This post appeared in issue #36 of my newsletter, Res Extensa, where I write about the intersection of product design, bottoms-up systems, innovation, and what we can learn from the history of technology. I’d love it if you subscribed.
The older I get, the more I appreciate two fundamental skills in every line of work:
This piece from Anton Howes gets at one of the key insights about how innovation works: it doesn’t happen through sudden bursts of insight from thin air — it requires the combination of the right simmering ingredients and a person in search of solutions to specific problems:
Santorio’s claim, it seems, is safe. But in this lies an important lesson for all would-be inventors. The inverted flask experiment had been around for centuries, and even been understood since ancient times as being caused by hot and cold. So its application as a...
Online magazine BigThink has just published a full issue dedicated to progress studies. Lots of great stuff here from noteworthy folks like Tyler Cowen, Hannah Ritchie, Kevin Kelly, and many more.
A lot of Steve Jobs content is hagiography at this point, but this clip is fantastic:
There’s an enormous delta between idea and execution. Someone can take a great idea and squander it. Or conversely, someone could take a middling and obvious idea and execute so well they build a billion dollar business. From the first part of the clip:
One of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. And that disease, I’ve seen other people get it, too,...
New forms of technology tend not to materialize from thin air. The nature of innovation takes existing known technologies and remixes, extends, and co-opts them to create novelty.
Gordon Brander refers to it in this piece as “exapting infrastructure.” As in the case of the internet, it wasn’t nonexistent one day then suddenly connecting all of our computers the next. It wasn’t purposely designed from the beginning as a way for us to connect our millions of computers, phones, and smart TVs. In fact, many types of...
Image credits: Florida ECRRT
Marc Andreessen was recently interviewed by Noah Smith in his newsletter. It’s a great post-pandemic update to Marc’s views on technology (spoiler: he’s still as optimistic as ever), following a year after his “Time to Build” essay.
When asked about the future of technology, he responds to the common criticism that tech is often gives us progress in the virtual, but not physical world:
Software is a lever on the real world.
Someone writes code, and all of...
Vicki Boykis on the impossibility of true breadth and depth of technical expertise:
What used to distinguish senior people from junior people was the depth of knowledge they had about any given programming language and operating system.
What distinguishes them now is breadth and, I think, the ability to discern patterns and carry them across multiple parts of a stack, multiple stacks, and multiple jobs working in multiple industries. We are all junior, now, in some part of the software stack. The real trick...
Jason Crawford is maintaining this list on Roots of Progress, an archive of inventions that seemingly could’ve been uncovered earlier than they were, based on what precursor knowledge would’ve been required. This one about stirrups is wild:
Humans domesticated horses in ~4500 BC, but stirrups were not invented anywhere until like ~200BC (4300yrs), and did not show up in Europe until the Middle Ages (from central Asia)
It’s fascinating how there aren’t even clear explanations of why these took the time that they did to discover. It points to the random, serendipitous, evolutionary nature of...
Mark Andreessen’s piece from a couple months back drove a flood of response, both in support and disagreement.
This piece from Tanner Greer agrees with Andreessen’s sentiments in general, but more interestingly dives into why American progress has slowed so dramatically, tying the root causes to change in the culture of ownership, self-reliance, and self-organization.
We live in a culture today of management hierarchy, bureaucratic approvals, designs-by-committee, taking little risk without consensus, and regulatory restriction (and, just...
In this piece from a few years ago, historian Anton Howes wrote about about what drives innovation. Is it part of human nature to pursue innovation? Or is it not a naturally occurring phenomenon? He makes the case that innovation is not inevitable:
The more I study the lives of British innovators, the more convinced I am that innovation is not in human nature, but is instead received. People innovate because they are inspired to do so — it is an idea that is transmitted. And when people do not...