"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 Cabrita"
Hacker mansions mix startup commune, luxury crash-pad, and sales-floor aesthetics and appear across Silicon Valley, housing tech founders and futurists. A particularly opulent example in Hillsborough features marble floors, taped-up portraits of tech royalty, raked Zen gravel and shimmering pools. A BBC Radio 3 recording in June captured a producer asking whether AI would eliminate her job, shifting a theoretical conversation into a personal, unsettling reality. Conversations moved rapidly from AI as an assistive tool to claims that it could replace every creative role, presented cheerfully as an inevitable fact. The moment marked a hinge between curiosity and imminent obsolescence, with developments continuing through October.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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