For the New Year, Resolve to Outsmart Robots

This year, 2017, has been the year of AI and Innovation. But not the way we all imagined. The decade-long imperative to innovate—you’re supposed to have figured out what it means and started doing it by now—met its first serious nemesis: AI and robots are going to take over everything, some say. Pressure and anxiety is mounting. Many think this means the robots are coming for their jobs.

I have a New Year’s resolution for you that offers relief: ditch your current innovation library. It’s a first step on the path to outsmarting the robots by doing something that matters—and that they can’t do.

This is actually easier than you might think, because of what it is that you can do and the robots cannot do that makes us, humans, different: you can conjure up a preposterous thought and your operating system doesn’t freeze. Instead, we, humans, get to go on and make our preposterous thoughts into something real. I guess that means they weren’t preposterous after all; it just took doing something to show that.

What do I mean by preposterous? Here are a few examples.

Humans last visited the Moon more than 30 years ago, but Elon Musk is talking about settling Mars so we become a multi-planetary species, which will allow our species to survive no matter what we do to Earth. That’s preposterous. If you ask me, it’s also insanely cool. Given Musk’s track record, he’ll probably make it real.

Another preposterous idea: Henry Ford talking about making cars affordable for everyone. We take it for granted now, but when he said it was like saying today that private jets will be affordable for everyone.

Another example: will.I.am, a founding member of the hip-hop group The Black Eyed Peas, had a conversation with NASA Administrator Charles Bolden about writing a song and broadcasting it from Mars as part of NASA’s educational outreach. will.I.am said at one point that the conversation was “surreal” (a close relative of ‘preposterous’). And yet, they made it happen. The song was uploaded to the Curiosity rover on Earth and, on August 2012, after Curiosity landed on Mars, “Reach for the Stars” premiered on Mars and was broadcast to Earth.

Even today, the next example still sounds preposterous. A bunch of people in 1971 felt the world needed to be made aware our planet was in danger, and they decided the way to do that was to set out on a fishing boat and navigate to the blast zone to stop the U.S. government from testing a nuclear bomb. It worked. Then they founded Greenpeace and continued to apply the same approach.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the founders of Microsoft, reportedly set the goal of “a computer on every desk and in every home.” That was the late 1970s—and preposterous. But Gates made it work. Now that we carry computers in our pocket all the time, what motivated Microsoft for so many years is no longer preposterous. So Gates today has new preposterous ideas, like taxing robots that don’t earn wages. I can’t figure out why, or what problem it solves, but since he made an earlier preposterous idea work we should be inclined at least to listen.

So whether you’re a musician, an artist, an engineer, an industrialist, a businessperson, or an activist, there’s a preposterous hunch that’s right for you, and all you need is a way to embrace it. Here’s how: in every example, something that may be obvious now as an innovation started out as a preposterous hunch. It took someone unafraid of being wrong in the eyes of everyone to pull it off. At some point in your life, you had that fearlessness, too. Fortunately, you now have an empty bookshelf we can fill to help get you back to that:

• Get What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe to train yourself again to ask seemingly preposterous questions and find solid answers to them—something you likely stopped practicing after third grade. This book is a masterpiece.

• Check out Ashlee Vance’s biography Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future to get a sense for how much practice it takes to reformulate a preposterous idea and how many times you’ll be told your ideas just won’t work. Most important, take from it the idea that whatever you set out to do, you can be certain you don’t know enough about it and it will take some learning. You are so unlikely to know everything you need to know to do something no one has done before that the very idea that you can be knowledgeable and prepared for what comes ahead is moronic.

• You may also want to pick up a copy of the young reader’s version of Vance’s biography: Elon Musk and the Quest for a Fantastic Future Young Readers' Edition. Read it aloud to your kids. I did, and it sparked some awesome conversations with them about what it means to invent a future.

• Read Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner and/or Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable just to get a sense for how misleading common sense can be. This will keep you sane and will help you ignore all the advice you’ll get about “validating” your idea. Taleb put it nicely in a recent tweet: “Social scientists want to ‘learn statistics’ w/o understanding probability.”

• Get Alexis Madrigal’s Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. Even if you don’t fancy energy, it will come in handy when fear of technology has you second-guessing your preposterous idea. You’ll need technology or, as Madrigal puts it, a “human-made thing.” The precise thing you need may not yet be out there, but engineering is beautiful, and something similar has probably been tried that provides you with a starting point. Go for it: if what you need doesn’t exist, there’s a way to create it.

• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman will help you realize that despite all our human creativity, there’s a lot of reptile in you. Deal with it. On your reptile days, sunbathe.

• Give yourself some rest from so much non-fiction and devour Andy Weir’s novel The Martian. You’ll get two things from it: nothing ever works as expected, and progress comes from realizing what was wrong, not from failing. The story makes sense even if you don’t fully understand every detail about the technology, but technology will be there, and limiting yourself to what you (or a user) know today is probably why all your ideas suck.

Just as a good weight-loss program will keep you away from recipes that involve excess calories, my list keeps you away from all those innovation books fat with recipes for “disruption,” “exponential change,” and even “revolution” that in fact don’t work. Recipes, subroutines, and programs are for robots, anyway.

Instead, these books will help you retrain yourself to accept a bunch of things that once would have come to you naturally, before you were mistrained: you cannot solve a real problem no one has solved before by doing the exact same thing someone else already did (which is why books that explain a recipe born out of some innovator’s story and aren’t biographies are really works of fiction); the foremost objective is to solve a problem; pleasing users is not a good surrogate for solving a problem; you know you learned the day you realize how you were wrong; preposterous ideas are only so because they remain unsolved; and the number of people who like your ideas while they are still in your head is no measure of anything.

There’s one more book—my book—you should have on your bookshelf: Innovating: A Doer’s Manifesto for Starting from a Hunch, Prototyping Problems, Scaling Up, and Learning to Be Productively Wrong (MIT Press, 2017). People tell me it is an especially beautiful-looking book. It’s about how you can start solving real-world problems with what you have now. It all begins with something preposterous, something that defies common sense and that leaves you only critical thinking to work with. You don’t need step-wise recipes.

Sure, you can follow step-wise instructions like a robot can, but wouldn’t you rather use that one quality you possess that makes you an awful robot? Well, that and the quality of having a bookshelf with good books you can actually read. (You can get them here https://amzn.to/486Zjvu )

So, for the New Year: resolve that you’ve had enough with trying so hard to be disruptive. Resolve that you’re through trying to create exponential change. Resolve that you’ve had enough of failing for what seems only failure’s sake. Instead, relieve the innovation pressure, disrupt your bookshelf, and set out to outsmart the robots!