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 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. 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, 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, 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 TV) 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 human touch, too, in our look at gardens of the future on page 11, which will need to help us mitigate against climate change.
If you thought investments had to involve intangible, unreal numbers controlled by access to a bank account, we recommend getting into — and actually enjoying having around — reading (and giggling) at our close-up look at the luxury goods you can put your money in 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).
Last, since we truly believe life is here to be enjoyed, we have several pages devoted to the simpler pleasures: indulging in a good old-fashioned meal (page 16), celebrating the summer holidays with locally made bubbly (page 19) and taking in an art exhibition (page 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.
— Keith, editor
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