Recently I attended an Artificial Intelligence/Deep Learning Conference where one of the tracts was on AI for Enterprise. Within this tract, there was a Google talk on using AI to optimize employees seating to maximize useful connections between each other.
Although they didn’t use these terms, I think they are trying to “design for serendipity.”
Serendipity is a beautiful sounding word. (It’s my second favorite sounding word of all time. My favorite sounding word is “silver.”)
The Oxford English Dictionary (my favorite source for exploring words), defines it as:
Serendipity: The faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident. Also, the fact or an instance of such a discovery.
OED
This word was coined Horace Walpole after reading the fairy tale ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’, which involves “ the heroes of which ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’.” (More knowledge gleaned from the OED!).
Note that serendipity hinges on a discovery, and isn’t the same as luck, an event which can be good or bad:
Luck: The chance occurrence of situations or events either favourable or unfavourable to a person’s interests; the sum of chance events affecting (favourably or unfavourably) a person’s interests or circumstances; a person’s apparent tendency to have good or ill fortune.
OED
So can Google and other corporations (Pixar comes to mind: The Science Behind How Steve Jobs Designed Pixar’s Office) design for serendipity?
Could cubicle assignments of helped Alexander Fleming discover penicillin, Wilhelm Roentgen discover X-rays, Thomas Brock discover Thermus aquaticus, or Santiago Ramon y Cajal confirm the neuron doctrine? (For these and other serendipitous health science discoveries read the article The three princes of Serendip: Notes on a mysterious phenomenon).
I doubt it,—or, at least, I hope not.
Both the word and concept are just too lovely to broken down into another AI/Deep Learning algorithm.