Technology, Connected - AI Music Ends in a Hellscape.

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

Nicholas Ponari says AI music makes live performance more valuable, not less. Mark Fielding calls the same future a hellscape.Ponari's scenario: by 2045 his son types a script into a generator, gets a feature film in the style of Kubrick crossed with Tarantino, and hits publish. Everyone becomes a creator in every medium. Nobody can consume a fraction of it, so AI becomes the largest curator in history.Mark's objection is that shared culture dies with it. No song anyone else has heard. No film anyone else has seen. Nothing left to talk about.Ponari's answer is scarcity. When everything is generated, the things that cannot be, a room, a crowd, live music, become more valuable than ever.Who's right?Full episode at thinkingonpaper.xyz.Be curious, stay disruptive.--Thinking on Paper is a technology podcast about AI, Space, quantum computing, science, and the systems shaping your life. Thinking on Paper is a technology podcast about AI, Space, quantum computing, science, and the systems shaping your life. 🏠 ⁠Buy us a beer on Substack⁠🫵 C⁠hoose your own technology adventure ⁠📺  ⁠Watch our beautiful faces on YouTube ⁠🎧 R⁠emember Steve Jobs on APPLE⁠📺 ⁠Get clips and exclusive videos on Instagram ⁠

You're listening to a five minute thinking on paper short. I don't know what you're listening to. It might be AI. It might be quantum computing. It might be space manufacturing. It might be our book club. It might be one other interviews with IBM on Microsoft. Who knows that I do know that it's five minutes that will add a layer of knowledge to your thinking,

which you don't get anywhere else. You won't get anywhere else. Welcome to thinking on paper shorts. Imagine it's, let's just say it's like 2045. We're moving. in a direction where music is interactive. It's an interactive. It's all music is an interactive experience, right?

In part of that world, is there eventually going to be something that is like our composer in a pocket that basically scores our experience in the world? Think about it, like a film. Our lives just going to be scored by interactive music? No, I don't think that's going to happen at all. I saw the future very, very differently. And I'm going to iterate my vision. through the story of my son.

So my son right now is six years old, and I imagine when he's 17, right? Maybe one day he's going to say, I want to make a movie. And he's going to go to a specialized LLM that's going to generate a script. I want a script about a war in the afterlife with something or whatever, okay?

And then he's going to be able to input that script into a video generator. It's like generating me a one hour and a half film in the style of Stanley Kubrick mixed with Quentin Tarantino and, you know, hit these plot points and here's the script and yada. And then he's going to have a movie, right? And then there's going to be a button, like publish this to Netflix, right? What I'm trying to get across by this is that anybody and everybody will be able to be a content creator in any medium they want, whether it be music, video, writing, literature, poetry,

whatever it may be. What does that mean? We are going to see a surer, like this resurgence of content that we've never experienced before. It's going to be literally impossible. for anybody to consume all the content that's going to be being produced by other humans. What does that mean? It means that nobody wants to consume all the content. People just want to watch and listen to stuff they like. So I imagine actually AI in the future being the largest curator of content that you can ever imagine, where, hey, you liked A, B, and C titles in Netflix, or you like A, B, and C in music.

Well, here's the next 10 songs you should be listening to. and I think it's just going to be like everybody's just going to be continually fed content that is like really suited to their unique tastes and there's going to be so much content out there that everyone's going to be getting things that they love I don't know maybe you guys see it differently I'd like to hear your takes I see it differently Jeremy has painted a hellscape for me so like the hyper personalization of music wherever you go there's an AI in your pocket that is soundtracking your life for you which means that everybody

is walking around in their own hyper-personalized musical bubble. And hey, did you hear that new? Oh, no, sorry, you didn't because nobody else in the universe has heard it except me. Oh, did you see that new movie? But, oh, no, sorry, I made it in my head. Nobody else has seen it except me. Did you see that? And people will stop, people in that snow would stop communicating with other people because there would be no shared culture. There would be nothing to speak about. No music, no movies, no culture, no. art because everything is hyper-personalised. And in that world, like some people, kids, on the whole, have terrible music taste, right?

But there's too many adults in the world who hold on to that bad taste. Your parents thought your inner value. So there are people who have no taste in music and they will listen to whatever the hell they're told to listen to. But that, thankfully, that's a small minority of the population. Like what you describe is not happening, not on my watch, no way. Music is the language of life. You could literally go anywhere in the world and sing a melody and tell them how you're feeling. It doesn't matter if you don't speak the same language.

Nothing does it like. I think both can exist. I think both can exist. And the reason for that is because it's going to actually solidify the importance of shared experiences. Everybody can have their own hyper-personal bubble of music. While you're walking with your headphones, fair, in the world that I show that you can still share music because it's not being generated on the fly. However, there is still a magic to the human experience of going to live music concert.

Like, you don't need hyper-personalization to enjoy that experience. Actually, it's going to make that experience much more valuable. And the artists who can do interesting things in that venue are going to be the ones who are going to be the superstars of the future. That applies to everything from film to retail. It's not going to be good enough to just have a retail front. Yeah, here's my plant store. No, no, no, no, no. At this plant store, there's also classes where we teach you how to properly fertilize or repot a plant.

And, you know, then we have like the plant meeting greets where you can like, hey, find, you know, your partner who's also interested in plants. Or it could be that for video games. Or it's not just a video game store where you buy video games. You also compete. And there's contests and prizes, so on and so forth. Everything is going to be based on experiences. like the days of a brick and mortar storage is being a place where you go and buy something

and pay for it and leave, that's going to be gone. At least in like at 2045.