I have always felt the most human task someone can undertake is to create. I feel like I understand humans better when I see work work they produce: are they meticulous and orderly or broad and messy? Is their product scaffolded in best practices or dreamt up on the far horizons? The act of creating forces us to reach deep into our habits, wishes, fears, and prejudices and draw out something deeply personal.
Thus, my ears perk up when technology aids in what I see as a hallmark human process: creativity. Reid Hoffman stated that technology at its best should "amplify human capacity, not replace it". Yet with incredible frequency we hear gloom and doom around machines slowly replacing our neighbors, our peers, and possibly ourselves. For creatives, engineers, and designers, what does the future look like? Should we expect to be in the drivers seat or should we expect to have a T-800 crunching its iron boot on our throats? The future, for at least our lifetime, will be much more nuanced.
True, machines will begin undertaking human tasks. They will create art, they will write music, they will provide recommendations. Most excitingly though, humanity will use our own creativity to build such artistic machines. From there, we enter new universes of productivity and exploration that would have been unthinkable up until this point in human history.
For example, glaciologist Martin O’Leary showcased a fantasy map generator capable of constructing maps similar to those you would find at the front of an old Fantasy Novel. In his post, broke down the step by step function a machine will go through to construct the map, taking into consideration things like waterways, erosion, natural boarders, and roadways influence by human settlement. Each of these steps has distinct enough rules that allows a machine to generate something once left to the nuanced brain of an author or cartographer.
Yet the recent release of No Man’s Sky takes this concept to an exponential conclusion, in promising to allow players to traverse an in-game Universe the size of… well the Universe. In a genre of entertainment that has always promised to drop users into immersive worlds, the team at No Man’s Sky handed the reigns to algorithms that, using the complex rule engine, created planet after planet with creatures that surprise and delight any galactic explorer. The end-result is a game that inspires awe simply because of its sheer size - something that would have been absolutely impossible if humans had undertook the same task. Human creativity is paradoxically amplified by the power of today’s computing power, able to churn through permutations and iterations at scale, allowing the inevitable eye of the beholder to determine if the randomly generated creation is truly worth marveling over.
This trend will accelerate, and has already surfaced in a world often dissociated with technological innovation: fashion. IBM and fashion firm Marchesa teamed up to create a dress for New York City's Met Gala using Watson as a collaborator in the design process. Clothing designers from Marchesa fed inspirational material into Watson to calibrate the system's own algorithmic recommendations, and this allowed the machine to come back with fresh perspectives and ideas that could then be selected and refined by human eyes. Example materials included previous dress designs, color palettes, and fabrics, giving Watson a sense of the direction its human counterparts wanted to move in. The result was a piece of art crafted by man and machine.
It’s non traditional examples like these that make the space of human-computer creativity a fascinating one. Netflix is famous for having based its popular new shows on the deep analytics it receives on viewer preferences across the globe. Youtube analytics can tell you which part of your videos are “hot” - meaning people went back to rematch them within the viewing session, or conversely skipped over within the same session. Video data like this could be fed into an algorithm that might make recommendations on how to create the most viral, watchable video video content simply based on massive troves of viewing data.
In the age of the PC, technology was merely a tool for human creativity, not a partner. Many times Creative Directors, Lead Engineers, of Design Leads will ask their juniors to “play with an idea” - a means of producing new fodder for the team’s creative process. When a machine can algorithmically generate untold new directions that can then be handed over for human curation, the process takes on a whole new light. It becomes a process of fine tuning parameters and inputs, locking down positive aspects and expanding the variability of negative aspects to see options. Suddenly, a design team can explore hundreds or thousands of directions so long as they maintain and refine the underlying machinery.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the artists of tomorrow are just as much programmers as they are creatives, able to craft algorithms that allow for massive exploration of untold, new directions in the realms of music, video, app-design, literature, and more. Just as the creators of No Man’s Sky admit they didn’t expect some of the outcomes their procedurally generated universe yields - so too may the artists of tomorrow scratch their heads in amazement at what their programs output for consideration.
