The myth of the “creative professional”
OCTOBER 29TH, 2016 — POST 299
This week was never meant to matter. We knew both Apple and Microsoft would have events, some new PC hardware would be released, and the world would just move on. And, don’t get me wrong, the world will certainly move on. But of what we could have reasonably expected this week to hold from either company’s track records and the leaks that came out in the lead up to either’s event, I don’t think anyone could predict the content of the conversations being had around what are just two new models of computer.
Walt Mossberg and Vlad Savov of The Verge and Bob O’Donnell of Recode have framed the releases this week as indicative of shifts in the status of the PC, that this device category that has become “furniture” as Mossberg puts it is slowly shifting underneath us. Some, myself included, have wanted to again turn to the question of input — of the specific hardware conduits by which we are able to have a computer understand us — in light of the Touch Bar adorning the keyboard of Apple’s new MacBook Pro or the new Microsoft Dial designed for use with the Surface Studio. Group these considerations in with the extreme cost of these devices and it’s natural to wonder:
Who are these even for?
The “creative professional” rhetoric dominated the presentation of both devices — whether in launch videos that depict users drawing on the screen to on-stage product demos that foregrounded applications like photo editing and DJing (holy shit, that was incredibly bad). Whether they themselves believe it or not, we’re being told by both companies that these are premium devices that ought to be immediately useful — and therefore desirable — to “creative professionals”. This phrase can’t shake its scare quotes in my usage of it because, as many have pointed out, people who actually make their money in creative fields are likely to be discerning enough to know better. If nothing else, they’ll want more than 16GB of RAM in 2016 and more than last year’s processors and graphics cards.
So why then do Apple and Microsoft seem to be going so hard for a market I’m sceptical will want these products? And it’s not just the MacBook Pro and Surface Studio, the iPad Pro and portable Surface devices are laced with the same rhetoric, albeit to varying degrees. It might be that Apple and Microsoft aren’t trying to sell to creative professionals but instead are trying to make professionals creative.
Titan of science fiction Frank Herbert co-authored a book in 1980 entitled Without Me You’re Nothing: The Essential Guide to Home Computers with Max Barnard. As Matthew Kirschenbaum writes in Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, “The cryptic title was meant to be understood as words addressed to the computer itself: Without our intervention they are useless junk”. And in 1980, that was largely the case. Ignoring the intelligent computer scenarios like that which is depicted in 1983’s WarGames, PCs were a beige box on your desk that could do very little without your telling it to. This is just no longer the case.
The slow drip-feed of artificial intelligence and machine learning — coupled with advances in robotics — has long been predicted to make a lot of professions redundant (the well-known fear of the Luddites is as pressing today, in some industries far more than others). Amazon is hoping to deliver goods via drones. Uber and Tesla could basically just drive you around if the government would let them. And these — and myriad other examples of industrial moves toward automation — are obvious Good Moves™. Computers are frankly just better (or can be made to be better) than at us at a lot of things. More and more, computers won’t need us: they’re already much more than useless junk without us. The natural next question is: “What then is there left for us to do?”
Writing for the New York Times on August 16th, 1964, another titan of science fiction Isaac Asimov penned a futurist snapshot entitled “Visit to the World’s Fair of 2014”. And he had some ideas about what is left over when we all become South Park-style rednecks underscoring a chorus of “They took our jobs!” with raised shaking fists. Asimov writes:
“mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014. The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine.”
If a generalisation can be drawn between the MacBook Pro and Surface Studio along the lines of creativity, it is that they further democratise the means of creative production. Photoshop becomes more approachable with the Microsoft Dial, Final Cut Pro easier to get around when abstracted keyboard shortcuts are presented along the Touch Bar right in front of you. These innovations are annoying to those that already know how to do creative work because — especially in the case of the Touch Bar — they come with costs. But they are magic to a neophyte. Those coming to Illustrator or DaVinci Resolve for the first time have just had their learning curve truncated.
Of all the sectors that automation will touch, sectors with a creative component — and especially a visuospatial creative component — would seem the most resilient. I don’t think we’re really far enough along into this to even know if artificial intelligence would even be capable of replicating and thus replacing that which might, however loosely, fall under the banner of “creative work”. When computers will more and more say to us “I got this”, all we might be left to do is make stuff. These devices are on-ramps to creative work, not workhorses to get creative work done. Their innovations — a physical dial that can be turned and a touch-based strip — are inherently human to signal that perhaps in this venue alone humans still have supreme control.
Apple used to sell devices by telling you that they were more fun than the competitor. Microsoft sold products saying that you could get more done with them than with others. Now both are hoping to be the ones to facilitate the discovery of your own creativity in industry-standard applications, not just little apps like Paper (iOS) or Fresh Paint (Windows). I’m not for a minute saying that either company is wilfully hoping to make their users more creative. But I do think they’ve both tapped into a possible future where all that matters is that you can create.
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