Why We Need Artistic Intelligence in the Age of AI

In our racing, tech-driven speed of life, artificial intelligence has changed the concept of intelligence with its unlimited and nonstop capacity to acquire and store information. In our hopeless quest to compete, stress and a feeling of inadequacy have become the norm, while the details and the depth of our engagement with the world and with ourselves get lost. What’s more, the AI embedded in our lives requires constant regulation and supervision to function. We need to process our situation better.

Even though AI is learning bigger and better and faster than humans, we need not compete on its terms. AI has not learned how to weed out lies, how to feel elusive emotions, or how to love others as part of its own identity. Human intelligence is more essential than ever to define our purpose in life.

However, we need to rise beyond a simplistic IQ to manage the complexities of AI and to create new jobs now that the old jobs are taken over by AI. In fact, Dr. Fei-Fei Li, “Godmother of AI,” wants everyone to help guide the future of AI.

As a Juilliard- and Yale-trained concert pianist and later a university faculty member teaching performance, I have always combined “artistic intelligence” with “academic intelligence.” It is important to differentiate types of intelligence if we are to update our current pedagogy priorities.

Defining Types of Intelligence

Our current education system still uses an intelligence quotient that prioritizes linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligence over all the others. It no longer serves us 70 years later in the age of artificial intelligence. Even more troubling is the reduction of arts education, as our world requires it more than ever to process ever greater complexities.

The idea of academic debate used to invite creativity, but there has been an alarming trend on both the left and the right to cancel and censor ideas. Debating skills have been drastically constrained and sometimes outright discouraged. One frustrated parent I met at a community function shared with me that their school debating team hires professional judges who score based on their personal opinion of which position is more politically correct, even though the teams are assigned a specific point of view. It was hard for me to believe, so I found a report.

We need to understand the concept of “artistic intelligence,” the ability to have an open-ended pursuit of personal meaning and discernment in a specific and complex moment. In contrast, “academic intelligence” is a fixed system with fixed elements. The arts include many types of academic intelligence, including the physics of sound and movement. Science is also taking a new interest in creativity and neuroarts.

When I perform on the piano, I also fold in spatial intelligence to adjust to the acoustics, emotional intelligence to connect with the music and the audience, kinesthetic and intrapersonal (including the adversity quotient or grit), and spiritual intelligence, among other layers.

Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences from the late 1970s and early 1980s, or “MI theory,” is much truer to life in my experience. “Artistic Intelligence” extends that idea to use all the intelligences together.

What’s Next?

In these AI times, it is no longer enough to know things. Human intelligence must focus on meaning and discernment, which lives in an ecosystem of curiosity, integrity and self-knowledge, collaboration, common sense, and creative problem-solving. How do we breathe life into collective actions while maintaining our individuality? How do we find the best question in one particular case versus another? How can we tell the difference between creative oratory exercise and truthful integrity?

I developed my conscious listening framework for music appreciation courses to use our multiple intelligences together to listen like a great musician and to be more aware. These multidimensional discovery skills supercharge our artistic intelligence for daily life. Music listening skills transfer to communication skills with practical applications. They have also helped my students survive uncertain times by building stronger relationships that lead to community.

Before training, most people can only “respond” to whether they liked a piece of music or not. Only after we work through the first step, describing what is going on (linguistic and emotional), and the second step, focusing on the “primary issue or element (attention),” we start to understand why we love a piece of music. When we move on to the third step, responding (creative), it carries greater personal meaning and aesthetic awareness.

After practicing both expanding mindfulness and focusing on details, the fourth step is “to integrate and absorb with mindful breathing (kinesthetic)” into our neuromuscular system. We each experience the integration differently, but we go through the same process to fully connect external ideas to our internal values.

In the coming new year, we urgently need to evolve our “artistic intelligence,” combining all our abilities to connect details with the big picture, recognize and process emotions, articulate crucial ideas, and connect knowledge with application.

Wishing you joyful processing in the new year.