Apple recently brought the issue of creativity in the modern technology era to a head with its tone-deaf Crush Ad. If you haven’t seen it, the viewer is treated to the slow-motion destruction of all manner of artistic media, from instruments to paints to cameras. The hydraulic press lowers inch by steady inch until the items explode in a confetti spray of finality. The point of the ad is revealed as the press retracts to show the “thinnest Ipad yet”.
Like a spark on gas-soaked kindling, the response was swift and loud. It seems like this was the relief valve that many pent-up creatives have been looking for. Writers and artists who thought themselves safe from the automation revolution have seen the future transform since the release of ChatGPT only 19 months ago. And here we had a technology monolith actively crushing creativity right in front of our eyes.
The truth is that human creativity has been getting the big squeeze for a long time. Ideas of corporate efficiency, bureaucracy, and organizational psychology gained ground rapidly in the 20th century. Together, they promote an “ideal” workplace where workers are self-motivated cogs, interchangeable and expendable. In this workplace, we’re reduced to the limits of the project scope, budget, and KPIs. There is no room for creativity or imagination outside of special planned meetings.
And most importantly, when we are made small enough to fit into these carefully proscribed roles, our work output becomes organized, routine, and boring. The film Office Space came out 25 years ago, and work was soul-suckingly dull long before that.
The truth is that work can be replaced by the LLMs because humans were made to work like machines with dull, predictable, outputs. The move to mechanizing these outputs wouldn’t even be so bad if it wasn’t happening so fast.
Modern corn began life as a wild crop that was much smaller and only produced a small number of kernels. The process of cultivation and selective breeding started around 10,000 years ago. The Russian experiment to domesticate wild foxes has taken 40 years and 45,000 foxes. In our experience as humans, transformative change takes time.
However, technology is evolving at a breakneck pace, and new developments in coding and chip architectures are promising to accelerate further progress while lowering costs and barriers to entry.
Creative skills like writing and graphic design will be forced to evolve. The economy will necessarily evolve to support fewer people with these human skills, and many of these skills will be offloaded onto people who can manage the automated systems instead of producing the work product themselves.
The original Luddites were not rebelling against the idea of technology or automation per se. They were rebelling against replacing what was seen as an artisan craft that required apprenticeship and training (and ensured that individuals could earn a good living) with a technical craft that could overseen by someone without weaving skills. Machine operators learned to operate the machine, not to work with the cloth. The user was separated from the materials and became another cog in the larger machine. This made them more easily trainable and replaceable, which meant it was easier to add more production capacity and workers lost leverage in labor relationships. The result created a massive textile industry with terrible working conditions and low pay.
I don’t believe that creative work will die out. For at least the foreseeable future, human beings will continue to express themselves and their ideas in art, writing, and new creative forms assisted or even created by technology. But I do think we’re entering an era when the economic engines of our society are becoming increasingly incompatible with human happiness.
We have the means to meet our basic needs, but that isn’t enough. The system won’t be satisfied until it’s fully optimized and has extracted everything of value from our world and our lives. We would do well to trap our economy in a box, demand that it work to meet our basic physical needs, put roofs over our heads, food on our plate, and clothes on our backs, and for that, we will let it continue to exist. And should it fail in its purpose, it will be rethought, rebooted, or replaced. One can hope that in that possible future, it’s our corporations that feel the threatening crush of the press and not us.