The explanation you might be 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 plenty of time within the college laptop lab, screwing round on Usenet and the early World Huge Internet, on the lookout for fascinating issues to learn. Quickly sufficient I wasn’t content material to simply learn stuff on the web—I needed to make it. So I discovered HTML and made a primary internet web page, after which a greater internet web page, after which an entire web site stuffed with internet issues. After which I simply stored 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, effectively, ultimately this journalism job.
However none of that might have been doable if I hadn’t been bored and curious. And extra to the purpose: interested in tech.
The college laptop lab could appear at first like an unlikely middle for creativity. We have a tendency to think about creativity as taking place 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 massive simple examples, like pictures or the printing press, however it’s additionally true of all types of artistic innovations that we frequently take with no consideration. Oil paints. Theaters. Musical scores. Electrical synthesizers! Nearly 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 precise our humanity. Consider the way in which we speak concerning the arts. We regularly praise it with phrases that seek advice from our humanity, like soul, coronary heart, and life; we frequently criticize it with descriptors corresponding to sterile, scientific, or lifeless. (And certain, you possibly can love a sterile piece of artwork, however sometimes 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 device 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 incorrect. I hope not.
This situation, which was fully produced by human beings utilizing computer systems, explores creativity and the strain 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 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 clear up issues. So it was necessary to us to convey you accounts of that as effectively. You’ll discover these in tales from Carrie Klein, Carly Kay, Matthew Ponsford, and Robin George Andrews. (When you’ve ever needed to understand how we would nuke an asteroid, that is the problem for you!)
We’re additionally making an attempt to get a bit 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 Things” for one such instance). Amongst these adjustments, we’re planning to solicit and publish extra common reader suggestions and reply questions you could have about know-how. We invite you to get artistic and e mail us: newsroom@technologyreview.com.
As at all times, thanks for studying.
