and the surrounding towns. If you wanted to travel or send something, you relied on him. For around a decade, he was the village’s only public transport system.
Then the motorised trucks and busses arrived. They began replacing horses and carts and eventually, he sold the business because he could see which way the wind was blowing. The world had changed and for whatever reason he wasn’t willing to invest and change with it. At least, though, those buses and trucks still needed drivers.
As the years rolled on, people bought their own cars. Fewer passengers needed buses because they could drive themselves wherever they wanted to go and so, independence replaced public transport. Now we’re watching another shift unfold. Cars are beginning to drive themselves, as will trucks and busses. Twenty years from now, it may seem completely normal for nobody in the village to be driving themselves at all.
Technology doesn’t ask our permission. It simply arrives.
As a musician and producer, I’ve watched the same pattern play out in my own industry. There was a time when making a professional recording required an enormous commercial studio, expensive equipment and highly specialised engineers. Then technology changed: big studios gave way to smaller studios and then small studios gave way to project or bedroom studios like mine. Record producers became optional because artists could produce themselves. Highly trained recording engineers found themselves competing with software that made complex tasks accessible to almost anyone. I benefited from that change. I can now create recordings in my own studio that would have been impossible for an ordinary musician a few decades ago. Technology democratised music production.
Today, AI is the next disruption. As a musician, I don’t like AI-generated music. I’m naturally on the side of human creativity, as many, if not most, musicians are. But personal preference doesn’t stop technological progress. If my great-grandfather could suddenly walk into my studio today, he’d struggle to comprehend almost everything around him. Computers, digital recording, streaming music, the internet, cars that can drive themselves – the list is endless. He might have understood horses. He certainly wouldn’t understand artificial intelligence.
If someone from 1926 can’t understand our world, why do we assume we can accurately predict the world of 2126? We can’t. We only know one thing for certain: technology keeps moving forward and as a result many of the jobs we do now vanish. The way we earn a living changes and the skills society values change. Every generation since the Industrial Revolution has experienced it.
It’s easy to protest. Musicians can argue that AI should never create music and artists can insist that computers shouldn’t replace human creativity. Producers can fight to preserve the way things have always been. I understand those feelings because I share many of them. But if I’m honest, I’m probably echoing the very same frustration my great-grandfather expressed over breakfast when motor vehicles began replacing horses. Those “new-fangled” engines threatened everything he’d built. His horses became redundant and his carts became obsolete – vintage almost overnight. Had he stubbornly refused to adapt and just carry on, he likely would have bankrupted himself trying to preserve a world that no longer existed. Instead, he recognised reality.
People often ask whether AI will replace musicians. I don’t know. Perhaps it will simply change how musicians create music, just as recording technology changed how producers and engineers now work. What I do know is that history rarely moves backwards. Technology continues to reshape our lives, whether we welcome it or not. That doesn’t mean we have to like every change and it certainly doesn’t mean we stop valuing human creativity. But it does mean we should recognise that every generation believes its own disruption is somehow different from all the others, and probably for the best. Time will tell.
The world is changing, it always has. The only real question is whether we adapt with it — or spend our energy wishing it would stop.
