The Nexus work has helped me to clarify a subject I have been tackling inadvertently over the last couple of years with all my work I do, one way or another – how to be a human in the modern world, all that entails in relation to AI and a dramatically changing social landscape/reality. Ever since I first got an iPhone I have wondered about how we humans are stored on those little objects and how all those apps are a digital record of who we essentially are.
The following article is a fantastic summation of so much of this and asks some excellent questions:
“Human creativity has always been a response to the immense strangeness of reality, and now its subject has evolved, as reality becomes increasingly codeterminate, and intermingled, with computation. If that statement seems extreme, consider the extent to which our fundamental perceptions of reality – from research in the physical sciences to finance to the little screens we constantly interject between ourselves in the world – have changed what it means to live, to feel, to know. As creators and appreciators of the arts, we would do well to remember all the things that Google does not know.” (Finn, 2017)
This is a super important article for me, and although my Nexus work is inherently linked to the questions in this work, I must stay focused on education – but of course it relates to much, much more and beyond. And I may well need to read the book (along with all the others on my shelf!) …
https://aeon.co/essays/how-algorithms-are-transforming-artistic-creativity