the AI Tsunami:
Our Brave New a.i.World & where it’s all Heading

[based on a virtual conversation with Tara over coffee & breakfast one morning]
2022.10.30 SUN — 07:14 AM PST

Once upon a Time…

There used to be a profession called painting.

The job was, ostensibly, to capture the essence of a person, or an event, or a place, in a stylistic manner, using a brush and a canvas and paints. The job might have also been to create images of beauty.

There used to be a profession called illustration. 

The job was to take concepts in articles and books, to extract their symbolism and metaphors, and to translate those into a hand-rendered creation that illustrated  the underlying concept or thrust of the piece.

There used to be a profession called photography.

The camera doesn’t lie, they said. Which, in one sense, was true. The camera captures actual light in the world, bouncing off of real physical objects. The crop and the angle and the focus, however, could certainly mislead or misconstrue. Nonetheless, manipulation of those qualities: focus, perspective, angle, lighting, etc… led to the field of “literal photographic representation” becoming recognized as a creative form all its own. 

There used to be professions called cinematography and editing.

Cinematographers, in a very simplistic view, take a continuous sequence of still images, 24 to 120 per second depending on your preference, and string them together. 

There used to be a profession called video game design & development.

As cinema is to photographic stills, so are video games to cinema. 

There used to be a profession (for a brief flashing moment) called Virtual Reality Design.

And as video games are to cinema, so is VR design & development to video games. Yet another order of magnitude more complex. 

And once upon a time, in a Galaxy far, far, away, there used to be a crude measure of homo sapiens intelligence called Chess.

And now there is only… the AI.

And its happening.

Very. Very.

Blindingly.

Fast.