Starfox

Don’t ignore your dreams; don’t work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.

I will hammer that iron nail a bit more, in case you aren’t getting it yet. Because this is the older generation’s crippling hangup with their alleged ‘thinking machines.’ When computers first shoved their way into analog reality, they came surrounded by a host of poetic metaphors. Cybernetic devices were clearly much more than mere motors and engines, so they were anthropomorphized and described as having ‘thought,’ ‘memory,’ and nowadays ‘sight’ and ‘hearing.’ Those metaphors are deceptive. These are the mental chains of the old aesthetic, these are the iron bars of oppression we cannot see.

Modern creatives who want to work in good faith will have to fully disengage from the older generation’s mythos of phantoms, and masterfully grasp the genuine nature of their own creative tools and platforms. Otherwise, they will lack comprehension and command of what they are doing and creating, and they will remain reduced to the freak-show position of most twentieth century tech art. That’s what is at stake.

Computers don’t and can’t make sound aesthetic judgements. Robots lack cognition. They lack perception. They lack intelligence. They lack taste. They lack ethics. They just don’t have any. Tossing in more software and interactivity, so that they’re even jumpier and more apparently lively, that doesn’t help.

It’s not their fault. They are not moral actors and they are incapable of faults. It’s our fault for pretending otherwise, for fooling ourselves, for projecting our own qualities onto phenomena that we built, that are very interesting to us, but not at all like us. We can’t give them those qualities of ours, no matter how hard we try.

#1 Be healthy. Are startups all about pulling all nighters and eating ramen noodles? Steve Jobs wasn’t like that in his early days, Metcalfe argues. You need to be healthy. “Don’t buy into this bullshit that you need to drive yourself into the ground,” he said. “You should sleep eight hours a day. The trick is to figure out when you need to get up and then go to sleep eight hours before that.