Every Spring, from the Rocky mountains in Colorado and Wyoming, the melting snow feeds the River Platte down into Nebraska, where earlier settlers described it as “a mile wide and an inch deep”. Not entirely accurate but nonetheless a vivid image. Nowadays the description is often used as a disparaging remark of someone’s knowledge. I have certainly heard it used about a lot of journalists. We might term this as a form of horizontal learning. Fair or not?

Equally a similar opposite term is often used about academics, in that they know “more and more about less and less”.  A form of an inch wide and a mile deep, so now a vertical format rather than a horizontal one. True or brutal?

One could argue that both journalists and academics are fitting a type or pattern of behaviour and activity that makes sense for their respective professions. There are of course some specialist journalists, and also academics that adopt a multi-disciplinary approach. So, which is best?

Ideally some of both perhaps? This may be the allure of big data and machine learning that seems to create the best of both worlds. Increasingly the immensely powerful combination of deep data and highly powerful computing is generating far more “results”. It is clearly helping a wide field of activities from medical diagnosis to more efficient use of networks, but to my mind it will always have one major constraint – it seems unlikely to ever really generate creativity.

The world seems enamoured by various party tricks that can be done by software such as ChatGPT (for example it would be v easy to turn this blog into Shakespeare Sonnets, or perhaps rewrite it in the style of a Dickens novel!). But this is not being creative, its merely fantastic machine learning routines that slice and dice past data into existing patterns – so it is both clever but also extremely stupid, or perhaps more fairly blind and unknowing.

So can we expect future machines and software to develop “artificial creativity”? My sense is certainly not now, and who knows if ever? This is why I cavil against the term Artificial Intelligence, because to be truly “intelligent” I think it has to demonstrate creativity, no be just gigantic pattern seeking and puzzle solving machines.

Where does this lead us as humans in terms of being creative and dare one suggest in being able to make better decisions? I think it is instructive that most of us however modest or fantastic our future success, we normally start learning more and more about something. (Of course, this could be a physical skill or talent not just pure mental work). Then perhaps depending on our interest and work rate we climb up a thin knowledge path and then increasingly want to branch out to look at other fields, so perhaps our creativity comes from building this letter “T” of a narrow start that blossoms out into wider ideas.

Here we are combining the vertical and horizontal approaches, and from this we start to make more creative ideas and plans, and it is this that is keeping us ahead of the data crunching machines and their dual world of clever/stupid answers. Some will argue that eventually the computing power will genuinely generate creativity – but I for one remain a little sceptical.