“When you think of your own curiosity and imagination, do you like what you see?”
– Mrs. P.
This was the question my eighth-grade teacher posed for her students in the middle of our leadership class. As the opportunity arose for me to write about what I believe the most crucial skill is in order for this generation’s future to thrive, I took the question to heart.
Curiosity and imagination are essential in all walks of life. Throughout our careers, we may stumble upon problems that we haven’t encountered before. Nurturing our creativity while we are still in our learning years will help our brains work faster when we don’t know what to do. We don’t have to know exactly what to do in each situation, but rather, we need to know how to be imaginative enough to solve our plights. With imagination comes broadening our thinking horizons.
With the rise of technology, robots and AIs, it is more important than ever for our generation to prove that we are vital to keeping the economy and planet alive. Unfortunately, I don’t doubt that many, if not all, multi-million/billion dollar companies will prefer to employ robotic workers over human ones as they are programmable, and honestly, predictable. Humans feel, and therefore, can be fickle-minded in the eyes of employers. Hence, we need to show the world that they need us working. What better way to do that than capitalize on the robots’ weakness; emotion?
Technology is programmed based on hundreds of thousands of stored data, carefully threaded through and replicated by their software. However, when something unexpected occurs, they could easily fail as they simply do not know how to solve the problem. They haven’t been programmed to do so because there is little to no real data on it. Yes, there are studies, research, papers, but nothing is the same as raw emotion. Nothing can clone the complexity of the human mind. (At least, not yet.)
Our thinking is most often influenced by how imaginative and how intense our feelings are. Creativity simply allows us to grow our capacity of thinking ‘outside the box’, as people say. Not everything can be solved by a textbook formula taught in school such as math, which is why imagination is so crucial for our futures.
Though inventive coders will certainly try their best to replicate human emotions, artificial intelligence will be just that; artificial. They don’t have our brains, our creativity, our imagination. Thus, we should stimulate all those in order to prepare us for the future.