Talent is built in calm.
Character is built in the storm.
Goethe
I’ve spent many years listening to quality dance educators and health professionals espousing the view that to be successful requires determination and discipline yet not suffering. Indeed, “work smarter, not harder” has been a popular mantra for many years.
Coupled with that, I’ve led a vegetarian lifestyle for the past 35+ years based on a refusal to cause unnecessary suffering for the pleasure of my taste buds.
And so, of course I accept the wisdom of those teachers and practitioners. We shouldn’t promote suffering as something to aspire to, as noble in and of itself, or to tolerate if it isn’t required when there are better, less torturous pathways open to us. While we need to be open to leaning into and exploring areas of discomfort, we shouldn’t promote suffering as desirable. And yet …
At the risk of conflating “suffering” and “cost” it occurs to me that perhaps our ability to suffer is – in part - a defining feature that separates human art from AI “art”. For AI doesn’t suffer to create (ask it and it will tell you). There’s no friction, no cost. There’s an energy and resource cost of course, yet it’s not borne by the AI: that price is paid by humans – and our planet.
These thoughts came to me after a friend commented on an AI rendering of ballet that I shared with her. She explained that she couldn’t enjoy it as “there was no suffering”. The rendering was OK, perhaps even good, and one could clearly see or sense that in 2 years or 5 (what does it matter?) the AI would be capable of producing a visual version of ballet that is, for all intents and purposes, as visually engaging as humans can produce.
And yet, there will always be something fundamental missing. And that missing ‘something’ may be suffering. It’s the cost in mortal time and physical labour to produce it. Time spent during a finite life that chose to do this, rather than that: a choice made, a difficult choice made, a giving up something for something else, sacrifice. In specific genres of dance, there’s a wear and tear on the body, both seen in sinew and sweat, and hidden during performance that matters. As an audience, while we may marvel at the incredible physicality, deep down we also recognise that a price has been paid. Simultaneously, and woven into the fabric of any physical labour, are the emotional and psychological tolls. The toil and heartache over years, the melancholy, the joys and loves, the yearning, the attempts, triumphs, and failures. All of this is a friction that is irrevocably stitched into human art and that AI cannot produce. It can replicate it, an echo, but it can’t know, feel, or express that cost itself. It hasn’t earned the art. It hasn’t cried, laughed, persevered, and bled for it. When we produce, it both takes something from us, while simultaneously nourishing.
It is this friction; us rubbing up against space, time, against the Universe and suffering for what we produce that is deeply embedded into being human. To fall back on a well-worn cliché, it’s the journey and process that matter as much, or more, than the goal. And in an era of AI, that can produce output ever faster and easier, that is perhaps truer now that it’s ever been.
Indeed, perhaps the truth of experiencing organic life lies in feeling, understanding, and appreciating with grace and wisdom the nature of that suffering. Certainly, the Buddha thought so.
When it hurts, observe. Life is trying to teach you something.
The Buddha
None of us knows for sure the impact AI is going to have in the coming years. And yet I’ve come to feel a quiet confidence, that the more inundated and flooded our world becomes with AI productions of music, writing, and video etc. – and it will - that humankind will gravitate in ever larger numbers to embrace the lived human experience. They’ll yearn to feel, not merely distraction or the equivalence of a McDonalds meal of human simulacrums, filling yet never satisfying beyond the initial bite, but deep connection to a shared suffering and friction that only other humans can understand and express. And so, while inevitably part of humanity will gorge on AI generated productions, their soul increasingly obese, their spiritual health ever more compromised, vast swaths will seek out human connection, craving not merely product, but an ever-deeper appreciation of the journey, process and cost; for it is only there they’ll find satiety and nourishment.
We live in an age where, for many, comfort is always close. And we – and I include myself as guilty – are often quick to Helicopter parent to stop our children suffering, to ease their pathways, to paper over failure, and over-reward. And it seems we’re too often sensitive to the smallest of slights and injustices, and the comfort of the known beckons as a Siron song in an ever-quickening world of change. Yet perhaps it would help us to remember that it’s our ability to push into discomfort, to suffer, to feel the friction and then express it through our art, through our embodied dance, that makes us individually and collectively, more valuable than anything AI could ever produce.
-Josef Brown
Authors note: AI did not assist in the writing of this article. J