Robot-Made Art

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about robots making our art. By 'art' I mean everything from writing novels to playing music, painting, and filmmaking. I’ve been wondering how good robot-made art will become, how dominant it will be in the marketplace, and whether all human-made art will eventually be relegated to a pastime or hobby. The most important question, though, is what will happen to our sense of humanity and community if the art we consume is, overwhelmingly, machine-made.

Of course, much of art-making has already become a pastime. Painting, once a viable profession supported by academies and apprenticeships, has been economically unsustainable for most practitioners for at least the past seventy-five years. Image-making technologies played a large role in that decline—but technology alone isn’t to blame. Advances in recording, for example, created an economic boom in music for musicians, songwriters, and concert promoters. In writing, print technology made authorship a profession.

Still, technology does seem to be the story. Once applied to art-making, it eventually replaces the professional artist. Mass-market economics demand it.

Advances in AI have now reached the point where machines can produce virtually any kind of mass-market art as professionally and more efficiently than humans. The economics clearly favor machine-made art, just as factory-made furniture and clothing displaced handmade production. The concern today isn’t so much about quality, but about how to tell the difference between human and machine creation—because the machine-made is getting that good.

Here's an example. This song is described as “Discovered on a forgotten mono tape marked ‘Handle Me – May 1952.’ This juke-joint scorcher captures the unstoppable blues powerhouse Bertha Mae Lightning—a woman who could outplay, outsing, and outdrink half the Delta.” Only at the very bottom of the description does it add: “Disclaimer: A lost-session tribute—written, arranged, and composed by a human, brought to life with AI in true blues spirit. The backstory’s fictional, the music’s real.”

The music is real, only in the sense that it was generated by AI from scraped samples. It’s undeniably good—very good—and most listeners, judging by the comments, have no idea it’s artificial. The packaging is designed to fool.

What’s happening in music will soon happen in books, films—everywhere. And since streaming platforms control access, they’ll inevitably promote machine-made work over the human. There's more money in it for them.

So does it matter if Bertha Mae Lightning is real or not? How about Elijah "Hollowfoot" Turner?

I think it does. No matter how good it sounds—or looks.

Art-making has been faked before, especially in painting, and we’ve always drawn a firm line between the counterfeit and the original. That line must exist in all the arts. Admittedly, it’s trickier in music, where performance and reproduction blur. But even in the visual arts, where a canvas or sculpture is one-of-a-kind, there have long been marketed facsimiles—prints, for example.

Still, knowing that a real person produced something matters. It’s part of what makes art art.

The artist’s presence is so integral to the experience of art that we’ve always struggled to separate the artist from their work. Often, the work itself is sublime and deeply human, yet the artist turns out to be a scoundrel. Art history is littered with such examples—from the Baroque painter Caravaggio to filmmaker Woody Allen. Should the fact that Ezra Pound and Roald Dahl were avowed antisemites change how we value their poetry and stories? The point is, it matters; it makes some of us deeply uncomfortable that the author of the beloved children's book "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" unrepentently hated Jews.

Whether it 'should' matter is a debate worth having—and part of what makes art so compelling. Art reflects the paradoxes and mysteries of the human journey, both the tasteful and the unsavoury. The nature of art is artifice to be sure, but it's artifice in the service of truth. 

The knowledge that there is no real experience behind Bertha Mae Lightning’s lines—I shine too bright, I cut too deep/ They talk that love, but they don't keep, means the essential component is missing. It changes the way it lands for me. I hope others feel the same way, once they know the truth.

What if

What 

What if

What if no

What if no one 

What if no one paid 

What if no one paid attention

What if no one paid attention 

What if no one paid

What if no one

What if no 

What if

What.

Ahead of his Time

One of the major regrets in my life is that I didn’t get to know my grandfather Sam better. I’ve written about him once before. That blog post was mostly about him as an artist. But Sam was best known as a businessman. At one time, his company, Sample Manufacturing Corporation, was the largest producer of ladies’ dresses in Canada. In addition to innovating by applying an assembly-line model to clothing manufacturing, he was a pioneer of private labeling—selling slightly altered fashion designs to mass-market retailers under their own labels.

Sam passed away in 1989 when he was seventy-six and I was twenty-five. I had just finished graduate school and started my first full-time job working at a library when he got sick. He succumbed quickly to his illness after only a few weeks in the hospital.

As children, we didn’t actually see our grandparents too often. They lived in Florida during the winter and came back to Montreal in the summer. We’d fly down to visit them for two weeks during Christmas and Easter vacations. During the summer months, when they were back in town, my brothers and I were away at sleepaway camp. The only time of year we were really in the same place was at the beginning of the school year, before they returned to Florida for the winter.

My grandparents divorced in 1975, and by the time Sam’s business was winding down in the mid-1980s, he was spending even more time in Florida. By the time I graduated high school in ’81, and my parents’ marriage had come apart, we weren’t visiting Florida as a family anymore. We didn’t see much of Sam in the last decade of his life. My two older brothers saw him more often because, for a period of time, he let them use some of his empty factory space for the kitchen cabinet business they were trying to get off the ground. I, on the other hand, had no interest in business.

What I do remember about Sam has stuck with me—and, oddly enough, become more resonant with age. So many of the things I remember him talking about fifty years ago seem even more relevant today.

Sam was an autodidact. Despite never graduating from high school, he loved books and read widely. He read about politics, economics, philosophy, psychology, and art. When I was at university studying political science I can remember having discussions with him about some of the theories we were learning. I can remember him incisively shooting them down as ivory tower nonsense. 

I remember Sam being deeply interested in the writings of Freud and Marx though. His interest in Freud, I believe, was partly personal—he had underwent psychoanalysis for many years—but also connected to his work as an artist and his belief in the dominant role of the subconscious in life.

He was also interested by psychology as it relates to spectacle. One of his favorite phrases was “Bullshit baffles brains.” What he meant was that people could be manipulated, diverted, or gaslit. He was fascinated by American culture, and especially by the popularity of megachurches and televangelists in the South. On a portable cassette recorder, Sam used to tape the Sunday morning broadcasts of the charismatic preachers—the “Holy Rollers,” as he called them. He loved it when they made their pitch for donations, the psychology of salesmanship.

He was highly skeptical of politics and politicians, and despite his own success as a businessman, he didn’t believe in the future of capitalism. I remember him saying that “capital and labour are in conflict.” I presume much of his economic skepticism came from his difficult experience negotiating contracts with garment workers’ unions. He also said, “The banks own everything,” expressing his doubt in the very concept of private property that underpins the capitalist system.

I remember one time he drew a circle to illustrate why capitalism cannot work in the long run. He said, “Let’s say you have a circle of ten people, and you give each one $100 to sell a product or service to their neighbour in sequence. According to capitalism, each person must make a profit on their transaction. Logically, after a number of cycles, one person will end up with all the money.” (The exact number of cycles depends on the profit margins, but the principle stands.)

Today it seems like Sam was right about everything. Nothing about current events, thirty-six years after his death, would surprise him. Capitalism has failed in the way he foresaw—all the money has ended up in the hands of a few. Politics has proven that “bullshit baffles brains”; people are easily diverted and gaslit.

Sam was ahead of his time.

The truth is, I’m not sure what Sam actually thought, because I never had the depth or maturity to ask him. That’s the source of my regret. I’m just sewing together fabric swaths of memory to create a complete garment he might have worn.

Smoke and Mirrors

This week has been one of mixed emotions for me.

Elation that the final living hostages have been liberated — tempered by disgust at the triumphalism surrounding trump. Watching him bask in the praise and glory he’s been receiving in Israel made me feel sick to my stomach. It was like watching a drug addict take his fix. In trump’s case, the addiction is narcissism, and the drug is adulation — heaped on him not only by Israeli leaders and the public, but also by analysts and media commentators, which has been confounding to watch.

Yes, trump deserves some credit for helping secure the release of the last twenty living hostages. But not the standing ovation we’re seeing. A little perspective is in order: the Biden administration managed to get 110 hostages released. The so-called “trump plan” is, in fact, a rehash of the ceasefire framework negotiated earlier by Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken.

Of course, timing is everything. In every film, it’s the ending people remember. And humility rarely earns applause in politics. If there’s one thing trump truly excels at, it’s hyperbole — turning minor accomplishments into monumental ones and claiming credit for what others have done. I'm just tired of watching people fall for it.

Still, let’s clarify what actually happened. No “peace deal” was signed — and the media should stop calling it that. What was agreed to was a ceasefire, and it’s already starting to unravel. Instead of demilitarizing, Hamas is doing the opposite. They’ve claimed victory and taken to the streets of Gaza as a self-styled “police force,” re-establishing control through public displays of power and executions.

The document signed in Egypt wasn’t signed by either Israel or Hamas. It was called a “joint declaration,” slightly more consequential than a communiqué, and was signed by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, trump, Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In other words, it was mostly PR.

If there was any doubt about the decline of western democracy, that was put to rest in Egypt, watching trump humiliate all the other leaders - their sycophancy together with the media's complicity.   

My question to Americans is this: At what point do you begin to see that the trump presidency for what it actually is, little more than smoke and mirrors — a performance designed to conceal the most corrupt presidency in U.S. history?

According to Forbes, trump’s personal net worth has jumped by nearly $3.4 billion in the first ten months of his second term — about $2 billion of that from cryptocurrency ventures, the untraceable currency of choice for crooks and corrupt politicians (read: bribes).

The rest of the trump family has profited handsomely as well. Jared and Ivanka have become billionaires in their own right. Jared has raised $4.6 billion from investors in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, and has already invested more than $2 billion in twenty-two companies. Eric and Don Jr. have joined in too, enriching themselves by roughly $750 million and $500 million respectively, much of it from crypto and real estate licensing deals across the Middle East and Asia. The family’s total enrichment from the presidency is estimated at more than $7 billion — and we’re only ten months in.

How do Americans not see that under trump, the office of the presidency, like every cheap product he’s ever slapped his name on, is for sale? Accepting the “gift” of a $400 million jet from Qatar wasn’t enough of a “for sale” sign? And what did Qatar get in return? Among other things, reportedly, a base for the Qatari Air Force — on American soil.

Meanwhile, trump has shut down the government while collecting billions in tariff revenue — effectively raising taxes on ordinary Americans — even as he cuts taxes for the wealthy and slashes benefits for the neediest. Does this get the public’s attention? Not so much.

What does raise Americans’ hackles? Apparently, the release of files on a wealthy, well-connected, dead pedophile. Maybe. Unless trump can keep the smoke-and-mirror show running long enough to distract them indefinitely.

And honestly, I wouldn’t bet against him. He knows you can never underestimate the American appetite for distraction — or the media’s willingness to go along with it. In the post-truth attention economy, spectacle is all that matters. 

Just Put The Phone Down

CLICK HERE TO HEAR THE SONG

Just put the phone down,

Don't follow the flock.

Just put the phone down,

And maybe we'll talk.

Don't look it up,

Don’t need to know why.

Don’t want the answer,

Meet me eye to eye.

Let's have a moment,

Share some head space.

Leave questions unanswered,

Inhabit one place. 

The screen doesn't give, 

A genuine impression.

Except of a person's,

Unhealthy obsession.

It's honesty I need, 

Now more than ever.

Not some stranger's comments, 

That makes him sound clever.

Don't care about the memes,

That try to make you laugh.

Don't need to be outraged,

By a dumb photograph.

Just put the phone down,

Don't follow the flock.

Just put the phone down,

And maybe we'll talk.

Don't look it up,

Don’t need to know why.

Don’t want the answer,

Meet me eye to eye.

Don't need further details,

On the Middle-East.

I have more concern for, 

The problems on my street.

The rivers of chaos,

Vulgarity and greed.

Vapidity, conspiracy,

On the misinforming feed.

The uncontrolled addiction,

The digital affliction.

The venal exhibition,

Of every politician. 

Hypnotized, mesmerized,

Anesthetized, lobotomized.

Paralyzed, desensitized, 

Our future is jeopardized.

Just put the phone down…

Hostage Release - Shehecheyanu

שֶׁהֶחֱיָנוּ וְקִיְּמָנוּ וְהִגִּיעָנוּ לַזְּמַן הַזֶּה

Shehecheyanu v'kiy'manu v'higiyanu laz'man hazeh

Blessed is the One who has kept us alive, sustained us, and brought us to this moment.

It’s the Hebrew blessing we say at moments of significance — family gatherings, holidays, birthdays, anniversaries. It signifies celebration and gratitude. But, as with all Jewish celebrations, it carries a certain heaviness — a shadow of memory and regret for those who are only with us in spirit. It’s a reminder of how much we owe to those who made our present moment possible.

I can hardly think of a more appropriate time to recite the blessing than today. There are inevitably mixed feelings. We celebrate the return of the living — their freedom from the dungeons of captivity. We mourn the more than two years they spent suffering helplessly, enduring mental and physical torment at the hands of the most depraved, sadistic individuals. We rejoice in their reunions with family. We grieve for those who could not return safely to theirs. We celebrate the end of a nightmare. We regret the 465 Israeli soldiers — most of them in their late teens and early twenties — who gave their lives in the war, and the tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians killed and wounded, along with the hundreds of thousands who continue to endure deprivation and inhuman living conditions.

I am grateful to the politicians who finally reached a deal. I blame the politicians for taking so long — for the unimaginable toll their delay has taken.

Shehecheyanu, yes — but this should have, and could have, happened much sooner.

Almost two years ago, on October 29, 2023, the Montreal Jewish community gathered downtown to call for the release of the hostages. My wife and I attended, and we brought home a bright yellow sign that said, “Release the Hostages.” That day, I stuck the sign in the window of our front door and vowed not to take it down until every hostage was released. I never imagined it would remain there for almost two years.

I thought I was taking a small risk. Ours is a quiet, affluent neighborhood. Many Jewish families live on our street, though it’s a mix. What worried me most was the bus stop directly in front of our house. I feared someone not from our neighbourhood might see the sign, take exception, and throw a rock at the window. I figured the worst that could happen was the cost and hassle of replacing some broken glass. Taking a public stand, however meagre, was worth the risk. My worries grew as the war dragged on, the Palestinian death toll rose, and antisemitism in the diaspora intensified. Still, I kept my vow to myself. 

In those two years, we experienced only two clear responses to our sign — and perhaps two more, if you count the ambiguous ones.

The first was direct but civil: someone stuck a pink Post-it note to our door, on the sign itself. In neat cursive it read, “And stop killing the children of Gaza.” Hard to disagree. It was a restrained gesture, considering the hatred and vitriol that were exploding online.

The second involved my wife’s small business. She sells vintage housewares online and by appointment from our basement. Once, a customer who had arranged to pick up an item failed to show. Later, she messaged my wife to say that she had changed her mind. We’re fairly certain that she came to the house, saw the sign, turned away, and decided not to go through with the purchase.

I might also add that more times than not, the sign elicited positive and considerate reponses from some of my wife's customers. One time, my wife went to the door for a customer and saw through the window that she was removing her keffiyeh, presumably so my wife wouldn't be offended.    

The remaining two incidents are more speculative. One week, our recycling wasn’t collected. Normally it’s picked up from the curb, right near where the sign is visible from the street. I’d put the blue bag out early; all the other houses’ bags were taken, except ours. It was picked up the following week, so our house wasn’t blacklisted — but I still wonder if the driver decided that day to make a quiet protest gesture of his own.

The last incident was stranger — and unsettling. One summer weekend, while mowing the lawn, I found a large kitchen knife planted upright in the grass near our walkway. I had no idea why it was there. Perhaps someone waiting at the bus stop had found it on the street and stuck it in the ground absentmindedly. But this happened during a time of vandalism and violent acts against Jewish institutions and on university campuses, and for a brief moment a chill ran through me — as if it were meant as a threatening message. Within a few minutes, I dismissed the thought as paranoia, pulled the knife out of the grass — it was perfectly good, maybe even expensive — and brought it into the house. We still have it. There was never any follow-up, and I’ve come to think it was pure coincidence.

Today, the last 20 living hostages have come home - I must settle for the living for now. I am taking the sign down. I’m relieved it’s gone.

Shehecheyanu, indeed.

On The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize

María Corina Machado, who won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for “promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela,” is literally the anti-trump.

As everyone in the world knows by now—because trump announces it every chance he gets, which is almost every day—he wants desperately to win the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s a pathological obsession. He thinks he can sell the Peace Prize Committee on giving it to him, as if it were one of his cheap ties or overpriced watches, by repeating the exaggerated lie that he has resolved seven conflicts around the world since coming into office (sometimes it’s as many as eleven).

Well, now we know what we’ve always known: the people in Norway are not as gullible as his merch-wearing MAGA yokel supporters.

You’ve likely never heard of María Corina Machado. She is Venezuela’s main opposition leader, and unlike trump she is relatively inconspicuous in international headlines, because she has been forced into hiding by the murderous Maduro regime. The Nobel Committee cited her decades-long “tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”

So while trump is ordering his military to blow up Venezuelan fishing boats and ratcheting up tensions by moving seven U.S. Navy warships and a nuclear-powered submarine off the coast of South America—giving Maduro an excuse to tighten his grip on power—Machado has been working to “mobilize both domestic and international support for a peaceful resolution to the ongoing electoral fraud crisis” and to “bring attention to the human rights abuses occurring under the current regime.”

Personally, I don’t much care about the Nobel Peace Prize. Ever since they gave it to Obama for no apparent reason—saying it was for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”—its meaning and prestige have been downgraded in my view. But of course, the fact that Obama got it makes it that much more desirable for trump. As the leader of a neo-Confederate, racist political movement, trump feels desperately that he must not be outshone in any way by his Black predecessor.

Still, I’m relieved the Nobel Committee didn’t fall for trump’s song-and-dance routine. Part of me feared they might give it to him anyway, as a way of reminding him that he’s not actually on Putin’s side and encouraging him to behave more like a Western leader.

But I don’t think the folks in Oslo have given up on using their platform to send a message. It’s as if awarding the Prize to Venezuela’s Machado was directed at trump. The message is: this is how you pursue peace—not with warships. And also: the Peace Prize is not about ceasefires, it’s about democracy. Because without democracy, there is no peace. No politician in U.S. history has done more to damage democratic principles and institutions, at home and abroad, than trump. Giving him the Prize would have been a travesty.

It’s why he will never deserve it. And all the talk lately by pundits and analysts that it may be merited for the Gaza 20-point plan misses the mark. There are plenty of reasons Netanyahu and Hamas have decided now is the time to cease hostilities—most of them having nothing to do with trump. The supposed “trump plan” is largely a rehash of the Biden plan that failed last January. Now, the timing worked out favorably: Hamas has essentially been defeated, and Netanyahu is thinking about his positioning as a “peacemaker” ahead of Israeli elections less than a year from now. 

We’ll see how much of the plan actually gets implemented. My guess is that phase one will go through, the hostages will be released, Israel will release prisoners and retreat to the agreed-upon line. Aid will start flooding in. After that, it's anyone's guess. I can't imagine that Hamas will de-militarize.   

Nonetheless, clearly trump’s recent push to bring the parties together was part of his campaign to win the Nobel Peace Prize. And if so, the prestige of the Prize worked in trump's narcissistic mind the way it had to. 

The rebuilding of Gaza will take a very long time and the sustained efforts and resources of the US. I hope trump remembers that for the Nobel Prize, like a trophy at his golf club that he's won a dozen times, there’s always next year.

Projection

Projection. Human beings are experts at it. In all likelihood we are the only creatures that do it—though that would be hard to test (but I suspect not impossible). Projection bridges the existential gap between our inner thoughts and feelings, which we are sure of, and the outside world, which we can never be sure of.

Projection is both conscious and unconscious. We anthropomorphize and personify. We project motives, thoughts, and feelings onto other people, animals, events, and even inanimate objects. We merge our own points of view and beliefs with the outside world so completely that we often cannot distinguish between the real and the imagined.

I think this is part of the reason our screen activities merge so seamlessly with our lives—because it is so natural. We have simply substituted the screen of our minds with the screen we hold in our hands. In fact, projection is precisely what the technology is designed to do, but in reverse: to understand our beliefs and desires, and to project a curated world back to us that reflects them. And then the world we inhabit digitally becomes pure projection.

Psychologically speaking, projection has utility. It has both positive and negative aspects. On the positive side, it is necessary for sympathy and empathy. To empathize with others, we must imagine that they feel (and suffer) as we do. On the negative side, projection can be a source of self-delusion and denial—an evasion of truths we find uncomfortable to confront.

Projection is also a form of identification. It feeds our powerful need for belonging. It reassures us that we are not alone, that there are others like us—and who like us. On another level, it aligns us with a seemingly indifferent and unknowable world. We want the world to make sense, by which we mean a world congruent with our personal thoughts and feelings. Nothing is as threatening to our sense of safety as lack of control, and projection offers a kind of control, however imagined. At its base, it is a product of fear, will, and desire—a denial of the true agency and independence of others and of the world itself.

In his talks, the Hindu sage Nisargadatta Maharaj spoke of moving beyond illusion. Illusion, by definition, is false—and the false is the source of all suffering. Freedom from suffering, the only true freedom, requires clarity of mind. This begins with recognizing that there is an unchanging reality to which we may have access, but which is obscured by the projections of the mind. Mistaking this projected world of illusions for reality, we are not fully conscious or aware.

Nisargadatta gives the example of the world as a screen and the self as a projector of images upon it. The screen is real and unchanging, but blank—one might say disinterested. The images are projections of the mind. The energy that animates them—the light—is the energy source of all life.

We have, he says, the capacity to discern the difference between the screen, the projections, and the light itself. Through stillness and self-examination, we can attune ourselves to the workings of the mind. The more attuned we become, the more elevated our consciousness, and the closer we draw to the unchanging light source—what he calls Love, Reality, or Truth. He uses these words not religiously, but as expressions of awareness and connection to the only thing we can truly know: our own mind.

For those of us shaped by Western thought, the first step is to accept that the universe is indifferent and uncontrollable. It doesn’t care about us; events happen. Believing they happen 'for a reason', as the old self-comforting adage goes, is projection and therefore false. Any notion that the world was created by a well-intentioned deity for our benefit is the epitome of projection. It is no mystery that our conception of the Creator is expressed in human terms—merciful, wrathful, jealous, loving.

Yet the universe, though it may not “care,” has produced us out of its own energies and forces. We are inseparable from it. Perhaps this is what appeals to many about Eastern thought: it acknowledges our innate connection to the universe without the need to invent a Creator or intermediary. It offers a practice of mindfulness that deepens that connection.

And as the falseness of projection and illusion dissolves, what remains is a quieter kind of happiness—a generosity of being. Perhaps this is all that enlightenment means: the light that remains when we no longer insist that the world mirror us, but let it simply be.

Some Time

CLICK HERE TO HEAR THE SONG

Those days were pretty wild,

We went to all the shows. 

Knew every verse by heart,

Had nowhere else to go,

Wore the future like a charm,

Danced to incantations.

We were mystics immune from harm,

Princes of provocation.

Our bodies had no limits,

Except to test the imagination.

We moved in sync like spirits,

The night was our education.

There was no giving up,

No matter how we got knocked down.

Always another chorus,

Always another round.

The hour may be late,

And I may not be in my prime.

But I'm here to tell you, girl,

I've still got some time. 

The ingredients are still there babe,

Not as fresh as they used to be.

But I can still remember, 

All of the recipe.

Don't call me nostalgic, 

Don't say I'm old fashioned.

If you're willing to go there, babe,

I don't have to search for my passion. 

The hour may be late,

And I may not be in my prime.

But I'm here to tell you, girl,

I've still got some time. 

I've still got some time... for you.

Belonging

CLICK HERE TO HEAR AUTHOR READ

We wear the weekday hats 

and costumes, 

in the stores, the factories,

the offices,

and weekend gatherings,

baseball 

and football,

warrior games,

flags and anthems;

and at night

in the bars,

the face paint, tattoos, dances; 

and on weekends

in churches and synagogue, 

the skull cap and fringed shawl, 

psalms and tribal chants, 

and every refrain means 

we belong, we belong, we belong.

Beneath the melodies,

between the words,

a silence, 

a nakedness

covered by the caps

and uniforms, 

stillness

like the moment 

we were born,

helpless and beheld -

on the edge between

death and life,

being and longing to be -   

when we witnessed  

that before anything

there was only

love.

The Power of Love

In the 1960s the Beatles told us that love was all we needed.

A decade later the British glam band Sweet compared love to oxygen: “You get too much, you get too high / Not enough and you’re gonna die.”

By the 1980s, Howard Jones was already asking the more skeptical question: "What is love anyway? Does anybody love anybody anyway?"

But perhaps it was composer Sammy Fain and lyricist Paul Francis Webster who said it best back in 1955, as sung by Andy Williams: "Love is a many splendoured thing. It’s the April rose that only grows in the early spring… the golden crown that makes a man a king."

Admittedly, looking for guidance on the meaning of love in pop music may seem strange, but together the songs testify to love’s eternally puzzling and multi-faceted nature. Romantic love is beautiful, intoxicating, and transformative. Spiritual love is defiant, transcendent, and awesome.

Poet Dylan Thomas assured us that love endures even beyond mortality:

"Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion."

Even the pop refrains point us in the same direction. Huey Lewis & the News declared in 1985 that love is a power beyond explanation: "Make-a one man weep, make another man sing… And with a little help from above, you feel the power of love." Even here, love is not just a fleeting emotion. It requires “help from above,” suggesting something eternal and transcendent.

And love has long been recognized as the cornerstone of Western morality. Leviticus 19:18 commands us: “Love thy fellow as thyself” - ve’ahavta l’re’echa kamocha. One of Judaism's greatest sages, Rabbi Akiva, called this a klal gadol, a great principle of the Torah.

This insight is shared in the East as well. In the non-dualist teachings of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, love is not selective but boundless — not an emotion directed toward one individual, but the very connective tissue of existence. When the ego dissolves, desire and fear give way to an inexhaustible energy of giving. “You are neither the husband nor the wife,” he taught. “You are the love between the two.” True love is not confined to bodies or personalities; it is the space of shared consciousness.

Seen this way, the journey of love is really the elevation of consciousness — the realization that beneath our separateness we share the same being, the same life. This is the universalism behind "love thy fellow as thyself": love as recognition, not preference. Or as Nisargadatta put it: “Love says: I am everything.”

From the Beatles to Dylan Thomas, from Huey Lewis to the Torah, the message converges: love is both mystery and power, both intimate and universal. But the essence of love is actually as simple as it is transcendent: act with kindness and compassion. The rest, as they say, is commentary.

When We Stop Creating

I used to feel proud to be part of humanity.

It felt good, because human beings had done wonderful things. We created majestic works of art, wrote magnificent books, sang joyous songs. We built cathedrals and pagodas, carved temples out of stone, and raised cities from the ground. We eliminated smallpox, split the atom, and stood on the moon.

Of course, we have also done terrible things. Atrocities, wars, cruelty beyond measure. But you cannot deny the Sistine Chapel, Saint Peter’s Basilica, the Taj Mahal, Angkor Wat, Machu Picchu. You cannot deny the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Yeats, the novels of Dostoevsky, the music of Bach, Beethoven, Gershwin. The songs of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. Humanity has proven itself capable of staggering beauty.

Growing up, I felt part of that story. When I read the books, visited the sites, sang the songs, I felt I belonged to a lineage of creators. It seemed to me that I was part of a species with limitless creative potential, because of what we had already achieved. Surely there was so much more ahead of us. And maybe—just maybe—I could play some small part in it.

Lately, though, another thought troubles me: What happens when we stop creating? What happens when the machines do it for us—the image-making, the music-writing, the story-spinning, the thinking itself? What happens to humanity’s sense of itself when we outsource the very acts that once defined our spirit and soul? 

In the film The Social Dilemma, technology critic Tristan Harris speaks of a paradigm shift. For the first time, he says, we have invented a technology that is not merely a 'tool'. From the wheel to the printing press, from the telephone to the personal computer, technologies have historically been designed to help us accomplish tasks more efficiently. They extended human agency. The printing press spread ideas. The telephone allowed voices to carry across distance. These were tools that worked for us.

But social media—and now machine learning systems—work on us. They use us as much as we use them. Algorithms learn our preferences and in turn shape our thoughts, desires, and behaviors to serve commercial or political ends. The more we rely on them, the more they influence us.

In some sense, this is not entirely new. Newspapers, television, and radio were always used to persuade and to sell. But the intimacy of today’s technologies is unprecedented. Our phones are not just media channels; they are companions, advisors, decision-makers. They mediate every aspect of life: work, shopping, travel, communication, entertainment.

And now, increasingly, they mediate creativity itself, which is troubling to me. 

Art is not just another domain of human activity. It is where we meet our own soul. Through stories, music, paintings, films, poems, we connect to one another and to the depths of our humanity. Art is not decoration. It is recognition: the proof that someone else has felt what I feel, seen what I see, longed as I long.

What happens when machines make the films we watch, the music we listen to, the stories we read? What happens when the mirror of human experience is replaced by the reflection of aggregated data scraped from the internet and optimized for engagement, but untethered from lived life?

I fear that as we outsource creativity to machines, we risk losing our faith in ourselves. We risk ceasing to believe in the potential that human beings are capable of. If beauty no longer carries the weight of human struggle, love, or imagination behind it, then it will not connect us to one another in the same way. It may dazzle us, but it will not bond us.

And without that bond—without that sense of belonging to a lineage of creators—we become disconnected, apathetic, and lonely. Just as great art once elevated our sense of humanity, machine-made art may begin to flatten it. If we consume only the reflections of algorithms, we will become their reflection: soulless, mechanical, cut off from our own depth.

The danger, then, is not simply that machines will replace us. It is that we will forget who we are and care less about each other. The moment we stop creating for ourselves, we risk losing the very thing that once made it feel so good to be a member of the human race.