The AI revolution is pushing human thinking into reverse, says Lewis Liu

Last weekend my wife and I were in Florence for an old family friend’s wedding. With a morning free, we visited the Uffizi, a solemn temple for a former professional artist and art major like me.

The exhibit is curated chronologically, opening with late Medieval works that reveal the flat perspective and “spell” of Church symbolism, a closed intellectual system where knowledge was copied from one generation to the next but never created, bound by a singular interpretative framework dictated by the Church. Inquiry was punished.

Room by room, the exhibit traces the early Renaissance and its rediscovery of perspective and geometry. The breaking of this closed informational spell has been largely attributed to the injection of outside influence: mathematics from the Islamic world, Chinese inventions like paper and the printing press, rediscovered ancient Greek and Roman texts. This resulted in a far more humanistic perspective versus singular Church doctrine.

Moving through the galleries, my wife, who studied abroad in Florence during her Stanford undergrad, pointed out that the colours were mostly sourced from ground minerals, so the local Tuscan landscape echoes the paintings themselves, something you simply cannot experience looking at photos on your laptop or art history textbooks.

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Walking into the High Renaissance – the Botticellis, the Raphaels – it felt as if the blindfold had been lifted from the Florentine people: vivid colors, perspectives, and subjects once thought blasphemous, almost daring the Church to limit human genius. Towards the end, I found the painting........

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