Like I don’t think a lot of the AI stuff etc is useless in a vacuum. It’s useless when the people making it view creative people as a thing to be replaced, and not only is that morally repugnant, it’s also pretty apparent that the people making tech shit need creatives
The revealing thing about the AI buzz is that it's an innovation that, 20 years ago, would have been sold as a convenience to customers - "look at Super Clippy making it easier to write!" - but in our economy it made more sense to aim the ad pitch only at the ultra-rich as a way to cut jobs.
My analogy has always been from Dead Poets Society: Mr. Keating's poetry teaching method versus the school's crusty old teaching method using soulless graphs and calculations.
STEM teaches people how to build and do things. Arts and humanities teach people why to do things. The line “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should” is more than a movie quote, it’s a warning.
1000% - art and science have been intertwined since the beginning. Desire for expression (art) leads to exploration (science) and discovery (science) leads to more thoughts to express (art).
Creativity has us explore scientific questions in novel ways, science allows us to dial in results in art (resin art comes to mind; requiring great attention to time, temperature, and pressure)
Technology at its best uses both sides of the coin.
FWIW, if art creation was managed by MBAs who take pride in under-resourcing and delivering it in half the time projected by cutting every conceivable corner, it'd come with substantially less soul as well.
At least at some level, too many artists are also unquestioned when they want to fundamentally boycott tech. We too often celebrate and idealize or envy Luddite behavior, and this endorses the abdication of artists’ responsibility for being able to speak to the ethics and ideas of tech.
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The intersection of both is a magical thing.
Technology at its best uses both sides of the coin.