Watch: Robot plays cello solo with orchestra

Ich bin Ereignis says:

People who marvel at this story — and I have seen many on news channels since it came out — simply lack even the slightest idea of what music might be. They seem to equate the mere fact that a machine is drawing a bow on strings, whilst applying fingers on a fingerboard, with making music — seemingly unaffected by the total lack of any sort of expressivity (not to mention basic vibrato) or personality, and by an overall result that recalls at best the playing of a talentless, though dutiful, beginner. No wonder classical music is doing so poorly. I actually suspect, if one were to create a robot that gave a similar performance, quality-wise, of some of our greatest hits in pop or rock, that many more people would immediately see through this charade. This robot is undeniably impressive from a purely technological point of view, but the Elgar concerto seems light-years away indeed, and even then, assuming AI can eventually learn to replicate human emotions which it can never feel nor understand, it would still remain as convincing and trite as these AI pictures posted everywhere on Facebook, which most people instantly recognize as fake and artificial. But the real story here is perhaps the radical deafness that seems to pervade in today’s society. Such deafness, sadly, is not limited to the arts — it affects literally every single aspect of our lives, and wresting ourselves from it requires considerable effort.

Kyle says:

Automation was supposed to do the grunt work so we could be free to do the more creative tasks, rather than the other way around.