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The Artificial Thinking machine has arrived. It promises – or threatens – to do all the hard work for us. AI has collected/gathered/stolen phantastillions of images, words, facts. But it has not been able to collect our experiences – the things we know without ever having said them, read or written them or drawn pictures or taken photographs of them. Our cognitive abilities have grown over thousands of years and now we are in danger of losing them as a result of wiping on glass panes only and waiting for an instant solution to all our problems. But something is missing: We may see the world with our eyes, read facts, exchange instant messages across the globe, but we still “grasp” things with our hands.
Erik Spiekermann is information architect, type designer, author. His FF Meta and ITC Officina are considered modern classics. He started MetaDesign (1979) & FontShop (1988). He is behind the design of brands like Audi, Bosch, VW, German Railways and Heidelberg Printing, among others; information systems for Berlin Transit, Düsseldorf Airport & publications like The Economist. He designed exclusive typefaces for corporations like Deutsche Bahn, Bosch, ZDF German TV, Cisco, Mozilla, Autodesk, Nokia, etc. Erik is Professor Emeritus from the University of the Arts, Berlin. He is founder of Edenspiekermann, Berlin, San Francisco, Los Angeles. He now runs Hacking Gutenberg, an experimental letterpress workshopin Berlin