Kevin Kelly: evaluation

Transcript context

…How will it matter? I think what it matters is a way of auxiliary — I don’t think it’s going to necessarily replace typing, but I think it’ll be another way of interfacing with the technology that we want to do. One of the dreams that Jaron Lanier and others have had with virtual reality is being able to create — paint — things as fast as we could think of them. There could be a way in which we are generating content faster and more easily than the laborious way we have right now of having to put things into language — there may be some way to post-symbolically skip some of the language framing that we do to make, say, an image. This is something I’ve learned recently about making daily AI art, which is that theoretically these machines can make any possible image. The real shock that we’ve had right now is we now suddenly have the conversational user interface. We now have an ability to use conversation as an interface to the AI capabilities. Here’s what happens: is we’re using a conversational interface to try to make art, but there’s a lot of art that humans create that can’t be reduced to language. You can’t get there by using language. There’s art that I’ve been trying to make, and I realize I’m never going to be able to make it with an AI because I need language to get there. There’s lots of things that we can’t get to with language. That’s one way in which this human-computer interface could make a new frontier, is enabling us to do things where we can bypass language and work with maybe emotions or other intuitions or things that we don’t even have language for because we’re actually tapping into the brain directly. But do you ever find that, say, you need to write a piece to figure out what you think about something, or maybe it’s the act of painting that is giving you the idea of the image, and there’s no way to reverse engineer that?…

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