Interviewer: Along those lines, there’s beauty in FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE, but it’s also deeply sad. Is that an accurate reflection of how you’re feeling about the world?
Brian Eno: For me, some of the music is very blissful. The last track is an idea of a kind of future that I would like. Also the track called “We Let It In” is not pessimistic. There is a threat built into it — that low barking sound — but that’s because I can’t conceive of a future where there isn’t a threat. I think we’re in for a hard ride for maybe half a century. Then it will either be the end of civilization or a reborn humanity with a different set of ideas about who we are and where we belong and how we must relate to things in order to survive. So I see a pessimistic short-term future. Not short-term for the person who’s living it but short-term in the history of civilization. Then I see this point at which we either really fail or we start to succeed. I think the succeed side has a very good chance because of the amount of human intelligence at work. There has never been more intelligence on the planet than there is now. Not only because there’s more brains than ever but there are also more augmentations of brains. There are more connections among all these brains. We’re in a sort of intelligence explosion. I hope. It doesn’t always seem like it. No, it certainly doesn’t. [Laughs.]