The Zero Problem
On a plane recently, as everyone was boarding, the door to the cockpit was kept open. I was sitting in an aisle seat from which I could see a little of what was happening in there. The pilots were flipping switches and turning knobs and pressing buttons, doing whatever it is that they do to prepare a plane for departure. It occurred to me that I don’t know one thing about how they operate this extraordinarily powerful machine. Not even how they turn the thing on. Which struck me as the way it goes with most machines and technologies: what they can do depends on who is at the controls. Then, after takeoff, I got to reading a new book, The Human Advantage: What AI Can’t Do Without You, by Jeremy Utley, a longtime Stanford teacher who studies creativity and innovation. In a section about how the capabilities of AI—and technology in general—depend on the capabilities of its user, Jeremy writes, “AI multiplies what you bring to the collaboration…AI doesn’t lift everyone to the same place. It amplifies your existing capabilities, your baseline competence.” What if you have no existing capability? What if you bring total incompetence to an extraordinarily powerful machine? “I call this the ‘zero problem,’” Jeremy writes. “Zero times any number, no matter how great the multiplier (the power of AI [or a plane!] . . . times nothing!), is still zero. If your thinking is shallow, AI will make it shallow faster. If your problem selection is poor, AI will help you pursue the wrong problems with incredible efficiency. If your judgment is underdeveloped, AI will faithfully scale that weakness…This is the paradox of the AI era: The better the tools get, the more your underlying human capability matters.”
Avoiding the zero problem, cultivating the things we bring to things—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
You Should Be Filling Yourself Up With Art
In a Q&A with Vincent D’Onofrio and Rosario Dawson, the stars of the Marvel television series Daredevil, an audience member mentioned in passing that he was an aspiring actor before going on to talk about his admiration for both D’Onofrio and Dawson, mentioning some of the performances from their respective careers that he particularly loved. “And I wanted to ask you both,” he eventually said, “what is either your favorite role or one of the most challenging roles you’ve had to do throughout your careers?” D’Onofrio turned to look at Dawson, who was looking off in the distance, contemplating the question. He turned back to the audience member: “Can I ask you a question?” Of course. “Did you say you’re acting? Or–.” “Yeah,” the audience member said. “Trying to.” “Trying to,” D’Onofrio said. “Great. Can I give you some advice?” Of course! “When’s the last time you went to the opera?” A year ago. “When’s the last time you went to Philharmonic?” I actually don’t know what that is. “It’s like an orchestra.” Oh, two years ago.“When’s the last time you read poetry?” About a year ago with a friend of mine. “Yeah,” D’Onofrio said. “You should be reading poetry from all over the world, and from every century. You should be going to as much—as much—performance-oriented things as you can. You should be filling yourself with art.” Aspiring actors ask D’Onofrio for advice all the time, he said—“they ask for advice about acting schools and techniques and all that.” Those things can help. But what you get out of them depends on what you bring to them. “That’s what I tell every person that I meet—every person like you that’s trying or aspiring but they aren’t blossoming yet in whatever it is: fill yourself with art. If you let that become a habit, it will pay off a million times during your career.” He shared an example from early in his career—in consideration for a role, D’Onofrio was chatting with the director who all of a sudden started to recite a poem by the eighteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Burns. D’Onofrio knew the poem well and, to the director’s surprise and delight, joined in reciting it. “That kind of thing—getting that role because I simply knew that poem—that kind of thing has come up again and again and again in my career,” he said. “I made it a habit to fill myself with art. And it pays off every year of my life. So I wanted to give you that advice.”
This Became The Law of the Land
Before Pixar became known for its movies, it developed the technology to make them. Its founders were computer-graphics pioneers who had spent years figuring out how to create three-dimensional objects on a screen, make them move, and give them convincing textures, lighting, and shadows. The company built specialized computers and developed software called RenderMan, which turned digital scenes into finished images. Then, in 1991, Pixar struck a deal with Disney to make the first entirely computer-animated feature film. There was one problem. “We didn’t have any storytellers among us,” Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull explained. They had developed extraordinary technology. But they totally lacked the human capabilities needed to bring out all its technical power. So they set out to solve their zero problem. The team attended a three-day storytelling seminar taught by Robert McKee. They left the seminar, one Pixar employee said, “as true believers [in] McKee’s doctrine that…character emerges most realistically and compellingly from the choices that the protagonist makes in reaction to his problems…This became the law of the land at Pixar.” Essentially, McKee taught that the beating heart of a good story is a character who wants something and has to overcome a series of problems to get it. Guided by this principle, the Pixar team wrote a story about a toy named Woody who wants to keep his position as a boy named Andy’s favorite toy. “Woody’s world is rocked,” Catmull writes in summing up the plot, “when a shiny new rival, a space ranger named Buzz Lightyear, arrives on the scene and becomes the apple of Andy’s eye.” That problem would become the beating heart of “Toy Story,” which was released in 1995 and was a critical and commercial sensation. Following the success of Toy Story, Pixar returned repeatedly to McKee’s principle. One of Pixar’s character designers said, “We really followed McKee almost to the letter of the law.” The former Head of Pixar’s Creative Development team added, “Our movies are very conventional, in terms of story conventions like character arcs. If you look at all of our movies, there’s a protagonist who…goes on a journey and comes out the other end a better person . . . or rat . . . or fish.”
What You Create Is A Culmination
In 1985, Nike held a 24-hour shoe design contest. Nike was struggling. Their stock dropped 50%. They had to lay off people. Adidas, Converse, and Reebok were all selling more shoes. So in a panicked attempt to find creative talent, Nike held a shoe design contest. The winner was a corporate architect named Tinker Hatfield. “Two days after the competition,” he said, “I wasn’t even asked—I was told that I was now a footwear designer for Nike.” As he got to work on his first official shoe design, he thought about a building he had studied in architecture school: The Centre Pompidou in Paris. The Centre Pompidou is an inside-out building, meaning that the structural, mechanical, and circulation systems are all exposed. “That building,” Tinker said, “was describing what it was to the people of Paris. And I thought, ‘Well why not do that with a shoe? Let’s cut a hole in the side and show what’s in the shoe.’” So Tinker designed an inside-out shoe: The Air Max 1. The Air Max 1 was a massive success, and it steered Nike’s design direction from then on. “To this day,” Tinker says, “Phil Knight says I saved Nike.” Had he not studied that building in Paris, he couldn’t have created the Air Max. Creativity, Tinker likes to say, is a function of the “library in your head.” “When you sit down to create something…what you create is a culmination of everything you’ve seen and done previous to that point.”
People Talk About, “Connecting The Dots”
Nolan Bushnell loves to go to trade shows. “A trade show is like an encapsulation of an industry,” he said, “there’s always something to learn.” In the early ‘70s, for instance, Bushnell went to a “manufacturing mechanisms” trade show. There, he noticed that almost everyone was using these tiny cylinder actuators called pneumatics. Essentially, these things convert energy into mechanical motion. He asked one of the engineers, how many actuations do you get with one of those things before you have to replace it? “Ah, they never break,” the engineer said. “I never replace them.” A few years later, in 1977, Bushnell opened the first Chuck. E. Cheese. There and at every location that opened after, there was a stage where an animatronic band performed nonstop. The animatronic band “used the pneumatics because they just work and work and work and work.” Bushnell has started more than 20 companies, he’s been included in “50 Innovators Who Have Changed The World” lists, he’s been called “the founding father of the video game industry” for creating Atari—he says his “innovations” are always just a blending together of elements that previously existed separately. He says, “People talk about ‘connecting the dots.’ Well, if you collect a whole bunch of dots, you can make a better matrix.”
Get Filled Up To Pour Out
Johnny Cash is estimated to have written and co-written more than 1,000 songs during his lifetime. He was one of the most prolific artists of all time. In an interview in 1993, Cash talked about his process and what he would do to try to increase the probability of being able to write a song: “Songwriting is a very strange thing, as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “It’s not something where I can say, ‘Next Tuesday morning, I’m gonna sit down and write a song.’ I can’t do that. No way. But if I say, ‘Next Tuesday morning, I’m gonna go to the country and take a walk in the woods,’ then the probability is that next Tuesday night, I can write a song. You know, creative people have to be fed…I do. I have to get fed. I have to get filled up in order to pour out. I really have to.”