‘Let’s learn from that history’: opera looks to luddites for how to deal with AI
If you ask artificial intelligence when in history we can learn lessons about the global challenges of AI it does, thankfully, agree with the composer Ben Crick: 200 years ago in the north of England,Crick believes we could all benefit from knowing more about the luddites, the “Industrial Revolution machine-wreckers”, and we need to draw lessons from them to address what is, for some, the biggest existential question of our time,“This sudden and abrupt increase in technology which is affecting the labour market, has already happened here,” Crick said,“It happened in 1812, it happened in places like Bradford and Huddersfield, which were tiny hamlets and then all of a sudden they were massive, sprawling cities,“This question has been asked before – in the north of England.
We found answers then which are not the ones we want to find this time,Let’s learn from that history,”Crick has composed the score for a new work commissioned by Bradford opera festival telling parallel stories of AI and the luddites,With a libretto by Kamal Kaan, it will premiere in venues around Yorkshire in November,As 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.
“I remember being marched into a hall and teachers wheeling a television in for us all to watch a mockumentary,” he said.“I remember us being taken to the Tolson Museum in Huddersfield where they have the hammers from Marsden they used.”People had misconceptions about the luddites, said Crick.They often remember them only as violent machine-smashers.Today, calling someone a “luddite” often means they are thought of as being anti-progress and anti-technology.
“The luddites knew technology was coming,” said Crick.“They knew they couldn’t stop it.“First 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.“Ultimately they said: ‘We only want to prevent the implementation of technology as it is harmful, as it is injurious to the working man.
’ So they weren’t 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.“This idea that they’re just backward-thinking people that tried to stop the inevitable march of progress is nonsense.It’s not right.
They tried every other avenue.When that didn’t 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.“We are approaching a pinch point now, I personally feel, where we need to ask similar questions.
”Crick said the opera may not have all the answers, but it asks important questions including: will progress be humanity’s salvation or its downfall?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? “AI is here,” he said.“We can’t stop it.We shouldn’t want to stop it.“But I am worried.
I know that I, as a composer, I’m 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,“A great part of our work is an amalgamation of previous generations and that’s 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,”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 “it should be creating works that are relevant, not trying to repurpose works from the past all the time”.
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,The Last Machine Breaker, An Opera on Luddites, AI and Revolution, runs from 10-16 November
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