Exceptions are little vacuums.
What is creativity, and how does it relate to artificial intelligence? This week, I attended a design meeting in Chicago in which four “creative” professionals shared their thoughts and reflections. I found the event revealing and perplexing, and there was a herd of elephants in the room that I will call out here. This gets to the heart of humans’ relationship with artificial intelligence (AI). Do you want to understand how you can compete with AI by leveraging something it can never have? Come along!
What Is Creativity?
Of course this cannot be answered definitively, but let’s go through a cycle or two. At the one level, like any word, it’s a label. Most commonly, it is tied to “art” in some way, I think because the cultures in which I’ve lived have that bucket for people who are “different” somehow, who don’t fit. “Think different.”
In business, creativity is usually tied to “innovation,” which uses a usually structured process to break some rules and invent something uncommonly new. I riffed on this in White Space.
Creativity is also a key part of identity for many people I know. In various flavors of design, people often call themselves a “creative” when speaking generally. In the realm of hobbies, people often say, “I like being creative.”
Astro Insight Into Creativity
Robert Hand, in his brief description of quintiles, points out that this family of aspects indicates uncommon energy and focus around finding new kinds of order in earthly affairs. Quintiles bridge the earthly aspects, the two- and three-series (squares, oppositions, trines, etc.), with the more spiritual one (septiles, noviles, etc.). He calls quintiles quintessentially human and creative. “The human spark.”
What Is Creativity
For our purposes here, I propose that creativity is dependent on vacuum. Creativity can occur when a person has empty space (white space, empty mind, psychic space..). This is not absolute, in amount or degree, but I think it must be present. If we are following frameworks or running routines, we may be productive and efficient, but we are not being creative.
Creativity can occur when we don’t know what to do. We don’t have a routine for that. We’ve never encountered this before.
Artificial Intelligence
Many of the designers and artists I spoke with were nervous about AI. Several of the speakers demonstrated how they were starting to incorporate AI into their design processes.
AI can also be defined in innumerable ways, but let’s run it into a corner, even hypothetically. We know that it must be “trained,” usually by feeding it data, so its neural webs (complex rules and routines) can process it. Many AI systems also learn from interacting with humans.
The thing I want to point out here is that it is dependent on data and knowledge. It outperforms humans in many many situations, and it enables us to automate and shrink work, much of which is built on process and routine. It’s far less adept when exceptions occur.
Exceptions are little vacuums.
Two of the speakers explained how they use humor in their work, and they observed that AI was horrible at humor. I don’t know much about humor, but I observe that it often involves some kind of surprise. I think it is also grounded in emotion. AI has no emotion; it is not alive. It can only ingest “funny information” in an attempt to be humorous. The few standup comedians I’ve seen reflect an inherently creative process; sure, they have routines, but they improvise as they work the crowd.
AI can never be creative, so understanding creativity is key to thriving in the AI age.
Out There (Spiritual Lens)
Using astrology as a reference point, we know that Saturn rules the earthly world that we perceive with our five senses. Observable “reality.” Birth and death, above ground and below ground.
Transpersonals take us beyond Saturn, and it’s difficult to talk about that world because words are also Saturnian artifacts. Most “thought” is also governed by Saturn. What we call imagination does not depend on data. One close friend asserts that imagination is what we do when we don’t “know” what to do. We “make it up,” try it. Does that sound familiar? Vacuum.
Many of us entertain (or believe) the idea of existence outside earthly life, through an afterlife or additional/former incarnations. Many imagine that spirit” and “soul” exist before and after the current incarnation. Jung posits that, through the unconscious, we access the collective unconscious while the Self is our connection to the entire universe.
When I entertain these concepts and ideas, I imagine that when we are in vacuum, we may access beyond-Saturn. For example, if one has retrograde planets, especially transpersonals, we access former lives involuntarily, according to Martin Shulman. For example, I have a tight quintile yod between Saturn and Neptune, both retrograde, biquintile Mercury, so I have come to learn that I have an inherently timeless outlook on society. This makes it harder for me to understand the present in terms of itself, but I excel when the present isn’t working and we must imagine something else. That’s why I was drafted into PwC’s new “e-business” strategy practice. Vacuum, no one knew what to do with “the Internet” in the realm of business strategy.
AI, being a machine, has no soul or life. It cannot sustain itself if you pull out its power plug. Therefore, although it can excel and outperform in earthly tasks and situations, it is inherently limited in “creativity.” It cannot do vacuums. AI aficionados will argue that it only needs “creative” information, and it can “create.” We’ll see. I think it can only create facsimile based on data/the past.
Krishnamurthy, in Freedom From the Known, asserts that all knowledge, since it’s grounded in the past, is dead. If we want to be “present” in the present, we empty our minds of thought. Most meditation practices I’ve heard about focus on emptying the mind, so we can be open to the present, be with it with our whole selves.
Competing Against AI as a Human
First off, many (most?) of the things people and companies pay for are grounded in Saturn, so AI will displace many many current “jobs.” We must create new ones. Here are some places to start.
- As I asserted in Artificial “Intelligence” and Faust, AI has no Limbic System or Reptilian Brain. It cannot feel although it can offer a facsimile of feeling. It can use language that is gentle and empathic in common situations (routines). I think that many jobs in which humans can excel in an AI age will be grounded in emotion, human healing. Serving humans in personal ways.
- Study “creativity” intensely. Many things that (Saturnian) society label “creative” are not. Anything that is grounded in a framework or is defined approach or process is more likely to be a candidate for AI.
- Orient yourself to vacuum, complex exceptions that are expensive for people and organizations. Spontaneity, improvisation, making it up.
- Mash up (creatively combine) multiple bodies of work/disciplines/practices. As long as you combine them creatively based on exceptions-based situations, you’ll be competitive.
- Put yourself in unfamiliar situations in which there are no rule books, force yourself to improvise. Take vacations without planning.
- Focus on situations about which relatively little data exists.
- Thanks to the design event speakers, we can add humor to the list. Spontaneity and humor will probably be harder for AI. Think about how lame it is when a “comedian” just repeats popular jokes; it’s more like to be experienced as a “groaner.”
- Overall, I suggest doubling down on creativity that’s grounded in vacuum. Vacuum is often experienced in exceptional situations that swirl in the unknown. Try looking at people and situations that call themselves “creative,” and focus on the unknown in their work. Study and practice creativity based on vacuum. The more unknown, the more creative. For example, many designers I know follow protocols and design approaches. These diminish the unknown in the service of efficiency.
- There are few purely creative situations. Creativity often combines with routine and process. Look for its portion of the total offering. You can identify it by the unknown, the vacuum.
Practiced Ignorance 