Tech, Innovation & Society - The Creative Process: Technology, AI, Software, Future, Economy, Science, Engineering & Robotics The Creative Process

“AI is brilliant at cognitive empathy. However, the next kind is emotional empathy. Emotional empathy means: I know what you feel because I'm feeling it too. And this has to do with circuitry in the fore part of the brain, which creates a brain-to-brain circuit that's automatic, unconscious, and instantaneous. And emotions pass very  well across that. I think AI might flunk here because it has no emotion. It can mimic empathy, but it doesn't really feel empathy. The third kind is empathic concern. Technically, it means caring. It's the basis of love. It's the same circuitry as a parent's love for a child, actually. But I think that leaders need this very much."

How can we enhance our emotional intelligence and avoid burnout in a changing world? How can we regain focus and perform in an optimal state? What do we mean by ecological intelligence?

Daniel Goleman is an American psychologist, author, and science journalist. Before becoming an author, Goleman was a science reporter for the New York Times for 12 years, covering psychology and the human brain. In 1995, Goleman published Emotional Intelligence, a New York Times bestseller. In his newly published book Optimal, Daniel Goleman discusses how people can enter an optimal state of high performance without facing symptoms of burnout in the workplace.

“I've been playing with AI just to see what it can do. People who are not privileged with the skills of conceptualizing, the skills of abstract thinking, they will be replaced. And I'm just thinking about people from the Global South at this moment. People from the Global South have been working as supporters. They do a lot of support for creative work of entrepreneurs in the Global North. They do social media. They create content and things like that. The people who would provide the support live in, let's say, the Philippines. So, what I'm worried about is how AI technology could take the jobs of people who are not really trained to sort of do conceptual thinking.”

“As technology becomes more dominant, the arts become ever more important for us to stay in touch the things that the sciences can't tackle. What it's actually like to be a person? What's actually important? We can have this endless progress inside this capitalist machine for greater wealth and longer life and more happiness, according to some metric. Or we can try and quantify society and push it forward. Ultimately, we all have to decide what's important to us as humans, and we need the arts to help with that. So, I think what's important really is just exposing ourselves to as many different ideas as we can, being open-minded, and trying to learn about all facets of life so that we can understand each other as well. And the arts is an essential part of that.”

How is being an artist different than a machine that is programmed to perform a set of actions? How can we stop thinking about artworks as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences? In this conversation with Max Cooper, we discuss the beauty and chaos of nature and the exploration of technology music and consciousness.
Max Cooper is a musician with a PhD in computational biology. He integrates electronic music with immersive video projections inspired by scientific exploration. His latest project, Seme, commissioned by the Salzburg Easter Festival, merges Italian musical heritage with contemporary techniques, was also performed at the Barbican in London.
He supplied music for a video narrated by Greta Thunberg and Pope Francis for COP26.
In 2016, Cooper founded Mesh, a platform to explore the intersection of music, science and art. His Observatory art-house installation is on display at Kings Cross until May 1st.

"So, I am a data reporter at Grist. And what does that mean? I'm building statistical models of phenomena. I'm writing web scrapers and building data visualizations, right? I have quite a technical job in terms of my relationship with the field of journalism. I just don't think that those tools ought to be put on some kind of pedestal and framed as the be-all end all of the possibility of the field, right? I think that data science, artificial intelligence, and the advent of these new LLMs they're useful tools to add to the journalistic toolkit. We don't know what the ultimate effect of AI is going to be on journalism, but I think journalism is maybe going to look a little bit different in 20 years."