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Cinema of late has become littered with themes related to artificial intelligence, but arguably one of the most provocative moments from this genre comes in the movie Her when the intelligent OS begins composing music in its spare time. Music has long been used as something of a gold standard in reference to culture and creativity, showcasing the best and brightest aspects of the human intellect. Now The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the US military, would seem to be robbing humanity of this last emblem of intellectual singularity by teaching an artificial intelligence system to play jazz.

At first blush, DARPA and jazz music seem like odd bedfellows — and one is tempted to ask what mandate the military has for spending taxpayer dollars teaching a computer to play jazz. Is this a case of government spending run amok? But as often happens with DARPA, the seemingly innocent headline belies more insidious intentions. The first step in unpacking what might be DARPA’s real motivations behind this project is to ask, why jazz, why not teach the computer to play classical music, or reggae for that matter?

The answer would seem to be improvisation. Jazz requires spontaneous, real-time adjustments in response to changing patterns of behavior. Step back and this sounds remarkably similar to the fog of war encountered by military generals, where improvisation is often the determining factor in achieving victory. It is an interesting thought experiment to ask whether the great military commanders of yore like Patton and Zhukov had more in common with jazz musicians than they did with chess masters. If this indeed be the case, it shines a new light on DARPA’s interest in teaching an artificial intelligence to play jazz

Now that we have established a circumstance leading to motive, let’s pop the hood and see how DARPA is going about this task. To those familiar with advances in artificial intelligence of late, there won’t be many surprises here. The scientists conducting the project will first compile a database of thousands of transcribed musical performances by the best jazz musicians of all time. Then, using a mishmash of deep learning algorithms, they will train the AI to detect the salient features of successful improvisation.

While it’s simple in theory, in practice, training a deep learning algorithm can be devilishly complex — particularly when it comes to cleaning the data and removing outlying examples that could trip up the AI when it attempts to generalize patterns from the training data.

This band called Compressorhead offers another variation on teaching computers to play music

If successful, the DARPA project will do much more than accelerate the creation of jazz music or even presage a new era in military strategy. The farther reaching consequences will likely be felt in the effects it has on humanity’s perceived sense of self. For hundreds of years, one of the most common measures of intelligence was the chessboard. Now that Deep Blue and its silicon cousins have bested their human counterparts in this regard, music, language and art remain some of the last vestiges of human intellectual superiority. If DARPA’s project succeeds, it’s not unthinkable that we will look back upon this as one of the final nails in the coffin of human exceptionalism.