Self-driving cars are great, but we need lots more autonomous stuff

livemint.com:

All the talk about autonomous automobility—self-driving cars—has me wondering: Why hasn’t the self-navigating concept been applied in other areas yet? I’ve been trying to master the guitar for 60 years, with no great success. I can’t read music, and I can’t play scales. My fingerpicking is oafish.

I’m not much better than when I was a kid. A self-playing guitar—something very much like a player piano—could remedy this. A number of self-playing musical instruments have been invented, but not the way I mean.

They’re not something you can hold in your hands—they just sit there like a piece of furniture. You can’t pretend to be Eddie Van Halen standing next to a piece of furniture. It’s like owning a self-driving car that you can’t sit in.

A portable self-playing guitar—call it the Autonomous Axe—would allow the owner to pretend to be a talented guitarist while the machine handles the real work and the musicianship. It would immediately intuit, for instance, when a song calls for a diminished C minor seventh, whereas left to my own devices I would ineptly strum a generic C chord. Self-playing guitars could effortlessly modulate from G major to D-flat, something I have never been able to do.

And with a self-playing guitar in my hands I’d never have to worry about getting blisters on my fingers. (Self-callousing fingertips is another idea, though we are still probably years away from that.) Needless to say, critics would savage self-playing guitars for their failings. If you didn’t keep your eye on them, they’d start playing jazzy, fussy arpeggios in the middle of “Highway to Hell." And sometimes electrocute their owners.