humans seek to astonish each other, to amaze, to inject wonder, surprise, incredulity. This is what we’re wired to do for one another, and this is what we seek in one another.
And this, by the way, is part of the reason why computers aren’t terribly creative. Whatever you put in is exactly what you get back out – phone numbers, documents, photos – and this capacity often serves us better than our own memories. But the exactitude of computers is also why they’re so bad at, say, cracking a funny joke or acting sweet to get what they want. Or directing a movie. Or giving a TED talk. Or penning a tear-jerking novel. To achieve a creative artificial intelligence, we would need to build a society of exploratory computers, all striving to surprise and impress each other. That social aspect of computers is totally missing, and this is part of what makes computer intelligence so mechanical.
DON’T EAT YOUR BRAIN
A small mollusk known as the sea squirt does something strange. It swims around early in its life, eventually finds a place to attach like a barnacle, and then absorbs its own brain for nutrition. Why? Because it no longer needs its brain. It’s found its permanent home. The brain is what allowed it to identify and decide on its place to anchor, and now that the mission is accomplished, the creature rebuilds the nutrients of its brain into other organs. The lesson from the sea squirt is that brains are used for seeking and decision-making. As soon as an animal is settled in one place, it no longer needs its brain.
Even the most committed couch potato among us wouldn’t eat his own brain, and this is because humans don’t have a settling point. Our constant itch to combat routine makes creativity a biological mandate. What we seek in art and technology is surprise, not simply a fulfillment of expectations. As a result, a wild imagination has characterized the history of our species: we build intricate habitats, devise recipes for our food, dress in ever-changing plumage, communicate with elaborate chirps and howls, and travel between habitats on wings and wheels of our own design. No facet of our lives goes untouched by ingenuity.
Thanks to our appetite for novelty, innovation is requisite. It’s not something that only a few people do. The innovative drive lives in every human brain, and the resulting war against the repetitive is what powers the colossal changes that distinguish one generation from the next, one decade from the next, one year from the next. The drive to create the new is part of our biological make-up. We build cultures by the hundreds and new stories by the millions. We surround ourselves with things that have never existed before, while pigs and llamas and goldfish do not.
But where do our new ideas come from?
CHAPTER 2
THE BRAIN ALTERS WHAT IT ALREADY KNOWS
On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs stood on the MacWorld stage in his jeans and a black turtleneck. “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” he declared. “Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.” Even after years of speculation, the iPhone was a revelation. No one had seen anything like it: here was a communication device, music player and personal computer that you could hold in the palm of your hand. The media hailed it as trailblazing, almost magical. Bloggers called it the “Jesus phone.” The introduction of the iPhone was characteristic of great innovations: they come at us unexpectedly, with novelty that seems to have come from nowhere.
But, despite appearances, innovations don’t come from nowhere. They are the latest branches on the family tree of invention. Research scientist Bill Buxton has curated a collection of technological devices for decades, and he can lay out the long genealogy of DNA that has forged a path to our modern gadgets.1 Consider the Casio AT-550-7 wristwatch from 1984: it featured a touchscreen that allowed the user to finger-swipe digits directly onto the watch face.
Ten years later – and still thirteen years before the iPhone – IBM added a touchscreen to a mobile phone.
The Simon was the world’s first smart phone: it used a stylus and had a collection of basic apps. It was able to send and receive faxes and emails, and had a world time clock, notepad, calendar, and predictive typing. Unfortunately, not many people bought it. Why did the Simon die? In part because the battery lasted only one hour, in part because mobile phone calls were so expensive at the time, and in part because there was no ecosystem of apps to draw upon. But just like the Casio touchscreen, Simon left its genetic material in the iPhone that followed “from nowhere.”
Four years after the Simon came the Data Rover 840, a personal digital assistant that had a touchscreen navigated in 3D by a stylus. Contact lists could be stored on a memory chip and carried around anywhere. Mobile computing was gaining its footing.
Looking through his collection, Buxton points to the many devices that paved the way for the electronics industry. The 1999 Palm Vx introduced the thinness we’ve come to expect in our devices today. “It produced the vocabulary that led to the super thin stuff like today’s laptops,” Buxton says. “Where are the roots? There they are, right there.”2
Step by step, the groundwork was being laid for Steve Jobs’ “revolutionary” product. The Jesus phone didn’t come from a virgin birth after all.
A few years after Jobs’ announcement, the writer Steve Cichon bought a stack of timeworn Buffalo News newspapers from 1991. He wanted to satisfy his curiosity about what had changed. In the front section, he found this Radio Shack advertisement.
Cichon had a revelation: every item on the page had been replaced by the iPhone in his pocket.3 Just two decades earlier, a buyer would have spent $3,054.82 for all this hardware; they were now taken care of by a five-ounce device at a fraction of the cost and material.4 The ad was a picture of the iPhone’s genealogy.
Groundbreaking technologies don’t appear from nowhere – they result from inventors “riffing on the best ideas of their heroes,” as Buxton observes. He likens Jonathan Ive, the designer of the iPhone, to a musician such as Jimi Hendrix, who often “quoted” other musicians in his compositions. “If you know the history and pay attention to it, you appreciate Jimi Hendrix all the more,” Buxton says.
In a similar vein, science historian Jon Gertner writes:
We usually imagine that invention occurs in a flash, with a eureka moment that leads an inventor towards a startling epiphany. In truth, large leaps forward in technology rarely have a precise point of origin. At the start, forces that precede an invention merely begin to align, often imperceptibly, as a group of people or ideas converge, until over the course of months or years (or decades) they gain clarity and momentum and the help of additional ideas and actors.5
Like diamonds, creativity results from pressing history into brilliant new forms. Consider another of Apple’s breakthroughs: the iPod.
In the 1970s, piracy was a major issue in the record industry. Retailers could return unsold albums to a record company for a refund; many took advantage of this to send back counterfeit copies instead. In one case, two million copies of Olivia Newton-John’s album Physical were printed, and in spite of the album topping the charts, an astounding three million
