The explanation you might be studying this letter from me at this time is that I used to be bored 30 years in the past.
I used to be bored and curious in regards to the world and so I wound up spending a whole lot of time within the college pc lab, screwing round on Usenet and the early World Large Net, on the lookout for fascinating issues to learn. Quickly sufficient I wasn’t content material to simply learn stuff on the web—I wished to make it. So I discovered HTML and made a fundamental net web page, after which a greater net web page, after which a complete web site filled with net issues. After which I simply stored going from there. That amateurish assortment of net pages led to a journalism internship with the net arm of {a magazine} that paid little consideration to what we geeks had been doing on the net. And that led to my first actual journalism job, after which one other, and, properly, finally this journalism job.
However none of that will have been attainable if I hadn’t been bored and curious. And extra to the purpose: inquisitive about tech.
The college pc lab could appear at first like an unlikely heart for creativity. We have a tendency to consider creativity as taking place extra within the artist’s studio or writers’ workshop. However all through historical past, fairly often our best artistic leaps—and I’d argue that the online and its descendants signify one such leap—have been as a consequence of advances in expertise.
There are the massive simple examples, like pictures or the printing press, however it’s additionally true of all kinds of artistic innovations that we regularly take as a right. Oil paints. Theaters. Musical scores. Electrical synthesizers! Virtually anyplace you look within the arts, maybe exterior of pure vocalization, expertise has performed a job.
However the important thing to creative achievement has by no means been the expertise itself. It has been the way in which artists have utilized it to specific our humanity. Consider the way in which we discuss in regards to the arts. We regularly praise it with phrases that consult with our humanity, like soul, coronary heart, and life; we regularly criticize it with descriptors corresponding to sterile, medical, 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 could be, might be, and already is a software for artistic expression, however that true artwork will all the time be one thing steered by human creativity, not machines.
I may very well be flawed. I hope not.
This challenge, which was completely produced by human beings utilizing computer systems, explores creativity and the stress between the artist and expertise. You may 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 after all, creativity is about extra than simply the humanities. All of human development stems from creativity, as a result of creativity is how we remedy issues. So it was necessary to us to convey you accounts of that as properly. You’ll discover these in tales from Carrie Klein, Carly Kay, Matthew Ponsford, and Robin George Andrews. (Should you’ve ever wished to know the way we would nuke an asteroid, that is the problem for you!)
We’re additionally attempting to get somewhat extra artistic ourselves. Over the following few points, you’ll discover some adjustments coming to this journal with the addition of some new common gadgets (see Caiwei Chen’s “3 Issues” for one such instance). Amongst these adjustments, we’re planning to solicit and publish extra common reader suggestions and reply questions you’ll have about expertise. We invite you to get artistic and electronic mail us: newsroom@technologyreview.com.
As all the time, thanks for studying.
