The hacker mansion is part startup commune, part luxury crash-pad, part sales floor for the future. They are dotted around Silicon Valley, inhabited by tech founders and futurists. The most opulent I’ve seen is in Hillsborough, one of the Bay Area’s wealthiest enclaves, just south of San Francisco. Inside, marble floors gleam beneath taped-up portraits of tech royalty; in the gardens, gravel is raked into careful Zen spirals and pools shimmer beyond the hedges.
It was a sunny June afternoon, and I had come with my producer, Fay Lomas, to record interviews for a BBC Radio 3 documentary about the collision of generative AI and classical music in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
All professional creatives, Fay and I were told cheerfully, would soon exist only as hobbyists. This was not provocation. Not irony. Just fact. It’s the one moment in the documentary when we hear Fay’s voice. She suddenly cuts in, unsettled: “So AI’s going to get rid of my job?” It’s brief. Instinctive. But it changes the air in the room.
When we began making the documentary, I was as curious as anyone. “The cat’s out of the bag,” I joked. It felt like the sensible thing to say. The technology was here. Better to work with it than ignore it.
Composer Tarik O’Regan and BBC producer Fay Lomas in Silicon Valley. Photograph: Joel CabritaWe moved so quickly from talking about how AI could help the creative industries to hearing, quite casually, how easily it could replace every role within them
When I spoke to Fay recently, she remembered the moment clearly. “We moved so quickly,” she said, “from talking about how AI could help the creative industries to hearing, quite casually, how easily it could replace every role within them. The tone was friendly, encouraging, as if I should be excited.”
That exchange feels like the hinge of the story: a small, human moment of bafflement, when the conversation stopped being theoretical and became real.
They wanted to make us redundant.
That was June. It’s now October, and with a summer dominated by Oasis back on tour in the UK and US, I’ve been thinking of another kind of mansion: the band’s concert at Knebworth House in 1996. A quarter of a million people over two nights, waving lighters instead of phones. One of the last great communal singalongs before everything changed. Before Napster and the MP3. Before mobile phones. Before the quiet rearranging of culture by invisible algorithms.
Composer Ed Newton-Rex plays a keyboard piano while wearing a virtual reality headset at home in Palo Alto, California. Photograph: Marissa Leshnov/The Guardian
What came next was subtle but seismic: a shift from ownership to access. Playlists replaced albums, not curated by artists but by software, made to melt into whatever else we were doing. Something to work to, shop to, scroll to. We thought we were watching the future of music. Perhaps we were.
That is why I paused when, long after finishing the documentary, I read about RBO/Shift. It’s an exciting new initiative from the Royal Ballet and Opera exploring how the arts might “interact” with AI. It comes from an institution I care deeply about, run by people I respect and admire: one that has long supported me and many others. It’s presented as a bold, forward-looking conversation between technology and creativity: the beginning of what could be a fascinating partnership. Yet what stands out in the announcement is not what’s there, but what appears to be missing.
There’s no mention of ethics, of training data, of consent, of the environmental cost, or of jobs. There’s no sense that this technology now threatens to make the artists and the craft the RBO has helped sustain, and that whole ecosystem of labour, largely redundant.
A driverless taxi on the streets of San Francisco. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
The tone, much like the one we heard in that Hillsborough mansion, is unfailingly upbeat. “AI is here to stay,” Royal Opera artistic director Oliver Mears said last month in an interview with the New York Times. “We can either put our heads in the sand or ride the wave.”
Except that nobody I meet in San Francisco – where this technology is being dreamed up, built and sold – is riding a wave. Riding a wave means surrendering to its pull. The people here have no interest in that. They’re trying to control the tides, to shift the moon if necessary.
I don’t want to ignore AI. But that phrase I used earlier, “the cat’s out of the bag”, now feels like its own kind of moral laziness, as if ethics expire the moment something new arrives. After a summer inside the machine, it’s unsettling to watch major institutions treat AI like atomic energy for the arts: dazzling, lucrative, already leaking harm, and still somehow without a warning label.
It’s unsettling to watch major institutions treat AI like atomic energy for the arts
Things move so fast in this part of the world that our documentary already feels like a historical artefact, a postcard from the last moment before the future stopped asking for permission. That afternoon in the hacker mansion, with raked gravel, sunlight and calm, feels frozen now: the still point before acceleration.
When I listen back, I can hear the air shifting. The pause after Fay’s question, my uneasy laughter. It’s the sound of nervousness, of something human still holding its ground.
If Oasis at Knebworth was the last great pre-internet singalong, maybe this tiny moment we captured marks the uneasy breath before the machines start to hum their own tune.
Tarik O’Regan is a London-born composer, based in San Francisco. The Artificial Composer, a BBC Radio 3 Sunday feature produced by Fay Lomas, is available now on BBC Sounds
