Kenneth Stanley On Creativity, Objectives, and Open-Endedness

Oct 8, 2020

 

• About guest: 

Keneth Stanley is one of the founding members at Uber AI Labs and a Charles Millican Professor of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida. He is the author of "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective", a book that seeks that offers an analysis of something fundamental in our culture: Objectives, they're everywhere, and nobody questions them, but this book does, and possibly offers a useful alternative(s).

 

His research goes from introducing novelty search, an algorithm that has no defined objective; instead, it simply searches for novel behaviors, to Evolutionary Complexity and many others. You can learn more about him on his Scholar and University Profile page that will be attached in the notes below, including with a link to the book.

 

• Timestamps and main topics:

 

• 00:00 - 04:29 - Introduction to Kenneth Stanley
• 04:30 - 06:45 - What is Novelty Search
• 06:46 - 11:28 - Why the More Attached You Are Towards The Goal, The More Likely You Will Deceive Yourself
• 11:32 - 16:16 - Most of The Problems In Life Are Not Direct Lines From Point A to Point B
• 16:17 - 24:55 - How Revolutionary Inventions Were Created
• 25:08 - 35:17 - You Don’t Need To Have An Objective or Explanation For What You’re Doing
• 35:18 - 45:25 - How a Search Process Should be Performed When The Goal Is to Discover Something Great
• 45:36 - 58:10 - Evolution Is Not Trying To Do Anything Specific. It's A Fully Open-ended Process
• 58:10 - 1:00:00 - Carl Jung Idea of Circumambulation of The Self As Curiosity Towards Maximum Development
• 1:01:00 - 1:03:23 - Kenneth Message To The World

 

 

• Resources:

 

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/kenneth0stanley?lang=en
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenneth-stanley-3a159b/ 
• Book: https://amzn.to/3nFH7mf
• Scholar and University Profile: https://www.cs.ucf.edu/~kstanley/