The explanation you’re studying this letter from me right this moment is that I used to be bored 30 years in the past.
I used to be bored and curious concerning the world and so I wound up spending a number of time within the college laptop lab, screwing round on Usenet and the early World Extensive Internet, searching for attention-grabbing issues to learn. Quickly sufficient I wasn’t content material to simply learn stuff on the web—I wished to make it. So I realized HTML and made a fundamental internet web page, after which a greater internet web page, after which an entire web site filled with internet issues. After which I simply saved going from there. That amateurish assortment of internet pages led to a journalism internship with the net arm of {a magazine} that paid little consideration to what we geeks have been doing on the internet. And that led to my first actual journalism job, after which one other, and, nicely, finally this journalism job.
However none of that might have been attainable if I hadn’t been bored and curious. And extra to the purpose: interested in tech.
The college laptop lab could seem at first like an unlikely heart for creativity. We have a tendency to think about creativity as occurring extra within the artist’s studio or writers’ workshop. However all through historical past, fairly often our biggest artistic leaps—and I might argue that the net and its descendants symbolize one such leap—have been as a result of advances in know-how.
There are the large straightforward examples, like images or the printing press, nevertheless it’s additionally true of all types of artistic innovations that we regularly take with no consideration. Oil paints. Theaters. Musical scores. Electrical synthesizers! Virtually wherever you look within the arts, maybe outdoors of pure vocalization, know-how has performed a task.
However the important thing to inventive achievement has by no means been the know-how itself. It has been the way in which artists have utilized it to specific our humanity. Consider the way in which we speak concerning the arts. We frequently praise it with phrases that discuss with our humanity, like soul, coronary heart, and life; we regularly criticize it with descriptors equivalent to sterile, scientific, or lifeless. (And certain, you’ll be able to love a sterile piece of artwork, however usually that’s as a result of the artist has leaned into sterility to make a degree about humanity!)
All of which is to say I feel that AI may be, can be, and already is a software for artistic expression, however that true artwork will at all times be one thing steered by human creativity, not machines.
I may very well be unsuitable. I hope not.
This challenge, which was solely produced by human beings utilizing computer systems, explores creativity and the stress between the artist and know-how. You’ll be able to see it on our cowl illustrated by Tom Humberstone, and examine it in tales from James O’Donnell, Will Douglas Heaven, Rebecca Ackermann, Michelle Kim, Bryan Gardiner, and Allison Arieff.
But in fact, creativity is about extra than simply the humanities. All of human development stems from creativity, as a result of creativity is how we clear up issues. So it was vital to us to deliver you accounts of that as nicely. You’ll discover these in tales from Carrie Klein, Carly Kay, Matthew Ponsford, and Robin George Andrews. (If you happen to’ve ever wished to understand how we would nuke an asteroid, that is the difficulty for you!)
We’re additionally attempting to get slightly extra artistic ourselves. Over the subsequent few points, you’ll discover some modifications coming to this journal with the addition of some new common objects (see Caiwei Chen’s “3 Issues” for one such instance). Amongst these modifications, we’re planning to solicit and publish extra common reader suggestions and reply questions you might have about know-how. We invite you to get artistic and electronic mail us: newsroom@technologyreview.com.
As at all times, thanks for studying.
