But ideas out of left field - DF, or early rap music, or the stuff Aphex Twin does, won't be produced by software anytime soon, if ever. I think it's far more likely that programmers and creative types will simply have more advanced tools in the future, that games will be a product of a sort of symbiosis between man and machine.
It's extremely easy to write a program that generates Aphex Twin-style ambient or breakcore, and with a convincing speech synthesizer, a computer could easily top LL Cool J --
musically, at least. DF is a pretty interesting example, since all the actual
content is procedurally generated (although the system was designed by a superior creative mind).
EDIT:
@McClellan.
The best way to resolve an Existential Crisis is to realize that the crisis is yours and
yours alone -- it's part of your life and something you simply have to go through, alone, like the rest of us. Being capable of feeling visceral Existential Angst is the essence of being human (according to Heidegger, at least), and that's obviously not something a machine is going to figure out anytime soon
(oh shut up, Marvin.) You say that your life won't have a purpose if the inhumane new society refuses to give you one, but really, that's how the modernists felt like a hundred years ago. I have no idea what your purpose in life is going to be, but
my current purpose is to enjoy getting drunk and playing vidya gaems
(...also a tough job for any current machine).EDITEDIT:
That video sounded like something I read on Wired several years ago, it was just more pessimistic and limited in its scope. I'm personally more inclined to see the automatization of labour as a
second nth chance for socialism: Humans are generally unwilling to work for "the common good" within an impersonal mass society, and doubly so if they receive no additional compensation for their work (Soviet Union, I'm looking at you). This is
not a problem for machines, however, and I see no reason why the robot revolution could not be followed by a socialist revolution of equal magnitude. As Reelya already pointed out, a dramatic decrease in the cost of labour (combined with a dramatic increase in unemployment) could cause the market economy to collapse because the prices of manufactured goods would get hammered according to supply and demand -- all the way down to the cost of raw materials -- putting an end to the capitalistic accumulation of surplus value.