How We Kill Creativity and Why It Matters More Than Ever
Outthinking AI by Embracing Our Creative Minds
“How many jobs can I have?” asked my six-year-old daughter, Livia. “Most people have just one, why?” I replied. “It’s just that I like teaching, but I also like the supermarket and stationery shop; I could do something different every day.”
Livia, who spends her day at school, sees her teachers as professional role models. Grasping the concept of teaching comes naturally to her, as does understanding the workings of the stationery shop and the supermarket near our home.
Regardless, it’s doubtful she’ll end up in a career that’s on the brink of obsolescence. According to the World Economic Forum:
Surveyed organizations predict 26 million fewer jobs by 2027 in Record-Keeping and Administrative roles, including Cashiers and Ticket Clerks; Data Entry, Accounting, Bookkeeping and Payroll Clerks; and Administrative and Executive Secretaries, driven mainly by digitalization and automation.
Twenty-six million jobs gone in just three years? What can unfold in ten years?
Ever since OpenAI introduced Sora, even Brad Pitt isn’t out of the woods. The character below comes from a movie entirely crafted by artificial intelligence. He looks authentic, but this person is purely fictional!
Facing this scenario, how can we excel in the future?
The Future of Employment 2023 Report highlights:
Analytical thinking and creative thinking remain the most important skills for workers in 2023. Analytical thinking is considered a core skill by more companies than any other skill and constitutes, on average, 9% of the core skills reported by companies. Creative thinking, another cognitive skill, ranks second, ahead of three self-efficacy skills — resilience, flexibility and agility; motivation and self-awareness; and curiosity and lifelong learning — in recognition of the importance of workers ability to adapt to disrupted workplaces.
I challenge the importance of analytical thinking over creative thought.
Analytical thinking involves scrutinizing information, identifying patterns, and making decisions based on evidence. Artificial intelligence, like ChatGPT, excels in this area because it can process vast amounts of data quickly. Moreover, it’s capable of analyzing multiple variables simultaneously, identifying complex correlations, and predicting outcomes based on historical patterns — hallmarks of analytical thought.
However, generating novel ideas often requires linking seemingly unrelated concepts and venturing into lesser-known territories, a challenge for AI models that tend to rely on the most common patterns in their datasets. Creativity is the antithesis of the commonplace, which is why it remains a uniquely human trait.
In the next few minutes, I won’t be teaching you how to be creative — we’re all born with that ability. But I’ll show you how the war against creativity starts with our parents in childhood, moves through school with our teachers, and finally reaches organizations with our bosses.
But before diving into that, let’s discuss IQ tests. What do they measure? Primarily, they assess analytical competence, and this applies even in the realm of artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence and IQs
Albert Einstein’s IQ ranged between 160 and 180. You’re likely familiar with him, but William James Sidis, with an estimated IQ of around 210, might be a new name for you — an astronomical difference compared to the most emblematic physicist in the world. There are thousands of other lesser-known individuals with IQs surpassing Einstein’s. So, why did he manage to achieve such remarkable feats?
The Terman Study of the Gifted, initiated by psychologist Lewis Terman in 1921, sought to understand the development and potential of children with high levels of intelligence. Over decades, Terman and his team monitored about 1,500 individuals with exceptionally high IQs, anticipating that their intellectual talent would lead them to notable successes in adulthood.
However, Terman observed that many of these “geniuses” did not achieve the expected success, encountering difficulties in areas like career, relationships, and mental health. This finding challenged the notion that intellectual talent is synonymous with a life of achievements, highlighting the complexity of human development and the significance of factors beyond IQ in determining success.
In the book “Outliers: The Story of Success,” Terman’s study is also mentioned. Malcolm Gladwell, the author, argues that to achieve success, one only needs an IQ slightly above average; being a genius is not necessary, but it must be combined with a good dose of creativity. He presents an intriguing comparison between Poole and Florence, the latter being one of the students with the highest IQs in the school.
See, for example, Poole’s answers to the “utilization of objects” test:
Brick
To break a window and rob the store.
To help keep a house standing.
To use in a game of Russian roulette, if you want to stay in shape at the same time (bricks at 10 paces, turn and throw — no evasive action allowed).
To secure a comforter to the bed, place a brick in each corner.
To break empty Coca-Cola bottles.Blanket
For use on a bed.
As cover for illicit sex in the woods. Like a tent.
To make smoke signals.
Like a boat sail or wagon cover.
To replace a towel.
As a shooting target for myopic people.
To save people jumping from burning skyscrapers.Now let’s look at the answers from another student, her name is Florence, a prodigy, with one of the highest IQs in the school.
Brick
Build things, shoot.Blanket
Warm up, smother the fire, tie to trees and sleep in it (like a hammock), an improvised stretcher.
Do you notice the difference? As Albert Einstein said:
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Over time, various artificial intelligences (AIs) have been subjected to IQ tests in diverse experiments. One of the most notable challenges came from Mensa International, an organization that groups individuals with high IQs, which “invited” AIs, including IBM Watson, to take its exams.
Watson, known for his victory on Jeopardy!, a quiz show, participated and achieved an IQ over 150, a level considered to be genius. This episode, which occurred about ten years ago, illustrates how close AI is to human analytical capacity. Therefore, we must look back and discover why we are losing our creativity.
Parents
When we’re in the car on the way to my mother’s house, Lívia, my wife, and I play “What I Saw in the Sky.” If I say “I saw an orange,” my wife will likely say she saw some other fruit, but when it’s Lívia’s turn, she might say “I saw a chair.” Do you see the difference? Why do children have this ease that we lose over time?
My nephew João lives with his parents in a house attached to his grandmother’s. Sometimes, I spend the day with them, and the word I hear most is “no.” “Don’t do that, João,” “Don’t climb up there,” “Don’t go out in the rain,” “Don’t move that,” etc. This reminds me that I grew up in the same environment, which reinforces the idea that the world is binary and that there’s always a right and a wrong way.
For my mother, the house must always be tidy, a slight drizzle is reason enough to grab an umbrella, and any little mess could result in a scolding.
She doesn’t mean any harm, of course. Most adults don’t realize they’re stifling children’s creativity.
While I was writing this article, Livia came up with a glass of water filled halfway and placed it on the breakfast table. When she tried to dip her hand into the glass, I quickly said “no!” Then, the irony of the situation hit me. Why was I acting like this?
I changed my approach and asked her why she wanted to do that. “To see if my hand looks bigger,” she replied. “Go ahead, try it,” I encouraged her. She did and found it fascinating.
I admit I need to constantly make an effort to allow her to explore freely, following the advice of Neil deGrasse Tyson, the renowned American astrophysicist and science communicator:
Kids are born scientists. They’re born probing the natural world that surrounds them. They’ll lift up a rock. They’ll pick up a bug. They’ll pull petals off a flower. They’ll ask you why the grass is green and the sky is blue, and they’ll experiment with breakable things in your house. I think the best thing a parent can do, when raising a child, is simply get out of their way.
The common perception that children are more creative than adults leads us to view creativity as an almost magical skill. At work, when we praise someone’s creativity, we rarely think of it as related to a disciplined and systematic process. Therefore, for this analysis, it’s useful to approach cognitive creativity through the lens of various types of logical reasoning.
Logic and creativity are not opposing forces; however, the issue lies in the lack of emphasis on the kind of logical reasoning that fosters creativity.
Teachers
During our school years, many of us encounter two main types of reasoning: deductive and inductive. However, abductive reasoning tends to be less familiar.
Abductive reasoning, often considered the cornerstone of creative problem-solving, finds its roots in the scientific work of Charles Sanders Peirce in the late 19th century. The best way to understand how this type of reasoning works is to compare it with the other, more well-known types.
Deductive Reasoning
Deductive reasoning starts with a general premise and moves towards a specific conclusion. It’s like a funnel that begins wide and narrows down to a specific point. If the premises are true, the conclusion will also necessarily be true.
Example:
Premise 1: All humans are mortal.
Premise 2: Socrates is a human.
Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.
Here, we start with a general rule (all humans are mortal) to reach a specific conclusion about Socrates.
Inductive Reasoning
Inductive reasoning goes from the specific to the general. It observes specific patterns and from them makes generalizations or predictions. Unlike deductive reasoning, the conclusion is not guaranteed by the truth of the premises, but it is probable.
Example:
Observation 1: The sun has risen in the east every day up to today.
Conclusion: The sun will always rise in the east.
Here, from many specific observations, we generalize a rule about the sunrise. The conclusion is probable but not certain.
Abductive Reasoning
Abductive reasoning seeks the best explanation for the observed data. It’s like a detective who, faced with various clues, tries to find the most plausible explanation, but not necessarily the only one.
Example:
Observation: The ground is wet.
Most plausible conclusion (hypothesis): It rained.
In this case, given that the ground is wet, we conclude that the most plausible explanation is that it rained, although there are other possible explanations (someone might have washed the ground, for example).
Abductive reasoning is often the most closely related to creativity. Artificial Intelligence (AI) faces significant challenges with abductive reasoning, mainly because it involves making inferences from incomplete or ambiguous observations to arrive at the most plausible explanation.
This type of reasoning is particularly useful for formulating hypotheses and finding new and innovative explanations for the available data or observations. Essentially, it involves looking at a set of information and asking, “How can I understand this in a way that nobody else has thought of?”
Most people I talk to have never heard of abductive reasoning. Why is that? Why don’t we discuss this type of reasoning that’s so important nowadays?
During school, I remember times when I arrived at the correct answer on math tests, yet the question was still marked wrong. I was supposed to solve it the “right way,” as the teacher, the authority, had instructed. In traditional education, the concept of the “one right way” prevails.
This brings to mind another quote from Einstein:
The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
Notice the paradox: we send children to school, which ends up honing analytical thinking, an area where artificial intelligence is increasingly excelling, and, unintentionally, we end up stifling their creative thinking with the rigid protocols of the curriculum.
Unlike deductive reasoning, which operates within a strict logical framework, and inductive reasoning, which generalizes from specific cases, abductive reasoning allows for flexibility that can lead to innovative insights. It’s this leap to the best possible explanation, often in the absence of complete information, that opens the door to creativity.
Abductive reasoning is like assembling a puzzle with missing pieces, imagining what those missing pieces might represent.
In practice, this could mean creating a new theory that explains a set of observed phenomena, inventing a product to meet an unfulfilled need based on indirect observations of consumer behavior, or even developing an innovative narrative that originally connects dots.
But beyond the obstacles imposed by educational and parental influences on creativity, there’s a third adversary present in many “modern” organizations: the lack of autonomy.
Bosses
In 1909, Taylor published “The Principles of Scientific Management,” arguing that productivity would increase through the optimization and simplification of tasks. He proposed assigning each worker to a job that matched their skills, followed by training to perform it in a specific and repetitive manner. Although these principles still apply to roles that are likely to disappear, they do not adapt well to intellectual work.
Yet, many organizations still deeply adhere to Taylorism, maintaining the division between planning and execution. In this model, managers seek long-term forecasts, despite innovation being inherently unpredictable. To innovate, it is crucial to learn to manage uncertainty. This doesn’t imply that management and innovation are incompatible, but rather that traditional management methods are no longer suitable.
Creativity thrives in spaces that value experimentation, viewing mistakes as part of the learning process, and giving employees the freedom to explore various solutions to problems. For mistakes to be more readily tolerated, good experiments should be creatively planned using abductive reasoning.
But when the distant boss thinks they know the solution, teams often find themselves committed to long-term projects that are merely hypotheses. The issue is that a project isn’t an experiment, given its lengthy nature. If the project fails to solve the problem, a lot of money will have been wasted.
Moreover, remarkable results emerge when there is true cooperation among team members, bridging execution and management, as well as across the various areas of the organization.
However, in contrast to cooperation, from an early age, we are trained to compete. Our education is marked by competition in various areas: sports, attention, and even grades.
I was often one of the last to be chosen for the soccer team, struggled to attract the attention of girls who preferred older boys, and despite my efforts, couldn’t achieve the best grades in class. I was never first in anything, and society continues to value those who stand out, although humanity’s greatest achievements result from teamwork.
It’s not surprising that covert competition is so common within organizations. How can we fight against something that has been taught to us all our lives?
And finally, with so many jobs becoming obsolete, it seems we have a new and robust competitor: artificial intelligence. However, if we consider that it’s us, the humans, who are depriving ourselves of our main weapon — creativity — it becomes clear that we are our greatest enemies.
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