You sure about that? I assumed it would be celebrities, fine dining chefs, sommeliers, brew masters, etc... Basically, people who are recognized just as much for their notoriety as much as the products they produce.

My humidor after all, has not a single machine made cigar despite one every so often being improperly rolled and unsmokable.

On a general level I agree, the less quantitative-based is the job, the more chances there are that it won't be done by machines.

However let's not forget that we have (and we have had for some time now) algorithmic composition[1] and more recently we have seen style transfer through neural networks[2] and if artificial intelligence is able to produce visual art and music, that makes me think that there are very few human activities that may not be automated.

What will "save" some human activities is either technological shortcomings, which are probably temporary (e.g. the hand made cigars in your humidor: the difficulty is that machines are currently not very good at rolling cigars with a whole leaf filler, but I think eventually we will get there) or consumer's preference, which is arbitrary (e.g. you may think "OK so now, in 2025, machines are able to roll as well as the best Cuban rollers, but I choose to buy only human made cigars, just because I can").

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_composition

[2] https://research.googleblog.com/2016/10/supercharging-style-...

I don't think it really matters, humans can still innovate radical new art works anyway. That's all this stuff is based on, existing master works, it's just an augmentation.

Besides, a LOT of the music people listen to is already heavily computer generated.

Yes it is true that style transfer just applies a known style to an existing picture so it could be considered as not producing original work (I should have chosen a better example), however there are examples of completely algorithmic generated art e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_art

> a LOT of the music people listen to is already heavily computer generated

source?

Is this something you need a source for?

People have been "producing" music using computer assited software for decades. I know people who have produced whole albums without ever touching an instrument and who know nothing about musical theory, the product? Pretty good.

Music production software can correct melodies, autotune voices,setup chord progressions, lay down rhythms etc. You could probably argue that knowing advanced musical theory hasn't really been important for a long time because so many people love "simple" music. Pop, dance etc.

This combined with the already practically endless amount of good already available practically makes the need for machine generated music redundant, the automation of musicians, photographers and painters happened a long time ago.

I think music is largely about "discovery" now, there is just such an abundance of great stuff already available, you could never hear it all in a lifetime.

But hey, people still manage to make great stuff and live music is still the life blood of it all ;)

I did not downvote you but I think you are being downvoted because computer-aided music production and algorithmic music composition are two very different things; when using a DAW program, musicians still need to enter notes using some sort of GUI (nowadays the most common interface is called "piano roll")[1].

Algorithmic composition, on the other hand, is less common, and mostly relegated to avant-garde or art music, although there are examples in popular music such as Brian Eno[2].

[1] http://www.image-line.com/support/FLHelp/html/pianoroll.htm

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_music

Cheers, this is a good point!

We'll end up with "human made!" labels on some products...

Perhaps. Maybe we'll even see an anti tech trend of sorts. Who knows. I just think when everything is the same as generic stuff you buy at Walmart, people will value the things that have a human touch more.

Reminds me of "The Diamond Age" by Neil Stephenson

...or may contain human inputs :)

I assumed it would be customer service and technical support - the human interface to computers, the ones who tell others how to make the machine do what they want.

> technical support

Isn't that already very formatted and automation-friendly? I feel a dedicated machine could very well be the one that explains to a human how to make another machine do what he wants. The simple cases have been replaced with automated helplines already.

Data sommelier? Catchy.

May not be true as unsupervised learning improves.