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    NEXT: Does Creativity Have A Future?

    “New ideas no longer fuel economic growth the way they once did.” 

    – Jay Bhattacharya & Mikko Packalen

    This is the conclusion reached by two researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Jay Bhattacharya and Mikko Packalen were looking specifically at the production of new scientific ideas—and the technologies associated with these ideas—and concluded that, because citation frequency is the new metric for determining the value of scientific work, scientists are pursuing incrementalism, to make it easier to get published and frequently cited. 

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    “This emphasis on citations in the measurement of scientific productivity,” they assert, “shifted scientist rewards and behavior on the margin toward incremental science and away from exploratory projects that are more likely to fail, but which are the fuel for future breakthroughs. As attention given to new ideas decreased, science stagnated.” 

    Scientists—or, perhaps, those who fund their research—are becoming more risk averse and thus less inclined to explore innovative ideas. The researchers recommend that the scientific community adopt new metrics, those that measure novelty rather than impact: “[if] novelty metrics were utilized in scientist evaluation, scientists might pursue more innovative, riskier, projects.”

    Derek Thompson concurs with Bhattacharya and Packalen, although he sees this aversion to novelty in a wide number of sectors, not just scientific enterprise. As an example of what he is seeing, Thompson notices that Hollywood has not produced an original blockbuster movie in some time. Sure, there have been blockbuster movies like Iron Man 2, Jurassic Park 3, Toy Story 4, but these are merely extensions of existing franchises. 

    “Of the 10 top-grossing movies of 2019,” he notes, “nine were sequels or live-action remakes of animated Disney movies, with the one exception, Joker, being a gritty prequel of another superhero franchise.”  

    But it isn’t just movies. 

    “Across entertainment, industries now naturally gravitate toward familiar surprises rather than zany originality,” Thompson says. 

    What passes for novelty is little more than incrementalism, tweaking a preexisting idea: or, really, producing the same thing dressed up in different clothes. Do we really need another Gordon Ramsay cooking show? The Masked Singer now is done up in CGI makeup, just one more talent show.  

    Thompson sees this, what we might call, “flight from creativity” across many sectors. 

    “Today’s scientists are less likely to publish truly new ideas,” says Thompson, “businesses are struggling to break into the market with new ideas, U.S. immigration policy is constricting the arrival of people most likely to found companies that promote new ideas, and we are less likely than previous generations to build institutions that advance new ideas.” 

    The next app you download is probably going to be some version of “the Uber for ________.” It is hard not to conclude that we are in a creativity dearth in our society, and we might wonder how long this malaise might persist?  

    Conservative columnist Ross Douthat attributes this dearth of creativity to his belief that the U.S. has become a decadent society. By decadence, Douthat means “economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development. It describes a situation in which repetition is more the norm than innovation.” Repetition, cultural and intellectual exhaustion are all symptoms of a society suffering from the end of novelty, or at least the end of the praise of novelty.

    The geographer Oli Mould argues that “capitalism of the twenty-first century, turbocharged by neoliberalism, has redefined creativity to feed its own growth. Being creative in today’s society has only one meaning: to carry on producing the status quo. Creativity under conditions of neoliberal capitalism means generating ideas that solve problems or, preferably, create economic value. Twenty years ago, Richard Florida identified the creative class as people in science and engineering, “design, education, arts, music and entertainment, whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or creative content.” If Mould is correct and creativity today means not novelty but reproducing the status quo, then the malaise described by Bhattacharya, Packalen, Thompson and Douthat isn’t a bug, but a feature of the current economic system.  

    Perhaps the future of creativity will be driven by artificial intelligence. Like many others, I have been experimenting with Dream by WOMBO, an AI-driven app that generates art works. A user writes up to 100 words describing the sort of picture to be “painted,” then the user selects a style in which the image is to be composed. After pressing submit, the algorithm produces an original image. In a similar fashion, the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) language model starts with a few words composed by a human user, the AI then taking over and creating a written composition. (I assure you, this essay was generated solely and completely by yours truly, your human columnist/futurist.)  

    It is fair to ask, of course, whether machines generating art or essays really constitutes true creativity. If the answer turns out to be yes, then perhaps creativity in the future will become an attribute of machines, not of humans. Inasmuch as creativity is fuel for economic growth, perhaps that fuel will come from artificial intelligence: “artificial creativity.”   

    Because “creativity” has been harnessed to a neoliberal agenda, it is easy to conclude that those cultural, scientific and intellectual activities that are economically generative are the only ones that can be truly creative. Perhaps Thompson and others aren’t seeing novelty and creativity in our current moment because their only measure of creativity is economic value. That which is creative but non-productive eludes their gaze.  

    Does creativity have a future? Absolutely yes: when it’s value is untethered from the economy and de-coupled from economic growth. Until such time that it is once again recognized and elevated as the highest form of human achievement, a renaissance of creativity will continue to evade us.   

    David Staley is an associate professor of history, design, and educational studies at The Ohio State University. He is host of the “Voices of Excellence” podcastCreativeMornings Columbus and is president of Columbus Futurists. 

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    David Staley
    David Staley
    David Staley is president of Columbus Futurists and a professor of history, design and educational studies at The Ohio State University. He is the host of CreativeMornings Columbus.
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