As the world continues to grapple with the wide-ranging implications of AI, many of us are searching for the right analogy to make sense of the changes afoot. In framing the future role of AI, there’s now a commonplace argument that knowledge workers will turn into orchestral conductors.
On the surface, the analogy seems like a good one. Conductors magnify individual talent within an orchestra, making people sound better as a collective. Anne-Sophie Mutter, the great German violinist, once said that even the smallest gesture from maestro Herbert von Karajan transformed the Berlin Philharmonic into a “velvet carpet.” Conductors also bring musical source materials to life, taking the original score and liberating new elements of emotional and lyrical vitality.
This sounds like what’s happening with AI, doesn’t it? Under human direction, AI mines vast information terrain and unearths precious metals within it. Like an orchestra, AI achieves more than what human masters ever could on their own. The knowledge worker’s core skill, like the conductor’s core skill, seems to be knowing how to purposefully channel the power of a much larger force.
Here’s where the analogy breaks down. Members of an orchestra have clearly defined roles and tasks, and they are told exactly how to perform them. Orchestral musicians tend to follow scripted processes with uncompromising precision. It’s a mechanistic performance model in which the subjective judgment of the individual player is subordinate to the artistic vision of the conductor.
That isn’t where AI seems to be going. Increasingly, the “conductor” of AI will not have a specific end-state in mind. The outcome will be an emergent property, not a predefined destination. As compared to classical music performances, AI will be less about direction than guidance. It will be an organic performance model, not a mechanistic one.
The better analogy for our future relationship with AI seems to be that of a “producer.” Think about what music and film producers do. They begin with an overall objective or idea, and then they let the team bring it to life. Producers are agents and facilitators, not autocratic directors. They allow things to happen. They carefully create the conditions that permit a creative process to unfold.
For producers, success is measured by the degree of innovation rather than the degree of adherence to an original objective. There’s a necessary distance between producer and performer, because the team needs maximum freedom of movement to reach its creative potential.
Apple’s production of the iPhone is a conductor model: more than 1200 supply chain steps over 15 countries, each of which has to be perfectly executed. Cirque du Soleil is a producer model: a collection of hip hop dancers, belly dancers, capoeira performers, break dancers, and ballerinas finding new forms of expression around an organizing theme.
A conductor task for AI would be: How can we reduce our global supply chain costs by 30%? A producer task would be: Who are my best sales prospects, based on industry conditions, company health, and purchasing trends over the last six quarters?
Conductors optimize for precision and consistency. Producers optimize for innovation and creativity. The latter seems to be where AI is going.