I wrote this 10 years ago. Feels worth repeating.

A while ago, I stumbled upon the world’s smallest music venue, dreamt up gloriously by musicians Emily Barker and Dom Coyote. Inside a small wooden box is one musician and, 30 centimetres away, one audience member, who listens to one song in the ethereal darkness. The idea is both illogical and visceral. As one person observed, the tiny box is disorientating: it blurs the line between what’s weird and what’s wonderful. The shadowy darkness makes some people laugh. Others are reduced to tears.

In an age of demeaning and diminishing machines and downloadable digital delights, it proves that human intimacy still matters and that the answer we’re all searching for has to do with human contact. It proves that realness and authenticity are what you, me, and we (if you’ll excuse the grammar) must fight to preserve.Mathematicians, engineers, physicists, and financiers are all desperately needed to solve the world’s problems. But it is only poets, painters, novelists, filmmakers, and musicians who can reach out and touch the human heart. It is only they who can travel deep inside our heads and look outwards. It is only they who can answer the biggest question of all, which is us.This is a question that no computer seeking a logical or specific end point will ever be able to answer, because being human is not a logical problem and the answer will be different every time the question is asked.

We are, whether we like it or not, on the cusp of developing technologies that will give us godlike powers.The simple question is what to do with this power. Who do we want to be?