2 weeks Ago
Neeraj Gulati is the Chief AI Officer at Monotype . As a middle schooler in 1980s small-town India, I spent a lot of time teleported to the frontlines of World War II, thanks to the comic book series Commando . Through Commando , I had an immersive, ringside view of the strategy and art of war, the technology and innovation it drove and the vast tragedy of it all.
While I was perplexed by war’s realities, these experiences also activated my childhood obsession with airplanes. My notebooks were riddled with aircraft sketches of all shapes. Initially, these sketches were a terrible manifestation of what I envisioned, but over time, they marginally improved, thanks to a helpful art teacher.
However, what I really wanted to do was create technical drawings to build scale prototypes. This was in the pre-desktop computing and pre-internet era, so I tried crafting my prototypes by hand with paper, cardboard, wood and clay. It was a lonely struggle, and I was unable to achieve the accurate prototypes I envisioned.
I couldn’t break the "visualization and creation" barrier. Human imagination and perseverance fuel progress. But imagination and ideas are inherently fleeting and volatile—perhaps even more so in this era of digital overload.
Any barriers to action further exacerbate the mortality rate of our ideas. Thankfully, neuroscience suggests we can strengthen our imagination and ideas through action. Hebb’s Law ("neurons that fire together wire together") implies that without reinforcement through action, imagination weakens over time.
The brain rewards execution. Without action, there’s no reinforcement loop, making it harder to retain or further develop an idea. Psychologist Albert Bandura introduced the concept of self-efficacy , or an individual’s belief in their own ability to take action and achieve goals.
People with high self-efficacy are more likely to take on challenges, persist, recover from failures and perform better. What would the world be like if more ideas got actioned, visualized, prototyped, created and brought to the world? Could human progress be supercharged? Throughout history, humans have created tools to help us better manifest our ideas and curb the dissipation of imagination, starting with basic ones like hammers and chisels, and then getting increasingly more sophisticated with computer-aided design, coding, 3D-printing and no-code creation tools. These kinds of tools can be life-changing.
For example, normally, programming has a high bar to entry, as learners must master the vocabulary and obscure syntax rules for each programming language. To help combat this, MIT professor Mitchel Resnick's team created the tool Scratch , a visual programming language for kids. This made programming incredibly accessible, turning it into a fun, graphical block-building activity that over 20 million kids use every year.
With Scratch, Resnick’s approach was to “lower the floor” (easing barriers to entry), “widen the walls” (allowing for exploration into a diverse range of topics) and “raise the ceiling” (enabling mastery and advancement). While previous tools were expensive or had steep learning curves, artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a quick and affordable tool to make our efforts more intuitive. Instead of losing new ideas, even those of us who aren’t skilled at writing, sketching and prototyping can tap a virtual “creative partner” to assist us along the way, strengthening our self-efficacy.
Recently, I met a high school entrepreneur who had an interesting business idea. But he didn't have the tech skills to prototype it. He had reached a standstill and was on the verge of giving up—exactly where I was with my airplane prototyping impasse.
This was until we discovered a no-code self-serve AI-powered tool, allowing him to create a clickable prototype over a weekend. Now, instead of an abstract idea, he had a living prototype that potential users and investors could experience and understand. This ability to go from imagining to visualizing to prototyping was liberating.
If he had hit a dead end, it may have steered him away from innovation. Instead, now he’s a burgeoning entrepreneur with rising self-efficacy. In the future, AI-powered tools will be able to help us even more.
Part of what makes AI such a valuable creative partner is its ability to aggregate and synthesize large amounts of information at amazing speeds. By combining the speed and extensive capacity of these models with their incredible accessibility and use of natural language, we can lower the floor, widen the walls and raise the ceiling to help more and more people fuel their ideas and bring their imaginations to life. For instance, what if a designer working on a visual identity for an airline brand could utilize AI tools to surface a wider range of new design possibilities, instantaneously creating visualizations of these new designs on the fuselage of an airplane, a boarding pass, social media campaigns, billboards, crew attire and more? We’re starting to explore this more deeply with Monotype Fonts partners and customers with an AI tool in beta that lets users quickly generate visualizations across use cases using real typography.
Could the ability for a designer to test a new brand identity’s legibility, readability and visual appeal for themselves quickly and at a low cost raise the ceiling and boost their self-efficacy in bringing their ideas to life? AI can help us visualize and find the right elements to build the designs borne of our imaginations, for instance, combining elements like text, graphics and music in new and increasingly complex ways. And the backbone of these AI systems will be built with the help and expertise of designers, photographers, typographers, engineers and other subject matter experts, as new ideas, innovations and trends continue to build and shift over time. Now, I (and all of us) have a powerful creative partner emerging who can keep our imaginative spark ignited.
With fewer limitations, the possibilities for what we can create could become as boundless as our imaginations, with a world of higher self-efficacy for us humans and a much lower mortality rate of ideas to help supercharge progress for humanity. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?.
