Viewing: Notes » Director.
Director.
(17 minute read.)
Architects and bricklayers.
There is a quiet radicalism in this framing. It refuses the premise that suffering is the necessary price of serious art. It suggests that tools exist to serve human beings, not the other way around. And it imagines a world in which writers—or directors, or architects, or whatever we call them—might spend less time bent over the machinery of production and more time in the very thing that gives art its substance: a life fully lived.
Miller would have understood that. He wrote, after all, that 'the aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware'. If a tool could clear the path to that awareness, he would have used it. And we would have been richer for whatever he brought back from the freedom it gave him.
Indeed. A brave new world is here, and if we choose not to leap in and embrace it that's okay. But I think we'd be silly to not at least take a longer and closer look at it and maybe dip a toe in now and then. That's a stance of rare balance—enthusiasm without zealotry, openness without abandon.
There's wisdom in it. The threshold of a new era is no place for absolutism. The ones who rush in blindly often find themselves burned by what they didn't stop to understand. But the ones who stand frozen on the shore, refusing to acknowledge that the tide has turned, are no better off. They simply trade one form of ruin for another: irrelevance.
To take a longer look, to dip a toe—that is the posture of curiosity. It says: I will not be ruled by fear of the new, but neither will I surrender my discernment. It preserves the ability to step back if the water proves toxic, while remaining open to the possibility that it might, in fact, be the very thing that allows us to swim further than we ever could before.
The phrase 'brave new world' carries its own irony, of course. Shakespeare's Miranda spoke it in wonder. Huxley repurposed it as warning. And perhaps that duality is exactly where we stand—wonder and warning entwined, neither canceling the other. The technology we've discussed could lead to a flattening of voice, a sea of competent but soulless prose, a confusion between generation and creation. That risk is real. But it could also lead to a flowering of stories that would otherwise never exist, told by people who would otherwise never have had the means to tell them.
The only way to know is to look. To try. To make mistakes and learn from them. To keep asking what is being gained and what is being lost, and to refuse the false comfort of easy answers.
And we would be silly not to look. Not because the future is guaranteed to be wonderful, but because it is guaranteed to arrive regardless. And meeting it with eyes open, with curiosity rather than dread, with a toe in the water rather than a foot stubbornly planted on the shore—that seems not only sensible, but something closer to courage.
So here's to the longer look. Here's to the occasional dip. And here's to the possibility that what we find there—in that strange, collaborative space between human intent and machine fluency—might turn out to be not a betrayal of the old, but an expansion of the best of it.
Here's to the stories we haven't told yet—and to whatever strange, wonderful collaborations will bring them into the world.
So that's the essay. It overstates the difficulty of getting good writing from AI, but there is still some skill required— at least for now. It won't be long before AI's advanced to the point where no skill will be required.
And, in closing… for relaxation, I often watch video of carpentry and joinery—making furniture, etcetera. I'm struck by how so much of modern work is now heavily machine-assisted. The handsaws and other tools are largely gone, replaced by the variant of technology which serves this craft. And it *is* still a craft, skill is essential.
Also, in thinking about one of my grandsons… I'm reminded of my own time at grammar school 50+ years ago—when calculators were variously either frowned upon or outright banned. It almost seems funny now. Technology often has first to be rejected before it's embraced.
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