Wonderment
A state of being this thing called Wonderment. It is a human response. It can't come from AI, as a machine cannot feel. Feeling,and Emotion are strictly human endeavors. As I understand how AI functions it collects data from the universe of all written and visual material and constructs the best answer that it can, and spits an answer in seconds. The AI needs prompts. The answers or images received are perfect and unreal. You enter the space of the uncanny-valley.
There is however something in my view, that comes to the human mind before the state of Wonderment. That is observation. Something catches the eye, the ear, or touch, that captures the mind, and becomes a focus. The wind, the flying hawk, the blueness of the sea, and you stop, and enter the mentally aware stage of observation. You see the hawk and in wondering, you imagine how it would be to fly like a bird. AI cannot imagine, it only collects.
There is an old saying, Use it or Lose it. There is a problem that is becoming a thief for human observation in real-world experience. It is the Iphone. The addiction to the constant connection to a screen that bypasses the real-world preventing our human minds to see, hear, what is really in front of us...the world of the real. This wonderful experience of our world in three dimensions, in technicolor, and surround sound, it is before us, but increasingly, we see it only as a two dimensional state on a very small screen that does have not ability to create the state of wonderment. We experience the information as something to save in a folder, to look at some other time, maybe. This small sterile image is forgettable, and unworthy of memory.
Children use words, Why, What, How. They see something and ask questions about what they observe. They play about what they observe. They Imagine that they become what they observe. They enter the state of enchantment, one of intense imagined wonderment. They for the moment in their child mind's become the flying bird. When Leonardo observed the birds, did he enter into this state of wonder? We know that he documented what he observed, as his drawings indicate. To an artist this state becomes play, and eventually obsession. Wings turned into flying machines in his notebooks.
The Product of Wonderment is Imagination. From this place of Human endeavor, comes our present world. The Imaginators of the 21'st Century hopefully will be the ones who use their brain to observe and imagine the “What Ifs” and will be the inventors of the new wings of technology which will be the result of observation, confronting real-world experience of humanitarian needs, leading to solutions. AI cannot imagine. It only collects data, We are the Imaginators, who create in three dimensions, and live and imagine in the fourth dimension of time.
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