Night in the Woods contains a fun little scene between Mae Borowski and Lori M. where they talk about putting metal figurines on the railroad tracks to be run over and squished, which feels like a fundamental unit of creativity: turn one kind of object (a tin soldier) into another kind of object (a weird squished metal thing.) "This is important art," says Lori, and if I remember correctly, Lori and Mae squish two metal figurines together. Another unit of creativity! Combine two things into a third thing. Small achievements like that mean a lot when you're trying to rescue yourself from oblivion and the Void, so I find the scene heartwarming.
Something I haven't found heartwarming is the way that high-pressure business culture, which now thoroughly afflicts the world of technology, has idolized creativity. To hear them talk, they were the sole possessors of the stuff. Nobody wants to be a plain business executive any more, or even a CTO or CEO, although these titles still have weight. The real game now is to brand yourself as a builder, a founder, a creator, even if all you do is gamble on cryptocurrency or sell accessories to TSLA fans. It might simply be noise intended to drown out the voices of those who are truly dedicated to creativity and constructive activities. Yet as with all things in the world of business and technology, one senses an undercurrent of sincerity: they're not just lying or hyping, but really do believe, sometimes anyway, that they're building great things. Elon Musk surely still believes, even after all his humiliations, that he's assembling a paradise for himself and his followers. (Followers may be optional.)
It's not as though building a TSLA requires no creativity, no innovation, even if the feat doesn't seem nearly as impressive as the fanboys say it is. I must confess that I'm not wowed by cars in general and I detest how tricked-out cars are sold with a Top-Gear-ish technological fanaticism, as if a fancy car (and not, say, universally available insulin) was the peak of human technological achievement, aside from rockets of course. All the same, Musk's workers have been compelled to push at technological limitations. The fanboys aren't completely wrong to be excited at TSLA's novelties. All the same, I feel as though the TSLA approach to "innovation" is very much a matter of diminishing returns and trumpeting incremental changes as technological revolutions. We've had many decades now of technological marketing in which every single tiny alteration to a product is sold as revolutionary. And that's bad, because even thermal noise causes changes. If one can market anything as a novelty, then hasn't innovation become irrelevant?
Nevertheless, there's a speck of creativity in what these people do, akin to the fundamental creativity of Lori M. and Mae Borowski squishing figures together on railroad tracks. The techbros are mashing up everything they know into something they consider to be brand-new—and it is! The LLM approach to artificial intelligence seems stale, mostly different by virtue of scale rather than technological novelty, but one can't deny that there is some thing new here, even if it's just a new monstrosity. And then the techbros want to mash their new thing together with old things to make them into something different. Yes, it's like trying to gin up a new market for home decorations by outfitting them with cheap clocks or bimetallic thermometers, but it is new. It's creativity. Kind of. Isn't it?
~Chara of Pnictogen
