Job Automation: Are Writers, Artists, and Musicians Replaceable? | Andrew Mcafee | Big Think

Just about every time that I get involved in a discussion or a conversation about technological progress and how it can take away jobs from people and how it can automate away things that people used to do, one of the first things that people talk about this irreplaceable human skill is creativity, is coming up with some kind of eureka. And I think that is simultaneously correct and not correct at all.

Let me talk first about the way that it's not correct at all. There are lots of different definitions of creativity out there. One of them that I walk around with is the ability to come up with a powerful or a useful legitimately novel idea. I think that's what creative people, whether they are innovators or entrepreneurs or investors or musicians or painters, a lot of what I think of as creativity is this eureka, this coming up with something that's valuable or valued and also pretty novel.

Machines can do that now by any definition; they can do that in lots of different domains. There's a rapidly growing field called generative design, and what that means is if you feed into a modern piece of technology the specifications that you want this building to be able to handle, or this heat exchanger, or the frame of a car, or some kind of part out there in the physical world that has to meet some performance specifications or fit inside some performance envelope, we've got software that will generate a part that will do that admirably.

And what's interesting is when you couple that software to a 3-D printer, you print out these arbitrarily complex shapes that do exactly what you want them to do. They're typically very, very high performing; they're typically very efficient. They very often look different than what a human designer would come up with. When I look at the parts that get churned out by generative design software, they look like skulls or skeletons or exoskeletons that you see in nature, and I was initially surprised by that.

I don't think I should be surprised by that; the forms that nature produces are, by definition, really, really useful and really efficient because they've survived all the evolutionary challenges in history so far and arrived at this point. So they're really beautiful objects. Generative design software can turn out objects like that now that remind me a lot of the things that we see in the natural world. They look different than what human designers come up with. They perform better, in many cases, than what human designers come up with. I would call the work of design a very creative endeavor. We have technology that's now good at that.

There's also technology that can compose music in almost any style that you suggest. And there's an interesting phenomenon going on there: when people know in advance that they're going to be listening to computer-generated music, they very often dismiss it as shallow or trivial or obviously not coming from a human composer's mind and heart. When listeners don't know in advance that they're listening to computer-generated music, they very often find it as evocative, as beautiful, as moving as anything a human being would come up with.

I guess we shouldn't be so surprised by that. Human taste in music is not this great unknown. We know some of the rules about what Western listeners, for example, find appealing in music. You can bake those rules into software, hit go, and generate a lot of music. So again, that's an endeavor where I would've thought of it as creative, and computers are clearly doing at least an adequate job, possibly a really, really good job.

However, what we haven't seen yet are computers that can turn out lyrics on top of that music that sound anything except either really, really silly or flat-out nonsensical and ridiculous. And if you look at longer form prose that computers generate, they can generate an arbitrarily long novel, short story, set of prose, whatever; it's gibberish, it's nonsense, it kind of makes your head hurt in not a good way to have to plow through this stuff.

My explanation for why that is is that computers just don't know anything about the human condition. They're not human. They haven't evolved in this world. They don't live with other people in this world. They're beautiful mimics of a lot of things. But when I think about what truly creative writers and lyricists do, they understand the human condition; they illuminate it, and they kind of reflect it back to us in a way that we respond to. I still haven't seen any piece of technology do that.

There's a concept from linguistics that I find really helpful for understanding computer creativity, and the concept from linguistics is called the intuition of the native speaker. What they mean by that is because I'm a native speaker of English, I can immediately look at an English sentence and even before my brain has processed its meaning, I know if it's grammatically correct or not. I can scan that way before I even know what I'm doing, and I can know if that's a properly constructed English sentence or not.

I can't do that for any other language, and people who come to English as a later language can't do it nearly as reliably, nearly as quickly as I can. So we native speakers build up this intuition about the languages that we speak. The way I apply that to this notion about digital creativity is that we humans have the native speaker's intuition about the human condition, about the human world, about the social environment that we all create.

I'm skeptical; I'm a huge optimist about technology. Based on what I've seen so far, I am really skeptical that we're going to be able to successfully convey that intuition, even to a really, really big, really sophisticated piece of technology or machine learning system. I just think if that day ever comes, it is a long, long way away.