The purpose you’re studying this letter from me in the present day 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 lot of time within the college laptop lab, screwing round on Usenet and the early World Wide Web, in search of fascinating issues to learn. Soon sufficient I wasn’t content material to simply learn stuff on the web—I needed to make it. So I realized HTML and made a fundamental internet web page, after which a higher internet web page, after which a entire web site stuffed with internet issues. And then I simply saved going from there. That amateurish assortment of internet pages led to a journalism internship with the net arm of a journal 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.
But 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 middle for creativity. We have a tendency to consider creativity as occurring extra within the artist’s studio or writers’ workshop. But all through historical past, fairly often our biggest inventive leaps—and I’d argue that the net and its descendants characterize one such leap—have been on account of advances in expertise.
There are the massive simple examples, like images or the printing press, but it surely’s additionally true of all kinds of inventive innovations that we regularly take as a right. Oil paints. Theaters. Musical scores. Electric synthesizers! Almost anyplace you look within the arts, maybe exterior of pure vocalization, expertise has performed a function.
But the important thing to creative achievement has by no means been the expertise itself. It has been the best way artists have utilized it to specific our humanity. Think of the best way we speak concerning the arts. We usually praise it with phrases that confer with our humanity, like soul, coronary heart, and life; we regularly criticize it with descriptors such as sterile, medical, or lifeless. (And certain, you’ll be able to love a sterile piece of artwork, however sometimes that’s as a result of the artist has leaned into sterility to make a level about humanity!)
All of which is to say I believe that AI will be, can be, and already is a software for inventive expression, however that true artwork will at all times be one thing steered by human creativity, not machines.
I might be fallacious. I hope not.
This subject, which was fully produced by human beings utilizing computer systems, explores creativity and the strain between the artist and expertise. You can 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.
Yet 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 resolve issues. So it was necessary to us to convey 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’ve ever needed to know the way we would nuke an asteroid, that is the difficulty for you!)
We’re additionally attempting to get a little extra inventive ourselves. Over the following few points, you’ll discover some modifications coming to this journal with the addition of some new common objects (see Caiwei Chen’s “3 Things” for one such instance). Among these modifications, we’re planning to solicit and publish extra common reader suggestions and reply questions you could have about expertise. We invite you to get inventive and e mail us: newsroom@technologyreview.com.
As at all times, thanks for studying.