Romantic computing
Question
The Enlightenment was a European intellectual movement emphasizing rationality, science, universalism, and progress. It was a faith in human reason as the tool for understanding the world and improving society.
Romanticism was a cultural and intellectual revolt against what it saw as the cold, mechanistic worldview of the Enlightenment. It emphasized emotion, intuition, nature, imagination, and the individual. Where Enlightenment thinkers trusted reason, Romantics trusted feeling.
Computer science is clearly a machine to automate intellectual activity of the sort valued by the enlightenment. Does computing only support enlightenment values? Can there be romantic computing?
Some Romantic values
- Reason is limited
E.g. Hamann accepts the sceptical doubts of Enlightenment philosophers about our ability to understand reality, and concludes not that we should be intellectually humble, but rather that reason is ineffective in understanding reality, and so we must rely on faith.
Enlightenment: Virtue consists in knowledge. If we know ourselves, what we need and how to get it we can live happy and free lives. We can answer all questions, teach these answers to others, and everyone can have the same answers.
- Originality and Authenticity as a virtue
View of the artist as a godlike figure who brings a creation into the world. Humans should make their own values and follow them.
Extremes of emotion given the encouragement to break though the rigid structures of reason
Intuition and Emotion are key components of understanding
Subjectivity / Plurality of human values
Imagination
The Sublime
- There is value in confronting something overwhelming, something out of your comfort and control. Greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement and imitation.
Computing and romanticism
User Interface frustrations
Think about the frustration of trying to use a very narrow bureaucratic user interface. This is often observed when older people who are less familiar with computers are trying to navigate apps to do something. There is something you are trying to do, and the system is forcing you into an unfamiliar, cold and silencing logic.
- This is similar to human expression being suppressed and tamed by cold rational constraints.
Qn: Can computers be designed to allow more free human expression?
Ideas:
Human Computer interaction that is more tactile, more multisensory. Bret Victor argues that hands and all their sensory powers like feeling the weight and texture of a held object need to be better integrated into the experience of using a computer.
Instead of a future of computing that is tactile, we are being sold visions of direct brain-computer interfaces, which might even more confine and augment humans into a rational paradigm, rather a more holistic experiential and emotional paradigm. We understand very little about brain computer interfaces.
I’m reminded of this game that used to be installed on computers in my primary school which went by the names Stress Reducer and Desktop Destroyer. It would allow the user to start breaking their computer desktop using a variety of tools like hammers and chain saws. This allows the user to express their frustration at the constraining logic of a computer.
Generative AI?
I think GenAI is giving us tools to interact with computers in more human ways. We can now speak poetically to our computers, and they actually will play along. We can interact with them over realistic voice interfaces.
It also allows us to use computers to manipulate more familiar themes and ideas. If you think of early computers as only allowing the manipulation of bits and pixels, the new computer systems powered by Generative AI allow us to manipulate images, videos, text, sounds etc, and in familiar human language.
Design computer systems to accept the limits of reason
- Always give a way for a human to break the logic, e.g. to fill out a textbox at the end of a form answering “Anything else we should know”. When asking people for their name, allow all unicode characters. Don’t make identity markers a dropdown. Beyond forms, design computerised processes to privilege the freedom of the human.
Design computers to allow for original and authentic experiences
- I love video games where you can ignore the main objectives that the game wants you to follow and go off and create your own meaning and play.
Computers as tools to aid exploration of intuition and emotion?
Computers designed with subjectivity/pluralism in mind? Reject universalism , focus on access, multiple ways of engaging.
Computer science and emotional excesses?
Computing and the experience of the sublime?
- The complexity and scale of computing is vast. AI systems are scarily intelligent. Computational art can create experiences of complex unfolding processes. Computers can help us visualise the vastness of the world in new multimedia experiences. I think maps software, and especially 3D globe software like Google Earth gives an experience of the sublime.
Faith in the computer
- Maybe letting go and working with AI tools without checking all their work. Vibe coding might be a kind of romantic expression.