What Can Musicians Teach Us about Imagination?

Scientific American Beautiful Minds blog: 

What is the nature of music? What is imagination in music? What's the role of intuition in music? What motivates musicians? What makes a great musical performance? What creates transcendence in music? What is the role of the audience? What are some recommended approaches for increasing creativity in music teachers and music students? These are some of the fascinating questions that we discussed at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. The participants included: Paul Bryan, Dean of Faculty and Students at the Curtis Institute; conductor; trombonist Dan Lerner, Faculty at New York University Gloria dePasquale, Cellist in the Philadelphia Orchestra Yumi Kendall, Cellist in the Philadelphia Orchestra Georgia Shreve, Composer and writer Gene Scheer, Opera librettist Ashley Robillard, Opera Student at Curtis Institute Elizabeth Hyde, Research Specialist for the Imagination Institute Scott Barry Kaufman, Scientific Director of the Imagination Institute Martin Seligman, Executive Director of the Imagination Institute, Director of the Positive Psychology Center, and Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Seth Godin on Innovation

Seth Godin: 

Innovation is essential, but innovation isn't lazy. It takes insight and patience and experience to bring a new solution to an old problem.

Impatience is not a strategy.

Experience isn't free, but it's valuable.

And history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Jocelyn K Glei: How to be productive in a meaningful way in a world of distraction

Jocelyn K. Glei:

"We’ve gotten very good at making time for busywork and very bad at making time for our best work. In this recent talk, I outline why we’re so addicted to “fake productivity” — those small, mindless tasks that feel productive but actually get us nowhere — and how we can shift our attention back to the work that matters."

Teaching robots right from wrong

The cover story on The Economist 1843. "Artificial intelligence is outperforming the human sort in a growing range of fields – but how do we make sure it behaves morally? Simon Parkin meets the men trying to teach ethics to computers":

In 2017, this is an urgent question. Self-driving cars have clocked up millions of miles on our roads while making autonomous decisions that might affect the safety of other human road-users. Roboticists in Japan, Europe and the United States are developing service robots to provide care for the elderly and disabled. One such robot carer, which was launched in 2015 and dubbed Robear (it sports the face of a polar-bear cub), is strong enough to lift frail patients from their beds; if it can do that, it can also, conceivably, crush them. Since 2000 the US Army has deployed thousands of robots equipped with machineguns, each one able to locate targets and aim at them without the need for human involvement (they are not, however, permitted to pull the trigger unsupervised).

Public figures have also stoked the sense of dread surrounding the idea of autonomous machines. Elon Musk, a tech entrepreneur, claimed that artificial intelligence is the greatest existential threat to mankind. Last summer the White House commissioned four workshops for experts to discuss this moral dimension to robotics. As Rosalind Picard, director of the Affective Computing Group at MIT puts it: “The greater the freedom of a machine, the more it will need moral standards.”

Staying sharp

Seth Godin: 

Cooks know that a sharp knife is less likely to cause injury, because it goes where you point it. It does what you tell it to do, which means you can focus on what you want the outcome to be.