RUN/STOP RESTORE (or SYS 64738)
For the past five years or so I've felt driven to discover the "next best thing", to dream up a truly novel idea. I can't tell you just how insanely difficult it has been. An impossible task? How many engineers and dreamers before me have lost their minds questing for the same goal?
Yes, I've heard the cliche pronouncement that there is no such thing, there is no truly original idea - that everything new is simply an evolution of things past. My strategy to date has been to accept just that, and to instead look for the innovative concepts and ideas of the past or present, and attempt to build from them.
Even this approach, attempting to look beyond and think ahead of the technology curve, has proven remarkably challenging. No sooner do I dream up what I feel is a profound concept, when a quick Google search turns up a half dozen previous "eurekas" elsewhere around the globe. With over 6.5 billion of us living on earth, one I suppose should expect this concurrent thinking phenomenon.
But with this "building block" approach, innovating by compounding and extending existing intellectual efforts - where does one draw the line? What differentiates this class of innovation over simple intellectual thievery? I must admit I haven't always been so conscientous of the moral issues involved in the past.
When I was much younger, I was one of the rocket scientists that copied his book report from the back cover of the paperback I was reading for my grade school english teacher. And then there's this - Poker Parlor. Wow you say? 1984, that puts me at about 12 years old - published a game at 12? not bad! More like - not true. A friend of my fathers loaned me some BASIC code to play with, I thought I would learn how it worked - I picked it apart, change a few things - and called it my own. Little did I know that the game was previously published in a version of Compute's Gazette earlier that year. Apologies twenty years later go to Augie.
I am a software engineer by trade and I love to disassemble and reverse engineer prior art, in order to learn for example how something was accomplished, in hopes that I may improve upon what I find to be an already compelling or novel concept. Not much different than an artist or illustrator learning from the masters before them before executing their own ideas and concepts. Take this "study" I did during my first two years in art school...
All the paint went from my brush to the canvas, so it must be an original work right? Ah, you recognize it? I wanted to be like Rockwell at one time in my life, so I attempted to mimic his style - by breaking down his paintings one by one and duplicating them on my own canvas. What was the point? Unless I was studying to be a forger - the art I was creating was worthless. Sure friends and family would complement me on how wonderful it was - but it would clearly not add value to the art world - where was the novelty? I had gone so far as to learn how someone previous came to what they were able to call an original work - but I never bothered to go beyond technical mimicry.
For the next year I'm going to reset, steer clear of the slippery slope that is evolutionary innovation, and make an honest concerted effort to think on my own, to solve a problem or two folks never knew needed to be solved, or to challenge myself to "create" something the other 6.4999 billion day dreamers out there never even thought twice about. A more likely than not, fruitless and frustrating exercise - I'm resigned to the fact that I will most likely continue to be a day late, a dollar short.
But it's what I love to do. Just suppose....
posted by Twinsen @ 1:00 PM
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