Creativity

When I was young, people around me always told me that I was creative. I liked to draw, and I did a pretty good job as long as I used a photo or other drawing as a guide. I never agreed that my drawings made me creative; everything that others saw as creativity was just technical skill. To me, creativity involves creating something new, something that has never existed before. The better you can do that, the more creative you really are. On the other hand, there are a lot of things that most people don’t consider to be creative that really are. Any time you have a problem, and you are able to figure out a solution, that’s creativity. When you make something up on the spot, whether it’s a fib, a recipe, a new word, or lyrics to a song you can’t quite remember, that’s creativity.

Creativity is something uniquely organic. A machine does not create, it only imitates, follows instructions, or takes advantage of the fact that we find patterns of symmetry mixed with a touch of random to be beautiful. Of course, a machine can be used to create, but it is not the one doing the creating any more than a No. 2 pencil creates poetry in the margins of school books. A machine cannot solve even the most simple of logical problems if it has not been made aware of the problem and its solution beforehand. A machine does not know how to lie.