SK: Your work often looks to nature for inspiration\u2014whether it\u2019s butterfly wings or squid skin\u2014while staying deeply futuristic. Where do you see the line between copying nature and going beyond it, if there is one at all?<\/p>\n
NT: Nature is the smartest scientist you\u2019ve ever seen. If people had to recreate a bumblebee now\u2014we can\u2019t do it. We can\u2019t do anything. We probably can\u2019t recreate a worm. Nature is so utterly, fantastically clever, because as far as I\u2019m aware it\u2019s had about 780 million years to get good.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t think there was much complex life on Earth until relatively recently. Say the Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years. Nature, in terms of complex life, has been evolving for hundreds of millions of years. There was the Cryogenian period, one of the most extreme ice ages on Earth, which lasted a few hundred million years. After things began to warm, life started to evolve in increasingly complex ways. It\u2019s almost as if nature said, \u201cOh my God, I\u2019d like to start now.\u201d So nature has essentially been practicing for hundreds of millions of years. And humans\u2014in a civilized way, for argument\u2019s sake\u2014for maybe 40,000 or 100,000 years. So our advancements in the last ten years are truly astonishing, but nature is still the greatest inventor ever.<\/p>\n
All I like to lean into is people who\u2019ve created incredibly clever technologies. Sometimes the technology is inspired by nature. Trees can be set on fire and then give rebirth to themselves\u2014it doesn\u2019t matter that they\u2019re on fire, it\u2019s almost the way they germinate. They have these incredible survival properties. So let\u2019s say we make clothes like that. And then we probably also make clothes which are strictly technological\u2014take the Martian Aerogel Jacket, which uses a parachute they use to land the Mars rover. But then, honestly, they made those parachutes inspired by seeds that flew.<\/p>\n
So I\u2019d imagine if you were to write a PhD on it, the idea that everything is not inspired by nature is probably impossible. You could draw every technological revolution in clothing back to this: them trying to mimic something in nature, or create something incredibly tough. There isn\u2019t really a distinction\u2014science and nature are the same thing. It\u2019s a fascinating thing to think about.<\/p>\n
As we move forward, there\u2019s going to be an inevitability that biology and science will almost merge, with people working with biology at the most fundamental level to build materials that have never existed before. I think it\u2019s called atomic layering, where different materials are layered together at an atomic, microscopic level to create these quantum materials. But again, you\u2019re probably just doing something that nature has been doing for 500 million years and is already very good at. I\u2019d imagine that\u2019s what it will come down to.<\/p>\n
I also think in the next thousand years\u2014or maybe two thousand\u2014you really will start to grow most materials. You\u2019ll have self-healing materials, and they\u2019ll simply become more like nature. You\u2019ll be able to change things at a molecular level. That\u2019s probably just an inevitability, where we scientifically change our environment. And maybe the more we advance, the closer to nature our materials get.<\/p>\n
In the same way, you eventually might make things that fly through the air powered by the universe, as opposed to oil or petrol or gas. It might be that our clothes are powered by\u2014I don\u2019t know\u2014they\u2019re built by the equivalent of grass, and they grow through sunlight. The idea that we can predict what\u2019s going to happen in the next 5000 years is impossible. It might actually go back to when the original caveman was found with a grass skirt and bare-skin shoes. It might revert to that, when we use nature even more. We just understand how to harness it.<\/p>\n
SK: In your experience, what actually drives real innovation more: technical possibility or imagination?<\/p>\n
NT: It has to be imagination, in my opinion, because the technical comes from \u201cone plus one equals two\u201d answers. I take this and this and I make this. The best ideas in the world forever are going to come from people\u2019s brains. I was looking at what the human brain is capable of: in one second, it can do a 100 trillion computations per second. So imagination is always going to be king, because it\u2019s the fundamental architecture that creates the new idea\u2014and then the engineering simply catches up. Someone will have an idea so radical that then they have to work out how to do it. That\u2019s the difference between science and imagination, and I\u2019m always going to say imagination is better, because science will catch up to it. You can imagine anything. I can imagine a world where I jump through a portal and suddenly I\u2019m on Mars. Maybe in 2,000 years, that happens, and that is simply the way we travel. But the engineering is not there yet. Engineering is the thing that responds to the imagination.<\/p>\n
SK: AI is starting to enter every creative field. How is it already touching your process\u2014if at all\u2014especially when it comes to ideas, materials, or prototyping?<\/p>\n
NT: AI is a funny one. If you take the sentence, the limit of your world is limited by your language\u2014the AI can currently only know everything that\u2019s been fed into it. Unless I\u2019ve got something wrong about AI, which is possible. Its limit is therefore everything it\u2019s been fed. Say it\u2019s been fed fifty percent of the knowledge of all humanity, because it\u2019s pretty hard to feed in all the stuff of past civilizations. You can\u2019t feed into it everything the Aztecs did, because they might have done ninety percent of stuff we don\u2019t know about. So you\u2019re feeding it a part of the world that\u2019s happened in the last, say, ten, twenty years\u2014everything that exists digitally. Which is still a lot of resource.<\/p>\n
I personally love it. It\u2019s simply a tool; it\u2019s simply how you use it. At Vollebak, currently the only thing I\u2019m using it for is very fast visualizations of ideas. That\u2019s it. But it\u2019s only fast if you have really good taste. Say you have terrible taste and a terrible idea\u2014it\u2019s going to spit out some terrible things. But if you have really nice taste and a really nice idea, with a bit of tweaking it can produce some fairly good things. The visualization of a world or an object is useful, but that\u2019s about it for now.<\/p>\n
On Sonic Jacket, we used AI to visualize some really fast ideas, but essentially it was us feeding it: now I\u2019d like the wires thicker and yellow. Now more like this. I want it black. It\u2019s just a very fast tool. It\u2019s like having access to a brilliantly fast painter\u2014but one who can paint your portrait in two minutes, like Michelangelo. Well, maybe not Michelangelo\u2014it definitely lacks some of the art. It lacks some of the imagination. It lacks human brilliance.<\/p>\n
There will also be a bit of a\u2014not a war, but a thing\u2014in the world of high-end stuff: high-end AI art versus high-end human art. Some people go, I love this, because it\u2019s pure human touch, this is a wine grown from a grape in a field here. Other people might use AI to create the greatest wine ever in the greatest glass bottle ever. You\u2019ll have some who go, I love the humanity of this, and some who go, I love the technology of this. At Vollebak, it\u2019s quite easy\u2014I use it as a tool, the same way I\u2019d use Photoshop, or Illustrator, or a great art director. Obviously, it\u2019s changing very fast, and in the past two or three months, AI has become extraordinarily good at video. Ridiculously good.<\/p>\n
I made the first AI video for Sonic Jacket. That was an incredible experience. I worked with Maxim Kelly, and he creates incredible dystopic AI views of America that look maybe like the nineteen sixties, black and white. I got him to create an imagined time where the Sonic Jacket has existed for quite a long time. It was very fun, very interesting to do, and it felt like a very modern thing. But I wouldn\u2019t want to become overly reliant on it\u2014in the same way I got my friend Henrik, who\u2019s Swedish, to paint me three aliens. If it\u2019s used in conjunction with everything else, it\u2019s great. If you say it\u2019s the only thing, in an industry like ours\u2014it\u2019s just a tool currently.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SK: Your work often looks to nature for inspiration\u2014whether it\u2019s butterfly wings or squid skin\u2014while staying deeply futuristic.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":603161,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[61,60,82],"class_list":["post-603160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=603160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603160\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/603161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}