The ultraintelligent machines will certainly make possible new forms of art, and far more elaborate developments of the old ones, by introducing the dimensions of time and probability....The insertion of an intelligent machine into the loop between a work of art and the person appreciating it opens up some fascinating possiblitles. It would allow feedback in both directions; by this I mean that the viewer would react to the work of art; then the work would react to the viewer's reactions, then....and so on, for as many stages as was felt desirable. This sort of to-and-fro process is already hinted at, in a very crude way, with today's primitive "teaching machines"; and those modern novelists who deliberately scramble thier text are perhaps also groping in this direction. A dramatic work of the future, reproduced by an intelligent machine sensitive to the varying emotional states of the audience, would never have the same form, or even the same plotline, twice in succession.
What sort of art intelligent machines would create for their own amusement, and whether we would be able to appreciate it, are questions that can hardly be answered today. The painters of the Lascaux Caves could not have imageined (though they would have enjoyed) the scores of art forms that have been invented in the twenty thousand years since they created their masterpieces. Though in some respects we can do no better, we can do much more - more than any Paleolithic Picasso could possibly have dreamed. And our machines may begin to build on the foundations we have laid.
Yet perhaps not. it has often been suggested that art is a compensation for the deficiencies of the real world; as our knowledge, our power, and above all our maturity increase, we will have less and less need for it. If this is true, the ultraintelligent machines would have no use for it at all.
-From Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!: Collected Essays, 1934-1998.
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