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In my view, the advent of the fully creative machine will not arrive overnight but will continue to evolve in stages, as machine intelligence continues its progression up the skill ladder. The first computers were designed during World War II with pen on paper and assembled by hand with screwdrivers and wiring tools. Today a computer designer sits at a graphics terminal and specifies sets of high-level design parameters. The computer performs dozens of intermediate design stages of circuit schematics, board layouts and even the chips themselves. Then other computers actually build and assemble these components into working systems. The tasks these machines perform required highly skilled engineers and technicians just a couple of decades ago. Such "computer-assisted design" software packages are now used in every engineering discipline, as well as by architects and clothes designers. They represent the latest chapter in the story of automation, which started by amplifying the power of our muscles and in recent times has been amplifying the power of our minds. Since the Industrial Revolution was born two centuries ago with automated textile machines for the English clothing industry, we have been eliminating jobs at the bottom of the skill ladder while creating new (and, incidentally, more interesting and better paying) jobs at the top of the skill ladder. This process has progressed to the point where we are harnessing machines to assist with the creative process of creating yet better machines.
By the end of this decade, it will be possible for people without technical training to use an even more sophisticated generation of design tools to create complex electronic and mechanical systems. Many products will be designed not by research-and-development departments (at least not directly) but by professionals who understand the needs of their markets, aided by increasingly intelligent Web-research tools. Even consumers will design their own products, ranging from their clothes to their homes. We will continue to regard these machines as tools, but they will emerge as remarkably powerful amplifiers of the human creative process.
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By 2020, machines will emerge as true collaborators. They will have sufficient understanding of human language and culture to monitor trends on their own. And since they will have the speed (and patience) to read most of the world's literature and websites (albeit still not with the discernment that comes with full human intelligence), they will identify market opportunities on their own and bring them to our attention, along with their own suggested designs. We will then try out their creations either in virtual-reality simulations or as actual physical products produced by rapid prototyping machines. By this time, the line between human and machine creativity will indeed begin to blur.