woman artistShutterstockWatch out for robots.

There's been a lot of coverage recently as to which jobs are most likely to be replaced by robots over the next decade or two.

One of the sources of the ongoing debate is a study from Oxford University by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, which looks at the risk posed to 702 job roles using a sophisticated algorithm to analyse US Dept of Labor statistics.

The other primary source is a controversial new book entitled The Second Machine Age by MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. This book suggests that technology is an "inflection point" with profound consequences.

According to the conclusions drawn by the Oxford study, the job roles most at risk include telemarketers, insurance underwriters and sports referees, while occupations that require creative and social intelligence, such as recreational therapists, psychologists and sales engineers, are the least at risk.

But what does this mean for digital creative industries? Is there a likelihood that your colleagues in the next department could be replaced by C3PO anytime soon?

Well, you'd expect the answer to be no. As Prospect magazine puts it, if your job "involves the development of novel ideas, or if it depends on a lot of human interaction and empathy, then there is less chance of it being displaced."

So things would appear to be OK. After all, this is what creativity is in our industry: using original thinking to come up with efficient ways of solving business problems, usually requiring a lot of human empathy along the way.

True, there's been some interesting models using crowd-sourcing for human intelligence tasks such as Amazon Mechanical Turk. And, some would say, there's already a movement towards production being outsourced to artificial intelligence (ie code that writes code).

Also, huge scale big-data projects such as the 500,000-antenna telescope SKA exemplify the importance of the role humans play in assessing the relevance of data and agreeing on outcomes. SKA will be able to collect more data in a single week than mankind has collected in its entire history, but it'll all mean nothing without some intuitive thinking to act as the cohesion to hold it all together.

The really interesting thing, I believe, is when you start examining the way we employ creative thinking and the funnel-like way in which the thought process works.

As far as agencies go, there are (arguably) several key elements that feed into this and are used when trying to solve a problem.

There's context (the target audience, the background leading up to the business problem and the current situation). There's an insight to give us something to hang our ideas on; an angle, a way in. There's obviously an understanding of what it is we're trying to sell (or explain, or highlight). There's an appreciation of the media landscape. And, lastly – crucially – there's a grasp of the wider cultural landscape and some psychology of what it is that makes people tick.

In other words there's the data which, when put into the melting pot of agencies and coupled with their intuition, emerges as focused solutions. Somewhere along the way the emotional sparks off the rational and we end up with ideas that feel original, pithy, authentic – and human.

The data side is constantly being whacked into shape by our robot friends. It's all around us every day; distilling down the myriad streams of information into relevant, meaningful and usable conclusions. But the intuition part seems to be much more of a challenge for them.

But does it need to be? Could some algorithmic "informed randomness" actually be a useful and interesting thing? Could algorithms be developed that could add some pre-determined intuition of their own, to see what unexpected avenues could be arrived upon for use by creative thinkers?

Look at some of the creative ideas that have been generated by robots, such as the novel which combines the plots of Leo Tolstoy with the style of Haruki Murakami ("written" way back in 2008!).

Or the music created by a computer called EMI – Experiments in Musical Intelligence – which works by looking for patterns in works by composers and then replicating them in new ways; the program was written by a professor at the University of California called David Cope.

Or read a news report generated by an algorithm which allows earthquake stories to break faster.

Bearing in mind that technology has the power to crunch through a lot of information very quickly, there is a parallel here with the way creativity is used by agencies to solve business problems already.

Brainstorming through a bunch of notions and sorting the good from the bad – until one or more routes stands out – is what agencies do. Taking information about context, insight, media and cultural understanding and mixing it all with a bit of informed opinion, original thinking and – yes! – intuition, is more often than not a process of whittling down quantity, before it becomes about quality, of ideas.

It's very labour intensive, as anyone who has ever worked on a pitch will tell you. Could there be a more efficient way, allowing creativity to be channeled into other areas instead of sweating the idea origination?

Could the process be powered by artificial intelligence?

Of course, humans would still be required to pick, shape and apply the ideas that felt right. But would they feel authentic, informed and true? Or would they feel shallow, inhuman and fake?

Well, I guess that depends on your powers of intuition.

Jeremy Garner is the former Executive Creative Director of Weapon7 and is now a creative consultant at Orange Digital



This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk