How to Throw the Right Kind of Party |
Our productivity, creativity, and ability to build depend on having spaces to gather in.
Creativity partially emerges from how we perceive old and new environments.
Parties can sync brain waves, trigger serendipitous relationships, and allow happy accidents to happen.
It’s been exactly one year since my book Thinking Like a Human: The Power of Your Mind in the Age of AI was released. In many ways, the core message of the book, that the greatest threat to humanity is not superintelligent machinery but a lack of trust in the power of our own minds, is even more pertinent today.
People are becoming wiser to the hype that is behind much of the AI boosterism and starting to ask the right questions to make better decisions about the tools we use and create healthier relationships with the world around us. When people ask me for a one-sentence prescription found in the book that can most easily help steer them to a more pro-human direction, I always advise them to “throw the right kind of parties.”
What a good party does for cognition
Our productivity, creativity, and ability to build are uniquely supported by the spaces we choose to gather in and the people we gather with. And yet, it’s getting harder to find spaces worth leaving our screens for. This is partially a consequence of tech advances, partially a function of a difficult economy, and partially exacerbated by changing demographics and social norms. It’s not easy to willfully and intentionally create physical, real-world social spaces that nurture the best of what’s in us. But it’s work that can make or break our society.
Creativity is partially defined as an act arising out of a perception of the environment. Throwing the........