Isaac Asimov and the Perfect Brainstorm

Isaac Asimov by Andy Friedman

I recently stumbled across a long overlooked essay by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. Before being shared on the MIT website, ‘On Creativity’ had been gathering dust for nearly fifty years in a filing cabinet at the Allied Research Associates, a thinktank tasked with generating ‘outside the box’ ideas for a missile defence system. Asimov had been hired by the agency but soon thought better of it; he felt that…