Cyberman №4 — Radical Creativity in Google X, The Talent Myth, Creativity is the New Productivity
Welcome fellow Cyber people.
Every week, this newsletter will bring you a few interesting articles about contemporary human beings, machines, and interactions between them.
It will be curated to bring different perspectives to these subjects, to ask important questions and maybe suggest a few possible answers.
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Enjoy!
This issue is colored by creativity.
Creativity is the New Productivity
A new era of work is coming, with machine learning and artificial intelligence taking over repetitive, structured tasks. Doing more in the unit of time is not enough anymore. We need to be more creative to keep up with the demands of the new economy.
“In a sense, humanity has been doing the same thing for centuries: “hiring” people and machines to take over every mundane and repetitive action that consumes our natural human resources (work, energy, carbs — however you want to frame it). Sure, you could walk half a day to get your crop to market, but if a truck will get you there in half an hour, you’ll earn your revenue quicker and have more time to spend planting the next crop.”
“But will there be enough demand to support such growth among creative professionals and everyday artisans? Take a look around at recent trends in consumer products, entertainment, and design. We’re starting to purchase more personalized “microbrand” goods as opposed to mainstream brands. We’re supporting more niche content targeted to specific audiences on platforms like Netflix. With networks like Pinterest for discovery, and marketplaces like Etsy, Soundcloud, Kickstarter, and Patreon for creative services, we’re starting to consume unique goods, music, and entertainment from a long tail of creators who are finally able to find their market. We’re even starting to engage deeply in extremely niche creative communities. Demand is tilting towards a larger creative workforce.”
The talent myth assumes that people make organizations smart. More often than not, it’s the other way around.
“Tyco Corporation and WorldCom were the Greedy Corporations: they were purely interested in short-term financial gain. Enron was the Narcissistic Corporation — a company that took more credit for success than was legitimate, that did not acknowledge responsibility for its failures, that shrewdly sold the rest of us on its genius, and that substituted self-nomination for disciplined management.“
“They were there looking for people who had the talent to think outside the box. It never occurred to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing.”
Google X and the Science of Radical Creativity
A company can hardly get more creative than Google X. They basically invented the term “moonshots”.
“A snake-robot designer, a balloon scientist, a liquid-crystals technologist, an extradimensional physicist, a psychology geek, an electronic-materials wrangler, and a journalist walk into a room. The journalist turns to the assembled crowd and asks: Should we build houses on the ocean?”
“X is perhaps the only enterprise on the planet where the regular investigation into the absurd is not just permitted but encouraged, and even required. X has quietly looked into space elevators and cold fusion. It has tried, and abandoned, projects to design hoverboards with magnetic levitation and to make affordable fuel from seawater. It has tried — and succeeded, in varying measures — to build self-driving cars, make drones that deliver aerodynamic packages, and design contact lenses that measure glucose levels in a diabetic person’s tears.”
For the end of this issue listen to Heat Control, a song from Bella Technika:
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