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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Matt Ridley
Read between
May 16 - June 27, 2021
This was Norman Borlaug, a Minnesotan descended from refugees who left Norway during a potato famine.
Iowan, not Minnesotan.
the chief organizer of Earth Day, in 1970, said it was ‘already too late to avoid mass starvation’;
Innovation, and the discontents who prefer the satisfaction of screaming ruin over the satisfying hum of growth and progress
Bizarrely, the organic-farming sector refused to approve the new plants even though they used the same molecules as their own sprays, because of an objection to biotechnology in principle.
doubling of natural insect predators such as ladybirds, lacewings and spiders was recorded in Bt cotton fields, meaning better control of all pests by natural predators.
Between 1960 and 2010, the acreage of land needed to produce a given quantity of food has declined by about 65 per cent.
By the middle of the current century, the world will be feeding nine billion people from a smaller area of land than it fed three billion from in 1950.
That would mean we could cultivate much less land, enlarging national parks and nature reserves, returning land to forest and wilderness, managing more land for flowers, birds and butterflies. We could enhance the ecology of the planet even as we feed ourselves.
The whole of the classical world and early-medieval Christendom got by with a system of counting that made multiplication virtually impossible, algebra unfathomable and accounting primitive.
It is notable that this innovation, like so many, comes to us through commerce.
‘A debt minus zero is a debt. A fortune minus zero is a fortune. Zero minus zero is a zero. A
Perhaps it was just as well that Fibonacci took zero across the sea to Pisa and the other city states of northern Italy, where commerce thrived and people cared more for practical enterprise, for buying low and selling high, rather than glory or God.
Yet you never smell it. Why not? This is a new phenomenon, an innovation. In past eras, cities smelled richly of sewage all the time, and you would be hard pressed to walk down a street without seeing it or stepping in it, let alone smelling it.
In the mid-1950s shipping goods by sea was almost as expensive, slow and inefficient as it had been for centuries. Despite faster engines and bigger ships, the ports were costly bottlenecks.
McLean was one of those ambitious, risk-ready entrepreneurs who make getting rich look simple.
By the time the voyage was over, McLean reckoned it had cost less than 16 cents a ton, compared with $5.83 a ton for normal cargo rates. Such enormous cost saving spoke for itself, or so one would think.
The lesson of wheeled baggage is that you often cannot innovate before the world is ready. And that when the world is ready, the idea will be already out there, waiting to be employed:
the main method of innovation here is not de novo invention, but recombination – bringing old things together in new combinations – and that this is a general feature of innovation elsewhere in the economy: ‘Innovation is a process of search and recombination of existing components’, a point also made by Joseph Schumpeter in the 1930s: ‘Innovation combines components in a new way’.
it is not the invention but the commercialization that makes the difference.
eventually its popularity came to earn the snobbish rage of cultural commentators. There can be no greater accolade.
Morse’s real achievement, like that of most innovators, was to battle his way through political and practical obstacles.
‘fly, you tyrants, assassins and thieves, you haters of light, law, and liberty, for the telegraph is at your heels.’
Techno-utopianism
The innovations came rolling off the silicon, digital production line: the microprocessor in 1971, the first video games in 1972, the TCP/IP protocols that made the internet possible in 1973, the Xerox Parc Alto computer with its graphical user interface in 1974, Steve Jobs’s and Steve Wozniak’s Apple 1 in 1975, the Cray 1 supercomputer in 1976, the Atari video game console in 1977, the laser disc in 1978, the ‘worm’, ancestor of the first computer viruses, in 1979, the Sinclair ZX80 hobbyist computer in 1980, the IBM PC in 1981, Lotus 123 software in 1982, the CD-ROM in 1983, the word
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Wow...
Tunis Craven, commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, said in 1961: ‘there is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television or radio service inside the United States.’
Tim Harford points out that in the futuristic film Blade Runner, made in 1982, robots are so life-like that a policeman falls in love with one, but to ask her out, he calls her from a payphone, not a mobile.
Search is probably worth nearly a trillion dollars a year and has eaten the revenue of much of the media, as well as enabled the growth of online retail.
Yet here is a paradox. There is an inevitability about both search engines and social media. If Larry Page had never met Sergei Brin, if Mark Zuckerberg had not got into Harvard, then we would still have search engines and social media.
Something can be inevitable in retrospect, and entirely mysterious in prospect. This asymmetry of innovation is surprising.
the usual path of innovation: incremental, gradual, serendipitous and inexorable; few eureka moments or sudden breakthroughs.
‘The shift from exploration and discovery to the intent-based search of today was inconceivable,’ said Srinija Srinivasan, Yahoo!’s first editor-in-chief.
Omg. Looking back. Moving out here in 1995, I had a job offer to work as a human editor, refining Yahoo’s categorization of web sites.
I turned it down for a “real job” (business analyst) somewhere else because “that doesn’t sound like a real job.” Silly me...
‘Amazingly, I had no thought of building a search engine. The idea wasn’t even on the radar,’ Page said. That asymmetry again.
Page discovered that three of the four biggest search engines could not even find themselves online.
It was an automated way to tap into the wisdom of humans – in other words, a higher form of human–computer symbiosis.
Only later were they persuaded by the venture capitalist Andy Bechtolsheim to make advertising the central generator of revenue.
We have been here before. The invention of printing caused political and social upheaval in Western societies that polarized society and killed a lot of people, mainly in wars fought about whether the body of Christ was literally or figuratively present at the Eucharist and whether the Pope was infallible. It also ushered in an enlightenment of knowledge and reason unprecedented in scope and depth.
Every new technology is blamed. It disrupts, often with negative consequences. But we adapt and evolve.
printing press, paper and movable type, brought together by Johann Gutenberg around 1450, was an information innovation that caused huge social change, little of it predicted and not all of it good.
But even if you call Gutenberg the inventor, Martin Luther was the true innovator, transforming the use of printing from an obscure business confined mainly to the ecclesiastical elite to a mass-market operation aimed at ordinary people.
explainability – the opportunity to interrogate an algorithm as to its reasoning – will be a key ingredient of making artificial intelligence trustworthy.
There is no great invention, from fire to flying, that has not been hailed as an insult to some god. J. B. S. HALDANE
Before the last two centuries, innovation was rare. A person could live his or her whole life without once experiencing a new technology: carts, ploughs, axes, candles, creeds and corn looked the same when you died as when you were born.
Farming changed the human being from a sparse population of predators and gatherers into a landscape-altering, high-density, ecosystem changer.
Soon strange new cultural innovations like kings, gods and wars began to dominate events.
Like the Industrial Revolution, the agricultural one was all about energy: producing more of it, in more concentrated form, and directing it towards the reversal of entropy through the creation of more human bodies at the expense of other species.
There is another similarity with later bursts of innovation: it happened at a time of plenty and in a place of plenty.
True, a life of farming proved often to be one of drudgery and malnutrition for the poorest, but this was because the poorest were not dead:
Human beings are just as useful to dogs as vice versa, I sometimes reflect as my dog snoozes while I write books to be able to afford to buy it food and a bed to lie on.
Dense populations inevitably spur human technological change, because they create the conditions in which people can specialize.
150,000 years ago human beings had become reliant on a collective, social brain mediated through specialization and exchange. If you cut people off from exchange, you lower their chances of innovating.
Innovation flourished in cities that traded freely with other cities, in India, China, Phoenicia, Greece, Arabia, Italy, Holland and Britain: places where ideas could meet and mate to produce new ideas. Innovation is a collective phenomenon that happens between, not within, brains. Therein lies a lesson for the modern world.
During every second of your life a human being pumps a billion trillion protons across membranes in the thousand trillion mitochondria that live inside the cells of the body. The failure of these proton gradients is the very definition of death.
A freshly dead body is, to all intents and purposes, identical to a living one, except that on an invisible scale, its ability to keep protons the right side of membranes has suddenly ceased.
