Author: СЕМЕНОВА МАРГАРИТА ЭДУАРДОВНА | SEMENOVA MARGARITA
From the author
Sooner or later, a person will begin to change, for example, to replace body parts with artificial prostheses, first for medical purposes, as now, then for the sake of beauty and strength. The same thing will happen to the human brain, people will want to improve it and the first innovation may be the introduction of special neurochips, the development of which is already underway. The story tells about a small competition between an advanced person with a neurochip and an ordinary one, but in love with his profession.
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It's always hard to start over when you know the denouement of the plot. But I will try to tell this story as fully as I can.
Everything happened at the dawn of the new century, when they just began to emigrate en masse to the Moon and Mars, personal android robots remained an expensive pleasure, and neurochips were used only in medicine. They could grant sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and much more. It was then that for the first time there was an advertisement for new Scrabble bio-devices, which allowed you to learn everything in just a couple of minutes by downloading information from the database of the company producing these chips directly into the brain. The head of the company, Jonathan Parker, personally acted as the developer of a new generation of non-medical neurochips. For advertising, however, he did not insert the chip himself, but did it with his son. First, the boy learned how to cook complex dishes, then draw still lifes, eventually Parker Jr. began to speak extinct languages such as Latin... It seemed there was nothing that this tomboy would not have learned thanks to the chip.
Once again, Jonathan Parker performed on a popular show with his son. The presenter asked the following question:
– Over the past three years, you have surprised us many times. What else can David learn on the air?
– This is an interesting question. To be honest, we've run out of ideas," Parker mused, "I'm offering a competition. Anyone can compete with my son in a wide variety of fields of human knowledge and skills. We will choose the winner live and, in fact, hold the competition.
I don't know how many different ideas came then, but the winner was chosen immediately. David was supposed to play a real organ in the once Catholic church of an old Siberian town. The idea was sent by the director of the Philharmonic, who was in charge of the above bulky instrument.
This event attracted a lot of attention. Including the heads of our news company. They sent me there, to Siberia, to listen to a music competition. I must admit that I have never been a fan of music, everyone liked everything that neural networks created, but not me. The words weren't poetry, the melody sounded good sometimes, but there was nothing special about it. The music of previous centuries, written by living composers, not machines, was outdated and only the most loyal fans listened to it, which I also did not consider myself to be. Therefore, the choice of me as a journalist for this event was strange. However, this is my job and I couldn't refuse.
When I arrived at the church, I saw a very small building in the center of the old town, it looked unusual and even alien to other buildings around. Inside, everything was ready for the competition. The hall clearly held only a couple of hundred guests, but there were dozens of live broadcast cameras around so that the game of David and his opponent could be seen in the smallest detail around the globe.
Jonathan greeted the journalists and fans of live music, who took all the seats in the hall, and the viewers of the broadcast. He explained that this place is unique:
"This temple," he said, "was built a little over two hundred years ago and has no analogues for more than a thousand kilometers in any direction of the world. And the organ standing behind me is only a hundred years old, but it is also the only representative of its family at such an advanced age in the entire Asian continent. The organ has 1836 pipes, the length of the longest of them is almost five meters, and 28 registers, has two manual keyboards and one foot. A unique object, nothing more can be said here…
Having finished with the story, Parker Sr. spoke the rules of the competition. Three compositions are played for the participants to choose from, a total of six melodies will be played on the organ, the audience both in the hall and at the screens of their gadgets can vote for any of them. The one that gets the most votes and reveals the winner.
David was announced as the first speaker. His father showed him a chip on which information was recorded containing everything about playing the organ. Jonathan inserted it into a special device on his son's head. I managed to find out that the specialists of the Parker company studied an ancient musical instrument for three months, and invited the best organ masters for this purpose.
A thin and small boy sat down at the organ, he announced that he would play a melody written by the neural network of his father's company specifically for this event. The music from the first notes showed the beauty of the organ's sound, I did not know that such a thing was even possible. The high and low notes combined unimaginably and gave out something wonderful. However, David's face was blank, as if it wasn't him playing at all, but someone else. When Parker Jr. finished his game, there was applause in the audience.
David stood up and bowed, and Jonathan called his rival, the local organ keeper Andrei Petrov, a man with an unremarkable appearance who looked three times David's age, onto a small stage. He was a little nervous, which was evident from his gait and awkward movements. Before coming here, I studied his biography for my article. Andrey had a musical education in piano, but never won competitions and did not perform at major venues. He was more interested in the profession of a tuner, they were called an extinct kind of professionals a hundred years ago, and now nothing has changed. Once he was called to help fix this organ, after that Petrov, who was in love with the instrument, remained its tuner and the main performer of music on it. He plays a couple of times a month and his concerts are always sold out.
"In the cave of the mountain king, Edvard Grieg," he said in a trembling voice and very quickly sat down at the organ.
From the very first seconds, I remembered this melody, although the name has long been erased from my memory. Once upon a time, back in the first grades at school, we studied it in music lessons. My hands were covered with goosebumps, I felt the tension that the hero was experiencing, the slowly increasing pace accelerated and accelerated. Now Andrey did not seem constrained and awkward, the man was collected, I felt that every movement of his hands was worked out to perfection. When Petrov finished his game, he received more modest applause than his opponent, but Andrei's face was shining with happiness, it seemed that they were enough for him.
It was David's turn. He played the melody that the algorithms had written again, this time it did not make such a splash as the first one, especially since they looked too much like each other. Again, I noted that the boy did not like playing the organ, there was too strong a contrast with Andrei.
"A song from the Secret Garden, Rolf Loveland,– said Andrey.
Petrov played music that was not written for the organ, unlike David, but it sounded natural and absolutely not alien. The second composition of the organ keeper also caused less reaction from the audience. Apparently, we were all waiting for something more fun than the presented composition. I gave victory in my thoughts to David and his father's neurochip.…
The intermission was announced for a couple of minutes. While there was a short pause, Jonathan and David had a quick conversation. I don't know what the dialogue was about, but it seems that Parker Sr. came up with some idea that he shared with his son.
"And now David is going to play the composition Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565," Jonathan said when the break was over, "the most popular piece for organ by Johann Sebastian Bach.
It looks like the whole room only knew this tune. Complex, serious and beautiful, she couldn't help but evoke the emotions of the audience. Jonathan laid out his last trump card, and his bets were justified. David executed it perfectly, without a single mistake. But his emotions were bothering me.
"Green sleeves,– Andrei announced when his turn came.
The audience looked at each other, at least someone had heard or knew the previous compositions. But this name caused outrage.
Andrey, closing his eyes, played selflessly, a simple melody, quite light compared to the previous one, but there was something in it. I felt hope and love everywhere. There will probably never be words to describe all my feelings correctly, even the most skillful writers will not be able to convey them completely. At some point, a tear ran down my face. It was then that I understood the meaning of the expression "the power of art." My whole soul was listening to this composition with pleasure.
Petrov finished playing. I immediately got up from my seat and shouted:
– Bravo!
I wasn't the only one like this, a dozen other people did the same thing at the same time as me. I finally noticed emotions on David's face, he was in the same state as me. Actually, Jonathan seems to be the same, he approached Andrey and held out his hand to shake. Parker Sr. announced the vote, but this was only a formality, the winner had already been determined a couple of minutes ago.
When the results of the vote were announced, Andrei, although he was an adult man, smiled like a child. The purest and most genuine emotion…
It was only when I returned home that I found out that "Greensleeves" is one of the oldest songs in the world. It is more than five hundred years old. In it, the man who was left by his beloved sings. Andrey's game showed these feelings perfectly.
What conclusions did I draw from this event? Probably very simple and well-known a long time ago. A neurochip can really teach you everything, even playing a complex musical instrument, but it can't make you fall in love with this instrument. And this instrument, no matter how terrible it sounds, is just an instrument, it can't do anything by itself. But in the hands of a man who loves him, he is capable of anything. And this applies not only to the organ, as in this story, but also to all human activity.
Five hundred years ago, someone, loving music, wrote the ballad "Greensleeves", four hundred years ago someone, loving travel and the unknown, founded a city in a harsh region, two hundred years ago someone, loving their homeland, built a church here, reminding of it, a hundred years ago someone Loving art and enlightenment, he created an organ hall. And all this, like the circle of samsara, closed today in the performance of Andrei, who played the melody "Green Sleeves" on the organ in the church of this city. It is worth noting that he did this not for money or fame, but because he loves music and his organ. Andrey did not send the application for the competition, but he was happy to participate in this unique competition.
And I am sure that Jonathan was the one who, loving technology, designed the "Scrabble" neurochip, and his son, when the time comes, loving, will do something else, and certainly extraordinary.
Jonathan and Andrey subsequently collaborated a lot. For example, the oldest organ in the world in the Basilica of Valer in Sion, Switzerland, built around 1435, "fell ill". Andrey was invited along with other organ doctors to fix it, but they failed to do so. Then Jonathan, who found out about it, came up with the idea to upload all the books, drawings and other literature on this organ and its relatives to Andrey's memory using his neurochip. So they did, the knowledge that came to Petrov with experience was combined with information from past centuries, and the problem was solved…
Many years have passed since then. "Scrabble" and similar neural chips are now available to everyone. The future dreamed of by science fiction writers of previous centuries has come true, technology has changed people for the better. Thanks to the widespread introduction of neural chips, science has gone far ahead. Now, not only our Solar system is open to humanity, but other star systems and even galaxies.
And as for me, I am happy to come to a distant Siberian town every year to hear the performance of the composition "Green Sleeves" on the centennial organ.
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Afterword
Despite the scientific and technological progress of the future, if you do not love the business you are doing, you will never achieve success. Let you have an incredible neurochip capable of downloading all the information of the world into you in seconds, what will you do with it? Most likely nothing, you will know as if you have memorized it as a formula for an exam, but you will not be able to understand it and apply it in most cases. Therefore, such technologies can lead humanity to prosperity only in synthesis with the interest of each person.