Where Good Ideas Come From

by Steven Johnson

If there is a single maxim that runs through this book’s arguments, it is that we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.

Because incubators focus exclusively on the beginning of life, their benefit to public health—measured by the sheer number of extra years they provide—rivals any medical advance of the twentieth century. Radiation therapy or a double bypass might give you another decade or two, but an incubator gives you an entire lifetime.

Consider the legendary Analytical Engine designed by nineteenth-century British inventor Charles Babbage, who is considered by most technology historians to be the father of modern computing, though he should probably be called the great-grandfather of modern computing, because it took several generations for the world to catch up to his idea.

Looking for unusual visa applications in flight school attendees might well have led the Bureau to the hijackers, but there was no information architecture in place that could have successfully executed that kind of query in a matter of weeks. And so, by that standard, Ken Williams’s hunch was not enough on its own to prevent 9/11.