A new year starts today. Happy New Year! As I have in past years, I think it’s also worth noting that another year will start tomorrow, too. One also started yesterday. In fact, countless new years have started just now, during the seconds it took you to read this sentence. May they all be beautiful, interesting, and meaningful!
The beginning of a new year is a good time for reflection and for making important decisions. Why limit yourself to doing these things only on one New Year and not on more of them? Why not ask yourself each day, or even several times a day, what ways are open to you—today, right now—to spend whatever time is your own in the most meaningful way? Perhaps today is a good time to start something new or to chip away at something already in the works, perhaps a time best spent taking a break from busy work to behold and to be awed by some work of great art or wisdom, perhaps your mind may be up to learning something new and interesting, perhaps you may benefit from time spent meditating in solitude, perhaps you may enjoy communing with other people or other beings or with some special place, perhaps you feel overwhelmed or fatigued and may benefit most from resting and recharging. Pick one and do it, without regret. Tomorrow you may pick something else.
The purpose of performing this exercise often and not just on certain calendar dates, is that you may be confident that—regardless of any accomplishment—your time was spent deliberately in useful ways—i.e., not wasted, which is really the only thing you may legitimately regret.
Reflect on each day as it passes, and on your journey to date at every meaningful juncture. There is no reason to believe that January 1st is by some coincidence a better time to tend to such things than any other. Let the person you will be tomorrow make tomorrow’s decisions. At worst, it will be the same person you are today. At best, a wiser and/or better-informed version of you.
—Guy
Electronic photography will soon be superior to anything we have now. The first advance will be the exploration of existing negatives. I believe the electronic processes will enhance them. I could get superior prints from my negatives using electronics. Then the time will come when you will be able to make the entire photograph electronically. With the extremely high resolution and the enormous control you can get from electronics, the results will be fantastic. I wish I were young again!
—Ansel Adams, in 1983
Previous installments in this series:
- Remembering the Future — Part I: Introduction
- Remembering the Future — Part II: The Future Will Come
- Remembering the Future — Part II: The Future Will Come (cont.)
- Remembering the Future — Part III: The Future is Shaped by the Present
- Remembering the Future — Part III: The Future is Shaped by the Present (cont.)
Henry Miller wrote, “I am content to live in the mystery, to be surrounded by the unknown. I am content to be a seeker, a pilgrim, a traveler on the road to nowhere.” Albert Einstein wrote, along the same lines, “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.” But Richard Feynman, who was also no stranger to the allure of mystery, still had the good sense to qualify, “It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it.”
Indeed, the future is shrouded in mystery and uncertainty, but not all mysteries are equally mysterious, and not all uncertainties are equally uncertain. In historical perspective, we may recognize trends, patterns, and causal relationships that may not be obvious at surface-level but that, once known and acknowledged, we may use to forecast with varying degrees of plausibility (at least some of) what the future may hold: to know a little about the mystery. We may do so by instinct, which may not be reliable, or we may seek evidence to inform our intuitions, perhaps even go as far as to apply statistical calculations to arrive at more confident and accurate predictions.
As I’m writing, I’m reminded of times (now blissfully long past) when I pursued a corporate career. On various occasions, I found myself either a candidate or an interviewer for certain positions. I recall with some amusement certain inane questions that seemed to come up regularly on job interviews, one being this: where do you see yourself in 5 years? (or some other number of years).
Now on the tail end of my sixth decade of life, I can say with confidence that there has never been a time when I could have predicted where or who I would be 5 years later to any useful degree of accuracy. This is not a coincidence. If I ever felt I could predict accurately where or who I will be 5 years later, I would consider it a warning sign: a sign that I am not challenging myself enough, not trying enough new things, not taking enough risks, becoming too set in my ways.
Not to sugar coat it, there are undoubtedly some disconcerting trends unfolding in the world today. In this essay, I’ll focus on one of the most obvious of these, which seems to be getting a lot of attention from photographers: the increasing powers and prevalence of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
Like it or not, AI is at least part of the future of photography. I think a lot of photographers know this because I see a lot of discussions about it online. Alas, almost all of these discussions miss the most important point about AI, which is this: worrying about the effects of AI on the future of photography is like worrying that a nuclear bomb might interrupt some people naps.
AI is about to change our lives in much greater and more pervasive ways than whatever effect it might have on photography. Prognostications abound about the many jobs and tasks now performed by human beings that AI will almost certainly be able to replace and likely do better. Of course, evidence of AI’s power to generate realistic, photographic-looking images and video, both for entertainment and as means to influence public perceptions, is already a reality.
Some people think that an AI powerful enough to surpass at least some human cognitive capacities may even spell the end of the human species, and perhaps of all organic life on Earth. One, perhaps extreme, example is expressed in an open letter by Eliezer Yudkowsky, published in Time Magazine in March, 2023. In the letter, calling for an immediate stop to AI development until we first develop a strict regulatory framework for it, Yudkowsky wrote, “If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.”
The primary reason for such dire warnings is something known as the “alignment problem.” In simple terms, the alignment problem is this: given AI’s ability (now or in the future) to set goals for itself and to pursue them without need for human approval or even knowledge, how do we make sure that these goals align with the interests of the human species? How do we guarantee that an AI will not choose (by its own rational analysis) a goal that may contrast with or prove disastrous to some or all human beings?
The short answer: currently, this is not possible. Given the opaque nature of AI’s architecture and method of “thinking,” we don’t even know if such control can ever be possible. Even if such regulation was possible technologically, there seems to be no way to enforce it universally. Statements like “we must regulate AI” are specious for the simple fact that there is no unified “we” who can commit and be trusted to enforce such regulation without exception. Either way, as things stand now, there is no stopping the proliferation of AI and no real attempts being made to regulate it effectively. As our species has done so many times before, we have implicitly chosen the “let’s try and see what happens” method of finding out.
~~~
Assuming AI doesn’t kill us, what does it mean for us—as human beings and as photographers—to live in a world of AI? I like the advice offered in this passage, written in 1998 by Hans Moravec:
Imagine a ‘landscape of human competence’ … Advancing computer performance is like water slowly flooding the landscape. A half century ago it began to drown the lowlands, driving out human calculators and record clerks, but leaving most of us dry. Now the flood has reached the foothills, and our outposts there are contemplating retreat. We feel safe on our peaks, but, at the present rate, those too will be submerged within another half century. I propose that we build arks as that day nears, and adopt a seafaring life!
To paraphrase Moravec, technology has been outperforming humans in almost everything we do, and this trend is not stopping. If anything, it is accelerating. His advice, which I agree with completely, is this: if we don’t want technology to drown us, we must find a way to live with it and to float above it.
How do we do this? The key is in the word “competence,” defined (among other things) as “having knowledge, judgment, skill, or strength.” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). AI indeed may evolve to a point where it can do better than human beings in all the things that rely on competence: on knowledge, judgment, skill, or strength. But living a meaningful life also involves elements other than these. These are the elements we must strive for to avoid being “drowned.”
Meaningful living is primarily about having elevated, satisfying inner experiences—things like the experience of beauty, a sense of meaning, awe, creative expression, eudaemonia (the term philosophers and psychologists use to describe a sense of personal flourishing and contentment). Of course, AI can’t experience these and other inner feelings on our behalf any more than another person can.
The upshot for photographers is this: we can certainly use AI to make beautiful, even popular and profitable, images—with or without meaningful aspects of inner experience. In fact, we can now let AI make beautiful images for us without any meaningful experience whatsoever, just sitting in front of a computer and feeding it keywords. But even if we employ AI in useful and profitable ways in some capacities, we don’t have to surrender our meaningful life experiences to AI. We are free to choose to live, to create, and to photograph in ways that elevate our inner experiences and sense of meaning in life: in ways that engage our attention in pleasurable work, and challenge our creative and expressive faculties. We may even incorporate some AI-driven tools into our processes without compromising or sacrificing these things. But these are choices we must make deliberately.
Nobody is forcing us to give those things up, even if AI can outperform us in terms of some skills or productivity or any other metric of “competence.” And if it does, so what? We are still free to enjoy photography just like we did before AI. We can still be out in the world, experiencing it, exploring it, enjoying it, photographing it, making meaning from it. The danger, as the psychologist Rollo May pointed out, is that “technology will serve as a buffer between us and nature, a block between us and the deeper dimensions of our own experience. Tools and techniques ought to be an extension of consciousness, but they can just as easily be a protection from consciousness.”
At least when it comes to artistic photography, the greatest AI-related threat to our enjoyment and artistic expression is not the existence of AI; it is the seduction of letting AI overtake the meaningful experiences that photography may give us in the name of ease, financial interest, or competition. The solution is obvious: resist. Resist using AI to replace or supplant your meaningful experiences as a human being, as a photographer, as an artist.
Continue to Remembering the Future — Part V: The Future is Not Here Yet, But We Are
There has been recent news that a battleship may be designed that is run by AI. I can’t imagine feeling good about the possibility that an AI system might misinterpret potential dangers and decide to launch atomic weapons.
Thanks, Tom! Happy New Year!
Alas, when it comes to weapons the same forces that caused previous arms races are still in play. No country can afford to be left behind if there’s a chance its enemies may gain the upper hand.
“There is no other salvation for civilization and even for the human race than in the creation of a world government, with the security of nations founded upon law. As long as there are sovereign states with their separate armaments and armament secrets, new world wars cannot be avoided.” —Albert Einstein
I started using AI in photography several years ago. I loved it at first, then gradually grew to hate it. I couldn’t explain exactly why. But your last paragraph above expresses the reason perfectly. Thank you.
Thank you, Gary! Happy New Year!
Emphasis on “artificial”. I have used it; to plan a trip (help me find routes, or what’s going on in a city when I land). I have used it in my photography to help remove a twig or a poorly placed line behind a subject (because LR now uses AI in the remove tool). I don’t look for friendship from my camera. Or from, say, a knife, or a broom. These are tools. Just like farmers used to tell their kids not to name their food (giving names to the animals), I don’t expect anything from AI other than as a tool. I am not willing to let my tools BE the experience. Wishing you peace and health, Guy. In all places, on all days.
Thanks, Lori! Wishing you a peaceful and healthy year, too.
In today’s world, where technology can anticipate our habits, influence our choices, and even take advantage of our vulnerabilities, this is more than just a curious experiment—it’s a wake-up call.
Alas, the increased influence of technology in our lives parallels another unfortunate trend: a decline in reading.
More and more people prefer to be fed information and entertainment passively rather than to seek out information actively and critically.