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How soon before we humans stop being creative?

Francisco Miraval

During a recent speech, British philosopher Nick Bostrom explained some of the “existential risks” humanity will face in the near future and among those risks, he said, is the risk of becoming too creative.

According to Bostrom, humanity is at risk that somebody, with an extraordinary creative mind, will one day invent something so marvelous that for that same reason it could bring disaster for all of us, leading to a permanent stagnation of human development or perhaps even to the extinction of humanity.

Bostrom argument is simple: so far we have been able to control the atomic energy without destroying ourselves and our vaccination programs did not create an uncontrollable pandemic, for example. But what if a new, creative invention, such as exobrains or artificial wormholes, escapes our control?

For untold millennia creativity helped as to survive. But it is a different situation when creativity happens at a global scale in the context of a techno-scientific society. In that context, creativity, according to Bostrom, could be a risk.

Bostrom doesn’t say we should stop being creative, but it seems that others are thinking that perhaps it will be better for us not to be creative. Perhaps, they say, it is better not to ask too many questions, not to think, not to imagine. In that way, there will no risk of creativity creating our own destruction.

The idea of stopping creativity seems to be a preposterous one. Yet, according to writer and journalist Scott Timberg, that’s exactly what is happening right now in our culture, where creativity is being undermined.

In this book Culture Crash. The Killing of the Creative Class, Timberg says that after the recent Great Recession (around 2008), the new post-modern, techno-scientific (and, I add, increasingly trans-human) culture has caused “a devaluation” of arts and humanities.

Musicians, artists, journalists, writers, and the whole of the creative class “are crumbling”, he said. For Timberg, when creative minds disappear, we will see “the decline of art itself” and “a diminishing understanding of ourselves, one another, and the eternal human spirit.”

If arts and humanities are disappearing, what is replacing them? According to Timberg, creativity is being replaced by an “unforgiving, winner-take-all marketplace” where creativity “is no longer open” to talented people and, therefore, creativity is becoming more and more distance from the human experience.

Timberg suggest that creativity is becoming “a luxury,” that is, if anybody wants to be creative, he or she will have to do it without any compensation or as a freelancer. 

Perhaps that’s why students spend more than half of the school year preparing for test and not learning anything new. Perhaps that’s why teachers spend more than half of their time teaching students how to pass a test, but not teaching anything new.

I wonder what could be better for humans: a future with no risks and no creativity or a creative, but risky future. I don’t know. And perhaps, if we keep thinking and dreaming less and less, we will never know.

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