Decius wrote:
] Don't worry. You'll be long dead when this all comes to pass.

I sure hope so.

We will all be listening to completely machine derived techno in the future. Your iSoul will have four buttons one it. One labeled "happy", one labeled "emotional", one labeled "focus", and one labeled "fuck". You will be happy to have your four buttons, and so will all your friends. You will hope that you get a sizable bonus from your corporate masters so you can afford the six button variant, or maybe they will require you to have the one that decides what your moods should be without asking for user input. Your ability to pick up members of the opposite sex will be determined by how long your player's "fuck" button allows you to do your thing, since it now has complete control over your body rhythms. Your significant other must have a compatible unit. Foreplay will be replaced with "sync up". "Wanna beat match?" will become a popular pickup line.

It will all go great until some day when a new virus hits the scene that upon infection causes your iSoul to produce a blend of music so calculatedly depressing it causes people to kill themselves. In remix culture style, a variant of the virus that causes people to go on murderous rampages will follow within a week. Bugs will be bugs, they will be squashed. Life will go on, plus a few class actions lawsuits, and minus a few thousand people who did not have their virus definitions up to date.

Eventually these new iSoul players will be able to break free of techno and generate their own lyrics too. You may decide to listen to a rap based off the works of Robert Frost, or simply feed your iSoul player text from various RSS feeds. You may find yourself with a chorus stuck in your head that's something about yesterday's NASDAQ performance, the current state of the bond market, or the latest from the Canadian battle front. Everything will be timely and fresh. You will always be excited. You will buy lots of clothes.

After this technology exists for about ten years, people will wear them all the time. Just another part of the whole augmented reality thing. Every sense must be used to its fullest potential. They will filter what people say around you (and online) into a derived blend of music to help you remember and concentrate. ADHD will be mitigated. You will always be listening to your email. It will be contextual. You will have several dozen memory periods during the day, they will cycle over time, your iSoul will keep logs. By triggering a certain memory period, you will be able to recall events and information you digested with amazing accuracy. You will not have a choice in the matter, you must do so in order to meet the demands of the modern workplace.

What what once for enjoyment will become a required and inescapable part of life. There will be no way to rage against the machine. Art will fully be replaced by function. Concerts as we know them will be a thing of the past. Everyone's music taste is so individual its hard to come together as a group, although ironically everyone is listening to music that is almost identical, abet at different times. The experience of seeing a didactic artist reproduce something based off the most popular shared norms will require a two hour "sync up time" for the audience in order to achieve the same level of enjoyment and attachment experienced alone.

Eventually there will be a resurgence of human generated art in the form of choral arrangements. Finally, a new golden age of music occurs as a new generation of artists re-embrace something called "manual instruments" and "human arrangement".

Its all fun and Tivo until someone loses a soul