The Loss of Creativity as Technology Rises

[jedishrfu]

The implication seems to be that you think that today's kids (or perhaps today's teenagers) are somehow less creative than the preceding generation by comparison. Do we have any empirical evidence that this is the case?

Sadly, yes.

https://www.livescience.com/15535-children-creative.html

and the actual study is here:

https://www.nesacenter.org/uploaded/conferences/SEC/2013/handouts/Kim_Creativity-Crisis_CRJ2011.pdf

My experience is from working with kids over the years and comparing notes. I grew up without organized sports, with boy scouts being too pricey to join, with parents willing to buy me books and science/education related toys and an uncle who inspired me with a microscope and a CRC math book. We watched TV but there were limited science or scifi shows on. My favorites were the Outer Limits, Forbidden Planet, the Invisible Boy and TOBOR the Great. I always wanted to see more movies and shows like them but discovered much later that there weren't any more. They were the best of the times.

I still have both book and microscope and remember many times wondering what all the numbers in the book were for (log, sin,cos ... tables and integral tables) but never cracking the code. I remember building a hinged wooden box with a rope handle for my microscope, compass, theodolite, hammer, magnifying glass and other weird things that I thought were scientific and then going on expeditions looking at rocks, leaves and anything else imagining that I was a scientist.

I had another uncle who was a engineer/ programmer and later manager at GE who gave me some Fortran/Assembler/Cobol programming manuals and taught the rudiments of how core memory worked. He inspired me to become a programmer (money and prestige not so much now).

My kids played with the latest cool toys, loved LEGOS but once built it became a model to be played with but not reused. I'm sure we contributed to LEGO stock in a big way. They played organized sports ala soccer and Taekwondo because every kid did that at the school. Summer was planned out for them. Parents feared that letting their kids roam freely. What if a predator took them? What if they found drugs? so organized activities were the way working parents handled the situation and I'm sure it affected their creativity.

They never built anything of wood even though I had the tools. Just no interest. They did help me build a tree house (gret fun eating Oreos looking down at the world below (10ft)) Since then I've seen their friends and kids at school and there's that rare kid who does do these things but mostly with computers not so much other things.

I am encouraged by the Maker community which is getting kids to build cool things but not every kid is interested and not every parent so encouraging. Also there are maker camps sprouting up for summer time but they are once again organized attempts which don't always inspire kids. There are also "programming" toys that try to get kids interested in robotics or coding but they only touch the tip and have no depth for the kid to explore.

I give talks at work to high school kids on patents and how to be creative, how to think outside the box but I can see that most are disinterested. I do see a few who spot me later on and ask more about what I was talking about.

One funny story I remember was at college, we were trained on sliderules to solve physics problems but in my Junior year the new scientific calculators invaded the campus. In one physics lab, students were measuring the voltage across some battery using some resistive setup and we asked them what answer they got. 4000 volts! What? How did you get that? We put the numbers in and the calculator said it was that. The battery was a 6 volt box battery ( think the voltage was removed from the cover) common for security system use today.

Basically organized stuff and technology will make us stupid. We are riding an elephant that will someday toss us by the roadside and make us walk back home. A word to readers: Don't be that person!

 

[symbolipoint]

I remember the days of conventional photography, before all the digital stuff, learning about f-stops and shutter speeds, and actually handling black & white film. I used this knowledge along with the fact that full moon was less intense than sunlight by a factor of 400000, and calculated how much time to expose a frame of film in a camera during night time to take a good picture. The results worked well. I was young back then and thought this was clever and interesting.