AI Makes the Musical Case for AI Dominance of the Economy

I came across this today and was pretty amazed by it. It’s a five-minute long musical number about the likelihood that AI will quickly dominate and transform the economy called “AI is a normal technology?” 

The whole thing was written and produced by Claude Opus 5.5. That in itself is pretty impressive because most AI music I’ve seen up to now is pretty low quality. The music seems barely passable and the lyrics often come across as a distillation of 100 similar songs without any distinctive qualities or interesting details. I wrote about some bad AI-written country music last November.

But this is different. This music is almost as clever as the lyrics. It mostly comes across as a modern show tune but there’s a bit of rap styling in there as well. It’s catchy and has a good chorus but it’s not too repetitive that it gets boring. 

The lyrics are very detailed and contain references to several real people who are well-known AI skeptics. Honestly, I think if this were performed just like this as part of a Broadway show about AI, it would be a hit number. I can sort of envision the performers acting out the song on stage with a group of background dancers/singers dressed as robots.

So here’s the full clip and then I’ll point out some of the references made in the lyrics.

Some of the references include a pretty obvious callout to Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” which has been transformed into “Thus Spoke Compute.” In the novel, Zarathustra is a prophet who pronounces that “God is dead” and who teaches about the coming Overman or Übermensch. 

Then there are references to several AI skeptics (I got some help from Gemini identifying them). For instance, there’s this bit: “Darren ran the numbers with the Nobel on the shelf. Point 7 on the TFP. 10 years all by itself. Only easy task it touched. The rest are way hard to learn. So the model keeps it modest and the model gets its turn.”

That’s a reference to MIT economist Daron Acemoglu who wrote a paper anticipating the impact of AI on the economy would be a modest 0.71 percent (at most) over the next decade. He also estimated that only 5 percent of business labor could be taken over by AI because he said many tasks were too complex.

Then there’s this bit: “Solow saw computers everywhere except the stats. So the seminar concludes. Go put away the party hats. Permits take a year. The grid upgrade takes 10. The FDA wants phase three and then phase three again.”

That’s a reference to another Nobel Prize winning economist named Robert Solow. Several decades ago he famously said, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” So this is playing off that idea that AI is just another technology that will get adopted without changing anything very much. The references to permits and the grid are pointing to the idea that AI adoption will be limited by physical and bureaucratic forces.

The song continues with references to economist William Baumol and scientist (and AI skeptic) Gary Marcus. The song clearly has a theme, which is that AI is not going to be like other technology. It’s going to advance faster than anyone predicts. 

Of course it’s just a song and the economists mentioned in it could turn out to be right about its impact, but as a piece of PR for the dynamic and disruptive nature of AI, this is pretty well done. It’s apparently only about a week old. At least I couldn’t find any older copies but I may have missed them.

It reminds me of something said during one of Bernie Sanders’ seminars on the topic. At some point, if AI is smart enough, we won’t want to shut it down because if we try it will be able to talk us out of it. I’m not saying this clip is at that level but in a few more years, maybe it will be its own best PR person.

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