How to Be 2/5ths More Creative than a Robot

On Coming Back to Your Senses

AI has gotten very good at mimicking our most taken-for-granted senses. Microsoft’s Notebook LM turns anything into an audio podcast. Sora creates visuals in seconds that make even the smartest person do a double-take. Last week, I even heard tech lords are close to machines that can detect odors!

We’ve conquered sight, sound, and soon, smell.

While machines focus on perfecting all that, the job every creatively maladjusted leader, every nihilism-bashing educator, every wonder-preaching parent should be focused on is the remaining two senses:

Taste and Feel.

Taste

…as in that uniquely human ability to see something, hear something, or even smell something and respond by saying, “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

The recipe may call for a pinch more salt, a color outside the palette, or a note that bends just a little to catch your ear. It’s the bulletproof ritual of bringing our intuitive selves to whatever story we’re faced with and understanding we can change it for the better.

Feel

Of course, you can’t have Taste without Feel—without building a résumé of experience learning what’s true, or good, or beautiful in the first place.

Without developing a vocabulary for groove.
Without having your heart broken.
Without knowing it can be repaired by the company of another’s broken heart.
Without rolling down a window in favor of a skyline that’s un-tinted and un-air conditioned.

Forget soft skills. Feel is perhaps the roughest of them all. The kind that can withstand wind, get close to suffering, and hold fire.

While the landfill of artificial-everything keeps growing, Taste and Feel are the intelligent tools wielded by those smart enough to realize that people’s attention isn’t the end goal; it’s whether that attention moves them to care enough to do something about it.

Best friend to the creator,
worst enemy to the mediocre,
are these two less-talked-about senses each of us are born with.
May we come to them, keep them close, and cultivate them in others.
They matter even more now than they used to.