The rationale you’re studying this letter from me as we speak 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 whole lot of time within the college laptop lab, screwing round on Usenet and the early World Huge 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 discovered HTML and made a fundamental internet web page, after which a greater internet web page, after which a complete 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 web arm of {a magazine} that paid little consideration to what we geeks had 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 may have been potential 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 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 characterize one such leap—have been as a result of advances in expertise.
There are the large straightforward examples, like pictures or the printing press, but it surely’s additionally true of all types of artistic innovations that we frequently take as a right. Oil paints. Theaters. Musical scores. Electrical synthesizers! Virtually anyplace you look within the arts, maybe outdoors of pure vocalization, expertise has performed a job.
However the important thing to inventive achievement has by no means been the expertise itself. It has been the way in which artists have utilized it to precise our humanity. Consider the way in which we discuss concerning the arts. We regularly praise it with phrases that confer with our humanity, like soul, coronary heart, and life; we frequently criticize it with descriptors resembling 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 believe that AI might 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 might be unsuitable. I hope not.
This challenge, which was fully produced by human beings utilizing computer systems, explores creativity and the strain 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 clear up issues. So it was essential to us to deliver you accounts of that as effectively. You’ll discover these in tales from Carrie Klein, Carly Kay, Matthew Ponsford, and Robin George Andrews. (In the event you’ve ever wished to understand how we’d nuke an asteroid, that is the problem for you!)
We’re additionally attempting to get a bit of extra artistic ourselves. Over the subsequent few points, you’ll discover some modifications coming to this journal with the addition of some new common gadgets (see Caiwei Chen’s “3 Things” for one such instance). Amongst 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 artistic and e mail us: newsroom@technologyreview.com.
As all the time, thanks for studying.
