brettworks

• A tribute to Jack DeJohnette.

“The idea of improvisation is tied up in the very nature of our existence. We don’t expect our life to evolve without changing and we never know what’s round the corner – why should music be any different?”

• An essay on AI and the sublime.

“Sublimity isn’t an illusion. There are reasons we feel it out in nature, and reasons we experience the technological version, too. Yet in both cases, it’s important to break the trance. At some point, you have to flee from the oncoming wave. You have to return to yourself—to remember, and embrace, the fact that you’re a particular person with agency, obligations, and values. In the natural world, returning to yourself can be as simple as walking away. But, in the technological one, it’s more complicated, because we’re in charge of the pace of exploration, discovery, and invention. Technologists can, to some degree, conjure the technological sublime, and consumers of technology can become addicted to it. But the path to responsibility leads through disenchantment.”

• An essay on AI’s effects on cognition.

“It’s only software developers and drug dealers who call people users.”

“In the ever-expanding, frictionless online world, you are first and foremost a user: passive, dependent. In the dawning era of AI-generated misinformation and deepfakes, how will we maintain the skepticism and intellectual independence we’ll need? By the time we agree that our minds are no longer our own, that we simply cannot think clearly without tech assistance, how much of us will be left to resist?”

• An essay on Apple’s TextEdit.

“But nothing has served me better than the brute simplicity of TextEdit, which doesn’t try to help you at all with the process of thinking. Using the app is the closest you can get to writing longhand on a screen.”

• An article about writing as thinking.

“Writing scientific articles is an integral part of the scientific method and common practice to communicate research findings. However, writing is not only about reporting results; it also provides a tool to uncover new thoughts and ideas. Writing compels us to think — not in the chaotic, non-linear way our minds typically wander, but in a structured, intentional manner. By writing it down, we can sort years of research, data and analysis into an actual story, thereby identifying our main message and the influence of our work.”