Creativity as survival
Josephine Condemi
Dear reader,
We ended 2024 with Discoveries shaping the future, in which we shared some of the year’s major scientific breakthroughs and reflected on the relationship between individual “Eureka moments” and the socio-cultural context in which they emerge, including prevailing scientific paradigms.
We are starting 2025 with a month dedicated to creativity, the generative process through which Eureka moments, or insights, come to life. Since the Romantic period, we have been accustomed to viewing creative individuals as rebellious geniuses, leading troubled lives often culminating in tragic endings: a sort of modern-day Prometheus destined to pay for the imaginative spark stolen from some deity and shared with humanity. Conversely, with the advent of the internet and the gradual incorporation of digital technologies into daily life, creativity over the past thirty years has often taken the form of new economy entrepreneurs, successful superheroes capable of leading societies towards magnificent and progressive destinies—a process the economist Schumpeter had decades earlier defined as creative destruction.
Both visions are facing a (narcissistic?) blow with the emergence of so-called generative artificial intelligence: software designed to act as our communication partners by recognising patterns in natural language. Trained on vast datasets, these machines can statistically predict sentence structures, replicate writing styles, and transform textual inputs into audio, images, or videos—content we have long considered the exclusive domain of human creativity.
Suppose creativity can be described as a combinatory art, as defined by physicist Henri Poincaré and later by semiotician Umberto Eco. In that case, machines seem capable of generating more combinations in less time than we can. But are these combinations meaningful? Can they produce something that, as advertising expert Annamaria Testa wrote in the now-classic La trama lucente, is both “New and useful”?
As of today, generative AI lacks not only a body but also the ability to assign meaning to the correlations it processes. From an input—an objective that addresses a human-defined need—it produces an output, which can be refined based on further instructions. The semantic dimension—the encoding and decoding of meaning within a context—remains entirely human. And yet, this marks the first time in human history that we can interact with machines at this level for tasks previously considered “non-mechanical”.
Will we end up with “serial creativity” (a rehash of the 20th-century debate on cultural homogenisation), or will we gain clearer insights into the variables (the paradigms) underpinning creativity at the dawn of this millennium? The future, as we have written before, is never what it used to be.
At Mangrovia, pragmatically speaking, we believe that creativity has always been and will continue to be a matter of survival. Expanding one’s repertoire of experiences and knowledge can help both individuals and societies explore more ways to solve problems—sometimes even by reframing the question itself. Conversely, clinging to the same thought and action patterns without evaluating their contextual effects has rarely, to put it mildly, yielded significant benefits. This month, we will aim to employ lateral thinking more than ever to uncover creativity where it is least expected. For us, this too is information.
Thank you for being here. Enjoy the journey!
