The future belongs to curators!

In his 60 minutes interview with Anderson Cooper two years ago, legendary music producer Rick Rubin gave viewers, as usual, incredible insights into his success and also about the future (of humans and AI). This is my personal view on Rubin, and man does this guy inspire lots of views!

It is also a very rich interview, so here are two (admittedly cherry-picked) moments that I found revealing:

1️⃣ One that everyone saw and commented upon (about 0:30 in the video, link in comments): “I have no technical ability. And I know nothing about music.” And he claims that he can barely play any instruments, doesn't know how to play a soundboard. The truth is probably more nuanced but the idea here is that he is not a great artist, he was an average guitar player. And then comes the great reveal: "I know what I like and what I don't like." The fact that what he likes or doesn't like matters is because he is in tune with what the world will respond to. But the way he evaluates music boils down just that: does he like it or not? And he has "great confidence in his taste"! In other words, Rubin is telling us that he is an amazing curator 🦄 .

2️⃣ The second moment I think is fascinating (2:16 in the video) is an answer to Cooper's "what are you listening for?" when in the studio with musicians around. "I am listening to the feeling", Rubin replies. That means, obviously, how HE feels -but again, how he feels tends to be a pretty good predictive model for how lots of other people will feel. Why is this interesting? Because the potential of the music he is listening to lies at the intersection of sounds and feelings, technical production of music and human emotions. In his case, that is what curation is all about: he listens to a lot of stuff, his "generative model" is listening to tons of music, and he can detect and steer what resonates with him.

This can be generalized to all creative endeavors, including scientific discovery. If you have a generative model at your disposal to crank out possibilities (poems, music, paintings, molecules, hypotheses), you need to be a curator of these possibilities and guide the generative model toward the stuff that "resonates" with you. The combinatorial power of AI has creative value only when combined with the curatorial power of the human experience.

For those who remember, of course that is the basis for the hunch engine: the algorithmic engine creates the possibilities, you provide the hunches. Quinn Norton's 2006 article: link

This post is for Thomas Wolf!