Reframing Human Creativity in the Context of Ubiquitous AI Technologies

With technologies increasingly capable of supporting higher-order thinking tasks and even producing novel and aesthetically pleasing designs, teaching, training, and re-training for future workforce competitiveness is a daunting challenge. What skills will provide competitive advantages for workers as they navigate the impact of ubiquitous intelligence technologies?

Many agree that creativity will be an essential competency to establishing and sustaining value henceforth. However, we may need to revisit traditional conceptions of key creative considerations. This session explores how reframing and fostering creativity through a lens of “distinctly human activity” may better prepare current and future employees for this uncertain future.

We will first demonstrate how creative thinking is currently valued (or not), fostered (or not), and supported by technology (or not) in schools and professional settings. We will then discuss an important paradox—that in order to utilize the creative capacity of technology tools, we need to cultivate and safeguard certain distinctly human creative abilities, some of which may be diminished by excessive technology use. We will then identify the critical distinctly human activities that should be the focus of teaching and training efforts intended to foster long-term workforce relevance and productive creative technology partnerships. Finally, specific strategies for teaching and training these activities will be considered.

In this session you will learn:

• Why creativity is one of the vital competencies necessary for establishing and maintaining value in the current and future workforce
• How to reframe creativity to better prepare learners for technology-mediated creative experiences in the future
• Specific strategies for fostering “distinctly human activity” that will enable learners to optimize their technology-mediated creative opportunities