It’s always nice when someone reaches out via email who you haven’t heard from in a while. It’s even better when they leave you with a treat link that you follow for some knowledge. Bryan Alexander is classic for this, and that’s why I love him. But yesterday’s came from Fabio Nascimbeni with a link to Bruce Sterling’s talk from the Dream Syndicate seminar in Rome called “Whatever Happens to Music Will Happen to AI.”
Sterling always has an interesting take, and his comparing the the red hot AI craze we are currently in to the Jazz Age of the 1920s (and music more generally) is compelling. It suggests there’s both a before and after (not to mention the during), even if the after irrevocably transforms the before. One of the most interesting bits from the essay was the following:
The models are modelling computers, while the computers can’t compute AI. The new way is overwhelming the old way.
This pithy summation of how AI is changing the world in which we live and why it’s both an “Age” that has a definite beginning and end as well as a transformative moment in how we understand the role of computers versus a broader paradigm shift to models modelling computers (and all the potential variables that explode in that space) kinda helps me wrap my small brain around some of this insanity. I think.
Anyway, thinking in historical epochs can be helpful given you seldom can understand the epoch you are in until it has already happened.
