Dr. Tony McCaffrey

Founder of Teens Solving Global Problems, Head of Computer Science at Eagle High School, USA

Dr. Tony McCaffrey holds a PhD in cognitive psychology, specializing in creativity and problem solving. He first obtained an advanced degree in AI, but left the field because of AI's inability to be creative. He then switched to cognitive psychology to focus on human creativity and how to enhance it.

During his dissertation, he devised the Obscure Features Hypothesis (OFH) of Innovation, which states that any creative solution is built upon at least one rarely noticed or new feature of the problem. From this principle, he has crafted creativity techniques to overcome every known obstacle to creativity, which are presented in his 2018 book "Overcome Any Obstacle to Creativity."

In 2017, McCaffrey published the first mathematical proof that there is severe limit to how creative any machine can be. In that same paper, he details how humans and machines can collaborate to amplify each other's creativity.

Recently, he founded "Teens Solving Global Problems”. In a pilot study, teens solved four of the six global problems they attempted, according to domain experts. McCaffrey is now spreading this problem solving activity to other schools and encouraging all technology and science companies to gather teens to help innovate on big problems. This is a new innovation model where teens lead the innovation activities while the adult experts refine, test and implement the best ideas.

McCaffrey has recently co-authored an academic paper, "The Einstein Test and Beyond: The Architecture of the Semantic Zero," that proves that no current AI can pass the Einstein Test, which asks whether an AI model trained on all knowledge up to 1911 can go on to create General Relativity, as Einstein did in 1915.