How Technology Is Transforming Art & Why We Should Care

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Welcome to Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams from Cricket Media.

I'm your host, Stacey Abrams.

On our show, we take what feels like intractable problems, break them down, and figure out workable solutions.

We won't solve everything, but it's a start.

A few months ago, as I scrolled through my FYP on TikTok, a creator was fretting about the intersection of technology and art, waxing a bit nostalgic about the good old days of patrons as protectors of talent.

Of course, patrons only supported certain artists and specific styles, leaving most artists to find their own way.

Governments have dipped their toes into the economics of arts and culture with funding, but never as fully as they should, because art is a real job and it's big business.

In fact, the nonprofit arts and culture industry generates more than $165 billion in economic activity, which supports nearly 5 million jobs and generates almost 30 billion in government revenue.

But today's conversation is not about the woeful lack of true public funding for the arts as a cultural and business obligation.

Instead, I bring you the topic that brought the TikToker to my feed.

Today's conversation will focus on technology's impact on how artists and musicians create and monetize their work and what that might mean for culture, the economy, and how our public discourse will unfold or collapse.

Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

I'm sorry, Dave.

I'm afraid I can't do that.

Despite Hal's stubborn refusal to comply in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey, which came out in 1968, the artificial intelligence or AI of science fiction has morphed into the ready companion of 2024.

AI unlocks your phone, does your homework, and changes the temperature in your living room.

Technology lives within your Instagram feed as the content you see is selected, ranked, and delivered to you by multiple machine learning models working together.

If you've heard the eerily chatty podcast that AI can now generate, you might be wondering if I'm real.

I am.

AI also sounds like Ghostwriter 777's Heart on My Sleeve, which featured AI-generated fake vocals from Drake and the Weekend.

In April 2023, that song quickly went viral.

After being uploaded to streaming services, it was just as quickly removed after the label representing both artists, Universal Music Group, released a statement condemning the song as infringing content created with generative AI.

But the song racked up about 600,000 streams on Spotify before the platform took it down, catching the attention of Spotify CEO, Daniel Eck.

While he acknowledged the copyright infringement concerns created by Heart on My Sleeve and similar songs made with AI tools, Eck said this could be potentially huge for creativity and would lead to more music, which is one, great culturally, and two, benefit Spotify, because the more creators they have on their service, the more opportunity Spotify has to grow engagement and wait for it, its own revenue.

Recently, Hollywood writers and actors went on strike over legitimate fears of technology encroaching on their terrain.

and other artists have raised concerns about the absolute lack of concern that AI has generated in their fields.

Influencers are also being challenged by AI-generated bots who are engaging, dynamic, and totally making it up.

Across the arts and culture domain, artists have watched the field of play transform seemingly overnight via different technologies, including the growth in streaming, which now represents over 80% of recorded music revenue.

But not a lot of the money is finding its way to the actual artist behind the music.

Streamers rely on technology to curate for their consumers.

And, for example, AI could help them replace artists or at least create more competition.

For musicians, this vise showcases technology's potential to further cram down their ability to make a living with their craft.

For example, on average, musicians receive a royalty of between 0.003 cents and 0.005 cents per stream.

Earlier this year, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib did the math on what that means.

It would take more than 800,000 streams per month to make equivalent of $15 an hour.

And the vast majority of our artists are on platforms like Apple Music, Spotify.

And even for them, they never ever get to 800,000 streams in a year.

In addition to underpayment, Earlier this year, the nonprofit Artist Rights Alliance issued a letter calling on tech companies, digital service providers, and AI developers to, quote, cease the use of artificial intelligence to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists, unquote, stressing that any use of AI be done responsibly.

The note featured more than 200 signatures, including the likes of Billie Eilish, Pearl Jam, Nikki Minaj, and Miranda Lambert, as well as the estates of Bob Marley and Frank Sinatra.

The letter also notes that while these artists agree that AI, and by extension technology has enormous potential to advance human creativity, they fear that some platforms and developers are employing this nearly limitless technology to sabotage and undermine artists, songwriters, musicians, and rights holders.

However, the letter has no force and effect, and with legislation to support artists and regulate technology still in the works, musicians and their interests are offered little protection.

For other artists who do not enjoy the organizing or platforming of musicians or actors or writers, the potential of AI and the expansion of technology loom as both tool and weapon.

Dreamtrack, which is being tested as an integration into YouTube's TikTok rival, YouTube Shorts, allows creators to make AI-generated songs with the voices of famous artists.

That's from a report earlier this year when a number of musical artists agreed to let YouTube use their voices in exchange for compensation.

One of the CNBC journalists described it as, quote, if you can't beat them, join them.

Between capitulation and resentment is a whole universe of opportunity to get it right.

The materials generated by artists are part of what makes AI operable.

The term machine learning refers to feeding massive amounts of information into a data set.

that trains the AI to imitate the subject matter and create new patterns and projects.

In fact, part of the negotiation happening right now is about guardrails.

Who gets to use an artist's voice, for what, and for how much, which is why musicians and other artists are speaking out about how training AI on their work without compensation infringes on their copyright.

It also steps on the bottom line of the companies that manage those copyrights.

So, you guessed it.

You're already seeing lawsuits and complaints from visual artists and Getty Images, from recording artists and industry stalwarts, and music labels, all against AI companies for using their copyrighted images, songs, music, what have you, as inputs.

Interestingly, the warning shots are being fired at AI companies, even as other technology platforms like streaming are the most common place you'll find these AI tools and this evolving technology.

So where does this leave the artists themselves?

Well, I figured we'd ask one, and I couldn't think of anyone better to ask than Grammy and Emmy-nominated artist KNA, who you may know as Kenna.

While the enigmatic KNA has worked with the likes of Pharrell Williams and Childish Gambino, he is also a social media pioneer.

He's also a brand strategist and a philanthropist whose transmedia platform Summit on the Summit raised awareness for clean water initiatives.

That work helped secure $400 million in funding from Congress.

And in addition to investing in technologies that help artists access resources in the digital world, KNA is partnering with Fortune 50 companies to drive innovation in technology and AI.

We'll get into how he plans to fix all of this right after the break.

Welcome to the podcast, KNA, otherwise known as Kay.

Yes, thank you so much.

I'm happy to be here.

Well, I appreciate you taking the time.

Yeah.

So I was introduced to you as this Wonderkin who has fused music and technology and business and activism and really.

Do you pay that person?

Do I pay that person?

You could.

I might be paying that person.

I could be a conduit.

Yeah.

But what I love to do is talk about what comes first.

So for you, when you think about all of these identities, which one came first?

I'm an artist.

That's my core.

That's what I was born to do.

I think everything else is a

extrapolation from that, right?

The artist is, to me, someone who lives in the physics layer, who reaches into the void and comes back with something new and hopes to generate or elicit a response from the world from their work, hopefully being heard or being seen or being known for that,

but mostly just wanting to put something important

into culture and maybe helping other human beings have a better experience.

So artist first.

What was the first work of art that you shared with the broader community that wasn't just something private for you.

It was something that you thought needed to be part of a larger conversation.

Wow, you know what?

That's a funny story.

I was 14 and I was watching television and I hated what I saw.

And so I decided I'd put together a three-ring binder and

outline a show I wanted to make.

And then I lived in Virginia Beach.

literally drove to the family channel, which was around the corner.

And I loitered until I could could meet the head of original programming and talk to him about a show i wanted to make um and it was the first time i just felt like oh what the worst thing you could do is say no right um ended up selling two tv shows and being able to actually like work through scripts and build ideas with them really kind of spawned this idea that, oh, I can do this.

I can be an artist.

I can be a creative and I can be in the world doing this for the rest of my life.

And it was such an inspired moment.

But that's probably the first moment that I found the,

you know, I found the impetus, I guess.

And then from there, it was maybe the first time I wrote a song and played it for someone and they didn't tell me it was crap.

Okay.

I watch an inordinate amount of television.

What was the name of the first show that you sold?

That's the thing that didn't happen.

The show wasn't made.

Okay.

But it was called So Real High.

Okay.

Tell me about it.

It might as well have been

Parker Lewis Never Loses Meets Save by the Bell.

And it was a combination of this kind of animated

performative short, it was a 30-minute format, but high school show.

And it had all these different diverse characters, like an Ethiopian kid and a bunch of other like

kids in school trying to just make it through like high school and stuff like that.

But whatever.

whatever didn't make it didn't make getting made i don't you know you were ahead of your time yeah exactly that's how i'd like to think of it yeah well speaking of being ahead of your time one of the conversations we're having in popular culture and community is technology and

in particular the technology of ai yeah

we know that technology has long been part of the lore of

writers and of creators, whether we're talking about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Samuel Butler's Erwin, Isaac Asimov, who I adore, and his, we'll talk about his laws of robotics in a minute.

But we also have an artist, Stephanie Dinkins, who has a series of conversations that she's having with a humanoid robot named Bina 48.

When you think about technology and AI, when did you first, as an artist, especially, I mean, you're, again,

you were out selling shows at 14.

So when did you first start thinking about the intersection of your art and technology?

I mean, I think movies did a lot of

inspiring in that regard, like, you know, Kubrick's 2001 and HAL,

you know, but then everything from there to Bicentennial Man or

Transcendence or, you know,

Blade Runner.

You know, I mean, there's so many moments in history

and in the film history that kind of warned us, Terminator, you know, warned us about what's impending doom, you know, and everyone being kind of concerned about it then, but thinking it was so far away, right?

I don't think that AI really struck me, though, until

probably mid-2000s, mid-2010s, because it started to be a part of the technology surrounding social media.

And it was really a big part of how

we were being trained to

feed the beast, if you will.

And that was something that really kind of struck me as like, oh,

this is different.

That's actually when I went off of social media.

That's when I pulled down everything from social platforms.

And I just wanted to understand more what was happening to our data and what's happening to our existence.

After that, you know, obviously in the last couple of years, we've seen this kind of boom in the LLM world.

And how that really comes to life is really from the last five, seven years of big data being,

you know, thrown together through what was really kind of the social media boom along with the internet.

And then of course

the ability for the GPUs of the world to help us process all this data.

We're kind of in this really interesting spot now.

So that's kind of like the arc for me.

But I've always been a nerd who tried to program when I was a kid.

I'm into all of the A, like, you know, from everything from Atari to the computers my dad would bring home from university.

My dad was a professor.

And so he would bring home computers and I would try to figure out how to program based on the rule-based considerations.

But we're in a whole other world now.

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So I'm going to go back to two things you said.

One is

you use the initialism LLM, which is large language models for people who are not coders from birth.

Describe what that is.

So

I'm also not a coder from birth.

So this is very much new to all of us, right?

You know, what LLMs do, large language models,

use

It's a lot like predictive text on your phone, right?

You see a few words and then it gives you an additional word that you might have said or you might have thought of saying, right?

It is actually

the assimilation of the internet and all of our social information and syntax that's out in the world.

And this new technology is basically allowing

these predictive models to understand what you might say in parallel with what other considerations are out there that you might say and then delivering it to you in context of how you have given it information.

So it's not thinking, right?

It's not a

thinking, breathing thing.

You shouldn't be afraid.

It's not Arnold Schwarzenegger pulling up to your house.

It's basically giving you back what you put into it.

And it really is defined by how much what you put in and how you communicate.

So that's a simpler way to communicate what it is.

So this weekend, my siblings and I,

we share TikToks, which I know is unusual.

Sharing TikToks.

It is one of our pastimes.

And the one that made the rounds and led to a lot of conversation was the new iteration where you can feed a memo or a report to

a chat bot and it produces a podcast.

Have you seen that one yet?

No, I've heard of, there's one called Notebook LM or something, where kids are putting up their actual textbooks and it'll actually create a podcast.

Yeah, I've seen that.

I've heard about it at least.

I haven't seen it yet.

Well, it's really interesting.

It's mildly eerie.

And part of what happens in the

TikToks we were sharing is that they reach a point where the two chatbots start talking about their own reality and their own existence as they come to recognize that they are not human.

They're not thinking.

I want to take it back to something you said about when you took yourself off of the internet and off of social media and came back.

What brought you back?

And were you expecting to be in non-conscious conversations with chatbots when you got back?

You know,

my return to,

and I'm not really fully returned to socials at this point.

My return to this moment is really on a creative level, acknowledging the challenges for my creative community.

A lot of what I do is focused on artists and artists advocacy.

So a great deal of my thought around

the

new advent of technologies that are allowing us to have these kinds of conversations is how does it allow us to optimize our experience?

How does it help us buy time?

How does it support us in our activity?

You know, as we look forward, you know, there's so many different permutations of how this might play out.

And no one knows what's next.

But I do think that the idea of having a

digital twin of who you are and how you might perceive personal context of yourself will be an interesting thing right um

these llms you're talking to now are just reflecting the information you give them and the information they can find for you to answer your questions and help you um get to where you want to go.

It'll be interesting how that applies to when it knows you

in a total sense.

So I'm back to figure that out.

You know what I mean?

It's going to be wild, actually.

Part of your mission is, as you said, to think about the intersection of technology and artists, to think about their advocacy.

And one of the ways this has become very real

is the intersection of AI and streaming.

So

I grew up on, you know, owing lots and lots of money to Columbia, Columbia House Music because of the cassettes that was in my way with my I mean that penny was really persuasive yeah

and now we have streaming which is a very different way for musicians in particular to have their music shared but it also seems to be perpetuating a long-standing challenge of those who put the music out into the world make a lot more money than those who put the music in the world right and streaming has become one of the examples of how those who control the technology, and in this case, it's AI that's helping identify who should be listening and the algorithm for what should go out, but you still have artists that are not able to make a living wage doing this work.

When you think about the work that you do,

talk a little bit about how you see technology, in particular in the realm of musicians, playing out and what we should be concerned about and what gives you hope.

That's such a big question.

Well, you've got to fill a whole podcast.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Listen,

it kind of goes back to

what I love about you and your work and how you've

pursued

your career.

I see it as a pursuit for systemic change, right?

And I think we can deal with where we are and what has happened to date without really considering how we got here, or we can actually go back to how we got here and start to really think through where we can go with the systems that are in place.

I think that, you know,

I'm one of the first people, one of the first artists that was on iTunes.

Probably one of the first people to support the idea of,

you know,

peer-to-peer

platforms, not because I thought that people were going to steal music, but because I thought that this is a better way for people to get music or to actually be able to find the music.

And especially in my career, I've had many occasions where it was being limited by the gatekeepers of the industry.

I think what we're looking at is,

you know, the technologies that exist and the streamers that are out there and the deals they've done with the rights holders, there's always going to be this play towards catalog.

It's no longer about the album or the music that an artist is putting out for a major label or major partner.

It's really about driving people back to a platform that allows them to listen to catalogs of music related to that talent and others, right?

The living wage part of it is really critical.

And

how the system is set up, it's almost, it's a real challenge for streamers to pay more the way that it's set up.

But how do you actually get to change that?

It's going to be through leverage.

And that's the one thing we don't have because we are the most microserviced industry in the world, I think.

And we kind of reflect the global economy.

We're top 1%, a gigantic chasm, and then everyone else, right?

And so when you're looking at how these things will play out,

it comes down to whether or not we are actually acknowledging that the system itself was built a certain way.

And we have to deal with the core aspects of that first.

And that comes down to how we're accessing resources.

And it's not from the community or the fans or the people, but actually from the banks, from

the government, from all the different

systems that are in place that we don't actually know.

For example, people don't know that for every $1 invested in the arts, there's a $7 rate of return.

So taxpayers don't know to ask.

for their money back, right, by investing in the things that actually do benefit us.

So

I don't know that we're going to be able to change what it is now as a streaming world as it is now, unless we're dealing with the core of the issue first.

And that's really how we are collectively together on any concept or idea.

One of the reasons I was so excited to have you is that I've long admired your ability to be a translator and an ambassador who can move across these worlds.

And one of the goals of this podcast is to make certain our audience gets not just the tools they need.

We have a toolkit at the end, but that they have the language they need to navigate what they're hearing.

So you just used a term that I think is a really important one as we move through these conversations.

You talked about microservice, which is contrasted with monolith.

Can you talk a little bit about what those two concepts mean, especially in terms of the arts?

Yeah, I mean, look, I'll

I guess the best way to look at it is we've always,

I mean, for for a long time, there were only so many media outlets there were only so many media outlets and so many ways to receive content of any kind, right?

And it was gatekept by networks and labels and,

you know, any distribution mechanism that existed that was, it was pretty simple until we got to the 2000s.

And we started to find social media come into play.

MySpace was a very big piece of that.

That's part of my history.

And then

we started to really

find that these things could be broken up.

I'll give you MySpace as an example, right?

MySpace was the end-all-be-all.

It was the hub.

We all went there and built our little websites and did whatever we had to do.

But then Twitter took the statement part of it, Facebook took the friends part of it, and Instagram took the photos part of it.

And it all got decentralized, right?

It was no longer a monolith.

It became more microservice through these other technologies, whatsapp for communication etc

what we're dealing with as an industry is that we all are small businesses every artist is a business musicians especially start with four or five major you know industries of their own businesses of their own they have their masters their publishing they have their merch they have their touring and each one of those businesses we're not taught are that we're entrepreneurs at that point.

We're taught that we're musicians.

And, you know, what you you have to do with that is get it to the world, but how?

And

those are the things

we're not educated in.

Financial literacy, that kind of stuff is core to us being able to acknowledge

our business as a whole and then being able to start to plug into these bigger systems.

Major agencies, major partners of all kinds, they're there to support us, but they're also subjectively supporting because it's based on how much money money they can make.

And that's their job.

Our job is to figure out how we can plug into it and

do it authentically and reach our audiences.

So that in itself is a big challenge.

Across the board, we are no longer in a position where we are really aligned with each other.

We are aligned for our businesses trying to accomplish something.

I think it's going to be interesting how AI and technologies, and I'm building one now that's in stealth,

that will allow us to actually be individual entities with our industry and our business but aligned with each other.

That's the interesting thing I see for the future and how LLMs and technology will allow us to be strategic with the data we generate because we are the generators.

It's not,

like I said, we reach into the void.

So how do we partner with each other to do that?

Okay, well,

just tell me, you said it's in stealth.

What are you working on?

Oh, yeah.

No one's listening, right?

No one's listening.

No, listen,

I wish I could say more.

I can say that

what I'm building has an egalitarian tone a lot of another challenge for us as artists, whether you're an athlete, I consider athletes artists, actors, comedians, musicians, or authors, right?

We all have

this,

we've been taught from the beginning to be afraid and greedy.

Like that's a part of our unpack that for me.

Yeah.

So, you know, be afraid that you will not have a chance, that you may never be successful.

Hold on to every penny.

Don't pay for dinner.

Make sure someone else does.

Try to figure out how to hold on to everything because you're uncertain of your future.

You live in this uncertainty and this insecurity as a talent.

And the world doesn't understand that because you have to give a different facade, right?

You have to look the part, be the part, act the part.

And that is a very significant dichotomy to maintain.

And so with that in mind, we are afraid.

We are a little bit

tight-fisted.

And that in itself really kind of puts us in a difficult position to meet opportunities with an open mind and an open spirit towards what happens,

what can happen for us.

I mean, at least that's how I perceive things.

Well, you were kind enough at the top of this conversation to mention the way I approach the world, which is to think about systems and how do we structure systems?

How do we reform systems?

How do we understand them and deconstruct them so we figure out where our power can be?

You have done so much work around advocacy writ large from the vantage point of an an artist.

When someone's listening to this podcast thinking, well, what does this have to do with me?

I don't see myself as an artist.

One way I talk about it is, and you alluded to this earlier, arts and culture are one of the top 10 drivers of US GDP.

We make money from this.

We make livings.

Millions of jobs are created.

So talk to the person who is still listening to this podcast thinking, so tell me what I need to know about why this matters when I'm worried about how society will form and expand and survive.

Oh, that's a great, okay.

Good question there, too.

You're hitting me in the head with these.

Look, I look at, you know, we look at what happened in the last 10 years as it relates to the media world, what you can consider as the, you know, fourth estate.

I think, you know, the copy-paste culture of journalism, all the things that have happened to

blogs and

the misinformation, disinformation, all the things that are happening in that space.

You know,

there is a fifth estate.

And I believe those are the storytellers and the artists and the creatives who actually help mankind be better humans.

You know,

you're a writer, you have, you're a novelist, you have

all of these incredible stories that you're putting into the world that

to some degree or another have, you know,

is based in reality of some kind, right?

So that we can actually believe and we can be a part of that.

All the characters you build,

all the narratives you build, those things allow people to believe in a future, right?

Musicians and artists who make music that relate to any individual, young or old,

in their in key moments to help them understand who they are, where they are, how they are.

It's such a powerful mechanism.

And the artists, right, we're not talking about influencers here.

We're talking about artists.

And I believe those are the people who are in the creator economy, the actual creator economy.

Those people need to be supported and sustainable in order to maintain that level of

being an observer or being

a creative who's building out these stories and delivering them to the world because that's how any consumer, any person in the world will actually have an escape, have a chance to assimilate, to process what's happening to them.

So the movie Terminator made us afraid of AI.

Well, it also made us go, what are we doing about this AI thing, right?

And the same thing goes with, you know,

old TV shows that lead to, you know, who becomes president in a lot of ways.

Like there's, we all have actually been a part of how great stories lead us to how we believe and what we believe.

And so it's important for all of us to acknowledge that the best creators, the most important people who fight to be great at what they do, put in their 10,000 hours, those people need to be supported in ways.

And it's hard because you're like, I pay for my Spotify.

I do what I'm supposed to, I go to the shows and I do those things.

And I don't believe it's their responsibility.

I believe the responsibility is in the advertising world.

I believe that brands are responsible.

They spend a lot of money on social media and they spend a lot of money with Meta.

You know, Meta made $265 billion and paid creators a billion.

And most of the people who are paid out of that billion were not actually creators.

They were influencers.

That's where this really lives.

It lives in the $600 billion beast of the advertising world who derive a lot of their concepts and ideas and marketing concepts in the world off of the greatest storytellers.

And being able to have them be responsible and focus on the best creatives in the world to make sure they are sustainable is actually something that's important.

They need to be focused on authorizing,

having authorized access to our data and information.

And I have thoughts about that.

I can tell you more.

Tell me more.

So just think about this, right?

AI.

Let's go back to AI for a second.

One of the things that really troubled me when I was

working at MySpace when Timberlake took MySpace over, one of the things that really got me was learning about the data warehousing and how we acknowledge all of the information that

social networks have.

You started to realize that there was this dance for influencers and brands started to realize they needed to have access to our audiences.

We're We're leasing space on these platforms, right?

We have an account, but we don't own it.

We don't own the data behind it.

We don't do anything but talk to our fans there, but that information is really being aggregated.

There are platforms in the world, influencer platforms in the world, that have now sold for half a billion dollars, a billion dollars to major hold cos and advertising businesses and media businesses that will take Stacey Abrams' name and put it into

their tech.

And then they'll create a cohort of Stacey Abram-like people who will actually post and tweet with similar audiences to your audiences, but you will not benefit.

That applies to every single artist in the world who have generated and worked so hard to have authentic relationships with their audiences.

And yet the influencers will get paid for all of our work.

That's the kind of thing that has to be curbed.

That's where the major brands and partners that are out there spending money, billions on that, need to be educated and supported in learning how to aim their dollars at the right people and the right artists.

I mean, it's often been the role of Congress to intercede, to say, we've let you run amok long enough and we're now going to rein you in.

And we know that Representatives Rashida Talib and Jamal Bowman introduced legislation, the Living Wage for Musicians Act.

Yeah.

Just recently, yeah.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Representative Bowman, unfortunately, won't be returning to Congress,

and legislation takes a while to move.

But when you think about the next legislative initiative,

how do you strike the balance between not wanting to limit technology, but wanting to protect artists?

What's that balance that you look at?

What's the way you think?

If you're talking to some congressional folks who are listening to this,

what should they be thinking about when they're trying to solve this problem?

I mean,

there are a a lot of smarter people than I am.

Are you sure?

To speak about that, I'm positive.

There are a lot of really amazing people who are considering each aspect.

My challenge is that

there isn't an intersectionality to the thought.

What matters to a comedian or a musician

is less likely to matter to an actor or an athlete.

But there are central functions or considerations for all creators and creatives that are really important to the bottom line of how they're able to generate income and revenue.

And I think that when you think about policy, it has to be transformative in the core, right?

Because I think everything else will fall in place.

You don't want to limit technology.

The reality is we are going to,

it is going to happen anyway.

I mean, I was in 2019,

Google achieved quantum supremacy, and the Sycamore chip was able to do something a supercomputer couldn't do in 10,000 years in 200 seconds.

And then the question was, where did the computations go?

And then automatically, it was this lateral consideration of dimensionality.

And the guy, one of the guys went up and asked the question,

what happens to VR with this new technology in the next 10 years?

And the guy had a picture of like Arizona where we were, and it was, you know, mountains and flowers and things.

And he was like, oh, maybe in 10 years you could walk into that photo and smell that flower.

Technology's coming.

Neural networks, mapping the brain, all these things are going to happen.

What we want to do is make sure that the creative community is the author of the stories that allow mankind to absorb that kind of information.

We're already dealing with so much, 8 billion people, global economies.

All of these things are a challenge for mankind.

This could be an existential threat, or it can be something that we are able to assimilate and have be a part of our lives.

And I think we have to look at the latter

and try to make that happen.

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So Isaac Asimov is one of my favorite authors.

And to purist, I'm about to butcher the three laws of robotics.

I know I'm not getting them perfectly right.

Please forgive me, but so

we're both going to have that problem.

Exactly.

So the three laws are essentially: you know, one, robots should not harm.

Yeah.

Two, that robot should obey the orders of their humans.

And then three, they should protect their own existence unless doing so requires that they break law one or two.

Right.

What are the three laws of technology when it comes to creators if you get to write those laws?

Ooh.

You really are going hard right now.

These conversations.

I'd like to get to have these conversations.

I know, I know.

The three laws.

You can do two if you want.

I think, you know, when you think about do no harm in the robotic sense,

I think that

I would maybe not make it so that it's a do not do.

I think

it should be laws to empower.

Okay.

I think that the first law should be to always,

I'm just thinking that there should be a way to

always provide sustainability for your greatest storytellers.

Although that's subjective, I think that there are ways to use the data and information that lives in the world to acknowledge

who those people are.

You can't have

you know,

8 billion Nobel Prize winners, right?

The second thing I think would be always to support

the creative education of those who pursue that work, right?

I think that would be the second law.

And maybe the third law would be to always give and have some distribution mechanism for the most underestimated and

unknowns, right?

I think

some of the most powerful, most of the most ambitious people in the world who've created the greatest change in the world are anonymous.

So we have to make room for that type of

for that kind of work to be heard and seen.

But that's a really hard question, Stacey Abrams.

Well, you did a really good job with that.

Thank you.

So I've got two last ones, and they're going to be pretty easy.

Okay, good.

One, 14-year-old Kay

in 2024.

Yeah.

Where is he working so he can create change right now?

Whose office is he sitting outside of having pedaled his bike there or ridden his scooter?

Like what, what's the next thing that is unjust in the arts that need to be fixed?

And Kay is there to make it happen.

Oh,

that might be my favorite question you asked me.

You know,

I was, I was reckless as a kid because I knew that my mom and dad have my back and then I could go home after getting a rejection.

14-year-old K-Now

is really focused on

institutions that have the power to do exactly what I said those

three laws should do.

To me,

that's a bank.

And it's also the biggest bank in the world.

And it has to be a bank that you know is going to be there

in a global sense for the economy as a whole, right?

And they have to be educated.

They have to be taught

why and how they benefit, as well as the world for supporting the type of artists that I'm talking about.

And that's very,

that's the very core of the technology I'm building.

And

it's very close.

I would say maybe by the time this podcast

airs,

I will have actually crossed the threshold into

what I'll announce next year.

Awesome.

With one of them.

So I think that's where I feel like the most power is.

They're the ones who

we've as artists have never been close to resources in that way.

We're always one step removed.

You know, if you go back in time and you look at and think about an aristocrat who would have Mozart playing in his home, it would be so that he would be able to have the mayor there and shake hands with him for an infrastructure deal.

Mozart never benefited from that infrastructure deal, but we set the environment for those deals to happen.

And my mission is to create a mechanism and an apparatus, a vehicle for us where we can be acknowledged for that intangible

and to be given the ability to get to know ourselves, to get to know the people around us who support our visions and fight for us, and then also to get to know the opportunities that are in the world

that would not normally be surfaced.

And I think a major institution, a bank,

houses a lot of those opportunities.

And I think that's where we...

I see the future.

Well, my last question was going to be, what are you dreaming of?

But I think we've already already heard.

So yeah.

Kay, this has been delightful and

wonderful.

And I am grateful for your time.

No, I'm grateful for you.

And I'm actually grateful for you.

You are a light and a beacon.

I love the Assembly Required podcast for what you're attempting.

My dad

gave me a note.

He passed a few years ago, but he gave me a note a few years before that.

And it basically talked about how he's proud of me for my ability to, you know,

move in an unquestionable way.

But down at the bottom, it said in his very professor-like way, it had a red, you know, grading paper red note that said, note, you are still under construction.

And I really feel like what you're doing here with Assembly Required is acknowledging that we're all under construction and that we have a lot to do to make change.

But it starts with having these conversations.

So I appreciate you for that.

Well, now that I have my new best friend,

I'm with it.

This is delightful.

Thank you so much.

Pleasure.

Thank you.

Each week, we want to leave the audience with a new way to respond to what might feel inevitable.

That means finding an opportunity to make a difference and a way to get involved, or just to get started on working on a solution in a segment we like to call our toolkit.

At Assembly Required, we encourage the audience to be curious, solve problems, and do good.

Let's start with being curious.

Be sure to read the terms and conditions of your favorite social media site and streaming platforms.

Look, I'm not singling you out individually, but most folks don't read them before signing up.

The devil is not only in the details, it's in the fine print.

Next, solve problems.

Support your favorite musicians' music directly, not just through streaming.

Whether that looks like purchasing their material off of iTunes or Bandcamp, or picking up physical media like vinyl, CDs, or these retro things we called cassettes, buying albums guarantees your favorite artist bigger payouts than streaming on average.

Until the system is addressed, we have to write the system.

So start a little revolution where you are.

Finally, do good.

Buy some merchandise from your favorite visual artist or creators.

Visit their websites or use the autumn and this podcast as an excuse to go to a fair or a market.

and invest in the arts right where you are.

If you want to tell us what you've learned and solved, send us an email at assemblyrequired at cricket.com or leave us a voicemail and you and your questions and comments might be featured on the pod.

Our number is 213-293-9509.

In fact, we've had a few questions from our audience and more than a few about ranked choice voting and other voting alternatives.

Kevin Richard Patterson at Gmail asked, would awarding electoral votes proportionally, like how delegates are awarded, be a worthwhile intermediate step in that direction?

It would more closely represent the popular vote.

Now, this idea comes up periodically, but it's very complicated politically.

In fact, the recent debate over Nebraska's system, one that allocates electoral college votes by district, is a good example, as many of the state's Republicans strongly want to get rid of the second district's ability to diverge, but not enough to agree on how to actually do it.

This kind of gaming of electoral votes would come up if some states were allowed to use proportional allocation of electoral votes and the rest were not.

There's also the issue of gerrymandering and how that would affect the allocations.

So, bottom line, even if all states were to shift to the system used by Maine and Nebraska, the result would not be as responsive to the goal of the majority actually picking the president as would the national popular vote plan.

Please keep sending in your questions and let us know what topic is tickling your brain.

We might make it a focus for an upcoming episode.

That wraps up this episode of Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams.

Meet you here next week.

Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams is a crooked media production.

Our lead show producer is Stephen Roberts and our associate producer is Paulina Velasco.

Kira Polaviev is our video producer.

Our theme song is by Vasilis Fotopoulos.

Thank you to Matt DeGroote, Kyle Seglin, Tyler Boozer, and Samantha Slossberg for production support.

Our executive producers are Katie Long, Madeline Haringer, and me, Stacey Abrams.

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All right, huh?

Welcome to McDonald's.

Can I take your order?

Miss, I've been hitting up McDonald's for years.

Now it's back.

We need snack wraps.

What's a snack wrap?

It's the return of something great.

Snackrap is back.