Picasso once said that “Computers are useless – they can only give you answers”. True, they have enabled incredible productivity and played a large role in tremendous economic expansion. But Bill Gates would still be a geek without game (or a college degree) if he hadn’t asked: Software or hardware? Steve Jobs would still be a hippie if he hadn’t wondered “are these things just for nerds?”.
Staring into one’s screen, it is now awfully easy to be drawn mindlessly along. And spew out report after report without getting ‘out of the box’. You come up with the same garbage you would have without a computer – just faster or more frequently.
America’s first billionaire, shipping magnate Daniel Ludwig, thought about that and asked himself: “paperless office?”. He didn’t buy it and developed a massive project in Brazil to produce paper on a theretofore unheard of scale. He foresaw the reams you’ve “borrowed” from your office to feed the machine at home.
Artificial intelligence has a long way to go. It has no counterpart to the older parts of our brain – those controlling respiration, fight or flight, and lust for example. That neat stuff complete with its incredible cortical wrapper make quite the cosmic organ.
A tool kit comprised of only 1s and 0s, or circles and rectilinearity will be no help in discerning between cheese and mold or making lemonade from lemons or evaluating risk or associating truth and beauty. Or painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. (Or being a misogynist for that matter I quess.)
Gonna have to keep on thinkin’ – daydreaming at the very least…
The Subtle Landscape 
Leave a Reply