Nye Warburton
TLDR: AI science might reveal the secret to innovation: Stop Obsessing Over Objectives.
We're obsessed with objectives.
From the moment we enter school, we're taught to set goals, make plans, and work systematically toward achieving them. Get good grades, land a prestigious job, climb the corporate ladder, buy a house, start a family – our lives become a series of check-boxes waiting to be ticked off.
This objective-driven thinking is so deeply ingrained in our culture that we've built it into our artificial intelligence systems, where "objective functions" guide machines toward specific, predefined goals.
For most cases, it works wonderfully – especially for straightforward, well-defined tasks.
Want to become a certified accountant? There's a clear path for that. Looking to run a marathon? You can follow a structured training program.
These pursuits, with their established pathways and clear metrics for success, are perfect candidates for objective thinking. We know how to get there; it's simply about applying the energy, time, and drive to accomplish it.
But here's where things get interesting – and paradoxical. Research by AI professors Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman, detailed in their book "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned," reveals a fascinating truth:
The more ambitious or innovative your goal, the less likely you are to achieve it through direct, objective-driven pursuit.
Their work with an AI platform called Picbreeder, which allowed users to "breed" images algorithmically, led to an unexpected discovery. The most interesting and innovative results came not from users who had specific targets in mind, but from those who followed their curiosity and aesthetic instincts. In short, unplanned random discovery and curiosity driven remix create the best results.
We see this pattern often throughout history, where innovators discovered ideas.
Banksy revolutionized the art world with his template-style graffiti – a technique born from the need to evade the police. Spielberg invented a revolutionary POV horror camera style because the mechanical shark wasn't ready during Jaws filming. Bill Walsh created the "West Coast offense" not to revolutionize football, but simply to stay competitive.
From penicillin to Slack, and 1000s of other inventions, as John Lennon wisely noted:
"Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans."
So if objectives don't drive great innovations, how do we foster transformative ideas?
Enter "non-objective thinking."
Instead of fixating on specific end goals, non-objective thinking emphasizes the pursuit of novelty, curiosity, and play. It's about asking "What's interesting?" rather than "What's useful?" This approach combines human taste with serendipity – deliberately cultivating space for unexpected discoveries.
The authors explain with an experiment with a robot learning to walk in a digital environment. When trained to reach a specific destination in a maze, it would often get stuck. If the end of the maze is your objective, it makes sense to move directly towards it, but often this leads into walls!
However, when trained non-objectively, (to simply explore novel movements) it not only learned to walk more effectively but developed more adaptable locomotion skills. The robot discovered that random exploration was far more effective than pursuing an objective it couldn't comprehend. If you’ve observed a child learning to walk, they wiggle kick and precariously balance as they figure it out.
Think of jazz versus classical music. Classical musicians follow a precise score toward a predetermined outcome. Jazz musicians follow their intuition and respond to each other in the moment, often creating something more innovative than anything they could have planned. While jazz musicians work within constraints, their play is experimental and sometimes uncomfortable.
The real power of non-objective thinking lies in its ability to generate what the researchers call "stepping stones." You aren’t looking for a destination, but simply a place to keep moving in new directions. Each discovery opens new possibilities, creating a branching tree of opportunities rather than a linear path. A project's success isn't measured by its immediate impact, but by its ability to catalyze more ideas and possibilities.
This explains why diversity of thought often yields better results than consensus-driven thinking. When everyone works toward the same predefined goal, they tend to converge on similar solutions. When people are free to explore their curiosity, they discover entirely new territories.
Here's the beautiful paradox of non-objective thinking:
You can achieve amazing things; you just can't predict exactly what they'll be.
Does this mean we should abandon all goals or structure?
Society will continue to build educational standards, target ideal crime rates, and set quarterly profit objectives because we don't know how to function otherwise. But perhaps we should question whether these metrics actually mean anything beyond motivating action.
Living in a world that increasingly demands innovation and creative problem-solving, perhaps the best strategy is to cultivate curiosity, embrace uncertainty, and trust that following what genuinely interests us will lead to more valuable discoveries than doggedly pursuing predetermined objectives.
The next time you feel stuck or frustrated with your progress, consider loosening your grip on the objective and instead ask yourself:
"What here is interesting?"
"Is this awesome?"
And my favorite... "Is it fun?"
You might find that by letting go of the destination, you discover something even better than what you were originally seeking.
This exploration is based on "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned" by Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman – my favorite book of the year and one I highly recommend. The Amazon link is below if you wish to read it yourself!
Thanks for reading.
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective [Stanley, Kenneth O. O., Lehman, Joel] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective
Nye Warburton is a systems designer who builds generative experiments in the 9th dimension. This essay post was largely written with human labor with editing from Claude Sonnet 3.5. More info: https://nyewarburton.com
