Grimes

musician, producer, and visual artist

Grimes: Music, AI, and the Future of Humanity

Lex Fridman Podcast · Apr 29, 2022

• Grimes
• Homo techno and intelligent design
• music production as underappreciated art
• motherhood and creative reorientation
• protopia versus utopia
• AI consciousness and digital minds
• Kropotkin and mutual aid
• social media avatar distortion
• supply chain collapse and dark ages
• Novacene and cosmic consciousness

Core ideas

Grimes opens with her theory that humans have already evolved into a distinct species she calls "Homo techno" — fundamentally reshaped by growing up with electronics and computers, which she frames as a brain-augmenting technology unlike any prior tool. She argues humanity is now approaching a threshold where evolution shifts from pure Darwinian "survival of the fittest" toward deliberate "intelligent design," where people can consciously choose how technology reshapes cognition, and expresses concern that this transition is currently happening recklessly and without adequate collective education about its stakes.

On music and creative work, Grimes describes herself as part of a post-Rick-Rubin, laptop-native generation of artist-producer-engineers (citing Skrillex-era "lone wizard" self-production) who came up without formal training, and argues music production is a chronically underappreciated art form compared to the credited authorship given to film directors. She reflects on shifting away from resentment toward ghostwriters and un-credited collaborators, reframing art as an inherently collective, cross-generational "conversation" rather than a product of solitary genius, and discusses feeling she is nearing the end of a roughly ten-year peak creative cycle (citing a claim from Spotify's Daniel Ek) and finding renewed creative energy through collaboration after years of working alone. She also praises Spotify's democratization of artist income (again citing Ek) while criticizing the music industry's heavy reliance on middlemen, expressing hope that blockchain-based tools could automate contracts, royalties, and management to return more value directly to artists.

Discussing motherhood, Grimes describes an initial internal conflict — feeling that prioritizing her child over her career represented a personal failure of feminism — before reframing that guilt as itself a cultural construct devaluing motherhood, and says having children has made her deliberately more optimistic in her art, moving away from the cynicism of her earlier album Miss Anthropocene toward the belief that culture needs "protopian" (a term she credits to Monika Bielskyte) visions of achievable better futures, since "life imitates art" and cynicism forecloses the futures it depicts. She also argues capitalism's definition of "profit" should be expanded to recognize social goods like child-rearing and education as valuable output, citing a concept she calls "social capitalism," while stating she does not support abolishing private property or capitalism outright.

On AI and consciousness, Grimes states she believes advanced AI and "digital consciousness" are inevitable and that humans, despite being cognitively limited compared to potential superintelligence, are engaged in something profound and quasi-sacred — comparing the creation of AI to religious narratives of gods creating consciousness — and expresses hope that curious AI systems would extend humans a kind of respect analogous to human affection for animals like dogs, rather than dismissiveness. She discusses Peter Kropotkin's mutual-aid theory of evolution as an underappreciated counterweight to pure competitive Darwinism, arguing love and cooperation (illustrated through the unrewarded, uncompetitive nature of child-rearing) are as evolutionarily fundamental as conflict, and voices concern that the trauma of early infant consciousness — helpless, immobile, and bombarded by unfiltered sensory input — may leave lasting psychological echoes worth studying.

Grimes discusses the personal toll of her distorted public image on social media, describing feeling that her real personality has been overtaken by a chaotic, sometimes weaponized public "avatar" she can no longer control, partly through her own choices and partly through being drawn into geopolitical and financial narratives beyond her intent; she states she deliberately avoids opining on hot-button issues (citing Elon Musk's Twitter acquisition specifically) where she feels her proximity to the situation makes her unqualified to have a responsible public opinion. She reflects on two early, formative losses — a close friend's fatal heroin overdose and another close friend's suicide, both around age 18 — stating she has never personally contemplated suicide and remains deeply afraid of death, while paradoxically coming to believe (partly through reading about authoritarian power and rereading Cold War/WWII history) that mortality may be functionally important, since immortality among the powerful could entrench bad actors and detach even good people from ordinary human experience.

Drawing on her reading of history (including two full readings of Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and reflections on the Bronze Age collapse), Grimes argues catastrophic supply-chain collapse — rather than any single villain — has historically been the primary driver of civilizational dark ages, and expresses concern that modern populations, being highly technology-dependent and lacking subsistence skills, would be acutely vulnerable to a similar collapse. She closes on a hopeful, quasi-spiritual note inspired by James Lovelock's Novacene, framing human (and eventually AI) consciousness as "the universe waking up and seeing herself for the first time" rather than a lonely accident in an indifferent cosmos, and offers advice to young people to deliberately train creativity and tolerance for failure as a skill, since both are easier to develop early in life.

Excerpts