How computer-assisted art will help humans embrace the rise of the robots

For many people, the robot-populated future is a zero-sum game; it's either going to be us or them running things. Headlines -- and not just on conspiracy theory websites -- are rife with dire predictions like "Robots will take over most jobs in 30 years" and "The future has lots of robots, few jobs for humans." Lest one think they will be spared because they are in a "creative" or "people-oriented" discipline, this list should give even those folks something to worry about. "Computer art" -- where a computer uses algorithms to create a piece of art or music -- is an emerging technology. You know it's a serious endeavor when Google gets involved -- as the company did earlier this year with its new Magenta platform, which, according to the company, is "a research project to advance the state of the art in machine intelligence for music and art generation. Machine learning has already been used extensively to understand content, as in speech recognition or translation. With Magenta, we want to explore the other side -- developing algorithms that can learn how to generate art and music, potentially creating compelling and artistic content on their own."