Treating people like machines: There is a fear in art making. It is disguised as laziness, procrastination, lack of self confidence. etc. This came up in an interesting conversation I had talking to my brother about the drive that propels someone to obsess over art making. We tried to pinpoint attributes that made someone an artist. One attribute discussed was the overtly positive view artists are able to take on problems. It's a necessary mind-set that needs to be achieved in order to be an effective problem solver in art. Not all people start off with that. Self confidence is a big issue - early in art-making we tend to fall short in execution of what we imagine an art-work should look like. My brother said that we are a lot like machines in this aspect - continuously self diagnosing the problem set before us, executing possible solutions and eliminating the ones that don't work. In response to the view that we are like robots, I reminded my brother that robots are our creation, made in our likeness. That we don't act like robots but robots act like us. --
I wonder if DARCI cannot emulate a similar stage of growth where she overcomes her insecurities in order to become an obsessively positive art-making human?
--
Also: Thanks to everyone who put up with my game a couple of weeks ago:)
I really like your view point that machines are people. I think there may be a lot of value in thinking this way. We build machines to perform tasks that we think are valuable. The machines generally don’t come up with tasks on their own (though I think it’s possible). And if they did, we would only get excited if we cared about the task they came up with. In that sense, they are like very specialized “partial” people.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, many artificial intelligence related algorithms are inspired directly by human physiology and/or psychology.
The drive to obsess over and create art, and the ability to problem solve within that realm is indeed a very important skill to aquire, because this same approach to problem solving in art can be applied to so many instances in other life situations.
ReplyDeleteThe confidence to prevail in art can translate and apply directly to how problems in life are approachedand solved.