Creativity Machines? How humans can be more than mere pattern-readers

A great blog from our friend from the ad industry, Phil Teer, on whether human creativity faces a challenge from ever-smarter, pattern-and-formula-recognising machines. Answer?  Our human creativity need to become even more daring and boundary-breaking.

Excerpt below: 

We are about to go through the most far-reaching phase of technological change since the industrial revolution. It is estimated that up to 47% of existing jobs will disappear. New jobs will be created but there will be less jobs overall. Automation will challenge the very nature of work.

Proposed responses to automation, like universal basic income, have the potential to fundamentally transform the economic relationships at the heart of society. As the world comes to terms with a genuinely post-industrial and potentially postcapitalist state of affairs, we will need human creativity more than ever. The technology itself will only achieve its full potential with the help of creative minds and original thinkers.

The new world will not be like the old. There is a mantra in Cory Doctorow’s new novel Walkaways (which will be familiar to Alasdair Gray fans) that we will be living in the first days of a better world. The future will need original thinkers who can apply imagination to technology and see possibilities forever hidden to pattern readers.

Originality, the creative leap, the mould-breaking film or song, these will forever be the gift of the human. Creative machines that replicate past patterns will be limited in their usefulness.