“As Simulation Becomes Easier, Presence Becomes More Valuable”
There was a Sunday recently when I was cooking at home.
I’d been on technology for a while and I wanted to do something completely different with my senses. Cooking does that for me. Colour. Taste. Smell. Texture. Putting things together without really knowing exactly what they’ll become.
It was a beautiful day outside, and I thought I’d put some music on.
Nothing complicated.
Just some soulful Afro house. Something up-tempo. Something that would create an atmosphere in the kitchen while I cooked.
I found a one-hour mix on YouTube and pressed play.
The first track was beautiful.
Very polished.
Very clean.
There was soulfulness in it.
And because I’ve spent more than 30 years making music, I naturally listened to it in the way I’ve always listened to music.
Who made this?
Who played that?
What’s happening with the arrangement?
What choice did the musician make there?
I was listening with the assumption that somewhere behind the sound was a human being making decisions.
Then something started to feel strange.
Not immediately.
It took a few minutes.
The music itself wasn’t exactly repeating. But the decisions were.
The same kind of saxophone sound.
The same reverberation.
The same crescendo.
The same pickup.
The same emotional shape arriving again and again.
Beautiful.
But somehow too clean.
By about ten minutes in, I stopped cooking for a moment and looked properly at the screen.
No track list.
No artists.
No compilation information.
Nothing that told me whose music I was listening to.
And then I realised.
I was listening to AI-generated music.
What struck me wasn’t simply that the music had been made by AI.
It was that it was sitting in exactly the same place as music that might have taken somebody months to make.
Perhaps years.
On the same screen.
In the same playlist culture.
The same upload space.
The same relationship with the listener.
And yet the journey behind the two things could not be more different.
A human musician might spend months with a piece.
Come back to it.
Leave it.
Doubt it.
Change their mind.
Play something badly.
Discover something by accident.
Fight with the arrangement.
Fall in love with it again.
Bring another musician into the room.
Hear something they hadn’t planned.
Lose their voice one day.
Find another sound the next.
All of that becomes part of the music.
Not always consciously.
But it’s there.
And AI can now produce something sonically convincing in seconds.
That doesn’t automatically make one good and the other bad.
That isn’t really the question I’m interested in.
The question that stayed with me was:
What becomes more valuable when simulation becomes easier?
Maybe it is the process.
Maybe it is the uncertainty.
Maybe it is the mistake.
Maybe it is the time something has lived inside somebody.
Maybe it is witnessing a human being making choices in real time.
This is one of the reasons live music still affects us.
You are not simply hearing the song.
You are watching a person meet the song today.
Their breath today.
Their voice today.
Their concentration today.
Their relationship with the room today.
Something may go wrong.
Something may happen that never happened in rehearsal.
Someone may play one note differently and change the entire atmosphere.
You are witnessing choice.
And perhaps this is where presence becomes interesting.
Because presence cannot simply mean being visible.
It isn’t just somebody standing in front of us.
Presence is what becomes available when something is genuinely happening.
When there is uncertainty.
When there is response.
When something can still change.
As artificial intelligence gets better at producing images, music, voices, language and even personalities that feel increasingly human, I wonder whether we will become more sensitive to the difference between something that has been generated for us and something that has been lived through.
Not because one has to destroy the other.
They can coexist.
But perhaps we will begin to value them differently.
We may eventually have music platforms where people actively choose:
Human-made.
AI-made.
Hybrid.
Live.
Generated.
We may begin to ask questions that seem strange now.
Who made this?
Was anybody actually there?
Did this take time?
Was there risk?
Was there uncertainty?
Was someone changed by making it?
And this goes far beyond music.
It will touch education.
Therapy.
Conversation.
Art.
Leadership.
Relationships.
The ways we receive advice.
Even the way we experience somebody’s voice.
If an AI can respond to me instantly and beautifully every time, what happens to my relationship with the human being who pauses?
Who doesn’t know.
Who gets something wrong.
Who needs time to hear themselves.
Who changes their mind.
Maybe those things stop looking like defects.
Maybe they become evidence that somebody is actually there.
And perhaps that is one of the strange gifts of this technological moment.
The more perfectly we learn to simulate human expression, the more we may begin to notice what cannot be reduced to polish.
The hesitation.
The accident.
The breath.
The relationship.
The time.
The presence.
The choice.
I don’t think the future is asking us to reject artificial intelligence.
I think it may be asking us to understand human intelligence more deeply.
To recognise what happens when a person listens.
Chooses.
Waits.
Makes.
Feels.
Responds.
Changes.
And remains available to themselves while doing it.
So maybe the question isn’t:
Can AI make music?
Of course it can.
The more interesting question may be:
What do we begin to value differently once it can?
Because as simulation becomes easier,
presence becomes more valuable.
Remember you.
