The explanation you might be studying this letter from me right now 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 quite a lot of time within the college laptop lab, screwing round on Usenet and the early World Extensive Net, searching 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 internet web page, after which a greater internet web page, after which an entire web site stuffed 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, ultimately this journalism job.
However none of that may have been doable if I hadn’t been bored and curious. And extra to the purpose: interested by tech.
The college laptop lab could seem at first like an unlikely middle 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 best inventive leaps—and I’d argue that the net and its descendants characterize one such leap—have been on account of advances in know-how.
There are the massive straightforward examples, like pictures or the printing press, however it’s additionally true of all kinds of inventive innovations that we regularly take without any 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 creative 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 discuss in regards to the arts. We regularly praise it with phrases that seek advice from our humanity, like soul, coronary heart, and life; we regularly criticize it with descriptors similar to sterile, scientific, or lifeless. (And positive, you may 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 will be, might be, and already is a device for inventive expression, however that true artwork will all the time be one thing steered by human creativity, not machines.
I could possibly be fallacious. I hope not.
This concern, which was completely produced by human beings utilizing computer systems, explores creativity and the stress between the artist and know-how. 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 vital 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. (When you’ve ever wished to know the way we would nuke an asteroid, that is the problem for you!)
We’re additionally making an attempt to get a bit of extra inventive ourselves. Over the following few points, you’ll discover some modifications coming to this journal with the addition of some new common gadgets (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 could have about know-how. We invite you to get inventive and e mail us: [email protected].
As all the time, thanks for studying.
