How Technology Acceleration Will Affect The Visual Arts

Key Takeaways

• LEARN NEW THINGS: What you do remains constant, how you do it changes frequently.
• EMPATHIZE: Understand the importance of the customer-service side of a graphic design career.
• BE EXCITED: You’re in a pivotal career which will define and shape how all of these tools evolve with us. That’s crazy.

Lecture Outline

• Moore’s Law
• The number of transistors on a chip doubles every year while the costs are halved
• A transistor essentially allows or denies the passage of a current.
• Predicted we will reach the physical limits of the universe around 2020 in terms of how small we can make them
• Modern smartphones have 3-5 Billion transistors per chip in the phone

• The Augmentation Age
• Hunter-Gatherer Age (1,000,000 years—millions)
• Agricultural Age (1,000 + years—thousands)
• Industrial Age (100+ years—hundreds)
• Information Age (10+ years—couple decades, 90’s-2000’s)
• Augmentation Age (starting now)

• Our Tools are Changing
• They are no longer passive and require input directly from us
• Tools are becoming generative with the help of AI / machine learning
• You don’t get to decide how the general public interacts with this, so embrace it, get in front of it
• What’s important is Understanding what things do.
• Technology doesn’t have understanding that humans do. Empathy.
• Technology is only as good as the information we provide it.
• What is needed remains somewhat constant, how we make it has drastically changed.
• Augmenting rather than replacing.
• Designers will become conductors, rather than musicians.