A Divergent Future
Building the world’s creativity engine.
September 12th, 1962. Amidst the height of the Space Race, President John F. Kennedy gave his famous Address at Rice University where he ambitiously challenged the nation to land a man on the moon by decade’s end. In the eight years, one month, and 26 days that followed, over 400,000 scientists, engineers, and technicians worked night and day to launch Project Mercury, The Gemini Program, and The Apollo Program. On July 20th, 1969, Neil Armstrong took one small step for man, but one giant leap for mankind. This period has been dubbed the greatest technological sprint in human history, but perhaps one unheralded consultant’s contributions trumped all others. His name was Dr. George Land.
In 1965, NASA realized that in order to put a man on the moon, its engineers needed to solve problems both logically and creatively. The administration had robust tests for prospective hires’ critical thinking skills but lacked the tools to assess their creative thinking abilities, so it tasked Dr. Land with designing such a tool. Previously the chief executive of an international television network, Dr. Land had begun researching creative performance in 1958 and started his consulting firm Innotek Corporation in 1965. Dr. Land devised the NASA Creativity Test that same year and NASA began using it in engineering interviews. The interviewees would be prompted to concoct as many use cases as possible with a set of starting resources, an exercise now common practice in job interviews.
In 1968, Dr. Land had the idea to apply this test to children in order to study their creative growth. He surveyed 1,600 preschoolers to take the NASA Creativity Test, and the results were astonishing. Out of this group of 4- and 5- year olds, 98% scored above 90% on the test. This meant that the average preschooler is 1) by definition a creative genius and 2) a lot more creative than the average NASA engineer. Five years later, Dr. Land repeated this study with the same group of kids who are now 9- and 10- years old and found that only 30% of them scored at creative genius levels. Five years later, only 12% of the now-high schoolers remained creative geniuses. A mass study found that merely 2% of adults aged 25+ are creative geniuses.
The concept of Divergent and Convergent Thinking was first proposed by psychologist J. P. Guilford in 1956. Divergent Thinking involves creatively generating new solutions by exploring as many ideas as possible, whereas Convergent Thinking focuses on logically deriving one well-established solution to the problem. Dr. Land’s study demonstrated that we are predominantly Divergent Thinkers as children, but as we progress in the education system we’re molded into Convergent Thinkers when we enter adulthood. This makes a lot of sense. As children, we spend most of our time playing with imaginary toy characters and drawing fictional sceneries. Once in school, we’re given math worksheets and vocabulary quizzes and told that there’s one right answer at the back of the sheet. Education takes an emphasis on Convergent Thinking, largely neglecting our Divergent Thinking skills. As a result, we’re bound to lose our creative gifts from lack of practice.
This has many societal implications. Convergent Thinkers fuse knowledge from the past to solve the future’s problems instead of inventing novel ideas — so when we have a society where 98% of the workforce are Convergent Thinkers, “history tends to repeat itself”. Unfortunately, our history is one plagued by wars, pandemics, and inequalities. Is it a surprise, then, that our present is also pestered by these evils?
Einstein famously said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” If we want to march towards a utopian future where human suffering is minimized, technological progress accelerates, and giant leaps become rhythmic strides, then we must bring more Divergent Thinkers to the world.
At Divergent AI, we’re building the world’s creativity engine by giving children the tools to practice Divergent Thinking, observing their creative thought processes, and applying the learnings to solve real-world problems. We leverage frontier generative AI models to curate an engaging learning experience for children, neural networks to emulate their creative problem-solving skills, and large language models to deploy the algorithmic creative genius in new contexts. By taking a bottom-up and top-down approach, we teach and learn from the next generation of Divergent Thinkers and sparkle creativity into the world. Join us in our mission of building a Divergent future.
