The rationale you might be 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 number of time within the college laptop lab, screwing round on Usenet and the early World Vast Net, in search of fascinating issues to learn. Quickly sufficient I wasn’t content material to only learn stuff on the web—I wished to make it. So I realized HTML and made a fundamental internet web page, after which a greater internet web page, after which a complete 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 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, 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 laptop lab could appear 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. However all through historical past, fairly often our biggest inventive leaps—and I might argue that the net and its descendants characterize one such leap—have been because of advances in expertise.
There are the massive straightforward examples, like pictures 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. Electrical synthesizers! Nearly wherever you look within the arts, maybe outdoors 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 best way artists have utilized it to specific our humanity. Consider the best way we speak concerning 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, 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 some extent about humanity!)
All of which is to say I feel that AI will be, will likely be, and already is a instrument for inventive expression, however that true artwork will at all times be one thing steered by human creativity, not machines.
I might be unsuitable. I hope not.
This difficulty, which was completely produced by human beings utilizing computer systems, explores creativity and the strain between the artist and expertise. You possibly 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.
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 essential 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. (For those who’ve ever wished to understand how we would nuke an asteroid, that is the problem for you!)
We’re additionally attempting to get a bit extra inventive ourselves. Over the subsequent 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 inventive and e-mail us: newsroom@technologyreview.com.
As at all times, thanks for studying.
