Armin Van Buuren's new track, Computers Take Over The World, features vocals generated by his MacBook’s voice assistant

Armin van Buuren is back with a new track called Computers Take Over The World, which muses on the idea that technology might one day make the Dutch EDM superstar’s role redundant. Welcome to our world, pal.

For some, the idea of being enslaved by AI overlords is pretty chilling, but we’re told that this is “a light-hearted way of poking fun at how reliant the world has become on technology”. Indeed, the press release for the track implies that, these days, it’s easy to create a club banger, noting that all you need is “a beat, you need a clap, put in some hats, and you need some bass!”

If that doesn’t quite make sense, perhaps it’s because, in keeping with the ‘technology is coming for us’ theme, all promotional assets for Computers Take Over The World, including said press release, were co-created using AI technology, based on prompts given to the relevant tools. So, the artwork and music video had a robot’s hand in them, too.

What’s more, the track’s vocals were created by a computer, with Armin van Buuren (or possibly an AI bot) commenting: “The lyrics for Computers Take over The World were actually created by playing around with the voice assistant on my laptop. I was amused by how things would sound when read by that robotic voice and thought it would be fun to create a silly song about how computers can do almost anything nowadays." 

Of course, no matter how clever computers get, they’ll never have a heart and soul or be capable of experiencing what many would consider to be real, human emotion. As such, we find them strangely relatable.

Computers Take Over The World

(Image credit: Armin van Buuren)
Ben Rogerson

I’m the Deputy Editor of MusicRadar, having worked on the site since its launch in 2007. I previously spent eight years working on our sister magazine, Computer Music. I’ve been playing the piano, gigging in bands and failing to finish tracks at home for more than 30 years, 24 of which I’ve also spent writing about music and the ever-changing technology used to make it. 

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