"A Brief History of Creativity from Athens to Silicon Valley" (April 2014) at UC Davis - See also www.scaruffi.com/science/artence.html

1. "A Brief History of Creativity
from Athens to Silicon Valley"
(UC Davis, April 2014)
piero scaruffi
www.scaruffi.com

2. 2
Thesis
• We live in an age of accelerating progress
– "The 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000
years of progress" (Ray Kurzweil)

3. 3

4. 4
Why did it happen here?
• The technology, the money and the brains were on
the East Coast and in Europe (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, etc all invented elsewhere

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Why did it happen here?
• The official history of Silicon Valley
– Defense/DARPA
– Fred Terman at Stanford and HP
– William Shockley’s lab
– Fairchild/Intel/semiconductors
– Xerox PARC, Apple and personal computing
– Unix, Internet, Relational databases, Videogames
– The dotcoms
– Google, Facebook, Oracle, Intel, HP

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Why Silicon Valley?
• Until the 1950s the Bay Area was mainly
famous for
– Eccentric artists/writers
• Student protests of 1964
• Hippies
• Black Panther Party (1966)
• Monterey’s rock festival (1967)
• "Whole Earth Catalog“ (1968)
• The first “Earth Day” (1970)
• Gay Pride Parade (1970)
• Survival Research Labs (1978)
• New-age movement (1980s)
• Burning Man (1986)

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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”)
The first major wave of technology
was driven by independents,
amateurs and hobbyists (From
ham radio to the Homebrew
Computer Club)

8. 8
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
Xerox PARC
The first mouse

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Why Silicon Valley?
• 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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Why Silicon Valley?
• Dysfunctional synergy between two opposite
poles
– The rational and the irrational
– Technologists and anti-technologists
– Hippies and engineers
– Amateurs and corporations
– Nerds and outlaws (the "traitors", Jobs,
Ellison, Zuckerberg, hackers)

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Why Silicon Valley?
• What Silicon Valley does best
– Not invented here: computer, transistor,
integrated circuit, robots, Artificial
Intelligence, programming languages,
databases, videogames, Internet, personal
computers, World-wide web, search
engines, social media, smartphones,
wearable computing, …
– Invented here: disrupting products

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Why Silicon Valley?
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in
seeking new landscapes, but in having new
eyes” (Marcel Proust)

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Creativity
• Why do we value innovation,
creativity and originality?
• The history of human
civilization is about removing
the unpredictable from both
the environment and society
• 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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Creativity
• Creativity's peaks often correspond with periods
of great instability: classical Athens (at war 60%
of the time), 12th-13th century Venice (built on a
mosquito-infected lagoon by homeless refugees),
the Renaissance (Italy split in dozens of small
states and engulfed in endemic warfare), the 20th
century (two World Wars and a Cold War).

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Creativity
• Peaks in the humanities often coincide with
peaks in the sciences, and vice versa
• Wealth is not a cause or precondition, but
an effect of the creative boom

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What is unique about humans?
• Animals live the same life of their parents
• Humans are the only species whose life
style changes from generation to generation

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What is unique about humans?
• Children disobey, teenagers are rebels

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What is unique about humans?
• Animals only “innovate” when there is a
genetic mutation
• Humans innovate all the time
Beaver civilization over the millennia
Human civilization over the millennia

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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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What is unique about humans?
…….
Human aesthetic over the centuries
Spider aesthetic over the centuries

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What is unique about humans?
• Being creative is the natural state of the human
mind
• Creativity is what truly sets humans apart from
other living beings
• It is unnatural for the human race to be creative
only in one field

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Welcome to the 21st Century
• CP Snow’s “Two Cultures” (1959)
– a widening gap between the two cultures of
contemporary society: sciences and humanities
• The age of hyper-specialization
– “What do you want to be when you grow up”?
• The age of accelerating progress…
• …or not?

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Accelerating progress?
• One century ago, within a relatively short period
of time, the world adopted:
– the car,
– the airplane,
– the telephone,
– the radio
– the record
– cinema
• while at the same time the visual arts went through
– Impressionism,
– Cubism
– Expressionism

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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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Accelerating progress?
• while at the same time cities adopted high-rise
buildings

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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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Accelerating progress?
• On the other hand today:
– 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, use the same kitchen appliances

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Accelerating progress?
• We chronically underestimate progress in
previous centuries because most of us are
ignorant about those eras.

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Accelerating progress?
• Accelerating progress happened
simultaneously in the sciences and the arts
Monet Stravinsky Einstein Gaudi Edison

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Decelerating progress?
• Today there is a lot of change
• But change is not necessarily progress
Insert here a picture of a
notice from your bank that the
policy for your account has
been “upgraded”, resulting in
additional charges
Insert here a picture of the
“new improved” release of
the software application that
you have been using for years
with no problems and that
now causes a system crash

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Decelerating progress?
• Accelerating change is a why,
not a what
piero scaruffi
www.scaruffi.com

35. 35
Decelerating progress?
• Hyper-specialization in every field
• Practitioners do not interact
• Their audiences do not interact

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Decelerating progress?
• Scientific memes are understood
only by science world
• Artistic memes are understood only
by the art world
• Not CP Snow’s “two cultures” but
the “two gaps”

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Decelerating progress?
• Science is often slave to an agenda of
self-replicating research
• Technology is often slave to marketing,
profit, fashion
• Art is slave to critics, museums and
galleries

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Decelerating intelligence?
• The Turing Test was asking “when can machines be said
to be as intelligent as humans?”
• This “Turing point” can be achieved by
1. Making machines smarter, or
2. Making humans dumber
HOMO MACHINE
IQ
HOMO MACHINE
IQ
1. 2.

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Decelerating intelligence?
• Humans want to build machines that
think like humans while machines are
already building humans who think like
machines

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Decelerating intelligence?
(MIT Forrester Institute, 2012)