Androids do not dream of electric sheep

This evening somebody raised a topic I’ve heard from time to time: As our cyber-puppets — such as the creatures you can see these days in computer games and electronic musical instruments — become ever more autonomous, will there come a point when we lose control of them, and of our own creative process?

My take on it was that there is nothing to worry about. Every time you see an entity in a computer that seems autonomous, it is actually an illusion. That “autonomy” is in fact a reflection of the creativity and ideas of one or more people, although they may be people that you have never met.

Just as theatre is a collaboration between actors and a playwright (through the medium of a script), and a guitarist collaborates with the luthier who made her instrument, so it goes with computer mediated procedural performance.

As a dancer interacting with an autonomously animated human-like figure, or a jazz saxophonist accompanied by a program that improvises counterpoint to your melody, you are always actually collaborating with other humans.

There are many variations on this. It could be that there are many other humans on the other end of that collaboration, and it could be that your collaborator is long dead. Still, in all cases the computer itself is merely an instrument, designed by people to channel human thought, emotion and creativity.