More about the other half of my brain

Coincidently after I just finished reading Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future the NY Times wrote an article called:

Let Computers Compute. It’s the Age of the Right Brain.

The article references the book and restates it's premise saying, "much of the left-brain-centric work that the Information Age workers of America once did — computer programming, financial accounting, routing calls — is now done more cheaply in Asia or more efficiently by computers. If it can be outsourced or automated, it probably has been."

After reading the book and article I wasn't worried about losing my job as a software engineer I was excited that I could find a better fit for my creative desires. I've always been torn between art and engineering. They live in houses on the same block, but tend to face in opposite directions. If you've been reading my blogs you'll have noticed this recurring theme. After a little bit of thinking my excitement died down because I still couldn't figure out how this was supposed to work.

Apparently, "Now the master of fine arts, or M.F.A., Mr. Pink says, 'is the new M.B.A.'", but how much faith am I supposed to put into that? I'm pretty sure an MBA or PhD
still has a better chance of getting a business started or finding a job as a strategic manager.

Still it's a interesting thought. I could see how understanding creating a artistic composition would be useful in developing functional requirements. In the book Pink also addresses Story as a right brained skill that would be useful in the conceptual age. If you write use cases you could see how this would be advantageous.

I agree with Pink at some degree. But I also agree with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's idea, in Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, that a solid knowledge base of the domain is required to develop new creative ways of doing things in the domain. I guess it's really the teaming of the right and left brain that has the potential to make great things. (Not going to do the Apple reference)