Thinking about Invention

I watched a podcast starring a certain creator that I really admire which highlighted the work her was doing at a very innovative startup. It was really interesting.

It made me realize something. It made me realize that most of the things that drew me to computer science in the first place have already been done. That’s not to say that AI or AGI won’t change the world. But most of the things I wanted to do…like program a game or make a cool website or make slick hardware that communicates with software…all of this is derivative. In other words…I was thinking too small.

I think the way to think about the future is in terms of disruptions. Things that will upset the current paradigm. Those things are inevitable…or at least they seem to be in this day and age.

All this is to say that I’m more interested in AI now than I’ve ever been, not because making it seems fun, but because charting uncharted territory seems fun. I should be thinking in terms of what is uncharted and disruptive, rather than wishing I could do things that people have already done.

It’s kind of like the difference between being a composer and a performer of music. It would be fun to play any existing piece—in other words, to be a great performer—but I wouldn’t be happy with just that. I would want to make my own music—my own destiny. Combine the ability to play music very well with the ability to compose new music very well, and you have a true artist.

Hence, I’ve been thinking about the “art” of computer science all wrong. It’s not just about scaling the mountains that other people have scaled—getting a great job at a big company, making a cool startup, etc. It’s also about being familiar enough with the underlying rules of the system to invent things that disrupt the current paradigm. In the metaphor, that’s the composing side. If you can do both—performing and composing, or building and INVENTING—then you’ve really done something.

Maybe I’ve been looking at this all wrong. From now on, I don’t just want to BUILD. I want to INVENT as well. I want to disrupt. Not, of course, just for the sake of disruption, but for the good of the world we live in. If nothing else, I’ve uncovered a difficult block that I didn’t even know I had: getting bogged down in the ho-hum world of MERELY building. No—we need ideas, we need INVENTIONS. Builders are great, but I think, just maybe, I could do a little bit more…