The AI question we should be asking

AIthough our age is defined by humanity's disproportionate influence on the planet, we ourselves are undergoing profound changes.

Tasks that previously could be accomplished only through human labour are increasingly being performed by machines, including many tasks that rely on creativity. Far from a distant theoretical possibility, artificial intelligence has arrived - and it is here to stay.

In considering Al's potential, it can be tempting to channel the techno-optimism of the 1990s, when IBM's Deep Blue triumphed over the world chess champion, unleashing a wave of interdisciplinary interest in how AI might be deployed and commercialized in other domains. But it can also be tempting to adopt the opposing view and insist that AI will become an intolerable threat to most people's livelihoods.

Both reactions are not new: they have often accompanied the emergence of major innovations. They also make similar mistakes, because both treat technological progress as if it were something separate from us. Nowadays, the optimists fixate on what AI might do for us, while the pessimists worry about what it will do to us. But the question we should be asking is what AI will do with us.

This question is as pertinent to fine art as it is to finance, despite the apparent differences between these domains of quintessentially human activity. New-media art is best understood as a dialogue between experimentation and tradition. The human longing for novelty and tradition are mutually dependent: only by appreciating what came before an artwork can we comprehend what makes it new. No work is fully independent of cultural heritage, just as light cannot be understood in the absence of darkness.