When the phonograph was invented, the composer John Phillip Sousa was heartbroken. In a 1906 article on “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” he worried out loud that recording tools would reduce music from a matter of the heart and soul to a mere mechanical process. To us, this sounds ridiculous. It is clear that we have gained a great deal by the advancement of recording technology, which makes available to us a massive variety of beautiful music.
But more specifically, Sousa worried that recorded music would make us less likely to make music ourselves. After all, why, say, learn to play the piano when you could simply press play? For Sousa, half of the beauty in music comes from the personal element of its performance. He concluded his article thusly: “When a mother can turn on the phonograph with the same ease that she applies to the electric light, will she croon her baby to slumber with sweet lullabies, or will the infant be put to sleep by machinery?” In the age of the tablet-clutching child, this ought to hit home.
The point of this illustration is that we are often so thrilled with new technologies that we forget what they might cause us to lose. Neil Postman, the famous media scholar of the latter half of the 20th century, spent a lifetime thinking about these losses and outlined five principles for understanding technological change. The first of these is that technological advance is always, to some extent, a tradeoff. He readily admitted that the advantages of technology might well outweigh any losses involved, but we should pay attention to those losses, in case we accept a technology that takes more from us than it gives.
It’s almost quaint that Sousa was worried about the mechanical reproduction of music, given that we are entering an era of potential loss on a far grander scale, and no one now would think of Spotify in terms of the loss of making music for ourselves. The advent of artificial intelligence comes with a host of potential gains. But it could also rob us of our humanity.
Nathan Beacom writes from Des Moines, Iowa. He is the founder of The Lyceum Movement, a nonprofit dedicated to building better public conversations through exploring first principles, and the author of The Way of Shang-di Substack.
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