Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, by Kenneth O Stanley, Joel Lehman
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Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, by Kenneth O Stanley, Joel Lehman
Ebook PDF Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, by Kenneth O Stanley, Joel Lehman
Why does modern life revolve around objectives? From how science is funded, to improving how children are educated -- and nearly everything in-between -- our society has become obsessed with a seductive illusion: that greatness results from doggedly measuring improvement in the relentless pursuit of an ambitious goal. In Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, Stanley and Lehman begin with a surprising scientific discovery in artificial intelligence that leads ultimately to the conclusion that the objective obsession has gone too far. They make the case that great achievement can't be bottled up into mechanical metrics; that innovation is not driven by narrowly focused heroic effort; and that we would be wiser (and the outcomes better) if instead we whole-heartedly embraced serendipitous discovery and playful creativity.
Controversial at its heart, yet refreshingly provocative, this book challenges readers to consider life without a destination and discovery without a compass.
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, by Kenneth O Stanley, Joel Lehman - Amazon Sales Rank: #382309 in Books
- Published on: 2015-05-07
- Released on: 2015-05-07
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.25" h x .36" w x 6.10" l, .50 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 141 pages
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, by Kenneth O Stanley, Joel Lehman Review
"What is your ultimate goal -- your true objective -- when you pick up a book? The authors of this one believe that there may be no objective at all involved, just a diffuse feeling that a book can change the way you look at the world. They may be right." (Prof. Christos Papadimitriou, University of California, Berkeley and Co-author of the New York Times Best Seller "Logicomix")
"One of the original aspirations of Artificial Intelligence researchers was to help all of us, as thinking beings, understand ourselves better. Stanley and Lehman are among the few who have managed to achieve this. In this book they not only shed light on a glaring bias in the way we approach the creation of intelligent machines, but have also identified this bias at work in many aspects of our society. It is not every day that a technical book so clearly reveals something new about how we live our own lives and how we might enrich them. I cherish such a rarity, and I urge others to as well." ( Prof. Josh Bongard, University of Vermont)
"The ideas in this book have revolutionized the field of evolving artificial intelligence. They also help explain why biological evolution, science, and human culture are creative, endlessly innovative processes. Stanley and Lehman's theories are helpful for anyone who wants to foster a culture of innovation in their
organization and within their own mind." (Prof. Jeff Clune, University of Wyoming)
"Objectives in our lives and careers, and the endeavor to achieve them, can sometimes cause stress and feelings of underachievement. But do we always need objectives? This book challenges common beliefs in our culture and society, revealing indisputable evidence that the biggest discoveries in the arts and sciences are not driven by objectives. The reading provides an uplifting new perspective on creativity, innovation, and happiness." (Andrea Soltoggio, Lecturer in Computer Science, Loughborough University)
From the Back Cover
"What is your ultimate goal - your true objective - when you pick up a book? The authors of this one believe that there may be no objective at all involved, just a diffuse feeling that a book can change the way you look at the world. They may be right." - Christos Papadimitriou, C. Lester Hogan Professor of Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley and Co-author of the New York Times Best Seller “Logicomix”
"One of the original aspirations of Artificial Intelligence researchers was to help all of us, as thinking beings, understand ourselves better. Stanley and Lehman are among the few who have managed to achieve this. In this book they not only shed light on a glaring bias in the way we approach the creation of intelligent machines, but have also identified this bias at work in many aspects of our society. It is not every day that a technical book so clearly reveals something new about how we live our own lives and how we might enrich them. I cherish such a rarity, and I urge others to as well. " - Josh Bongard, Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Vermont
"The ideas in this book have revolutionized the field of evolving artificial intelligence. They also help explain why biological evolution, science, and human culture are creative, endlessly innovative processes. Stanley and Lehman's theories are helpful for anyone who wants to foster a culture of innovation in their organization and within their own mind."
- Jeff Clune, Director of the Evolving AI Lab and Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Wyoming
"Objectives in our lives and careers, and the endeavor to achieve them, can sometimes cause stress and feelings of underachievement. But do we always need objectives? This book challenges common beliefs in our culture and society, revealing indisputable evidence that the biggest discoveries in the arts and sciences are not driven by objectives. The reading provides an uplifting new perspective on creativity, innovation, and happiness." - Andrea Soltoggio, Lecturer in Computer Science, Loughborough University, UK
About the Authors
Kenneth O. Stanley and coauthor Joel Lehman are both experienced artificial intelligence researchers whose scientific discoveries led to the insights in “Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned.” Stanley, an associate professor at the University of Central Florida, has published over 80 peer-reviewed articles (10 of which have won best paper awards) and is regularly invited to speak at venues across the world. Lehman is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. In August 2015 he begins as an assistant professor at the IT University of Copenhagen.
About the Author
Kenneth O. Stanley and coauthor Joel Lehman are both experienced artificial intelligence researchers whose scientific discoveries led to the insights in "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned." Stanley, an associate professor at the University of Central Florida, has published over 80 peer-reviewed articles (10 of which have won best paper awards) and is regularly invited to speak at venues across the world. Lehman is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. In August 2015 he begins as an assistant professor at the IT University of Copenhagen.
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Most helpful customer reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful. The dilemma of easy objectives and hard improvements By Ted Anderson This book is a popular extension of a research project on Artificial Intelligence explored by the authors and their collaborators. Most research projects at the forefront of science are arcane in the extreme but this one has surprisingly wide and easy application to everyday life. While the prose struck me as short of enthralling, the message is important for almost everyone. The twin messages are that objectives are pervasive across society, but for *ambitious* goals objective are mostly counterproductive. This is bad news, since we are bedeviled by challenging problems across the spectrum of human endeavors. Yet our default approach of creating objectives and using them to select and improve solutions works poorly, while important advances we do achieve often arise accidentally or from society's outsiders.This dilemma is explained in the book through a series of examples taken both from their research (explained very accessibly, I thought) and from well-known issues of wide applicability. Especially significant to me, was a compelling critique of recent innovations to improve the quality of education that rely almost entirely on increasing the use of objectives. I remember thinking when these initiatives were proposed that these measures had obvious merit and couldn't help but improve education for most students. But the effect, as most would now seem to agree, has been woefully short of the goal. Applying Stanley's and Lehman's perspective makes it clear why this was all but inevitable. Education is far too varied and complex a problem to be reduced to a handful of numbers obtained from a few superficial tests.Years ago, I was greatly impressed with a paper by Drexler and Miller (Hubermann, 1988) called "Incentive Engineering for Computational Resource Management". In it I found a powerful metaphor for human organizations. Incentives matter a great deal; to an impressive degree, you get what you ask for. Sometimes it takes a while for people or organizations to respond to new or changed incentives, but the response is often amazingly faithful to the incentives (the US tax code is one powerful example of this process in action). The problem is that creating exactly the right incentives is very difficult or infeasible for any significant endeavor. Even a good incentive at one point in time may be useless or harmful at another time. This is just another aspect of the author's "Myth of the Objective" and its application to education is clear. The authors do make a concrete suggestion to improve education through a sort of review and communication process that could be realistically deployed incrementally and provide real benefits from the beginning.Another chapter in the book embarked on a case study of natural evolution and how it is such an effective generator of novelty. An active area of research and engineering in computer science and artificial intelligence has modeled its approach on mimicking evolution. The authors point out that a serious limitation of this approach has been its focus on survival of the fittest, by taking an aggressively objective perspective on evolution. In fact evolution is a notable for its generation of new forms, and in important ways survival and reproduction is only an incidental constraint on the process. They point out that the earliest primal bacterium had already learned to survive and the intervening eons have embellished life forms immeasurably but improved on reproduction hardly at all. The key accomplishment of evolution is not optimizing any objective, even that of survival, but of piling up endless new ways of doing the same old thing. This insight is an important contribution to a broad and important group of fields in computer science.Their point that objectives have a limited application to human affairs is an important one. It isn't that objectives are never useful, but they aren't universally applicable either. Civilization has become increasingly enamored of productivity and efficiency and planning. Viewed narrowly, improvements in these areas are easily interpreted as optimizing some objective. But more broadly, the authors show that effective objectives for distant goals cannot be defined in advance. Instead we must seek stepping stones from one intermediate stage to another, but without any a priori guide to evaluate these stages. Easily graded objectives cannot succeed with tough challenges, instead we must use judgment, wisdom, intuition and inspiration to select the best path.Easier said than done, to be sure. But as a caution, the book has valuable advice for everyone. Looking deep is hard, but at least we can be more aware of and alert to the dangers of superficial objectives and pernicious incentives.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful. A Potentially Major Paradigm Shift By Kenneth A. Lloyd Jr. During my long career using evolutionary genetic algorithms in artificial intelligence, modeling and simulation, one gets used to the unexpected and paradoxical. Stanley and Lehman, having discovered the demonstrable advantages of Novelty Search in underdetermined problem (and solution) spaces, extend their insights into this very interesting "phenomenon" - that the information about the problem space is distributed in non-obvious ways "out there", to be searched.Understanding and using this nascent phenomenon to overcome the great challenges our society faces will require a dramatic paradigm shift. We need to better understand these concepts - but Stanley and Lehman have provided the starting point on the journey.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful. On the path to discovery of the great ideas of the future, a concept from Artificial Intelligence By lee The great undiscovered inventions, concepts and art of the future are there to be discovered. The path to the greatness of the future can not be planned. This book presents the case against the current path based on creating and meeting objectives, and the case for a path more likely to lead to success. A path proven to work, discovered and demonstrated in current Artificial Intelligence research.Supported by abundant examples in the real world outside the world of artificial intelligence, this book inspires the reader to greatness by finding the interesting, the different, the new, without regard to preconceived ideas of what will eventually lead to the next great discovery. It is the novel, unexpected, the different that lead to the great undiscovered, one unpredictable step after another.Providing Insight into the exciting world of Artificial Intelligence research with unexpected applications to non-artificial intelligence. A great book for the computer scientist, non-scientist, and anyone looking for the next great thing in what ever they are interested in.
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