![]() For a technology to rapidly transform the world, the world needs to change too, and this change is often slower than either technological optimists or Jeremiahs would imagine. These jobs didn’t include just receptionists and drivers, but also paralegals and accountants. A paper by Carl Benedikt Frey, an economist, and Michael Osborne, a computer scientist, garnered headlines for its claim that 47 per cent of US jobs were at high risk of automation. More recently, the rise of artificial intelligence has led some to conclude that the robots are also coming for the jobs of the middle classes. However, for the weavers, laundresses or lamplighters whose skills were made redundant and who had little prospect of retraining, the averages offered little comfort. Since then, economists have reassured themselves that, by increasing productivity, new technologies on average create more jobs than they destroy. Following the Luddite uprisings in early 19th-century England, the economist David Ricardo wondered whether workers, who were concerned that the growing automation of weaving and other trades would leave them jobless, might have a point. The ‘machinery question’ dates back at least to the Industrial Revolution. I think that, in studying the evolution of this technology, we can learn something important about automation, the future of artificial intelligence, and what it means to be human in the machine age. But before we rage against the drum machine, we should seek to understand its origins and its potential. Faced with a drum machine that keeps metronomic time, plays no more or less than is asked of it and, once purchased, costs nothing, we can’t help but feel judged: is that all you think of us? Is that thing all it takes to make a drummer redundant? Practitioners with hard-won skills will, according to the sociologist Howard Becker, ‘resist the new both because find it aesthetically repellent and thus morally outrageous and because stand to lose if it replaces the old’. We are loud we take up space our instruments are heavy and slow to assemble our sounds are harsh and inconsistent, and sometimes we speed up or slow down when we play. We worry that our bandmates, presented with technological alternatives, might look on us as a problem to be solved. ![]() (What’s the difference between a drummer and a drum machine? You only have to punch the information into a drum machine once.) We are used to the jokes that suggest we lack the intelligence of our fellow musicians. The affordances of sticks, pedals and things to hit with them enable our sound. Like most musicians, ours is a craft that is technologically mediated. We drummers tend to be ambivalent about technology. I am also a part-time mediocre drummer, relieved not to have to rely on my musical talents to pay the bills. I am interested in social attitudes to new technologies, particularly those involving artificial intelligence. I am a professor of science and technology studies. But maybe not everyone cares as much as I do about the nuances of percussion. I think a drum machine couldn’t get close. The dance of his limbs, the bounce of his sticks and the movement of the air inside his drums combine to produce something undeniably musical. And yet there is something ineffably human about this performance. ![]() Drumming is all about patterns, and computers are very, very good with patterns. In principle, it would be perfectly possible to take each semiquaver, transcribe it, pull the notes from the stave, use readily available software to program them into a grid and fully automate the funky drummer. The backbeats on the second and fourth beat of each bar are decorated with what drummers call ‘ghost notes’ on the snare drum, more felt than heard. His right foot on the bass drum and left hand on the snare are in a conversation. His right hand is playing semiquavers on the hi-hats throughout, with his left foot opening the cymbals to produce an occasional offbeat whisper. The looped sample has been used on more than a thousand other tunes. Even if you’ve never heard the original, you will have heard Stubblefield’s drum break. He tells Stubblefield not to solo, but to ‘just keep what you got’. ![]() We can hear on the recording Brown instructing his band to ‘give the drummer some’. There’s a moment five minutes into ‘Funky Drummer’ (1970), an instrumental jam by James Brown, when the clouds part and Clyde Stubblefield is left alone. ![]()
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