Imperfect

how innovation works

Airplanes

In Your Creativity Comes from Your Limitation, Living Kindfully says:

The Wright Brothers who achieved first flight are bicycle mechanics, with no formal engineering training, no university degrees, and no significant personal wealth. Their achievement had beaten another person called Samuel Langley who also tried to achieved first flight. He was the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. He received a $50,000 grant (equivalent to over $1.5 million today) from the US War Department and another $20,000 from the Smithsonian. He had a team of engineers and craftsmen to work on the project. Logically speaking, Mr Langley should have achieved first flight, while the Wright Brothers should have never taken off.

Langley kept his project a secret until his big reveal. That ended up with his houseboat creation plunging off a cliff and into a river. Around the same time, the Wright Brothers aired out their process by talking with just about anyone who would listen. They acted more like the neurons communicating with each other inside our own brains. That helped the brothers find whom and what they needed to realize their invention. Not only that, but their achievement of first flight make them stand out within the annals of history.

Light bulbs

In When the Peloton Breaks, Yordi says:

It was only after a thousand failed designs that Thomas Edison managed to create a version of the light bulb that actually worked. He, too, persevered. Imagine what we would’ve missed if he hadn’t. We need people who persist.

Take comfort in that at least 20 other would-be inventors had existing progress toward inventing the light bulb by the time Edison did. The idea was clearly ripe. While I agree with Yordi that "we need people who persist", existing technology can influence enough people to persist toward specific inventions. Innovation can be more of a group effort than it leads on. Sometimes, it even occurs across superhuman stretches of time in the case of multiple independent discovery.

Innovation cycles

In LLM prompt superstitions, Ava says:

What we're left with are rumors about magical incantations and other workarounds and manipulations that feel like old rituals to ward off bad luck, like throwing salt over one's shoulder, as well as warnings that have the same vibe as "Never place two mirrors opposite of each other" or "Knock on wood for good luck". It seems less like a science or thing you can actively train and get better at, and more like a panic response by people to make something uncontrollable seem more controllable.

One of the ideas in cybernetic fusion was exploring how magical technology is. Today's emerging technologies like AI and robotics show just how much more polarizing such magic can be compared to their predecessors. I can see how a panic response upon lost control relates to current moral panics about technology. We have been through this already with smartphones ruining photography, cameras stealing souls, and video games causing violence.

Economist Joseph Schumpeter's innovation cycles shows how predictions of optimized technology can be blindsided by a cycle change. People in the era of evolving transportation predicted flying cars. What they didn't foresee was the oncoming shift to electronics, networking, and software. With a seemingly new cycle before us, visibility of and adaptation to higher-level innovation shifts could be keys to success. Could they unlock more accurate predictions, inform how to best navigate new paradigms, and temper our emotions too?

I strongly recommend the following lecture on YouTube for more stories about how innovation and invention work: Matt Ridley: "How Innovation Works: And Why it Flourishes in Freedom".

Want to reach out? Connect with me however you prefer: