Distraction fuels crosspollination
Many people today say they need to eliminate distractions from their lives. Everything needs to be focused. Fiction is a waste of time! Focus on your work! Gaming is just a deep hole to sink into. Some are even proud that they only read technical or self-improvement books. But is hyperfocus really helping us achieve peak performance? I argue that it’s doing us a disservice by creating tunnel vision. Let’s dive into a little bit of tech history.
The Artificial Intelligence revolution, that’s happening now, owes its entire existence to computer games. It’s a classic case of technological crosspollination and it’s just the first case I will present in this article.
In the last part of the 20th century, the game industry took a strange turn. The video game crash of 1983 had spelled the end for companies involved in it. Investors were no longer interested in paying to develop video games. The adults that had grown up playing video games found themselves abandoned. Not only were there few new games being developed, but almost none of them were for adults. The original audience had grown up and they wanted more. Fortunately, a platform for them to express their creativity existed already. The personal computer had already started to spread, taking over every office and eventually, most homes. It ran office software, but it also allowed users to write their own programs. It was, and still is, rare to see a system that allows to simultaneously consume and create that same content.
At first, lone creators started to make and distribute their own games. Small teams formed shortly after and the industry grew, as much as it could.
PC gaming remained a small successful niche. The games themselves were complex programs that were pushing the limits of the hardware, squeezing every drop of performance out of the PC. It wasn’t long before PC games were driving manufacturers to create better hardware and soon specialized PC components for games appeared. Chief amongst these was the graphics accelerator. That’s an early name for what would be eventually called the Graphics Processing Unit — GPU.
The GPU had many parallel pipelines dedicated to doing the same simple tasks simultaneously. Not very useful for general purpose computing, but great for crunching the numbers required to render 3D graphics. Every generation of GPU crunched dumb numbers beautifully, pushed by the ever-increasing demands of computer games.
Quite some time later, a computer scientist realized that the GPU he was using for gaming could crunch numbers for other problems that required a lot of parallel processing pipelines. For some tasks, like artificial intelligence training, it was thousands of times faster than the normal computer processors. Nobody had designed it for that. In fact, nobody would have invested years to incrementally improve the design up to this point. Before this revelation AI was a niche itself. The demand had come from games and it took a gamer to realize its potential for AI. It’s hard to overstate the impact this had on the world. Now we’re in the middle of the AI revolution, thanks to independent creators, of games for personal computers, and the people who played them.
Of course, this isn’t the only example of such a phenomenon. The virtual reality renaissance piggybacked off smartphones. It turned out the high-resolution screens were perfect for maintaining clarity when you put a screen close to your eyes. Not only that but the sensors in smartphones were much better than what the virtual reality industry was developing on their own.
Even self-driving cars are a result of a similar process. Most people assume they’re the natural evolution of cruise control, but they’re not related at all. In truth, a self-driving car is an autonomous robot. Years of robotics research were laterally transferred to the automotive industry. The result is that a self-driving car has more in common with a robot vacuum than it would like to admit.
These are all wildly successful examples of crosspollination. Technologies evolved independently of each other and, at some point, there was a transference of knowledge, from one to the other, that enabled a quantum leap. It only happens because the humans who developed these technologies had other interests outside their main field of expertise. Their ludic interests had a massive impact on their serious interests. I only presented these large scale cases because of visibility. This kind of thing happens on a day to day basis on a smaller scale and it sets the basis for great ideas.
So play that game, read some fiction, learn about history, play the cello, forge Damascus knives and take pleasure in what your heart desires. You increase your chances of making a breakthrough in your own field that you anyway dedicate the rest of your life to.
(This article is a spinoff from my upcoming article on the Airtaxi revolution. Follow me if that sounds interesting. It’ll be up in the next few weeks.)
