The rationale you might be reading this letter from me today is that I used to be bored 30 years ago.
I used to be bored and inquisitive about the world and so I wound up spending plenty of time within the university computer lab, screwing around on Usenet and the early World Wide Web, on the lookout for interesting things to read. Soon enough I wasn’t content to only read stuff on the web—I desired to make it. So I learned HTML and made a basic web page, after which a greater web page, after which a complete website stuffed with web things. After which I just kept going from there. That amateurish collection of web pages led to a journalism internship with the web arm of a magazine that paid little attention to what we geeks were doing on the net. And that led to my first real journalism job, after which one other, and, well, eventually journalism job.
But none of that might have been possible if I hadn’t been bored and curious. And more to the purpose: inquisitive about tech.
The university computer lab could seem at first like an unlikely center for creativity. We tend to consider creativity as happening more within the artist’s studio or writers’ workshop. But throughout history, fairly often our biggest creative leaps—and I’d argue that the online and its descendants represent one such leap—have been resulting from advances in technology.
There are the large easy examples, like photography or the printing press, but it surely’s also true of all types of creative inventions that we frequently take without any consideration. Oil paints. Theaters. Musical scores. Electric synthesizers! Almost anywhere you look in the humanities, perhaps outside of pure vocalization, technology has played a task.
But the important thing to artistic achievement has never been the technology itself. It has been the best way artists have applied it to specific our humanity. Consider the best way we talk in regards to the arts. We frequently compliment it with words that check with our humanity, like , , and ; we frequently criticize it with descriptors resembling , , or . (And sure, you may love a sterile piece of art, but typically that’s since the artist has leaned into sterility to make some extent about humanity!)
All of which is to say I believe that AI could be, will probably be, and already is a tool for creative expression, but that true art will all the time be something steered by human creativity, not machines.
I may very well be mistaken. I hope not.
This issue, which was entirely produced by human beings using computers, explores creativity and the strain between the artist and technology. You’ll be able to see it on our cover illustrated by Tom Humberstone, and skim about it in stories from James O’Donnell, Will Douglas Heaven, Rebecca Ackermann, Michelle Kim, Bryan Gardiner, and Allison Arieff.
Yet after all, creativity is about greater than just the humanities. All of human advancement stems from creativity, because creativity is how we solve problems. So it was necessary to us to bring you accounts of that as well. You’ll find those in stories from Carrie Klein, Carly Kay, Matthew Ponsford, and Robin George Andrews. (In case you’ve ever desired to understand how we’d nuke an asteroid, that is the difficulty for you!)
We’re also attempting to get just a little more creative ourselves. Over the subsequent few issues, you’ll notice some changes coming to this magazine with the addition of some latest regular items (see Caiwei Chen’s “3 Things” for one such example). Amongst those changes, we’re planning to solicit and publish more regular reader feedback and answer questions you’ll have about technology. We invite you to get creative and email us: newsroom@technologyreview.com.
As all the time, thanks for reading.
