If there’s one thing we know for certain about AI, it’s that it is artificial. It’s in the name — it’s made by humans to imitate human intelligence. There’s nothing about AI that’s real, except perhaps for its capacity to do things faster than humans. And that makes me sad. The thing I love about the things I love doing is the doing — the time taken to write a story, watch a movie or read a book. The pleasure is in the experience of it. Sometimes the tasks are hard and can require us to stretch our brains, but isn’t the slog part of the joy of life?
Hard work may sound like the opposite of joy, but it’s in the effort taken to get things done, the time taken to think things through and the energetic force required to use our imaginations to come up with new ideas and novel solutions that the rewards for being human are to be found.
In this issue we catch up with Lee-Ann van Rooi, someone who works hard to tell stories, as an actress and as a theatre maker. She’s widely known in South Africa because of her TV roles, but her heart is in live performance because, she says, theatre is where real connections are made. It is where we sit together as a community and experience a human ritual that has been practised since the earliest days of humanity, when we spent time around the fire sharing stories, dancing into a trance state and transcending the physical world to connect with something greater than ourselves. On page 4, you can find out what drives this dynamic artist and why she’s determined to make theatre that challenges and stretches us in ways that AI (and television) cannot.
In our travel section on page 13, we look at the luxury end of the industry, where bespoke planning and individualised attention to detail will always outperform generic itineraries and arrangements manufactured by a computer programme. There’s a human touch, too, in our look at gardens of the future on page 11, which will need to help us to mitigate against climate change.
If you thought investments had to involve intangible, unreal numbers controlled by access to a bank account, we recommend reading (and giggling at) our close-up look at the luxury goods you can put your money into in our finance feature on page 24. Or find out why people who love living in the real world are semigrating to the coast in our property piece (page 9).
Finally, since we truly believe that life is here to be enjoyed, we have several pages devoted to the simpler pleasures: indulging in a good old-fashioned meal (p 16), celebrating the summer holidays with locally made bubbly (p 19), and taking in an art exhibition (p 21). And on page 27, we find out what really powers South Africa’s favourite sporting pastime.
They’re all experiences created for humans by humans, and we don’t think an algorithm should be permitted to take such fundamental joys away from us.
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