Will creativity become valued more highly than STEM skills in the near-term future?
I'm doubling down here folks :) My prior post was called-out for being click-baity and rightfully so. The title was especially poor. I'll try to do better moving forward.
I'm starting a discussion here because my hope is that we can talk about the ideas within the article, rather than the article itself.
Here was the original post for those interested: https://tildes.net/~humanities/3y1/mark_cuban_says_the_ability_to_think_creatively_will_be_critical_in_10_years_and_elon_musk_agrees
I posted the article because at it's core are several interesting observations/propositions from two billionaires, Mark Cuban and Elon Musk, that presumably know a lot about business, and in Musk's case, a lot about STEM, and have a history of making winning bets on the future.
The article supposes that:
- Many (most?) STEM jobs will become automated
- This will happen very quickly; more quickly than we anticipate
- Creative skills will soon become more highly valued than STEM skills
There was a time when parents told their kids to "become a lawyer or a doctor" but after enough time we end up with too many people going into the same profession and there is more competition for those jobs as the market becomes flooded. I know anecdotally that's happened for lawyers (not sure about doctors).
I can see this happening with STEM as well.
Should parents encourage kids to pursue STEM but pair this with equal study in the humanities? Is STEM the next target of automation? Will creative skills be more highly valued? Will engineers find themselves in the bread line?
I think that eventually everybody who isn't rich will find themselves on the bread line, and that the bread will be poisoned. People like Mark Cuban and Elon Musk say they value creativity, but what they really want is the sort of constrained creativity that doesn't think so far outside the box that they start asking inconvenient questions like, "Why should I have to justify my existence by spending most of my waking hours working to make rich assholes even richer?" Not that you need to be especially creative to question capitalism.
As someone in engineering, creativity is valued in this STEM field. Creative thinkers are often able to more quickly come up with solutions to problems, and think about the bigger picture. I imagine the principal / architects I've worked with would be few less successful at their jobs if they weren't creative thinkers.
I wanted to mention this too. There's this stereotype that if you work with numbers, you're not working creatively or with people, both of which are incorrect.
100% this. My job simply cannot be replaced by a machine (at least not in the next few decades) because it is so heavily creative, requires the kind of interpretation that robots are terrible at, and involves a ton of human to human interaction.
What is this job?
I'm essentially a data scientist in health care. But my job functions are a lot more than data analysis. The correlations, predictions, etc. can be replaced by a robot (we're not there yet, but within the next 2 decades), however the data quality, clinical interpretations, data visualization, storytelling, and especially the translation between clinical and IT realms are not things easily replaced by robots.
Yea I'd guess you're correct. Thing is as automation eats other peoples lunches some will migrate to your field. There's also the likelihood that automation makes the people in your field more productive.
I'd guess the real saving grace for healthcare is that demand for it is predicted to grow and the better we get at extending life the more of it you need.
Being replaced by automation won't look like a robot that is suddenly sitting at your desk and doing your job. Instead, it'll look like helpful software tools enabling you to become more and more productive.
Imagine how many people it would take to do your job if there weren't computers, or if some of the software you use didn't exist. Those non existent jobs are the ones replaced by software.
As more improvements come you'll be twice as productive. Ten times. One hundred. The boring rote stuff will get automated. The hard stuff will become easier and the complicated simple.
Eventually, over enough profession, either a handful of elite experts will be able to do all the work in your field, replacing everyone else, or the work will become entirely dissolved by software and run automatically.
I am well aware, and my statement still stands.
I believe one of the points is that guy/lady is going to need to be creative to get that job, especially when STEM majors are plentiful.
To better explore this, I thought this study was interesting: The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?.
I think anyone who's looked into automation trends have probably seen at least part of this study. Starting on page 58, there's a list of jobs ranked from least likely to be automated to most.
Though there are STEM jobs on the list likely to be automated, I don't believe it's in any greater number than non-STEM jobs. This honestly supports what I intuitively think, which is "easy" jobs are easier to automate than "hard" jobs. Easy being more mindless and hard being more thought required.
I have been an educator in two education systems.
One is a Western (Canadian) education system, where creativity is highly valued. Right from kindergarten, kids are taught to express and value creativity, authenticity, individuality, etc.
The other is an Eastern (South Korean) education system, where excellent performance is valued about all else. Kids are taught that being knowledgeable, being quick thinkers, and being correct are valued. Individuality is not important: being #1 in the competition is important.
The kids in the Korean system are more competent overall, I would say. Canadian students, quite frankly, suck complete ass at sorting out complex details.
However, it's obvious that the Korean education system also has a lot of problems. (I mean, endemic stress and bullying and mental illness and suicide, and all that, but that's for another discussion). Give a graduate from the Korean education system a problem that they've never seen before, and many of them will just be at a complete loss, to the point where they can't even attempt it. A graduate from the Canadian system may not succeed in solving the problem, but at least they'll be very comfortable and confident banging their head against it trying a thousand different approaches.
My ideal system would roughly follow Bloom's Taxonomy. The Canadian system is right to value creativity and individuality, but wrong to put such a heavy emphasis on it before the kids are competent enough to know what they're doing, in my opinion. I remember seeing photo galleries going around of beautifully rendered and composed product design ideas, done by designers who had no idea that what they'd designed were completely physically impossible: they just flat-out lacked the fundamental science and engineering principles underneath what they were trying to design.
I studied computer science, which means that almost everyone I talk to has an "idea" for some creative technology or website. Maybe, as your premise suggests, this will change, but for the foreseeable future, a creative idea is pretty worthless. A creative idea is very common (everyone has a few, usually even good ones) and almost never realized. I've come across people who think that successful technologies like Facebook or Google or the iPhone are the result of a unique idea, and they're really not. Every innovative product is an idea that (probably conservatively) millions of other people also had. Their success is not due to a unique idea, but due to people who (a) got lucky; (b) mastered their craft (programming, math, etc.) better than most; and (c) put in a lot of tedious, boring, monotonous, STEMmy hours of work.
I think ideally children would spend some years doing relatively tedious learning and mastering of craft and then moving up Bloom's Taxonomy to consider creating something unique.
Economically? I dunno. Socioculturally? Absolutely.
I'm biased though. I fully believe that the automation of most of our economy is coming, soon. Within a couple of US election-cycles I'd wager. I fully do not believe that this automation will create enough new jobs to keep a majority of the working-age population employed.
I think the relatively near-future will see a shift towards people being freed from the need to work. I think once physical-labor is largely robotized, and mental-labor is largely performed algorithmically, the costs of goods will come down (assuming greed doesn't ruin everything 🤞) and society will work to develop systems to support those who are out of work, through no fault of their own. This cultural shift away from deriving our personal-value and self-worth from our production of capital will hopefully allow those with the drive or desire to pursue the intrinsic rewards of the Arts, Academics, and Humanities.
Though, I'm not sure we'll be free of all jobs soon. Fields such as healthcare and luxury services will benefit from the human-element, and even with automation the Sciences will be still driven by human curiosity. I'm sure there will be no shortage of people more than willing to perform work such as that for the sheer enjoyment of it.
The dream though, is for a future in which we can appreciate on a cultural level the creative sparks within all of us. We're primates — deep down we're all still silly, weird little guys who like to laugh and have fun. If we could build a future that frees us from begrudged-labor that enables our civilization, and allows us to be ourselves, I think we should try to make that happen.
We'll have to experience some dramatic cultural shifts for this to be reality — which I think they're coming — and you can't stop me from dreaming, besides.
What sort of short-term solutions have you thought about for this? UBI? I tell you it's not going to be a smooth transition here in the U.S.
huge, huge assumption of course. i was speaking with a comrade about this exact subject earlier this week - we think that it's more likely that greed will stifle automation, if there are no jobs there are also no consumers, and it's not like all of the ideals of capitalism will disappear overnight. I'm betting it'll take significantly longer than any of us imagine, if it happens at all.
Can you give some examples? I can only see a very small slice of STEM jobs being replaced by robots/automated within the next few decades. Computers are absolutely garbage at doing the kind of thinking that STEM does, which is why we see automation in fields which require very little thought.
Your two examples
Are both fields which require a lot of creative thinking and human to human interaction. Neither of these fields will be replaced by robots anytime soon.
Those weren't intended to be STEM examples, just examples where parents/society pushed a lot of folks towards a profession and it backfired a bit (at least with lawyers). It was supposed to be a historical example of how pushing a specific industry can lead to overcrowding.
I think process automation is a good place to look for those examples. I'm essentially an automation engineer, but I can foresee a day where that automation work I do is actually automated, so someone less knowledgeable (who makes a lot less) just drags and drops some thing to produce the needed code.
Lawyers, yeah. But honestly a lot of that is because the boomers just won't retire.
Doctors? Nah, still way too few to accommodate the aging population. Although realistically we need more PAs and doctoral nurses to manage primary care.
Process automation is a small slice of STEM.
The broad generalization that STEM as a whole should be worried I disagree with.
Well, first of all, how do we know that 'creative' jobs are safe under that scenario? Let's say we have a really advanced AI that can replace most STEM jobs; could one not use that AI to figure out exactly what kind of content the brain would like to see and then generate said content using an algorithm? I don't see how the hard problems in STEM would be harder than figuring out how to properly stimulate the human brain in such a scenario; in fact, with such AI at our disposal, art might become a STEM problem ;)
Also, what exactly is creative in that scenario? The work of theoretical computer scientists, mathematicians, etc. is extremely creative in nature in my opinion.
What I could foresee is a lot of programming being automated/further abstracted away. And yes, I do believe there is a bit of an oversupply of programmers at the moment and a lot of the work done is rather mechanical; but that does not indicate that the whole of STEM would be in danger.
Innovation without knowledge is useless.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcqDgk0wb-Q
STEM should be vastly simplified and advanced concepts should be introduced to middle schools as easily as possible.
There will be one day that our civilization accumulates such vast knowledge that no one can learn up-to-date. We need a mechanism to compress knowledge in order to advance further.
Let me mention a couple of ways in which the automation of "non-creative", non-STEM jobs might impair the productivity of "creative" ones.
My current work involves a great deal of planning, designing and "creating" activity, but there's also the 10% - 20% time overhead required for manipulating the automated systems that's required to be my own:
I'm salaried, so there's no direct incentive for my employer to automate better or to employ a minimal number of people to specialize in use of the automated systems on behalf of everyone else so that the productivity waste isn't spread everywhere.
In the end, everyone loses under this scheme - the people no longer employed (who actually did have a residual fraction of un-automated creative labor), and the "creatives" whose effective hourly wages are being depressed.
The problem with creative jobs is that they usually have a very skewed wage distribution. Just look at this article: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/20/earnings-authors-below-minimum-wage
So you're probably unintentionally exhibiting some survivorship bias.
Have you thought about writing a post about your self-publishing success? I'm sure many would be interested. I know I would!
Well if you ever decide to, please let me know as I'll be interested to read it.