Brad Barrish

David Perell interviewed Maria Popova on his How I Write podcast. I’ve been reading Maria’s blog, The Marginalian (f.k.a. Brain Pickings) for many years and it’s one of the greatest the web has to offer. I might have to re-listen and watch on YouTube. It was a great interview.

One of my favorite parts of the conversation was when AI came up, though I was maybe a little disappointed (not surprised) that she had never so much as played with it.

AI will never have feeling. AI will have the simulacrum of feeling. AI will never write the great American poem, the great French poem, because it hasn’t suffered. I mean, AI has not the capacity to suffer. Because even if you try to make it suffer, meaning write a command that is to execute failure, it’ll already be succeeding at executing failure. It will never know what it’s like to collide with its own impossibility. So AI can only ever succeed.

She goes on to dismiss the idea of the tortured genius.

I don’t subscribe to the tortured genius myth. I don’t think it’s necessary to suffer in order to create. But I do think that out of what we have suffered and do suffer comes that restlessness to find meaning, to find beauty, to find wonder, to give voice and shape to what we feel that can be so lonely.

There are so many great moments in this interview.