Michael Bhaskar. Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking (2021)

Michael Bhaskar.  Human Frontiers:

The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking (2021)

In a paragraph

Big Ideas move forward The Knowledge Frontier.  Advancing knowledge transformed Western lives in the century to 1970, but since then growth has slowed – The Great Stagnation.  Progress is harder with fewer low-hanging fruits, more complex knowledge and societal stagnation.  New technological tools and an interconnected world may accelerate growth.     

Key points

• The Knowledge Frontier is moved forward by Big Ideas.

• From the mid 19^th Century, lives were transformed by advancing knowledge, but since 1970 progress seems to have slowed. The Great Stagnation.

• Ideas go through conception, execution and purchase.

• In medical research Pasteur found more big ideas than now found by vast teams. Erooms’s Law – number of drugs approved for $1 billion on research halves every nine years.

• Aviation advanced quickly by Wright Brothers but has now stalled.

• We have gone from making major gains to marginal improvements. Aside from informational and communications goods, the signature advances of modern life occurred decades ago. Low-hanging fruit. 

• Ubiquitous light or a warm home and the big ideas behind them have happened: no other home lighting or heating idea will have equivalent impact.

• The 1^st Industrial Revolution used coal, 2IR used oil, 3IR used IT, 4IR unclear.

• If you judge research output by verbiage, you don’t find a problem; if you judge it by the rate at which ideas find purchase, you do.

• Almost everything we listen to now could have been produced twenty years ago. This is not culture as a vital workshop, being constantly forged anew; it is culture as a museum through which we absentmindedly browse, over and over. Just as we don’t have flying cars, we have a safe and predictable culture.

• Reasons for pessimism should not be overstated. There is no simple lens of stagnation or acceleration in such a complex process, only an almost infinitely deep concatenation of causes, interlocking on different timescales. If things look good or bad this year or this decade, that is never conclusive. Even if big ideas look uneven, are uneven, a lot may be brewing. Slowdown might mask a build-up of forces; a boom time might reflect the exploitation of discoveries made long ago.

• The Idea Paradox. We must travel to the frontier, and that process – of studying, mastering, memorising and practising – gets longer as knowledge accumulates.

• The Stagnant Society.   Box-ticking.  Hyper-financialism. Development and applications not research.

• A New Tool Kit for developing ideas, including AI, digital technology, virtual reality, and gene editing.

• If the eighteenth century marked a Great Divergence, when Europe pulled away, we are now living in the snap-back: the Great Convergence. We are seeing a convergence of humanity at the forefront of thought.

• The future of big ideas hangs in the balance. On the one hand, the inexorable ratcheting up of difficulty, complexity and paths already taken and the airless purgatory of stagnation; on the other, the promise of a new toolkit, and the crescendo of a scaled-up, joined-up world fizzing at the frontier.

• The further the timescale is extended, the more likely either twilight or utopia becomes. Our choices over the next decade or two – both in terms of stimulating ideas, and also of channelling their direction – will ultimately shape the trajectory that leads to one of the two major outcomes.

• This book’s central thesis is that the West currently spends more to achieve less because it is doing the same things in the same way, over and over again, but that a global mix of ideas will break that stagnation to produce a new set of tools, which in turn can spark a wider acceleration in the production of big ideas. Stagnation confronted with global scale-up.

Comments

Human Frontiers is a fascinating exploration of the idea that progress has slowed. It is a model of non-fiction writing and is full of good examples and memorable phases.

Growth through knowledge and culture is a theme of several of the books I have reviewed.  The Secret of our Success says that cumulative cultural evolution makes mankind; Guns, Germs and Steel argues that culture explains the success of the West; Enlightenment Now explains how culture has given us radically better lives; The Beginning of Infinity suggests that with the accumulation of knowledge we are only starting on a potentially infinite path.  Human Frontiers rightly tempers this optimism by pointing out that while the advancing Knowledge Frontier has given us so much, its rate of progress has slowed. Another book I have reviewed, What We Owe The Future, devotes a chapter to the issue of slowing growth and suggests that growth is needed for humanity to overcome its challenges. 

Human Frontiers, then, is dealing with a very important question. It is very persuasive in showing that Big Ideas are becoming rarer, using examples such as the contrast between Pasteur and the modern pharmaceutical industry.  Reasons for the slowdown are analysed, with lack of low-hanging fruits, intellectual complexity and societal stagnation considered the main causes.  It is noted that new technologies and globalisation may allow faster growth, but, appropriately, the book  does not conclude on which influences will predominate.    

Links

Human Frontiers on Amazon UK

Michael Bhaskar website

Michael Bhaskar very good discussion of book on Futures Podcast

Extracts and notes from the book 

Prologue

Archimedes eureka moment.

Ideas that change the world.  Often from recombining existing ideas.

Introduction: Life at the Human Frontier

To understand humanity is to understand its frontiers of knowledge and capabilities, which are expanding.   Ideas keep the frontier moving.  Big ideas have the most impact at the frontier.

Forecasts from 1967 book ‘The Year 2000’ not realised.

The world of the mid 19^th Century was more dangerous, backbreaking, boring, precarious and limited. The world changed at a blistering pace.

The frontier is, against expectations, getting stuck. Welcome to the great meta-problem of the twenty-first century.

The common unit was the idea. The knowledge frontier.

The Great Stagnation. A ceiling to new big ideas.

We have built a cautious and unimaginative world.

Through globalisation and catch up, all major civilisations are operating at the frontier of knowledge.

We could be at the cusp of a revolution in tools and technology.

Coming up with groundbreaking ideas has never been easy. On the contrary, they have always been rare bright spots in seas of ignorance and hardship.

Part I: Big Ideas Today

1 How Big Ideas Work

The Great Divergence.  Riches came from piling ideas on ideas.

This profusion of new ideas rested on new attitudes towards ideas; in other words, on ideas about ideas. For much of history the dominant assumption was that everything had already been thought, that ancient authorities like Confucius or Aristotle or Jesus had the final word. Originality was dangerous and probably impossible.

Understanding history means understanding both ideas and the conditions that give rise to ideas.  Victor Hugo: ‘There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an Idea whose time has come.’

Thomas Kuhn.  Disjunctive leaps.  Punctuated equilibria.

Statistical techniques in almost every field can build a snapshot of which ideas push back the frontier farthest.

Big ideas are also shocks.

Like all ideas they are composed of pre-existing ideas recombined.

Natural selection is a classic big idea. But its long, complex gestation, its prolific mixture  of existing theories and ideas – these are typical as well.

Every idea must go through conception, execution and purchase.

In the annals of invention, discovery and creation, the role played by serendipity is dizzying.

Ideas repeatedly exhibit multiple discovery. Ripeness.

Arguably the problem with Silicon Valley is its coupling of an infatuation with big ideas with the failure to grapple with their consequences.

From our earliest days we have been captivated by the search for deep explanations, for mastery of our physical environment. It is part of who we are.

Humanity also needs big ideas. In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond narrates how a series of island peoples saw their civilisation fall apart. Planet Earth is just a much larger version of Easter Island.

‘While technological progress is never riskless, the risks of stasis are far more troubling. Getting off the roller coaster mid-ride is not an option.’

2 The Breakthrough Problem

‘Fortune favours the prepared mind’

There are fewer ideas with the significance of Pasteur’s . Thinking may have become easier, but thinking big is as challenging as ever.  At the frontier, something is going wrong with Pasteur-style breakthroughs. The drugs don’t work; at least, not like they used to. Eroom’s Law. The number of drugs approved for every billion dollars’ worth of research and development halves every nine years. Eroom’s Law simply reverses the name Moore.

The days of the Wright Brothers, like those of Pasteur, are gone.

3 The Diminishing Revolution

1873 was the publication of James Clerk Maxwell’s Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism.  Huebner suggests 1873 was also the peak year for human innovation.

First Industrial Revolution.  The 1IR had been powered by coal; the 2IR hit upon a new, even richer energy source: oil.  The 3IR is all about digitisation.

Since 1970, Total Factor Productivity (TFP), the key measure of how technology boosts growth, has grown at only a third of the pace achieved between 1920 and 1970, leaving us fully 73 per cent behind the postwar trend.

We have gone from making major gains to marginal improvements.  Aside from informational and communications goods, the signature advances of modern life occurred decades ago. An age … of really slow and boring technological change.

The 4IR is less a historical fact, more a loosely assembled set of conference talking points notionally about ‘cyber-physical systems’, a handy label for a basket of potentially transformative but still nascent technologies.

David Warsh records in his magnificent book, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations the story of how ideas became central to economics. Instead of the traditional economic inputs of labour, capital and land came a vision of the economy and economic growth as ‘ideas, people and things’.

Paul Romer.  Endogenous Technological Change.  Another of Romer’s key insights: ideas aren’t just non-rivalrous, in the modern economy they are also ‘partially excludable’.

Every thirteen years we need to double our research effort just to stay on the same course.  It is around 18 times harder today to generate the exponential growth behind Moore’s law than it was in 1971.

If you judge research output by verbiage, you don’t find a problem; if you judge it by the rate at which ideas find purchase, you do.

4 The Art and Science of Everything

1913 Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring.  From Stravinsky on, music began to define and drive rebellion.

Almost everything we listen to now could have been produced twenty years ago.

This is not culture as a vital workshop, being constantly forged anew; it is culture as a museum through which we absentmindedly browse, over and over.

Just as we don’t have flying cars, we have a safe and predictable culture.

Two thousand years of constant endeavour doesn’t automatically get you big ideas beyond a Confucius or Socrates.

From around the middle of the nineteenth century we had an explosion of big thinking but also a great undoing.

The intellectual revolutions of the twentieth century remade everything.

Such an era of big ideas is, if not finished, de-energised.

One symptom is the ‘death of the intellectual’, of people whose basic function is to conjure and communicate big new ideas .

Fukuyama’s reading of political philosophy suggested that a major evolution of economically efficient and psychologically satisfying capitalist liberal democracy was unlikely. Had Fukuyama more prosaically called his article and book ‘The End of Ideological Evolution and Political Big Ideas’ it would, one suspects, have attracted less controversy.

We may live in turbulent times, but this takes the form of reversions. Political tropes, like their cultural counterparts, are endlessly recycled, whether it is the feckless poor or greedy financiers.

Again and again, the pattern of the Higgs boson is repeated: what took an individual or small team to begin requires thousands to finish.

Areas like particle physics and cosmology hence face a paradox: home to many of the biggest, most exciting ideas around, they often lack the kind of decisive verification science used to specialise in.

Reproducibility crisis.

David Deutsch argues we are at the ‘beginning of infinity’, an optimistic and radical explosion of ideas and progress, founded on opening new forms of knowledge and understanding. How does that picture square with the argument for a slowdown in the production of big ideas?

Today there have never been more people capable of adding to the sum total of human achievement. We are more numerous and better educated than ever. The situation is remarkably mixed for a society that should be firing on all cylinders.

Interlude.  Enlightenment Then – A Big Idea In Practice

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is also a kind of moon shot.  Like most big ideas, the timeline of human rights is long.

Reasons for pessimism should not be overstated. There is no simple lens of stagnation or acceleration in such a complex process, only an almost infinitely deep concatenation of causes, interlocking on different timescales. If things look good or bad this year or this decade, that is never conclusive. Even if big ideas look uneven, are uneven, a lot may be brewing. Slowdown might mask a build-up of forces; a boom time might reflect the exploitation of discoveries made long ago.

Part II: Big Ideas Tomorrow

5 The Idea Paradox

Fusion is always thirty years away.

Low-hanging fruits.

Ubiquitous light or a warm home and the big ideas behind them have happened: no other home lighting or heating idea will have equivalent impact. You can try re-inventing the wheel, but it will still be a wheel.

Thomas Young.  Perhaps, as his biography’s title has it, he really was the last person to know everything.

Benjamin F. Jones calls this the ‘burden of knowledge’ effect, whereby the sheer quantity and balkanisation of knowledge becomes an obstacle to original thought.

In the seventeenth century John Harvard was given the naming rights to his eponymous university by donating some 320 books. Today the Library of Congress alone holds 38 million volumes.

Breakthroughs happen at the frontier of knowledge. But the distance to that frontier is always getting further away. All of us start learning at square one, with nothing. We must travel to the frontier, and that process – of studying, mastering, memorising and practising – gets longer as knowledge accumulates.

It takes longer to create a patent, and even then, it needs more hands.

The impact of ageing is felt not only in research, but also on the economy.

New ideas impose an increasing educational burden on future innovators.

The more narrowly research is forced to tunnel, the harder it is to connect those tunnels.

We could arrive at a point where knowledge and culture are so complex, we are completely bogged down in trying to process and understand what is already there.

Knowledge creates its own problems. We have more powerful understanding, tools and capabilities; yet, inevitably, more intractable problems to go with them. Success is a burden.

A group of thinkers called mysterians argue that there are hard limits to the brain and thus to our intelligence.  If we have eaten the low-hanging fruit and arrived at the hard problems, while all the time adding a burden of knowledge and complexity, there is a further aspect to consider: that there may be limits to what ideas are possible – a set of physical constraints may bound the frontier. Something similar to the hedonic treadmill has occurred with ideas.

What would once blow minds, change the world, crowd the streets, feels much smaller, elicits little more than a shrug. Very little shocks us now.  Knowledge is saturated.

We shall have only one worldwide culture. So we shall have no one to exchange or interact with.

The set of overlapping mechanisms I call the Idea Paradox: Big Ideas will only get harder.

6 The Stagnant Society

Bell Labs.  While companies still invest in innovation, the focus is on practical applications rather than basic science. In essence they piled more into R & D, but forgot the R in favour of the D. From Idle curiosity to more cautious forms of innovation. It was famously not Xerox that profited most from its legendary PARC lab, but Steve Jobs and Apple.

Spengler argued that societies and cultures have, like organisms, a natural life cycle. First early, stumbling periods; then a phase of creativity and maturity; and then, inevitably, a period of decline and crisis: in his words, a winter. Decadent phase.  His schema of societies moving from periods of creativity to stagnation has force.

Vienna created, for better and for worse, the modern world.

Around 1980 capitalism changed. A new model of shareholder value gained precedence. Hyper–financialism. Patents became offensive weapons.  Our economy rewards trivia and ephemera over originality and long – term impact. The most significant brain drain in the world isn’t between countries but away from the frontiers.

Please tick all the boxes.  Universities have thus become classic victims of Goodhart’s Law: that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.  Just as in corporate life, endless guff about vision and innovation replaces actual practice.

Both the financial and the managerial ethos hate uncertainty. Yet the generation, execution and purchase of big new ideas is intensely uncertain.

Populist surge. Experts face a crisis of authority. The more extreme your religious views, the more children you have.

The political scientist Daniel Drezner argues that the public sphere has become an ‘ideas industry’: commodified, politicised, chiselled down, neatly packaged to capture that currency of the modern world, attention. We move from ‘public intellectuals’ to ‘thought leaders.’ But pockets of opportunity.

7 The World’s New Toolkit

DeepMind.  AlphaFold.  Machines could forge new paths, paths hidden from us.

Tools and ideas work in tandem, co-creating.  In the twenty-first century our capacity to develop big ideas will rest on the development of our tools more than any other factor. Hence the significance of AI.

If superintelligence is ever realised , the future of big ideas is bigger than we can imagine .

Quantum computing. Digital technology.  Virtual or augmented reality. 3D printing. Nanotechnology. Gene editing

None of these tools are immune to the dynamics already described in this book.  The 21^st st century’s most significant tools present acute social, political, economic and ethical dilemmas.

A new era that began around 1970 and is still in progress . We are in the opening phase of the era that will replace the Industrial Age.

8 The Great Convergence

If the eighteenth century marked a Great Divergence, when Europe pulled away, we are now living in the snap-back: the Great Convergence . Ready or not, we are seeing a convergence of humanity at the forefront of thought.

The West overlooked China’s historic role as a crucible of humanity’s biggest ideas.

Once we are all at the frontier, there will be no more quick wins in terms of connecting or adding or educating people.

Kevin Kelly calls it the holos, a new planetary layer composed of billions of human minds, chips and artificial intelligences.

Possible phase transition from human mind to global mind.  Whether or not you believe it forms a global mind, the plain fact of this scaling up and what it could mean for ideas is extraordinary. Facing off against the challenge of the Idea Paradox is a startling society – level emergent entity.

9 The Uncertain Horizon

The future of big ideas hangs in the balance. On the one hand, the inexorable ratcheting up of difficulty, complexity and paths already taken and the airless purgatory of stagnation; on the other, the promise of a new toolkit, and the crescendo of a scaled-up, joined-up world fizzing at the frontier.

Blame Jesus as much as feckless emperors for the fall of Rome. The Roman example is so instructive because it’s subtle, slow and insidious, and began with a shifting intellectual and cultural practice: the rise of one big idea that snuffed out all the others.

In Robert Harris’s novel The Second Sleep, a post-crash society eventually reverts to the medieval, deeply religious and conservative; still, centuries on, blaming the freewheeling intellectual, cultural and technological climate of the earlier era for the downfall and chaos that ensued.

If 1550s England could, despite everything, become a crucible for global takeoff then surely society today, with all our advantages, can do the same.

The further the timescale is extended, the more likely either twilight or utopia becomes. Our choices over the next decade or two – both in terms of stimulating ideas, and also of channelling their direction – will ultimately shape the trajectory that leads to one of the two major outcomes.

This book’s central thesis is that the West currently spends more to achieve less because it is doing the same things in the same way, over and over again, but that a global mix of ideas will break that stagnation to produce a new set of tools, which in turn can spark a wider acceleration in the production of big ideas.  Stagnation confronted with global scale-up.

Five Suggestions:

• Go on a mission. Vannevar Bush
• Let a thousand experiments bloom. Spend 20% of time on what they think will most benefit Google. Patronage.
• Relearn education.
• The other institutional revolution.  A new set of institutions, norms and mechanisms for working with ideas; for helping them quickly progress in a world that blocks them, while at the same time mitigating the most serious downsides.
• Go bolder. Scientists prepared to take leaps into faraway fields were the most impactful.  Take more risks. As disciplines’ frontiers progress, so they move further from others.