When I was fifteen, I was in a local fashion show. I was one of those girls who walked around my small town with an issue of Vogue under my arm. After the fashion show, I was approached and asked to be a magician’s assistant. At the time, I believed magic was real, so you can imagine my disappointment when I found out the dove was hidden inside the hat behind a piece of black felt and other secrets of the craft. I was disappointed and found it extremely tedious to watch the tricks over and over as I stood there handing my magician his tools on Saturday mornings.
At the Battery in San Francisco, there’s a magician who walks around and performs tricks for everyone. You have never seen someone run faster to get another drink at the bar when the magician comes around. I think it’s one of those things in life when once you have seen behind the curtain, you can’t unsee it. I love that my friends are so surprised and charmed by the magician, but I am not. Luckily, there are lots of places to hide from the magician at the Battery.
However, I do know the world is truly full of magic, as anyone who has had a baby knows. I run into a lot of atheists through my work in technology. They wear their logic like a badge of honor, but watching a child grow into someone who looks and acts exactly like you makes the world feel a lot less random. After my catholic upbringing, I’m happy to land on the diplomatic idea of “intelligent design” as a cause of much of this magic.
Because I work with tech founders and executives of all sorts, AI is a constant topic of conversation. I also use AI in my own work. It has made me more productive, but it does have its limitations. Recently, I became involved in the restoration of a fresco mural that had been vandalised. I was asked to help because apparently, I know something about art. I do spend a good deal of time raising money for the San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts, but my knowledge of art is limited to one class I took at the University of London on Art History as an undergraduate, and of course, I paint (sometimes badly). But the damage to the fresco was infuriating, so I agreed to help.
San Francisco’s fresco history was defined by Diego Rivera in the 1930’s with his first three frescos, and then later his amazing Pan American Unity mural, which is now back at City College after a long visit to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Following Rivera, the 1930s saw a boom in public art under President Roosevelt’s New Deal, with artists producing murals that documented California’s history, labor struggles, and societal changes. They are all over the city and worth discovering if you have the time.
For the vandalized mural, it was hard to find someone who does this sort of work. The person who was hired was trained in London in restoration of this very specific medium and will be working to restore it over the next few months. I will be assisting her much like my days as a magician’s assistant, I will hand her cotton soaked in solution to remove the marks left by the vandals, among other duties.
Between this work on the mural and my work in technology, I keep thinking about AI and how I hope that it does have an impact on the job market, and young people who were once training to be computer scientists, data entry clerks, and coders become artists, restoration experts, fresco painters, plumbers, carpenters, seamstresses, and all of the other occupations that people who love to work with their hands once did.
And maybe a magician will not be such a novelty, and you will find one standing at the mall with his young, disillusioned assistant by his side.
Sydney 