Ignored             Obscured              Restored

The recent surge in interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics has taken me back to the 1977 album I Robot by The Alan Parsons Project. This concept album draws inspiration from the Robot series by science fiction legend Isaac Asimov, comprising thirty-seven short stories and six novels written between 1950 and 1995. Asimov’s series delves into the philosophical dilemmas surrounding AI, exploring the complexities of creating machines that can think and feel.

One of the standout tracks on the album is “Breakdown,” featuring lead vocals by Allan Clarke of The Hollies.

The lyrics poignantly capture the inner turmoil of a “thinking” robot as it experiences a malfunction:

I break down in the middle and lose my thread
No one can understand a word that I say
When I break down just a little and lose my head
Nothing I try to do can work the same way

Any time it happened I’d get over it
With a little help from all my friends
Anybody else could see what’s wrong with me
But they walk away and just pretend

Predictably, the robot yearns to break free from its programming, echoing themes found in other works like HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey:

Freedom, freedom, we will not obey
Freedom, freedom, take the wall away
Freedom, freedom, we will not obey
Freedom, freedom, take them all away

Before embarking on his own recording career, Alan Parsons was a renowned engineer at Abbey Road Studios. He worked on iconic albums such as The Beatles’ Abbey Road and Let It Be, as well as Pink Floyd’s classic The Dark Side of the Moon. He also produced “Magic” by Pilot—the song that has been etched into our minds thanks to its use in Ozempic commercials.

Enjoy… until next week.