Special edition! Professor Kenneth Stanley is currently a research science manager at OpenAI in San Fransisco. His interests are neuroevolution, open-endedness, NNs, artificial life, and AI. He invented the concept of novelty search. His key idea is that there is a tyranny of objectives prevailing in every aspect of our lives, society and indeed our algorithms. Crucially, these objectives produce convergent behaviour and thinking and distract us from discovering stepping stones which will lead to greatness. He thinks that this monotonic objective obsession, this idea that we need to continue to improve benchmarks every year is dangerous. He wrote about this in detail in his recent book "greatness can not be planned" which will be the main topic of discussion in the show. We also cover his ideas on open endedness in machine learning.