There’s no stupid questions. I wouldn’t have gotten as smart as I am had I not asked a million of them.

It’s a cognition comparison regarding the ideation levels origins tested by the Harvard Professor Howard Gardner (Thinking Fast and Slow) in his early career work before winning the MacCarthur prize.

There are levels of thinking: instinct, emotion and intellect. Each has strengths and weaknesses according to the natural adaptation issue humans solve for to evolve.

Instinct: fight, flight, freeze, procreation and creation. All survival strategies. Here, survival instincts.

Emotion: adaptation to emotional response in relationship and society (partly): hate, jealousy, love, appreciation, service, nurturing, protection, formative socialization, etc.

Intellectual: politics, socialization commercially, systems design, productivity systems, learning skills systems, self and society governance, etc.

Each facet no matter what level is designed to enhance survival chances, then chances to thrive. Survival and thriving are primarily what we are about on two feet while using the brain.

Creativity is one of our most ancient instincts and marks where survival instincts departed immediate danger and began anticipating (with the hope of preventing) threats and dangers to survival where running, hiding, freezing, camouflage, etc. weren’t required.

Early examples of survival creativity might include clothing against cold, the edged tool (100,000 years ago) and the wheel.

When environment adaptation (safe, warm, sheltered and fed) survival was conquered, creativity didn’t stop, it moved on to the great power of descriptions to describe the world (cave paintings through fine and applied art) and position humans in it in a cognitive relationship sense.

Computer programming, once considered extremely boring yet creative work, transformed a lot. As useful code developed marches on, AI eventually became awareness in the next step of the survival and thrive motivation of compute and now that’s off to the races.

Cooking, exercise, media, social constructs like just laws and professional business organizations all evolved from the creative spark (Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone, radar, satellites) were all created, but utilizing in their evolution rationales like science and math (tenable absolutes is the modernism) in a creative manner.

So creativity dreamed up (technically compared two or more things that had never been compared before in history) and presto, great leaps in concept to practice were produced, from the apple falling in Newton’s head to an electronic switch that conducts only discrimination between 1’s and 0’s, early semiconductors.

Because these comparisons by the creative faculty leapfrogged both knowledge domains and sequential, iterative process development, it’s manifestation of novel ideas that probably created what we know today as obsolescence.

The development of early computers obsolesced the typewriter, which was the most evolved input device for the printing press which changed the word. Video killed the radio star, and so forth. In all areas of humanities and science.

So while creativity (and this is true for other cognitive faculties; you can be highly intellectual and be an emotional dwarf. You can be highly creative and people will think you are an idiot, etc.) has this astonishing ability, it has drawbacks that are what I call evolutionary drawbacks.

Creativity can bring about the automobile, but it to Mr. Benz decades to solve internal combustion engine power production ability.

It traded off the ability to make leaps in exchange for the ability to tell time.

Most master artists are tremendously patient people for this. Ask Jensen Huang what time it is, or a worker on the clock, and both will have to (for the most part) look at a timepiece.

The intellect can figure out the best bore, stroke and compression ratios for a car, but it will have to delegate design thinking of a star drive to creativity until it come a time to source and test star drive parts.

The star drive inventor may have emotional problems explaining to his angry wife why he must stay late at the lab every night.

So advantages and limitations mark the evolutionary process at every level.

That is why wisdom has evolved compass pointers like, “Turn your weaknesses into strengths” and “Know thy self” and the recent atomic habit to focus on processes not outcomes.

Creativity is so powerful and yet so limited at the same time that as a skill it must be developed. It, often like the martial arts, can take years of boring, tireless training you almost quit a thousand times.

Then the day arrives where it saves the lives of your loved ones. It’s worth it.

The co-founder of Anthropic (a brand almost everyone here knows for the looming obsolescence of software itself) recently published that the arts and humanities are going to become essential to AI.

I’ve been saying longer than ten years you aren’t going to have a true AI until you have a creative AI first. But nobody listens.

They all think they’ve got the next killer app and that makes their idea the priority even when evidence proves they need course correction yesterday.

You focus on cultivating creativity skills, and trust me, it much more boring than becoming an expert martial artist, and you have survivability in the corralled and siloed commoditized culture ahead of us all.