325 | Alvy Ray Smith on Pixar, Pixels, and the Great Digital Convergence

Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. You don't need me to tell you that we live in a digital world these days. We have digital cameras, we talk to each other on digital computers, listen to podcasts, our audio is digital, the whole bet. We've digitized most of human knowledge and are training our AIs on them.

We've had a transition from thinking of the world and representing the world and picturing the world in mostly analog ways, ways that involve smooth configurations of matter that you would in principle need an infer infinite amount of information to reproduce, to a digital world where we have finite amounts of data that we can store on a computer, that we can manipulate, compute on, and change the world around us with all that. technology. We see the changes going on. We're really just at the beginning of what these changes are going to bring to us. One example of the digitization of the world is the existence of computer animation, right?

You can make movies, you can make very popular movies such as those made by Pixar, as well as DreamWork. uh Disney animation, other studios, and they they can be just as emotionally compelling and good storytelling as movies made with human actors. You need both, I'm not saying you're going to replace them. The replacement narrative is a little bit misplaced sometimes, but it's there. It's a form of art, digital media.

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