Are We Losing Ourselves to Technology? AI’s Impact on Culture and Art

If you expect any machine in the world, doesn't matter which, can be the simplest computer that you are aware of, can be your phone, can be the quantum computation, to produce art, then you don't understand what art is. Our Bay Area innovator today is Dr. Mihai Nadim. He's a scholar and researcher in electrical engineering, computer science, aesthetics, and human-computer interaction. I studied computers without having access to any computer because we did not have in Romania computers. So we did programming on paper and we did debugging on paper. It has one huge advantage. I was not limited by any piece of hardware. I was limited only by my mind. He founded the world's first program in computational design in 1994 in Germany and is the author of Disrupt Science, The Future Matters. Our topic today is AI and a discussion on Dr. Nadim's most recent paper, The Age of the Fake, The New Normal. Since the computer is allowing us to imitate everything that exists already, and I say it's not creative. It is a mechanical process. To create means to make possible something that never existed before. It is like an act of love. This is Bay Area Innovators and I'm your host, Steve Esparz. Professor Nadim, welcome to our program. Thank you for having the courage of inviting me. Yes, absolutely. Well, the courage is all yours because of the things you're talking about and the things you're saying. I want to ask you about the paper, the most recent paper you wrote. It's called The Age of the Fake, The New Normal. Please tell us a little bit, first of all, what gave you the inspiration to write this paper? I cannot even call it an inspiration. I need to call it an obligation. We are experiencing an absolute explosion of artifacts that claim to be the output of various forms of computation. Some of these artifacts at this moment are subject to trade to the extent that one would wonder why would people spend that amount of money in order to acquire something that, from my perspective, is of questionable value and even of questionable significance. But I do not want to refuse the fact that in this huge explosion of attempts at using computation in ways that we never envisaged, I do not take the attitude according to which something is wrong with trying to do things. On the contrary, for me, these are the most exciting times ever in history. And I'm very honest about it. I feel very lucky that I can be part of this exciting moment. But like with everything exciting, I cannot give up the question of significance. Does all this effort that we put in justify the enthusiasm? Or does it actually invite us to understand better what is happening? So my paper belongs not to the marketing of what comes out from the effort of using computers, but rather from the need to understand what does it mean? What are the questions that we're asking? In 20, in 30 years, are we going to look back and smile and say, boy, this was an adolescent moment or a childish moment? Or are we going to say we were really witnessing a new renaissance? We're talking about computer-generated art. And you're a pioneer. We have some of your works here from a long time ago that you actually were involved with creating art from computers. Now you kind of analyze what's being developed by these very advanced computers in computer art. And tell us more, is this art real? Or is it fake? You have two subjects, and I don't want to mix them. The first subject is connected to the fact that in the 1960s, when computation was pretty much still at the beginning, it was, for me, exciting to try to do things that nobody else, as far as I knew at that time, was doing. Later, I discovered that there were some other people who, in a different part of the world, were doing the same thing. But I was not connected to them. Living in a communist country, you were supposed not to be connected to the rest of the world. And therefore, I confess to my ignorance, but it was an ignorance imposed by the system. So the questions that I had was, okay, computation means, in the first place, to deal with numbers. The first computer, or the first use of the word computer, relates to those women who were called in to do by hand calculations, took numbers that were relevant to astronomy. Those ladies were called computers, and they were paid a salary as a computer. Sure, it was before that the abacus, which is, in my opinion, the first real computer ever. But maybe before the abacus were the little stones that people used, the pebbles that people used when they negotiated. I'll give you two, I'll give you three of those, et cetera. And from here, the word calculus comes from describing the calculus, the little pebbles. And here I am saying, no, there must be more to the ability to do calculations. And I took advantage of the fact that I studied computers in a manner in which nobody sane would do it in our days. I studied computers without having access to any computer because we did not have in Romania computers. So we did programming on paper, and we did debugging on paper. It has one huge advantage. I was not limited by any piece of hardware. I was limited only by my mind. And at that moment I said, okay, instead of writing the equation of a line that goes from A to B, 5 inches, 10 inches, whatever, I'm going to look at ways in which I can translate the equation that describes the line into an image that I can look at. So my question was, at that moment, translating numbers into images. It's if you want the reverse of what happened in reality, where there was first the reality, a piece of land, and then you started measuring it, and that piece of land became numbers. I did the opposite. I go from the numbers back to what they might describe. Why was that interesting to me? Because I was involved in those years in a movement that was called information aesthetics. Information aesthetics was an attempt made by an American mathematician called David Bitkoff, and an attempt made by a very interesting, controversial at the same time, philosopher of science in Germany called Max Benze. And their opinion was, take any piece of art such as those hanging on the wall in my room here, and you can describe it in terms of numbers. Apply on it some kind of a raster, some kind of a grid, and you start putting numbers. Here, the color is more intense. Here, the color is less intense, etc., etc., etc. And their conviction was that I can reduce the art to the description, to the mathematical description. Any art. Any art. It doesn't matter. In the first place, music, because music is naturally the closest to numbers, because all those notes are numbers, which we relate to the length of a chord on an instrument. So I was looking at images, and so my question was a question of aesthetics. When does a certain numeric configuration become one that we're looking at and we're pleased by what we see? So I was at that time doing what eventually became the field of computer graphics. Computer graphics is really the mother of everything we do today in what is called computer art. And then computer graphics was developed, you'll be surprised, not by me in Romania, but by my good colleagues in the United States, for military purposes. Because they were interested in how do I get something from here to there, which means how do I target something? And the first prizes were given for targeting, not for the beauty of art, for the beauty of targeting precisely. For me, thank God, I did not have this commission to do military applications, so I could live in my universe of abstract thinking. What is beauty? And I was for the longest time in that field, along the Pythagora, in the Plato, etc. school, in which if I can describe it in numbers, then it has to be beautiful, because there is beauty to mathematics. And these are my images, the beauty to mathematics, okay? In the 1960s. But you asked the second question. Yes. And the second question is, did all this development lead us to a moment in which we say, we have a renewal of the arts, because we have new means of expression? Or does it lead us to the illusion of art, and to our abandoning aesthetic values? And that's the reason why I wrote the text. Not so much to start with my experience of programming in machine language, which means in zeros and ones, yeah? So, not so much as a reflection of what I was doing in the 1960s, but rather, where are we now with it? Where you go to the store, and you buy for $50 or $100 a computer graphics program, and tomorrow you can create images, you can produce, I should say, images, and not use the word create, produce images, which you sell to people willing to buy them as works of art. In the position I am taking is, if you expect any machine in the world, doesn't matter which, can be the simplest computer that you are aware of, can be your phone, can be the quantum computation, to produce art, then you don't understand what art is. If, on the contrary, if you are an artist, if you are a talented person, then you should be able to use anything in the world, computer or not, to create art. So, my answer is art is made by artists, art is not made by machines. Where does the word fake come in? Since the computer is allowing us to imitate everything that exists already, it creates the illusion that the imitation is enough in order to qualify as a creative moment, and I say it's not creative, it is a mechanical process. You don't need to be there, nobody needs to be there, if you put your signature under something that the machine imitates, you are committing, at that time, if you want, aesthetically speaking, or from the viewpoint of integrity, a crime, because you're not the author. The author is that stupid machine, and the author is that stupid software that is behind the machine. Now, here comes the scary part for me, and that's why I'm really passionate about this paper that you refer to. Unfortunately, in the absence of serious aesthetic education, people accept the fake, which is becoming in our days more and more than normal. So, let's talk a little bit more about what this really means. So, a work of art is created by an artist, a painter, for example, or a sculptor. The computer creates a work of art, or generates a work of art. Tell us, again, how is that different? The computer, is it just imitating the other images that it sees or it finds on the web, or how does it actually produce this work of art? This Bay Area Innovators episode is sponsored by Peter Cassara Clothiers, an Italian menswear store that brings timeless European style with a modern edge to Sunnyvale and the Bay Area for over 50 years. From top Italian suits and shoes, the exclusive Tami Bahama line, they've got your look covered. Check out their website at PeterCassaraClothiers.com to find out more. And now, back to our interview. The computer, is it just imitating the other images that it sees or it finds on the web, or how does it actually produce this work of art? Computers as we use them today, including the most recent AI procedures in deep learning or not, are Turing machines. Now, when I said this word, are Turing machines, people will look and say, okay, fine, they are Turing machines, so what? So, what means the following? They are able to mechanize the imitation of what exists already. If I put in front of a computer, like if I put in front of a photo camera, the most amazing painting that I love profoundly, it can reproduce it. There's no problem with that. But the difference between a reproduced work of art and the created work of art is the act of creation. To create means to make possible something that never existed before. It is like an act of love. Love results, as you know, because you are the son of your mother and father, so am I, yeah? Love results in an act of creation. Everyone who accepts to take what comes out from a machine that imitates an act of creation is not involved in an act of love, is missing it entirely. If you want music, if you want to experience music as an act of creation, you go to the concert. If you listen to the recording, and the majority of us listen to the recording, you are not involved in an act of creation. You are involved in an act in which you say, very nice, but you will never have the same feeling of characteristic of the aesthetic experience. Now, I also claim in this paper that art is as much as science an act of acquiring knowledge. You acquire knowledge about the person you love, and you acquire knowledge in the sense of the meaningfulness of life. Science asks the question, how do I describe the movement of the stars? It's a scientific question. Absolutely beautiful, and Newton gave us the mathematics of the mechanics of the planets in our universe. For the artist, he's not asking the question, how do those planets move? The artist is asking the question, what meaning does it have to me? The meaning is the focus of art. The focus of science is the truth. Art doesn't deal in truth. Art is almost never, almost never in the business of dealing with truth. You cannot call the artist to a court of justice in order to find out who was the criminal. That's where the science comes in. But you can invoke art as a testimony to our understanding of phenomena, some of them natural phenomena, some of them social phenomena, some of them political phenomena, and some of them, guess what? Your and my health. Medicine was for the longest time as much an artistic art as it was a science. The doctors of the ages, when the word doctor didn't even exist, were more or less artists who sometimes were lucky that they got it right, and if they were not lucky, the guys who were able to pay them because they were owned by those who had most of the money, you know, made sure that they are decapitated. You're not a good doctor, goodbye. Finished with that, yeah? But so were some artists decapitated. So were some artists burned because they brought to the public an understanding of reality that was not acceptable at that time. Think about what happened in the major revolutions, including the French Revolution, then the Soviet Revolution, then the American Revolution. Some didn't make it. Some were not accepted. Their meaning was not acceptable. Now, let's go to what a machine is doing. A machine is doing nothing else but taking the science that describes the act of making a painting or composing a symphony. In other words, the machine is dealing with the what, while art is dealing with the why. Obviously, art is never going to tell you why do we have an eclipse, but art can deal a lot with the why of the eclipse in terms of what does it mean to certain populations, how it became part of culture, how it became part of superstitions, etc. That's where the art comes in. We talked about this before, but I want to clarify, what is the ultimate goal of artistic creation versus the ultimate goal of computer art? The ultimate goal of artistic creation is to make possible something that, again, never existed before, which means an expression of the originality, an expression of the individual nature. Original means individual. If I look at an image created by Picasso, I recognize Picasso. If I look at an image that imitates Picasso, I cannot recognize the machine because all machines are the same. Turing said it. The Turing machine is the universal machine, is the machine of all machines, is the mother of all machines. It cannot have originality. It cannot have individuality. It does not have uniqueness. It has only the characteristics of the science that I used in order to describe what I'm going to imitate. No artist who deserves the title of artist is interested in the, let me imitate Picasso. If that's what you do, you are called plagiarism. There's not even a discussion. But at the moment when the computer is plagiarizing real art, we fall on our knees and say, look at what this machine can do. Nothing. It can do to the extent that I have a good description of what you want to imitate and I have enough energy to run the machine. A good painter, the most remarkable artists that we know in history didn't use more energy than the energy that kept them alive. For us to generate some of the images as people do on the internet in our days, we're consuming huge amounts of energy. For what? For an imitation that is as valid as any other imitation which you have and tomorrow you're going to throw away. So the question is, what is the goal of computer art, in your opinion? If you say in my opinion, then it's very simple. What does it take to translate art into computing expression, which is a technological subject, technological device, and it has applications. The applications are the entire technology that we developed for the wars in our days. We can target from here, from California, somebody in, who knows, in the Bora Bora mountains, to go back to an episode that people might remember, and kill somebody at a big distance. We can do it because the technology that makes those imitations of pictures is the technology that allows me to picture and to use the picture in order to target something. That's a practical application and that's why the military was always involved and continues to be involved. When it comes to how do I have this process autonomously, in other words, not a person who presses a button but a procedure that takes care of the whole thing, or even worse, how do I manage to talk to my AI procedure and say, I would like you to make me a portrait of Mr. Espos in a Picasso manner and Picasso the blue face. The machine can do it. If you want to try it, if you want me to try it with you, we can do it easy. It will come out. I showed you that sequence of images integrating the image between the time when I was 12-14 years old and all the variations. The machine did it. I didn't do anything. I only asked. I gave the machine this assignment. And if I'm not happy, I can change it here and there in order to make it happier. That is done automatically. So, computers automated mathematics to an extent that we should be forever grateful for many, many, many, many, many applications. The question that is asked today, can the computers at this moment automate not only mathematics, but also the making of art? And my question is no. They can only generate imitations of what we call art, but never produce a work of art. And to make it even more pointed, there is no computation possible that can formulate a question. There is no computer known with all the enormous progress that we made that was ever able to formulate a question. The question is not what's today. That's not the question. That's an imitation. What's today? I use, they use, they can imitate that. No, I'm talking about an authentic question. An authentic question meaning here is something that we have no idea how it works. Give me a question on that. Art is always throwing in the world questions. Science is throwing in the world answers to questions. Art is throwing in the world questions supposed to trigger our interest in the meaning of whatever we're interested in. Well, I want to talk about one of your quotes from the book, and I'm going to read it right here. And I love this quote. You say, the machine illusionist is not hiding its secrets. It's not the art that wants to be celebrated, but the machine. Please expound there about what do you have in mind? Explaining that there is a big difference between the goal of art and the goal of technology. The goal of art is to engage those who are going to interact with it in a conversation. And that conversation is independent of the fact that the artist is alive or not. The artist is alive through the work, and it's independent of what the artist said. Oh, if you look at my image, it shows you how beautiful, I don't know, this landscape is. And you look at the image and you say, I don't see the beauty of the landscape, but wow, here are a couple of questions that I have. What does it mean that in this landscape, and so on and so forth. Since we're in this region, think about Ansel Adams taking pictures here in Monterey Bay with these tremendous images of the moon reflecting on the bay. He was not doing science, the science of moon over Monterey. No, he was realizing the scale at which we perceive nature and what are the emotions that we get. What do we get from the computer art? We get the first question, how did you do it? You never get the question looking at computer art, what does it mean? How did you do it? Because the purpose is to do it in an impressive manner in which it looks like being made by an artist. It's not a final product. That's correct. And so you admire the fact that we are at this moment able to train a neural network on an immense amount of data. And that computer network is not only able to understand the difference between a cat and a table, but it's also able to understand the difference between looking at a piece of nature and looking at a piece of art. And then making inferences. Yes, these machines are able at this moment to make inferences, which is an accomplishment that deserves all the credit in the world. The only credit it cannot get is it is not a creative act. It is a rational act. It is an act governed by high quality logic and makes logical inferences. But that inference is not of a creative nature. And again, I will bring the doctors into the discussion. If you have a successful surgery made by a very successful surgeon, you are going to be impressed by the art of the surgeon and not by the knife, not by the instruments that he used. The computer is in the position similar to that of the surgical equipment that the surgeon is using. But the art is with the surgeon. Or used to be. Because in our days, we go as far as to say, this surgery will be performed by a robot. And you as a patient should be happy. I'm not sure that you should always be happy. I know of people who went through such robotically guided surgeries who are suffering for the rest of their life. Would their destiny be different if a surgeon would have done it? I don't want to fool around with anyone's destiny. But I know that the art, the artistry of medicine is reflected in a different kind of healing than the mechanical healing. I want to ask you about a comparison. Would you say that the same way you have a living human versus a robot. A living human being has a soul in it. The robot is just a mechanical thing. Would that be the same comparison if you have art done by a human versus computer art? Basically, the art done by a human is alive. The art done by a computer is dead. Let's be careful. Not every piece of art produced by a human is art. Let's be very careful when I define the art as a form of acquiring knowledge. I know that 80% of the junk produced today in the world is not art. I know that there are works of art that are sold at 300-400 million dollars that are in museums and which are not worth my time even stopping in front of them because they do not qualify as art. There is something called the market. The market is not really the expert in art. But this was true also in the time of the renaissance. The majority of the art produced in the renaissance is not the art that we see as the big victories of the renaissance. The majority was in the meanwhile thrown away. Art as a form of acquiring knowledge with a focus on meaning is a very strict definition of art and it excludes everything else that was reproduced mechanically or reproduced even by human beings. Because there are those human beings who imitate it. I give in the article the example of China having a whole village in which near Shenzhen, that's probably the name of the place, in which the whole village was producing imitations of the great works of art that we have in the west. And people bought them and have them in their homes today. That's their private matisse, private money. They are like the difference between your own preparing your soup and going to buy the canned soup. The canned soup can be produced in two million, in five billion copies. And it's the same all over the world. If you want to call that soup, it's your choice. But the real one is the one in which you have the fresh ingredients and you have the influence of your own taste and you have your heart telling you don't go too strong on salt and things like that. It is an art. The art of cooking is part of the arts. But you don't go into Carmel, a place famous today for the many restaurants. And the guy who, one of the guys who is selling pizza, is honest enough, if you ask many times, to tell you that the dough for the pizza he bought in the store is frozen dough. I don't call it the art of cooking. Well, we are here in your beautiful home in Carmel. The question is, is an aesthetic machine possible? You studied aesthetics. You had, you work with students to ask this question. And please tell us what you found. The notion of the machine is the notion of something that we made possible that will perform a certain function at the highest level it can do. The electric generators are such machines. We get electricity and we expect it to be always present, always within the parameters needed for all the machines that use electricity. Can a machine perform aesthetic tasks? I started the question trying to avoid giving an answer before the test. And I had the privilege of running a graduate seminar for 19 years. And every year, every semester, because the students changed from one semester to another, I gave the same assignment. Can you create an aesthetic machine? The University of Texas at Dallas. After going through the science of what is a machine, how you define a machine, after saying, you decide what kind of a machine. It can be hydraulic machine, it can be electric machine, it can be computer, whatever machine you think about. Even a machine with a crank that you crank. If it's a machine, it's supposed to have the same performance if you do the same crank. And in 19 years, I saw superb examples of creativity. All these graduate students, some of them PhD students, trying to come up with an aesthetic machine. My hope started fading away after 3, 4, 5 years, knowing and working myself on this idea, knowing that there is no way to come up with an aesthetic machine, because that would mean that we can create, we can make a machine that creates. Machines cannot create. And I can say, this is a long-term experiment. You have enough people participating. If you consider every semester only 30, you have a respectable number of 3, 4,000 people who were involved in this. And in many examples that they produced, look, I was doing this, look, I was doing that. Does it qualify as a machine or not? If it is a contraption that does something once, but never again the same way, then it's not a machine. If it does the same thing, then it qualifies as a machine. But then you look at the aesthetic quality of what came out, and you say, where is the art? So, based on this experience and on everything that is behind my thinking regarding computers, I'm of the opinion that an aesthetic machine belongs to the category that in science is called an impossible task. You cannot square the circle. It has nothing to do with computation. It has nothing to do with you and me. It has nothing to do with maybe another nation. Maybe on the moon they can circle the square. No, cannot. The nature of the entities that we call square and we call circle would not allow, no matter what, quantum computation or you name it, the squaring of the circle. The same thing holds true for the aesthetic machine. It is a contradiction in terms. If you use the word machine, you eliminated the word aesthetics. If you use the word aesthetics, which is the logic of the senses, then a machine cannot have the senses because in the first place it cannot have senses. I love that example and I challenge our audience to look into squaring the circle. And it mainly has to do with the fact that the circle has irrational numbers, right? Pi. It has the pi. It has the pi, which you cannot put in a square. There's no way you can define that number in a length that's a square. We calculate today the pi using computation. Millions of digits. Trillions. It's an amazing piece in which adults are playing the game of calculating pi. I was at one moment interested after I gave up saying, okay, this is a joke that will never end. This is not a joke that ends in a good punchline. There is no punchline when it comes to pi. Another question is, it seems like as a society we're moving more towards automation, being whatever it is, being art, being medicine, being going to the grocery store. Why is that? Is it just the evolution of science or is there something else? We always wanted somebody else to do what we are supposed to do. That explains slavery. And the new slavery is the slavery of the machine. The only thing is, it was cheap to maintain the slaves alive because it really didn't cost you more than to keep them doing the work. The new slavery is unfortunately a slavery in which we become the slaves of the machines. The majority of the tasks that we think we automated actually are taking part of our lives. We did not really automate too much in terms of calculating your tax return. We still waste weeks of our lives doing tax returns in a domain in which this can be automated. But it's not. Why? Because the factors at work say it will cost us the state too much to automate it, therefore we take the cheap labor of you, the taxpayer, and you will do the work for it. You do the work in order to pay your taxes. It's one of the beautiful ironies. But now we go further. The automation of tasks such as make an image such as Picasso leads to the fact that it costs in terms of the energy that we need to crank that machine an amount of energy that cannot be justified. Period. It is the example that I give in the article is the example of the game of chess which like any game has artistry to it. That's why you have world champions. The artists in chess are not you and me playing it but some who do have this artistry. At this moment the game of chess has absolutely no artistry left because all the games of chess were played by the computer. That's the AlphaFold, the company that Google has in England and whose chief guy there even got a Nobel Prize. Nobel Prize for what? For solving a problem that was never a problem but at an expense that starts being questionable because it starts affecting sustainability. If we continue to pay our slaves, the machines, the energy that the slave is requiring, we are going to have huge problems in remaining sustainable as a society. I want to follow up on the game of chess because I think that was a very interesting analogy or a very interesting fact. So basically the game of chess computers have played every single possibility that can exist in a game of chess. The number is huge but that indeed playing a computer takes away any kind of creativity anything because everything has already been done so whatever you play against the computer it doesn't have any result. The number just for audience is 10 to the power of 120 possibilities of games. And the number was calculated by Claude Shannon, considered the father of information theory but Claude Shannon was very much aware. He wrote chess programs, computer chess programs and he was very good at that but Claude Shannon was very clear about it. I am giving you here the description of the mechanics of winning a game of chess but you are going to lose the pleasure of playing chess because playing chess is a competition between the players and that competition has aesthetic moments, has drama to it, has everything you want. That's why people were interested who is going to win. The names of the great players, Fischer, Spassky, you name them. We were interested in that. Imagine I can play all the football games in the football league simulating football on a computer. All those thousands of people who go to the stadiums to scream and yell and to play through the game are going to be happy if I give them that mechanical game? I don't think so. It's pretty amazing. I would like you to share some of your experience. We have your books here that you wrote and you have an amazing background. You studied so many things but tell us something, how you came to the U.S. and some experience that you had that might be interesting for our audience. It's a subject that goes a little away from where we are now with aesthetics and so forth but it really has to do with, remember, I was talking about art as a form of love. It has to do with the love that I had for a gentle lady who came to Romania from a different country. That was the United States and from there started a saga that I will probably never write that book. Maybe she will write the book, who knows? That meant for her adapting to a different way of living in a communist country under the dictatorship of one of the most notorious dictators. But in that country, the right to marry a foreigner was not a right that the citizen had. Only the president of the country would or would not approve of that marriage. Finally, I practically escaped from Romania, did not go back and left behind my wife with three children who heroically not only survived in Romania but in the end had to go through all the hoops in order to get out of Romania. The rest is history but not history to the extent that basically we arrived in the United States, three children and two suitcases and from here on things then evolved including the fact that my first position was at the Rhode Island School of Design calling itself still in our days the Harvard of the Arts, a very small college in Providence, Rhode Island and many other things happened including those images that were in continuation of my exploration of what does it mean to explore the aesthetic space. Professor Nadine, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Any concluding thoughts, anything for our audience that you would like them to take away as an end for our conversation? I will go back to the beginning of our conversation saying this is the absolutely positive, the most exciting moment in the history of humankind. Be happy that you can be part of it but if you don't want to go through deep disappointments, try to be as informed as possible and informed means not to read the papers, I would even say stay away from rather get involved in this development, don't allow others to tell you what can this machine do, don't allow those in marketing to take advantage of your naivety, you have to call the shots and this is the time when you have more than ever the possibility of doing that and if you don't do it you will never be able to blame somebody else for falling, falling victim to the fake, many people fall victim to the fake, many, many, many, many, again go through downtown Carmel which is the world capital of kitsch which is means things that pretend to be art and are far from being any art and there is no day in which somebody will not go and put his or her not easy earned money into something totally useless, that it's irrelevant, will not change their lives, seek the life experience, if you like music be at a concert, if you like art be in the museum, if you like ballet, theater, be there, be part of it, to the extent possible be even yourself the artist, try to formulate your own questions and see whether they are relevant questions but don't live under the illusion that, oh if it's coming from the most advanced technology it must be good, so many things that we call poison are coming from the technology and not only they are not good, they started ruining our own existence, think only about the fact that due to the many errors we made in accepting what claims to be science, we ended up as being the only species in the living that gets from year to year to year to year having more and more and more disease, we are diseasing ourselves continuously, so my message is do what you have to do in order to stay sane and in really in order to bring to expression all your talents. Professor Nadin, thank you so much for your time, fascinating discussion, I really appreciate it, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for watching another episode of Bay Area Innovators, if you enjoyed this episode and you know someone who should be on our show, please send us an email We would love to hear from you. Thank you and see you next week.