Dwapara Yuga - Creativity

The Wall Street Journal ran an article today - Tinkering Makes Comeback Amid Crisis.

The article talks about the move away from theorizing in top engineering schools into creativity and actually building things, something not seen in years.

Previously the best talents went into "financial engineering" on Wall Street. When the wheels came off their theoretical models, the crash was felt around the world.

One student makes the recession era and critical Dwapara point - "If it doesn't have that creative aspect to it, it may not be worth doing, because your job can be outsourced,"

Where once tinkerers like the Wright Brothers could build a plane 100 years ago, we have lived through decades of only large companies having the resources to innovate. In the 90s, inexpensive computing power fueled the dot com and telco revolutions. Today falling prices are making high-end engineering tools like CNC machines inexpensive. CNC machines do not output 2-D pieces of paper but 3-D parts in metals, ceramics or wood that can be combined into planes, robots or just about anything. To the last point, researchers are looking at printing replacement organs.

Together these trends are democratizing the access to the tools for innovation so that inventors need not put forward just blueprints but complete working solutions. With such advances, small independent companies like Tesla and Armadillo Aerospace have been able to succeed where trillion dollar incumbents have failed.

Apple was an early pioneer in computing with the Apple ][ in the late 70s, launching the PC revolution. Its latest platform, the iPhone, has spawned another generation of people who do not settle for using pre-existing software but create their own and share it with others.

This week saw the launch of the first computer language in almost 10 years - Go. For the millions and millions of developers in IT, it's ironic that so much time should have passed since the last, and that the authors of the new language are not trendy teens from Russia or China but actually figures from the UNIX/C world of the 1960s and 70s, the same technology that sits behind the modern faces of iPhones, iMacs, DVRs, Google, Amazon, Pixar, Dreamworks, the FAA, NYSE and CME exchanges that so symbolize modernity.

In terms of art, it is today incredibly easy to go from a strong idea and some drawing skills to a hit animation with desktop sound and image software. In terms of television, the creators of animation have the greatest degree of artist control and simultaneously largest rewards, free from physical limitations of sets, actors and to an extent heavy censorship of themes and language.