The European Patent Office recently turned down an application for a patent that described a food container. This was not because the invention was not novel or useful, but because it was created by artificial intelligence (AI). By law, inventors need to be actual people. This isn't the first invention by AI – machines have produced innovations ranging from scientific papers and books to new materials and music. That said, being creative is clearly one of the most remarkable human traits.

Will artificial intelligence (AI) create an environment where design thinking skills are more valuable than data science skills? Will AI alter how we define human intelligence? Creativity is the application of imagination plus exploration with a strong tolerance to learn through failure. Innovation and creativity are the human ability and willingness to ask provocative questions (like Tom Hanks in the movie Big); embrace diverse ideas and perspectives; blend these different ideas into a new perspective (frame); and explore, test, fail, and learn to apply the new blended perspective to real-world challenges. No, that definition doesn't exactly fit into our ACT, SAT, GMAT tests of intelligence, and that is exactly the point!

The European Patent Office recently turned down an application for a patent that described a food container. This was not because the invention was not novel or useful, but because it was created by artificial intelligence (AI). By law, inventors need to be actual people. This isn't the first invention by AI – machines have produced innovations ranging from scientific papers and books to new materials and music. That said, being creative is clearly one of the most remarkable human traits.

That said, being creative is clearly one of the most remarkable human traits. Without it, there would be no poetry, no internet, and no space travel. But could AI ever match or even surpass us? Let's have a look at the research. From a theoretical perspective, creativity and innovation is a process of search and combination.

In parallel with the progressing digitalization of almost every area of life, artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics capabilities grew tremendously, enabling companies to transform random data trails into meaningful insights that helped them greatly improve business processes. Targeted marketing, location-based searches and personalized promotions became the name of the game. This eventually led to the ability to combine data from various sources into large datasets, and to mine them for granular user profiles of unprecedented detail in order to establish correlations between disparate aspects of consumer behaviour, making individual health risks and electoral choices ever more predictable – for those who held the data.

Go grandmaster Lee Sedol recently announced he was retiring from the game because "there is an entity that can never be defeated": AI. As readers likely remember, an artificial intelligence known as AlphaGo defeated Lee in 2016. The grandmaster later commented that AlphaGo had displayed "human intuition." AI is in the news regularly these days, but one area is still hugely underreported: its potential to be creative. Machines such as AlphaGo are unquestionably displaying clear glimmerings of creativity.

Will artificial intelligence (AI) create an environment where design thinking skills are more valuable than data science skills? Will AI alter how we define human intelligence? That sounds like questions one might expect from an episode of Rod Serling's TV series Twilight Zone. Instead of AI replacing humans, will AI actually make humans more human? Will characteristics such as empathy, compassion, and collaboration actually become the future high-value skills that are cherished by leading organizations?

Will Artificial Intelligence (AI) create an environment where design thinking skills are more valuable than data science skills? Will AI alter how we define human intelligence? Will AI actually force humans to become more human? Okay, sounds questions one might expect from an episode of Rod Serling's TV series "Twilight Zone" (which I preferred over the meaningless college football bowl games on New Year's Day). Instead of AI replacing humans, will AI actually make humans more human, and the very human characteristics such as empathy, compassion and collaboration actually become the future high-value skills that are cherished by leading organizations.

"AI: More than Human," an exhibition that appeared at London's Barbican Art Gallery this past summer and can now be seen at the Forum in Groningen, the Netherlands, mirrors the muddled zeitgeist of artificial intelligence. It seeks to bring together the various elements of art, research, and commerce, displaying interactive installations as well as projects applying AI in fields as diverse as agriculture and neuroscience. Rather than untangle these distinct areas, Barbican curator Anna Holsgrove has chosen to intermix them under sections titled the Dream of AI, Mind Machines, Data Worlds, and Endless Evolution. I saw the show in the company of computational artist Memo Akten, who has been at the forefront of many micro-movements, learning new tools to study how they expand human creativity. At the Barbican, Akten presented the latest iteration of Learning to See (2017), an interactive installation in which machine-learning software analyzes a live feed from a camera pointed at a table covered with everyday objects. The software interprets this visual input based on data sets, sourced online, that contain tens of thousands of images--ocean views, fires, flowers, and star fields.