Lecture given by piero scaruffi at University of San Francisco on February 4, 2014

1. creativity is a why
not a what
history, biology and thermodynamics
of innovative processes
february 2014, usf
piero scaruffi
thinker
www.scaruffi.com

2. Student Snapshots
• Definition of creativity:
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Most: unique/ original/ new/ innovative (most of you)
Thinking outside the box (Louise, Katrina, Carla)
Different (Andy)
Something that has core value for others (Guo)
Bridging Art and Science (Erica)
Makes people interested (Lyudmyla)
Makes the impossible possible (Youxi)
Turns imagination into something concrete2(Alicia)

3. piero
• Why do painters paint sunsets but not
dawns?
• Why does it get colder as you climb a
mountain (i.e. as you get closer to the Sun)?
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4. piero
• My definition of creativity:
– Creativity is about asking the questions not
just finding the answers
– Paradigm shifts
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5. Student Snapshots
• Most creative thing:
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Flash mobs (Maren)
Building things (Emily, Andy)
My father coming to America (Melina)
Gandhi’s nonviolence (Yiuxi)
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6. piero
• Most creative thing:
– Life in the slums and rural villages of poor
countries
An express bus in Zambia
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Ordinary life in Bangladesh

7. piero
• Most creative thing:
– Life in the slums and rural villages of poor
countries
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A market in Haiti

8. piero
• Preamble: let me give you an example of
why creativity matters…
• Why are we here?
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9. 9

10. Why did it happen here?
• The technology, the money and the brains were on
the East Coast and in Europe (the transistor, the
computer, the great electronic research labs, the
great mathematicians, Wall Street, etc)
• The great universities were on the East Coast
(MIT, Harvard, Moore School, Princeton,
Columbia), and in Europe (Cambridge)
• Bell Labs, RCA Labs, IBM Labs
• Britain and Germany won most of the Nobels
• Transistor, computer, Internet, WWW,
smartphone, etc all invented elsewhere
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11. Why Silicon Valley?
• Until the 1950s the Bay Area was mainly
famous for
– Eccentric artists/writers (the “beats”)
• Student protests of 1964
• Hippies of 1966
• Black Panther Party (1966)
• Monterey’s rock festival (1967)
• Stewart Brand’s "Whole Earth Catalog“
(1968)
• The first “Earth Day” (1970)
• Gay Pride Parade (1970)
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12. Why Silicon Valley?
The first major wave of
immigration of young educated
people from all over the world
took place during the hippy era
(“Summer of Love”)
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13. Why Silicon Valley?
• Anti-corporate sentiment
• The start-ups implement principles of the
hippy commune
• SRI Intl and Xerox PARC: computation for
the masses, augmented intelligence
• The Bay Area recasts both Unix and the
Internet as idealistic grass-roots movements
• Young educated people wanted to change the
world
• They did
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14. 14

15. Creativity
• We value change, innovation, creativity
and originality, e.g. the genius
• The history of human civilization is
about removing the unpredictable from
both the environment and society, e.g. we
create states to enact/enforce laws
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16. Creativity
• Humans are genetically
programmed to break the
rules from a very young age
• The biggest reservoirs of
creativity are to be found in
the slums and villages of the
Third World
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17. Creativity
• Creativity's peaks seem to correspond with periods
of great instability:
– classical Athens (at war 60% of the time),
– the Renaissance (Italy split in dozens of small
states and engulfed in endemic warfare),
– Paris at the turn of end of the 19th century
(France lost one war after the other and almost
got civil war)
– the 20th century (two World Wars and a Cold
War)
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18. 18

19. What is unique about humans?
• Animals live the same life of their parents
• Humans are the only species whose life
changes from generation to generation
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20. What is unique about humans?
• Children disobey, teenagers are rebels
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21. What is unique about humans?
• Animals only “innovate” when there is a
genetic mistake
• Humans innovate all the time
Beaver civilization over the millennia
Human civilization over the millennia
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22. What is unique about humans?
• Art is pervasive in nature (eg birds make nests and
sing, bees dance, spiderwebs, humpback whale
songs, etc)
• Each animal has the same aesthetic, generation
after generation
• Human aesthetic changes from generation to
generation
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23. What is unique about humans?
Spider aesthetic over the centuries
…….
Human aesthetic over the centuries
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24. What is unique about humans?
• The human brain is a machine to create
problems: the human brain is a problem
solving machine that creates the very
problems that it will spend a lifetime to try
and solve
Pollution, traffic, crime, global warming…
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25. What is unique about humans?
Humans are not the smartest species on the
planet (they keep trying to self-destroy) but
they are the most creative
If they self-destroy, it will be the most
creative self-destruction ever
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26. Unfortunately, that was only the
teaser.
Now let’s get serious…
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27. Meditations on
ArT, ScIeNcE & CrEaTiViTy
• Biological origins of creativity
• Imitation vs Innovation
• Interplay of order and chaos
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28. Origins of Creativity
• Play
– Children play.
– Children are genetically programmed to
play, and playing might be a way to learn
the environment and to be creative about
it.
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29. Origins of Creativity
• Play
– Being creative about interacting with the
environment yields several evolutionary
advantages:
• you learn more about the environment
• you simulate a variety of strategies
• you are better prepared to cope with
frequently changing conditions
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30. Origins of Creativity
• Play
– Over the centuries this continuous training
in interacting with the environment has led
to the creation of entire civilizations
• Art
• Science
• Technology
• Philosophy
• This class
• Your life…
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31. Origins of Creativity
• Rebellion
– Teenagers are rebels.
– Parents have accrued experience/wisdom and
Darwinian theory would predict that their children
should be eager to absorb that experience in order
to maximize their chances of survival.
– Quite the contrary: doing the exact opposite is
cool.
– We need to do something to outrage our parents
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32. Origins of Creativity
• Rebellion
– Humans are genetically programmed to
break the rules and question authority from
a very young age, which contrasts sharply
with the behavior of other animals.
– This might in fact be the fundamental
behavioral difference between humans and
other animals that set the human species
on a course of unbridled technological
progress.
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33. Origins of Creativity
• Nature of Life
– Creativity is a property of life: the behavior of any
living being is unpredictable.
– Living beings are nonlinear systems: they change
as they live. Therefore they are never the same
twice.
– “We" change all the time: we are never the same
again.
– Your brain changes all the time: you are creative
and unpredictable because your brain is governed
by a nonlinear equation.
– You cannot possibly be non-creative for as long as
you are alive
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34. Imitation vs Innovation
• Two instincts at work in nature.
– “Imitation": each living being tends to
imitate what other individuals of the same
species are doing (the fundamental "social
instinct“)
– A consequence of sharing the same
genes?
– People who imitate are considered "nice".
They behave in a way that conforms to
what society expects from its members.
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35. Imitation vs Innovation
• Two instincts at work in nature.
– “Innovation” is not pervasive in nature.
– Innovation is a risk.
– Animals "innovate" when there is a genetic
mistake.
– In most cases those animals die.
– If they survive, they cause instability in the existing
ecosystem.
– Innovation is rare and, when it survives, often
catastrophic (“disruptive”).
– "Innovation" in the planet's climate causes the
extinction of thousands of species.
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36. Imitation vs Innovation
• Two instincts at work in nature.
– Innovation in human society is rarely
welcome.
– It is most often met with skepticism,
hostility and plain accusations of heresy or
madness.
– It is correctly perceived as a threat to the
established order.
– In a sense, society is right to put innovators
in madhouses: innovation is the social
equivalent of a genetic mistake.
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37. Imitation vs Innovation
• Two instincts at work in nature.
– Innovation changes the established order
and creates a new order.
– People recognize it as "innovation" (as
opposed to madness or terrorism) when
they start imitating it.
– The paradox of innovation is that it is
accepted as an innovation when it has
become imitation.
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38. Order vs Chaos
• Civilizations and creativity
– Civilization is very much about making our
life easier.
– Civilization is about structuring our life so
that it is no longer a continuous struggle.
– A structured life, though, is not creative, by
definition.
– The more structured our daily life is, the
less creative we have to be in our daily life.
– We even structure entertainment (gyms,
dance classes, movie theaters).
– Civilization is about routine
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39. Order vs Chaos
• Civilizations and creativity
– Civilization is about routine, structure,
order
– Emotions are an impediment to order and
structure
– Society tends to suppress our emotions
and turn us into disciplined robots
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40. Order vs Chaos
• Civilizations and creativity
– Creativity's peaks seem to correspond with
periods of great instability: classical Athens
(at war 60% of the time), the Renaissance
(Italy split in dozens of small states and
engulfed in endemic warfare), the 20th
century (two World Wars and a Cold War).
– Peace and wealth seem to yield structured,
monotonous, predictable lives that depress
creativity.
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41. Creativity
• The dance of logic and madness, reality
and hallucination, peace and war, order
and chaos, stability and instability,
censorship and virality…
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42. Creativity
• What is the relationship between creativity
and progress?
– Technology does not exist in a vacuum.
– A society that does not encourage poetry,
music, painting, sculpture and so forth
does not encourage discovery and
invention.
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43. Creativity
• What is the relationship between creativity
and success?
– Not a direct one: most creative people died
poor!
– Creativity sets in motion in system that
leads people in that system to be
successful
– Creativity is not about the individual genius
but about the collective subconscious
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44. Almost the end…
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45. How do you increase your
creativity?
• Strengthen the Mind’s Immune System
– Education/learning
– Avoid customized news/ads that only increase
your hyper-specialization and your routine
– E.g. demystifying machine intelligence
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46. How do you increase your
creativity?
• Strengthen the Mind’s Immune System
– Education/learning: the more you know the less
spectacular your creativity looks like (e.g. the
more you know the past, the less spectacular
the present looks like)
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47. •
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San Francisco: since Jan 2008 (SFSU, then USF)
Silicon Valley: Feb 2009 (SETI Inst, then Stanford)
Washington: Mar 2011 (National Academy of Science)
New York: Sep 2011
UCLA: Jan 2013
Berkeley: Jun 2013
Santa Cruz: October 2013
Davis: October 2013
London: February 2014
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48. www.lasertalks.com
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49. The Age of Customization
• The Internet tries to understand who you
are, what you do and what you like to
“customize” your experience online
• “Customizing” (ads, news) is a way to make
you even more hyper-specialized
• Customization is the enemy of creativity
www.lasertalks.com
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50. 50

51. Accelerating progress?
• One century ago, within a relatively short period
of time, the world adopted:
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the car,
the airplane,
the telephone,
the radio
the record
• while at the same time the visual arts went through
– Impressionism,
– Cubism
– Expressionism
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52. Accelerating progress?
• while at the same time science came up with
– Quantum Mechanics
– Relativity
• while at the same time the office was
revolutionized by
– cash registers,
– adding machines,
– typewriters
• while at the same time the home was
revolutionized by
– dishwasher,
– refrigerator,
– air conditioning
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53. Accelerating progress?
• There were only 5 radio stations in 1921 but
already 525 in 1923
• The USA produced 11,200 cars in 1903, but
already 1.5 million in 1916
• By 1917 a whopping 40% of households had a
telephone in the USA up from 5% in 1900.
• The Wright brothers flew the first plane in 1903:
during World War I (1915-18) more than 200,000
planes were built
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54. Accelerating progress?
• On the other hand
– 44 years after the Moon landing we still haven't
sent a human being to any planet
– The only supersonic plane (the Concorde) has
been retired
– We still drive cars, fly on planes, talk in
phones, etc…
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55. Don’t answer, ask questions
• Answer: we live in an age of accelerating
progress
• Question: do we truly live in an age of
accelerating progress?
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56. piero scaruffi
www.scaruffi.com
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57. Appendix: Art and Science
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58. Art and Science
• Why did we separate art and science?
– The separation of art from technology/
engineering/ science is a recent phenomenon.
– Art and science are so distant in the 21st century
because we live in the age of hyper-specialization.
– Specialization started in the Middle Ages and
picked up speed with the Industrial Revolution.
– Specialization is, quite simply, a very efficient way
to organize society.
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59. Art and Science
• What caused the separation of art and science?
– It was part of a broader trend away from
unification and towards specialization.
– A continuum of knowledge and of human activity
was broken down into a set of discrete units, each
neatly separated from its neighbors.
– Humans were able to build large-scale societies
thanks to the partitioning of labor and of
knowledge.
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60. Art and Science
• What caused the separation of art and science?
– As knowledge grew, it would have been
impossible to maintain the same continuum of
knowledge.
– Knowledge was broken down into discrete units
and handed down to "specialists".
– The gap between art and science kept increasing
for the simple reason that the discrete space of
specialized disciplines was more manageable than
the old continuum of total knowledge.
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61. Art and Science
• What are the consequences of the
separation of art and science?
– The language of science has
become more and more difficult to
understand.
– The language of art has become
more and more difficult to
understand
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62. Art and Science
• What are the benefits for science of an
integration with the arts?
– Art educates people to be creative.
– A lack of creativity is a handicap for
science.
– Science creates new paradigms of thought.
– Art can help usher in a paradigm shift.
– Major scientific revolutions have usually
coincided with major artistic periods.
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63. Art and Science
• Today most science is evolution, not
revolution, perhaps because it has been
decoupled from the arts.
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64. Art and Science
• What is the impediment to art/science integration
today?
– Dogmas: if we don't comply with the ruling
dogmas, we are not accepted.
– A history of jazz music written by a rock historian
is accepted neither by the rock establishment nor
by the jazz establishment. It doesn't exist.
– The 20th century disliked multifaceted
("renaissance") artists/scientists.
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65. Art and Science
• Restoring the continuum
– The digital age is providing us with an
opportunity to rebuild the continuum
– Unprecedented degree of exchange,
interaction, integration, convergence and
blending
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66. Art and Science
• Restoring the continuum
– The new continuum, though, bears little
resemblance to the old one, in that its
context is a knowledge-intensive society
that is the exact opposite of the knowledgedeprived society of the ancient continuum.
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