[Ask anything ]
Rick Rubin, in his very interesting book The Creative Act, explores various topics related to the creative process. Among other things, he asserts with full conviction that each of us is a creator. This is tied to his fascinating view on how artistic works come into being. He perceives new ideas, or simply ideas, as independent, objectively existing entities that try to emerge into the world when their time has come. They seek various gates, doors, portals, and passages. These are different modes of expression. Different media. And the human being is the realizer, the executor, and the tool.
Rubin further claims that if an idea is trying to come into the world through you, and you don’t respond, don’t allow it, hinder it, or obstruct it because you’re too absorbed in constant consumption and fail to take action, it will move on. It will find someone else. And when the idea is truly grand, it might not be able to emerge through just one person.
Indeed, we can observe such cases in the world. Take, for example, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, who arrived at the idea of natural selection almost simultaneously. Consider Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who published calculus almost at the same time. Or take Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray, who filed patent applications for the telephone on the very same day! Thus, this is how an idea is born.
Along with it, a question arises – what is it about a human that makes ideas choose them? What is it within them that drives them to create, convey, speak, shout, sing, paint, record, build, test, experiment, and so on?
Could this knowledge be used to design a new kind of Turing test? Something that would help us distinguish AI from humans. We take a human and an AI. We say nothing. We stand. We wait. The one-way mirror glimmers, and we watch. So far, I haven’t seen any text spontaneously appear in the “Ask me anything” field. Not yet.
Possible future professions:
- Midwife for birthing ideas.
- Observer of the LLM text field.
Needed future inventions:
- A one-way mirror impervious to prompts.
