The importance of whimsy
· 1 min read
In elementary school, we used to play a game with my classmates. It was a team-based PvP game with several hero classes, abilities, and maps. How did we get away with playing it for hours on end during the school day? Well, it took place entirely in our imagination, alongside a few scribbles in the back of my notebook to keep track of a few numbers.
I'd define whimsy as the practice of playful and unusual imagination.
As we go through the traditional education system and become adults with jobs, whimsy is systematically driven out of us through routine, rules, and responsibility. Routine reduces the amount of novel `inputs our brain receives. Rules and responsibility keep us grounded in reality, as straying implies risk.
Why do we need whimsy?
In daily life a bit of whimsy can slow down time, while routine does the opposite. It is also critical to achieve those innovations that are 100x better than any alternative, and it's something I believe is quite uniquely human.
Today, AI is great at optimizing for an objective, and lets take real-time translation as an example. AI might plan, implement, and train a great voice translation model for English<>French. It won't however stop to consider if both parties should just be instructed to learn a third language that is uniquely designed for their conversation. Because that's an absurd concept... or is it? In the future we might be able to consume information a lot faster. We might even be able to smell it.
End note
I've always felt that software engineering is inherently creative, but admittedly most of my creative decisions were built on a large heap of logical thinking. I believe the best whimsy originates from the other side of the brain, and to harness it you must let the logical thinking come after.
Still practicing.
- Christian