A lot of people might say that automating a given creative task kills creativity and devalues the result. Why learn to sing if you can just use autotune? Why learn to draw portraits when you can apply a bunch of filters in photoshop and make something neat-looking? These kinds of “cheap tricks,” though, do something that I think is really fascinating. Through automation enabled by technological advances, a new world of creative possibility emerges. Because along with the inevitable use of such tricks to produce large amounts of thoughtless crap, there is the raw potential for the thoughtful creator to play a different creative game. This realization leads to another that I find even more exciting — that as an engineer, one can engage in a sort of metacreativity by creating technologies that have a huge influence on the ways people are creative.
