Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

- Beveridge W. I. B., 1950, The Art of Scientific Investigation, New York. https://archive.org/details/artofscientifici00beve

A charming and easy-to-read enquiry into how scientists conduct research. Old but (like all good science) still applicable.

Kaufman, J. C., & Sternberg, R. J. (2010). The Cambridge handbook of creativity.

Tons of great material. Section 1, chapter 2 gives a literature review of the topic.

- Johnson. S., 2010, Where Good Ideas Come From, Penguin UK.

Packed with lots of good anecdotes, this is a very accessible book.

- Currey, M. 2013, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, Knopf. Blog avaiable here: http://dailyroutines.typepad.com/.

This started off as a blog and developed into a wonderful and useful little book. In my opinion, creative rituals are a very under-estimated component of creativity.

- Sternberg, R. J. (2001). What is the common thread of creativity? Its dialectical relation to intelligence and wisdom. American Psychologist.

A very readable 3 page essay.

- Christensen, C. (2013). The innovator's dilemma: when new technologies cause great firms to fail.

Perhaps the most well-known book on this list. It was this book that addressed the idea of 'disruptive innovation'... innovation that completely destroys some businesses, and creates others. He uses the railroad as an example, but clearly the internet falls into this category as well.

- Seelig, T. (2012). inGenius: A crash course on creativity.

This evolved from the course notes from one of the first university courses on the subject of creativity. A bit annoying to navigate (her chapter headings are 'too creative') but it has good stuff.

On top of this, there is almost everything that Edward De Bono wrote (the lateral thinking guru).

Perhaps, but perhaps not. The point isn't about some innate feature of humans that has only increased recently, but rather that throughout history humans (and the great classes therein) have faced material (not only economic) hardships. It is material conditions which drive history.

I think there is a huge dividing line between inventing to seek profit and seeking "other kinds of status". The only thing in common these motivations have is that they arise due to our relations with other humans. Likewise, many motivations, depending on the predominant point of view (which certainly does change with time and place) can be viewed either altruistically or selfishly. I'd wager that a cynical society, or one dominated by the totalizing logic of capital ("accumulate!") would have a tendency to see previous motivations as selfish, because it's very hard to empathize with people through history. In other words, we view things in a certain way because it is unimaginable to us to see it any other way, since we have no experience with those times and places and the motivations therein.

The ancient world is filled with proverbs and sayings and stories of heroism for some kind of greater good, certainly without looking for some kind of profit, and more often than not, without looking for some kind of recognition. As to whether these are just stories we tell or whether there is some truth to them is an important question. It's probably worth asking anthropology, or at the very least sociology. The latter has discovered huge changes in public consciousness since the industrial revolution.

An idea I've been having lately, and one that might be unpopular on this site, is that we've found all the low-hanging in electronics, networking, and software. So the main reason why it seems like there are no new ideas is because we're only looking at places where there are few new ideas to be found.

If we stop equating "tech" with computers, and instead search the vast parameter space of new technologies, we'll quickly find lots of interesting new ideas. Unfortunately, that also means we've more or less reach the end of the growth era of Silicon Valley, and from here on out SV just becomes another old fashion industry with minimal avenues for new growth.