Perpetual novelty

Some fuzzy thoughts I don’t know what to make of yet. In Complexity, Mitchell Waldrop talks about the work of John Holland, who talked about agents in coevolving systems as exhibiting perpetual novelty. In a system with lots of agents that are constantly adapting to each other, each agent has to find new means of survival as the environment is changing. Hence, perpetual novelty – it’s a neverending strive for newness.

A while ago, I had the urge to read a little about what creativity really is. To me, creativity is about effectively solving problems. It does indeed rely on past experience, but books on creativity techniques all seem to be about breaking free from your preconceptions. After all, being creative isn’t about repeating what has already been done (by others or by yourself). But there’s tension between being experienced and being open-minded.

(Writing this, I came to think of an article by Nicholas Negroponte I read a few weeks ago, Creating a Culture of Ideas. The introduction to the article read: “Nicholas Negroponte says expertise is overrated. To build a nation of innovators, we should focus on youth, diversity, and collaboration.”)

There’s a difference between creating a product or service to address the needs of some group of people, and creating something new. To me, focusing on the needs seems to work only in the short term. For an ecosystem (assuming the agents would be able to make qualified guesses about what would be good strategies for survival) it would only enable the survival in the immediately following generation, while a new solution could prove a success for several generations. Now, ecosystems doesn’t consciously make decisions for their future; natural selection works by random mutations and killing the ones that won’t work.

Of course, a completely new solution (which in practice is impossible, since you can’t not build on existing solutions) can fail as dramatically as it can succeed – but then again, mere attempts to address identified needs aren’t guaranteed to succeed either.

I’ve got to go.