Why IMAGINATION is (BECOMING) vitally IMPORTANT?

There was a time, not so long ago, where human beings lived a steady life, doing the very same things day after day, generation after generation, with little or no changes at all in between.

This way to live our lives as part of the human tribe was interrupted from time to time by small variations, usually related to the way we worked, or the way we dressed or meant art or beauty or ideas.

To drive these – rare – changes there were some specific breeds of human beings: inventors for technology, artisans for our living habits, artists for our ideas of aesthetic and beauty and philosophers and scientists for ideas on how to understand the world we lived in.

Things started to change from Renaissance first and Illuminism afterwards, bringing to some increase in the number of changes any generation was facing with compared to their parenthood, until we reached our times, where technology – electronics first and then computer science – brought those changes to a constant acceleration, which drives towards an ever-increasing speed in our life changes.

We no longer notice the existence of inventors (whose name sounds indeed “old”) or be in the position to attribute “inventions” to a single individual: most of the times the changes we face with are the consequence of a collective intelligence, which somehow dreams what does want to create and then translate these dreams – at least some of them – into actions to make them real.

This process has finally led towards the invention of Artificial Intelligence – and specifically the Generative AI – which surpasses the Touring Test (the ability to act as a human) and shows the skill to reason au-pair with other human beings.

This invention is probably the most important invention of all times, after fire and electricity, with the drawback of making most humans, specifically those who always behave on a daily basis the same way – without taking the risk of thinking differently – obsolete.

How can we react in front of such great – and terrible – invention?

The answer is contained in the word Imagination, a quality that only human beings may still exhibit, and AI still can’t. To survive in the new age of Generative AI (which is still in its infancy and will be followed by more powerful and effective AI algorithms in just a few years by now) we need to go back to the origins, being capable again of Imagination and leverage it to really drive our future.

We can’t wait any longer to Activate Imagination: we (you) must do it now.