I first heard the beginnings of what would be If Not Numbers two years ago during the N.E.O. Festival’s ExplOratorio performance, Uncanny: An open letter to A.I. Aria’s contribution was a piece for voice and electronics called “if not numbers” that seemed to involve a conversation between a user, their AI, and a pile of laundry. I loved the piece and am thrilled to see an evening length work built around it.

Much has already been said about our fraught relationship with the growing intelligence of computers, especially around generative AI. A common sentiment I hear is, “I don’t want AI to write music for me, I want it to do the laundry.” The idea is that technology can be a force for good, a tool of efficiency that not only increases the chances of our survivability (allowing us to grow more food, for instance), but also freeing us from menial labor so we have more time. That’s always been the promise of technology: get more done with less and be free from drudgery so we can focus on developing our highest selves through enjoying community, making art, contemplating the nature of the divine, etc. 

But is that what we’ve seen? Have the technological efficiencies of the last 30 years successfully brought us more leisure time to pursue the introspective, build community, and engage our own creativity; or are the same tools that supposedly free up our time also clawing for every second of our attention? Is a future where machines not only do all the day-to-day work, but also provide endlessly entertaining content, the goal, or a dystopian nightmare? If machines do everything for us, will we end up like the future humans in WALL-E?

My question is, what’s wrong with doing the laundry? Why do we want to avoid these quiet moments of involvement in our daily lives? Every passing year we embrace a more convenient world, but does convenience always improve our quality of life? Or is our increasingly digital and overly sanitized world stealing the process of being? Why are we avoiding having a direct hand in our embodied existence, our survivability, that direct connection to the world around us and to each other? Increasingly few of us have experienced the sweaty and satisfying labor of building a home, or the subtle mystery of cultivating soil, or the wild intimacy of killing the animals we eat. Now we are off-loading the joy of discovery, the wonder of imagination and creation itself, and for what? So we have more time to watch 30 second videos that we’ll forget the moment we scroll away?

*takes a breath and counts to 10*

What’s missing is our own unfolding, the joy of learning, becoming, discovery, the delight of the unknown, speculation, and wonder. By pursuing efficiency and relying on tools that provide immediate answers we have lost the central tenet of process over product. 

Let’s not forget why we have art in the first place - it’s a vehicle for accessing the intangible; connecting with the mystery both inside and between us. When we engage our creativity we are directly inquiring into the nature of that mystery in all its profundity, absurdness, and humor.When we present our art we are sharing a moment in our journey, a moment of questioning and realization, a moment that reveals our shared humanity. When we ask a machine to create something for us, all of that is skipped over. We lose the possibility of accidental discovery along the way, the discovery of the world around us, the discovery of ourselves, and the discovery of each other. It’s at this point art loses its center and becomes merely content.

Perhaps one day machines will engage in that type of discovery as well. If they do, I’m sure it will be fascinating and beyond our wildest imaginings as they explore and share their own process of becoming. Until that day, however, let’s not lose sight of what machines can and can’t do for us. They might, one day, be able to fold our laundry, but the joy of living is ours alone, and won’t be found by running away from the process of life, only by embracing how it unfolds.