closeup photo of turned on computer monitor

closeup photo of turned on computer monitor

By Greg Williams

A LUX x ROSEWOOD COLLABORATION

Black and white portrait of WIRED magazine editor Greg Williams

Greg Williams

In recent years, ambitious parents have added a further endeavour to the list of educational activities they believe will enhance the character of their children. Along with music lessons, chess and languages, coding has become a must for any child whois to compete in the global economy of the future. No longer is it acceptable to master the Suzuki violin method or be proficient with an épée, no, the corporate titans of the future must also be armed with a fully developed grasp of the programming language Python. Tiger mothers from Cupertino to Chelsea compete to secure Imperial College computer science graduates as tutors, fearful that their children will be left behind by the merciless advancement of AI and quantum computing.

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There is some truth to large numbers of young people needing to be proficient in STEM skills. But it isn’t the whole picture. As it has floundered from one recent catastrophe to another, Facebook has demonstrated at in ear to deficiencies in its business, from culpability in undermining the democratic process to data privacy. Founder Mark Zuckerberg’s response that he would ‘fix’ Facebook demonstrated his engineer’s mindset. Having leadership capable of empathy and creative engagement would have served it much better than the obfuscation and platitudes that have become its hallmark.

Technical, scientific and engineering skills are crucial for economies, but so too is the underpinning of all discovery: language. Many in the technology industry believe that coding will soon be done by machines themselves, making much of what humans do today obsolete. What will remain crucial for our advancement are the skills that existed long before the concept of the programmable computer: human creativity and ingenuity. It’s what will determine our destiny.

Six ways to get technical:

1. Realise that it’s not just you; everyone else is also trying to understand what digital transformation means.
2. Ignore jargon. If it can’t be explained simply,you probably don’t need to know about it.
3. Don’t be afraid of the new.
4. Assume big tech is not your friend.
5. Stay curious. You have access to every piece of information ever, why follow Kylie Jenner?
6. It’s not really about technology, it’s about human beings.

Greg Williams is editor in chief of WIRED

This article was originally published in the Winter 2019 issue.

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close-up photo of SPMTE color bars

close-up photo of SPMTE color bars

By Dylan Jones

A LUX x ROSEWOOD COLLABORATION

Portrait of GQ editor Dylan Jones

Dylan Jones

I remember the very first time I met Jonathan Ive [Apple’s chief design officer], 15 years ago, at the old Design Museum near London’s Tower Bridge. It was a winter’s evening and we were sipping entry-level sauvignon blanc and eating overly complex finger food as we stared across the Thames and compared notes on how our respective companies were working together.

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We were talking about the need for creatives to work more collaboratively with those in the emerging tech sector, and, obviously, why it was imperative that ‘tech-heads’ (his term, not mine), should seek out more creatives. A decade and a half later, the penny finally seems to be dropping.

I have long been involved in discussions with creatives about how the big tech companies still think they can get away with treating content providers like serfs, but not only does this situation look as though it is slowly changing, but also it seems that far more people in tech are now reaching out to the creative industries. Not because they still desperately need content, but more importantly because they understand that in order to build long-standing editorial propositions, it is vital for both sectors to work hand in hand. Which means that the creative sector as a whole needs to be more responsive, and perhaps even more proactive in reaching out to tech, in order to start building for the future. It is no use pitching editorial against delivery systems, as they both need each other, more so now than at any time in the past.

Almost unbelievably, there are still those on both sides of the divide who think that one can work without the other. But more fool them. The future is bright and the future is exciting and the future is right here under our noses, but there is little point in trying to embrace it alone.

Six ways to get creative:

1. Build a proposition that partners can co-own.
2. Never clip your own wings.
3. Be transgressive as well as transformative.
4. Listen more.
5. Ask more questions.
6. Own the data.

Dylan Jones is the editor in chief of British GQ and menswear chairman of the British Fashion Council.

This article was originally published in the Winter 2019 issue.

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Reading time: 1 min