Some excerpts from recent Alan Kay emails
There's an interesting book on the topic discussed in these emails, entitled "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned":<p><a href="http://amzn.to/2CtIrRR" rel="nofollow">http://amzn.to/2CtIrRR</a><p>There's a YouTube talk by the author on the subject here:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/dXQPL9GooyI" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/dXQPL9GooyI</a><p>The rough idea is this:<p>- creativity often arises by stumbling around in a problem space, or in operating "randomly" under an artificially-imposed constraint<p>- modern life is obsessed with metrics and goal-setting, and this has extended into creative pursuits including science, research, and business<p>- sometimes, short-term focus on the goal defeats the goal-given aims (see e.g. shareholder value focus)<p>- the authors point out that when they were researching artificial intelligence, they discovered that systems that focused too much on an explicitly-coded "objective" would end up producing lackluster results, but systems that did more "playful" exploration within a problem space produced more creative results<p>- using this backdrop, the authors suggest perhaps innovation is not driven by narrowly focused heroic effort and is instead driven by serendipitous discovery and playful creativity<p>I found the ideas compelling, as I do find Kay's description of the "art" behind research.