Years ago, I remember reading a short piece written by an artist. He (we used that word back then) described the experience of performing onstage during live music performances with an intoxicating tone that made you feel like you were on stage, smelling the paint fumes with him.
He used one phrase that’s stuck with me. While describing the feeling of being on stage and smelling the toxic fumes while he saw paint emerge before his eyes, he said he felt:
”Like being on the edge of knowing”
I thought about that phrase an awful lot. Oftentimes, I’d think about what it meant while I was making my own creations in the workshop – wherever that may be.
There’s something inherently beautiful about creating something. However, there’s a deeper truth that comes with creation – it is always accompanied by destruction. The egg emerges, only to be broken and scrambled The painting emerges, while the clean canvas is permanently marred.
There’s been a recent change in the world, and it’s emerged in a way that’s now unstoppable.
In the time it would take me to properly explain artificial intelligence to the casual onlooker, the technology will have evolved at an exponential rate far greater than the growth of traditional microcomputers, which were accurately governed by Moores Law – a calculation that showed a predictable rate of growth for microcomputers.
In my occupation, I’m now able to complete a month of work in the span of a day – were I to try and complete the same tasks at the entrance point of my career. The advancement is due to a combination of new, emerging tools and my own experience in the field.
What I find incredible about this new place in our time is that it allows a new freedom I haven’t experienced in my life before; time.
When the cotton gin emerged, it changed the way that people harvested cotton; turning a once-painstaking hand-powered process and giving the task to a machine.
We’ve had a substantial amount of equally-liberating advancements in the way we do things, and yet there’s been little reduction to the amount of hours that we work, or increase to the money we earn – largely speaking.
AI will change that, and it already has. However, all that AI will do is elevate and benefit the lives of the people already in occupations that employ like-minded technologies and modalities in their occupation. Some people will find their lives get exponentially easier – while the rest of people will find themselves struggling to pay their bills in a world that now demands automation and intelligence.
I believe the purpose of technology is to free ourselves to be, well, ourselves. While the work I do provides some level of purpose, I find a lot more satisfaction in spending time with Atlas and being present for each moment of his development, instead of leaving him in somebody else’s hands. Being able to spend undistracted time with him while he’s under my care is a luxury far greater than any car with a V12.
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