I'm doing a panel Tuesday evening up at BloombergNYC to discuss Creativity [in] 2020.
Now 'creativity' will be exactly the same in 2020.
Because, well, creativity is a process - an approach to the interaction of the world and people's minds.
Creativity is the faculty which performs operations on the inputs - the only thing in your head that you didn't get in there by seeing it.
[I seem to ascribe to a light tabula rasa theory of consciousness - that is to say I think all the 'knowledge' inside your head probably came from somewhere, even if you aren't conscious of having perceived or retained it, hence any idea is simply a novel combination of things you have experienced in some fashion, but I suspect the faculties, or some aspects of some cognitive faculties, are likely innate - such as the combinatorial faculty of imagination, which seems to be some aspect of how brains work.]
And that won't change because we have faster computers or more awesome fabric softeners or augmented reality contact lenses.
But we have a tendency to conflate creativity - the process - with craft - the execution thereof.
And by 2020 the craft will be very different indeed.
See - "IDEAS ARE NEW COMBINATIONS".
And by 2020, there will be lots of new combinations to make combinations from.
Certainly lots more traditional cultural expressions of creativity - but also lots more engineered, software created, bioengineered flesh grown, intelligent agent modelled, robotic combinations.
This is obviously a speculative excercise - the event horizon is too far for us to really have much of an idea - but it will make for interesting discussion decoupled from the obvious considerations of today.
But, when speculating on the future, it's worth bearing two things in mind - or one thing in two different articulations.
1. Amara's Law:
"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
2. Back to the Future 2:
With the hoverboards, holograms, and awesome sneakers, was set in 2015, which seemed reasonable in 1989.
Come say hi.
