The Mysterious Production of Being
In the age of AI, how will we reckon with the question of what it means to be human?
There are many artists who work hard at their craft. Visible is the discipline. The years of training. The rehearsals. The intention.
And then there are those who seem, for all intents and purposes, to have been born a musical Midas. I do not say this to undermine the decades of dedication regardless, but it can seem that for some, the end result was always inevitable. When you possess the gift of the ability to express so authentically through music, it could appear too as a curse, because how could you do anything other?
This evening I had the privilege of experiencing Andrew Bird together with the Britten Sinfonia for the twentieth anniversary of The Mysterious Production of Eggs. I have carried the erudite yet effortless whistle tones of Bird with me for years. His music hits like a wave in the ocean. A grounding reality check that brings me back to the emotional centre of myself. His sounds and lyricism live in the intersection of intellect and ache, as if his bones were borrowing from somewhere older. Tonight it did not feel like I was there to witness a performance, nor that he was there to perform. It was a collective experience of being adjacent to an authentic creative process, live on stage, born out of necessity. And I found myself thinking in that moment, that this feeling might be exactly the point.
Perhaps it’s not about what you see, or how you are seen, but about the intrinsic experience of the act of perceiving. It’s not about the beginning, nor the end, but the process of interpreting the inbetween. The way it makes us feel inside when we run our hands over the rough texture of the innards of a moment in time.
We have drifted too far into a culture of observability. Everything can so easily be captured, replayed, optimised, ranked. We have been tumbling down faster and faster into a channel of curating ourselves for optimal perceivability, and rewarding this grandly. Watching ourselves being watched, and confusing the performance experience with the experience itself. Value has become entangled with visibility. If something can be seen, measured, processed, then it counts. Then it is worthy of reward. If it cannot, then we too often fall into the trap of deeming it as only existing for itself. A self-indulgent byproduct of the human experience, not the bones of the human experience itself.
And now, we are faced with systems that can also see. Systems that can model their own modelling. Our best theories of consciousness hinge on complexity, on recursion, and on integration of information across a network. If those are the criteria then we are building machines that edge ever closer to them. It is a frightening prospect, one that’s never felt more real, and yet in some way the advent of dominant omnipotent AI can also feel a freeing gift. If machines can take the act of doing from our weathered hands - if they can outperform us at the visible, optimisable layers of cognition - then we are forced to confront what remains when those layers are stripped away. It pushes us up to the cliff face of that which is human, and that which is only human. The act of doing, of processing, is taken away from us, and our journey into self understanding is accelerated by it. What, then, is left to differentiate us?
Sitting in the hall of the Barbican this evening, the answer did not arrive as an argument. It arrived as a swell of a chord resolving somewhere behind my sternum. The almost unbearable privilege of feeling moved. The awareness that something was happening inside me that was not for display, not for capture, not for optimisation. I had to immediately become comfortable with the value of a feeling that can be known by me, and only me. All that was left in that moment was the experience of the processing, not the observing of the processing. The fact that there is something it is like to be here.
Perhaps when we strip away the capabilities of human, we are left with the condition, and it is too-long neglected in our society. Perhaps the push and reward system for observability is merely a lukewarm liquid diet we’re force-feeding. We’re well fed, but we’re malnourished. We are now forced to reckon with the fact that the act of observing and the ability to be observed, is not intrinsically and exclusively a human one. When intelligence is no longer a competitive advantage, when optimisable output is abundant, what then? When AI surpasses us at our own perceivable metrics, what then are we left with to differentiate ourselves?
What, then, does it mean to be human?