“Creativity is fundamentally not an efficiency problem.”

A computer science professor Paul Cantrell, on Mastodon: Creative work keeps taking roughly the same amount of human labor / attention / care, even as new technologies accelerate or remove things that used to take time. This is because creativity is fundamentally not an efficiency problem; process is not just the means of producing output, but rather a labor vessel that holds the near-invisible work that is truly important. One can feel the care that goes into creative work without being aware of that work, or even being aware that work of that type exists at all. This feeling is approximate, loose, vague, but cumulative and eventually all-important; work with no care behind it wears thin and tends to fade as people live with it over time. This really resonated with me. Elsewhere, Ginger Bill, in a recent – meandering, but thought-provoking – essay titled “Good tools are invisible”: I constantly see some people praise it not for what actually makes it good, but by taking the things…