Hi, Martin,
Your reply occasions a quick thought. You wrote:
“Just to clarify- What I am really talking about is creativity (yes, that old chestnut). The many examples of tasks/ jobs lost to technology that you cite are those that may require skill but not creativity. The weavers were not creating the designs. They were executing them (albeit skilfully). Typesetting is not the same as designing. The same goes for printing, drafting, visualising etc etc. Of course technology has been hugely beneficial here with the consequent loss of jobs. This is inevitable. I take a pragmatic view - there is no point in fearing technology if it can do a better job. When it comes to creative design however, it can't. When it can, we will be living in a very different world.”
As I see it, the different examples I gave involve different kinds of skills along several dimensions. Computers manage printing functions, but they don’t design type. Human beings can set type with a computer, but many of the choices require a human being. While computers have taken over most of the functions involved in drafting, much of the work requires human choices along the way. As it is when computers replace legal minds in document discovery, the computer requires guidance from a human intelligence. The difference is that the two working together can do much more work than a human working alone — while in many cases, the computer cannot do a competent job without a human to make decisions.
Many of the arts of skill and judgement involve different forms of creativity and intelligence that often remain invisible to those of us who do not master those arts. Some skills — loom weaving for one example, automobile construction for another — may be fully computerized if the skills and judgement involved depend on the instructions that can be rendered as algorithms. Other kinds of skill or judgement cannot be reduced to algorithms if they contain case by case choices in which the practitioner must engage in expert decision-making.
Writing and editing require expert decision-making. This is why so few people write well despite their ability to speak, read, and write reasonably well. The art of good writing requires transforming spoken language into written language. The useful redundancies and pauses of spoken languages become mistakes in writing, while the tones and gestures we use when we speak do not come across at all unless we create them through different stylistic means. Elegant writing is — as Picasso said of visual art — a lie that tells the truth.
Computers can apparently write press releases and they can replace a great deal of the work once done by the low-level journalists we sometimes call hacks, but they cannot replace all forms of writing. I gave the example of Grammarly to state that a computer cannot even tackle manageable academic prose without some of the kinds of decisions that a master recognizes as creativity.
To be sure, many skilled experts in every subject discipline seem to believe that they are able to write well when the rest of us recognize that this may not be the case. An astonishing amount of academic prose is incomprehensible. This leads to an absurd yet serious phenomenon. Audiences, including scholarly audiences, sometimes judge the competence of academic speakers and writers based on foggy, incomprehensible prose. It may be, therefore, that computers can imitate professors quite well.
Computers don’t usually write as well as Clifford Geertz or Richard Feynman … but neither do most anthropologists or physicists. Neither can computers write as well as or Martha Nussbaum or Gordon Wood, but few philosophers or historians rise to the clarity and beauty of a Nussbaum or a Wood. Reading the academic journals of most disciplines is a miserable experience. Turning turgid, incomprehensible prose into merely flaccid writing may be within the grasp of artificial intelligence. That’s programmable — but that remains the kind of prose that normal human beings must painstakingly translate into understandable language as they read.
While I tend to agree with the point of your comment, I gave examples of skills that require judgement based on understanding. These skills lie along a spectrum, so some aspects of these skills are more programmable than others. That’s why computers can assist human experts, reducing the time for each task. So far, computers can’t replace lawyers, anthropologists, or physicians. Just as a computer can assist a physician, a computer can also assist the designer of a book cover in many repeatable tasks — both diagnosis and cover design require expert human judgement if they are to succeed.
Where it comes to Fil’s confident prediction — “machines that not only match but exceed our creative abilities are inevitable” — All I can say is that in each era, we discover that the future isn’t what it used to be. I enjoyed your reply.
When someone can produce evidence of creative machines, I’ll be as interested as the next replaceable creator. My only mild disagreement with your post is to say that many partially programmable tasks also involve a creative dimension that remains invisible to those who cannot perform that task.
As Don Norman said in a long-ago post, many activities can be done better by humans-plus-computers than by either humans or computers alone.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia
Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
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