The philosophy of Digital Reductionism. The end of human creativity?

Since the dawn of the digital era, at least, the belief that human activity can be reduced to a series of steps, a computer algorithm, has been around.

We can call this philosophical belief Digital Reductionism. To overcome the obvious objections to this belief the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI) was introduced half a century ago and once again is enjoying much over-hyped publicity. Earlier posts put this hype into perspective.

Now we are being told that the employee recruitment process, which is already a nightmarish morass of HR department generated bureaucracy, can also be digitally reduced (and so farewell to HR departments). What this will mean of course is that only candidates whose own thought processes are capable of digital reduction will ever be selected for employment. Candidates capable of true creative thought will automatically be rejected.

So it will be goodbye to people like technology innovators such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Geoff Bezos, Elon Musk etc. and, oh yes in the world of creative thinkers, people like Albert Einstein.

Beam me up Scotty.