In that it brings novelty and expands our horizon while involving much human ingenuity and creativity, technological development itself is much like art. In certain utilitarian sense, the gadgets produced by, say, Dyson may have as much if not more value than other pieces of conventional artwork. Besides the work put in by industrial designers to make those gadgets as visually appealing as they are functional, some of the gadgets directly aid the work of artists in creating new artwork. The Dyson hairdryer may be wielded by a hair stylist to create a new hair style, or Apple's iPad and Mac can be used by online content creators to edit their videos, music producers to create their music, or graphic designers to experiment with their designs. That those gadgets are mass produced in factories in order to be sold and make profits may seem antithetical to art. Considered in the enlarged sense along with music, movies, mathematical theorems, and any product of collective human effort, intelligence, and ingenuity which lack physical authenticity while possessing wide accessibility, those gadgets are certainly a part of humanity's artistic output.
“Dyson Supersonic Special Gift Edition.” Dyson, https://www.dyson.com/hair-care/hair-dryers/supersonic/fuchsia-nickel.
With computers and digital files, and soon immersive virtual reality, more and more of art is not what we go to museums to appreciate. Since we are not allowed to touch the artworks on display in museums, nor do we usually smell them for artistic appreciation, they can in principle all be enjoyed in our rooms, either on our computers or with a virtual headset. With pieces of music or writing, we have been enjoying them in our privacy even before modern computers came along. We may even reproduce experiences with direct neural stimulation in the future, in which case who is to tell that that experience of appreciating art is not genuine. As argued by Douglas Davis, the distinction between the authentic and the digital becomes moot.
“Atlas: Partners in Parkour.” YouTube, 17 Aug. 2021, https://youtu.be/tF4DML7FIWk.
If robots and AI advance as far as we envision, then we would eventually be conversing with works of art, quite literally. In movies like the Terminator series or the Avengers: The Age of Ultron, the robots (or more precisely the AI running the robots) try to eradicate humanity and are portrayed as evil. On the other hand, in movies like Her or Interstellar, AI becomes a human companion, filling the human need for company. With careful development of the technologies, the former kind of robots will hopefully be just works of fiction while the latter will be actualized as accessible works of technological art like the existing gadgets around us. Already at the rudimentary stages, we have robots that can help us with depression, as demonstrated in an MIT Media Lab study. It's exciting to imagine the future when a piece of art actually starts talking to us, makes us laugh, and lets us know that life is fun and still worth living.
Bostrom, Nick. Superintelligence. Oxford University Press, 2016.
Chalmers, David J. Reality+ : Virtual Worlds and the Problem of Philosophy. W. W. Norton & Company, 2022.
Davis, Douglas. “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction (An Evolving Thesis: 1991-1995).” Leonardo, vol. 28, no. 5, 1995, pp. 381–86, https://doi.org/10.2307/1576221.
“Project Overview ' Robotic Positive Psychology Coach for College Students.” MIT Media Lab, https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/personalized-emotional-wellness-coach/overview/.
Russell, Stuart J. Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. Penguin Books, 2020.
"A Boy And His Atom: The World's Smallest Movie". YouTube , uploaded by IBM. 30 Apr. 2013 https://youtu.be/oSCX78-8-q0 Nanoscience indeed gives us a shift in our perception of reality, when we can visualize individual atoms whose sizes are hard to even grasp. Even though Jim Gimzewski and Victoria Vesna characterized the shift as "from a purely visual culture to one based on sensing and connectivity" (Gimzewski and Vesna 1), focusing on the mode of perception, I would like to focus on the significance of the shift in the content of perception, or more precisely the interpreted content of perception since while our perception changed over time reality stayed the same. “Scanning Tunneling Microscope.” IBM100 - Scanning Tunneling Microscope , https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/microscope/. Much like inhabitants of Flatland, for majority of human history, we could only see the surface of things at only our particular arbitrary human scale...
When we are appreciating art, that experience unfolds in our brains. Brain as we understand now is where all the interesting and exciting things happen: our feelings, imagination, intelligence, creativity, and consciousness all reside in the brain. It is impossible to imagine what kind of interesting life a brainless zombie would lead. If eventually what we care about are the ideas and feelings that we entertain and that entertain us, then it is safe to say that the brain is the most important organ when it comes to art. We create and seek art to expand our minds through novel experiences. Hence, I can imagine the future where we modify our brains with brain computer interface technology to augment our conscious experience. With companies like Neuralink, we may be closer to that future than we expected. "Upgrade Trailer #1 (2018) | Movieclips Trailers". YouTube , uploaded by Movieclips Trailers. 3 Apr. 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36PDeN9NRZ0. "The Science Beh...
Turing Machine from Wikimedia Commons Ideas are the currency and art of mathematics. In deep, novel, beautiful ideas lies the heart of mathematics. Like physical technologies, those ideas then combine to produce even more deep and beautiful ideas that surprise and inspire us. For instance, Alan Turing distilled the idea of computation from human "computers" back in the day, scribbling on papers and carrying digits, into abstract Turing machines that form the foundation of computer science, giving birth to the modern electronic computers and providing theoretical underpinnings for algorithms that run on those computers. Not only that, Turing machines further give rise to the Halting Problem, the problem of determining whether a computer program stops and successfully returns a result or never stops and runs endlessly like a broken record without returning a result, and the Halting Problem then implies Gödel Incompleteness Theorem, which tells us that we cannot prove that a ma...
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