Common Problems

If AI can hold objective reality, can I live an abstract life?

A little more than a year ago, I heard an interview with Common (the now-in-his-mid-50s hip-hop artist), where he talked about sampling: "borrowing" beats or melodies from other songs to use in your own works.

What caught my attention in the interview was Common’s statement that he wouldn’t just sample music from other artists, but that he would sample “energy”, “vibe”, and “feeling”.

You’ll remember, in those days, everything was recorded on tape. Common suggested that tape, being electromagnetic, would pick up not just the music, but also the "energy" of the sound people who were in the recording booth; people, after all, emit powerful, measurable electromagnetic fields, and his thesis was that the tape would pick that up, too.

If there was a party happening in the sound booth, the tape would pick up that energy. If there was a fight going on, same thing. Anger, boredom, sadness, love… it would all be recorded on tape, just as clearly as the music itself, if you knew how to “listen”.

So, he would find some bit of tape that had picked up the "feeling" he wanted to convey, cut the (not-relevant) audio out, and work the energy into his music…

Let that idea sink in for a moment. Sampling energy.

F^@king genius…

The interview concluded with his lament that this is no longer possible.

As the music industry has gone fully digital, you're no longer able to capture the energy in the way that tape did. It's all just zeroes and ones now.
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This idea - that something deeply important, deeply human, deeply alive – is lost with the shift from analog to digital is something we understand intuitively:

There’s no difference between meeting with someone over zoom vs meeting with them in person… except everything.

There’s no difference between a digital photograph vs a polaroid… except everything.

There’s no difference between a book-on-kindle vs a real book… except everything.

There’s no difference between receiving this post in your inbox vs as a snail-mail letter, hand written on beautiful stationary… except everything.
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As I reflected on the Common interview, I realized how important this energetic, unmediated-by-machine connection to life is to me, in so many ways.

-When I was younger, I shot tons of film. But as the world of photography went digital (and, especially as it went into post: photoshop and lightroom), I stopped shooting photos altogether, even though, like everyone else, I have my phone with me all the time.

-My very first car, purchased when I was 12, was a rust-heap 1971 BMW 2002, called “Beamer”. Even though she barely ever ran, I loved that car more than I can describe. And my love affair with old cars – those without a computer on board - hasn’t stopped. Since then, I’ve always had an old, crappy car. They all have/had names and personalities and quirks. Most of them hardly ran, and I love/d them just the same.

-I was, once upon a time, a prolific writer. Right up until my writing became emails rather than letters back and forth.

What to do, then?

Cancel Spotify, thrift a 60s Polaroid camera, and pull out the ol' typewriter...

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In the mid-1800s, the pinnacle of art is what we'd call photorealism - the ability to capture reality as objectively as possible. But then came the camera to capture objective reality more accurately than anything else, and, suddenly, art was free to explore everything else. Impressionism, abstractism, modernism, etc, etc. These "abstract" ways of viewing the world were only made possible because "art" no longer had to hold "objective" so tightly.

With the advent of AI, machine learning, and algorithm, I suspect a similar revolution is underway, with how we view and understand the world. If AI holds "objective reality" for us, what does that free us up to be/do/feel/explore? What would it mean to have an "abstract" relationship with someone, deeply grounded in something that isn't shared objective truth?

Somewhere in here, we're going to have to have a conversation about what it means, at our core, to be human. Because the answer is definitely not "our ability to be rational and observe the world objectively".

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Right now, I’m building a 2-year college to explore this question. I can’t wait to see where it all goes.

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Note: I love to write like this, but my deepest love in the world is to exchange letters with people, talking about any and all things. If you wanna chat more deeply, send me an email (rabbiben@rabbiben.com) or dm with your mailing address and I’ll send you a letter! Or you can subscribe to receive more of my writing, The Kangaroo Kabbalah of the Fool Rabbi, below!

-Rabbi Ben