The Rational Optimist (31 page)

Go back to that word ‘spillover’. The characteristic feature of a piece of new knowledge, whether practical or esoteric, whether technical or social, is that you can give it away and still keep it. You can light your taper at Jefferson’s candle without darkening him. You cannot give away your bicycle and still ride it. But you can give away the idea of the bicycle and still retain it. As the economist Paul Romer has argued, human progress consists largely in accumulating recipes for rearranging atoms in ways that raise living standards. The recipe for a bicycle, greatly abridged, might read like this: take some iron, chromium and aluminium ore from the earth, some sap from a tropical tree, some oil from beneath the ground, some hide from a cow. Smelt the ores into metals, and cast into various shapes. Vulcanise the sap into rubber and mould into hollow circular rings. Fractionate the oil to make plastic and mould. Set aside to cool. Mould the hide into the shape of a seat. Combine the ingredients in the form of a bicycle, add the startlingly counter-intuitive discovery that things don’t fall over so easily when they are moving forwards, and ride.

Innovators are therefore in the business of sharing. It is the most important thing they do, for unless they share their innovation it can have no benefit for them or for anybody else. And the one activity that got much easier to do after about 1800, and has got dramatically easier recently, is sharing. Travel and communication disseminated information much faster and much further. Newspapers, technical journals and telegraphs spread ideas as fast as they spread gossip. In a recent survey of forty-six major inventions, the time it took for the first competing copy to appear fell steadily from thirty-three years in 1895 to three years in 1975.

When Hero of Alexandria invented an ‘aeolipile’ or steam engine in the first century
AD
, and employed it in opening temple doors, the chances are that news of his invention spread so slowly and to so few people that it may never have reached the ears of cart designers. Ptolemaic astronomy was ingenious and precise, if not quite accurate, but it was never used for navigation, because astronomers and sailors did not meet. The secret of the modern world is its gigantic interconnectedness. Ideas are having sex with other ideas from all over the planet with ever-increasing promiscuity. The telephone had sex with the computer and spawned the internet. The first motor cars looked as though they were ‘sired by the bicycle out of the horse carriage’. The idea for plastics came from photographic chemistry. The camera pill is an idea that came from a conversation between a gastroenterologist and a guided-missile designer. Almost every technology is a hybrid.

This is one area in which cultural evolution has an unfair advantage over genetic evolution. For insuperable practical reasons connected with the pairing of chromosomes during meiosis, cross fertilisation cannot happen between different species of animal. (It can, indeed does, happen between species of bacteria, 80 per cent of whose genes have been borrowed from other species on average – one reason bacteria are so darned good at evolving resistance to antibiotics, for example.) As soon as two races of animals have diverged substantially, they find themselves able to produce only sterile offspring – like mules – or none at all. That is the very definition of a species.

Technologies emerge from the coming together of existing technologies into wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts. Henry Ford once candidly admitted that he had invented nothing new. He had ‘simply assembled into a car the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work’. So objects betray in their design their descent from other objects: ideas that have given birth to other ideas. The first copper axes of 5,000 years ago were the same shape as the polished stone tools then in common use. Only later did they become much thinner as the properties of metals became better understood. Joseph Henry’s first electric motor bore an uncanny resemblance to a rotative-beam Watt steam engine. Even the first transistor of the 1940s was a direct descendant of the crystal rectifiers invented by Ferdinand Braun in the 1870s and used to make ‘cat’s whisker’ radio receivers in the early twentieth century. This is not always obvious in the history of technology because inventors like to deny their ancestors, exaggerating the revolutionary and unfathered nature of their breakthroughs, the better to claim the full glory (and sometimes the patents) for themselves. Thus Britons rightly celebrate Michael Faraday’s genius in devising an electric motor and a dynamo – he was even recently on a banknote for a while – but forget that he got at least half the concept from the Dane Hans Christian Oersted. Americans learn that Edison invented the incandescent light bulb out of thin air, when his less commercially slick forerunners, Joseph Swan in Britain and Alexander Lodygin in Russia, deserve at least to share the credit, if not rather more. Samuel Morse, when applying for his patent on the telegraph, in the historian George Basalla’s words, ‘stoutly and falsely denied’ that he had learned anything from Joseph Henry. Technologies reproduce, and they do so sexually.

It follows that spillover – the fact that others pinch your ideas – is not an accidental and tiresome drawback for the inventor. It is the whole point of the exercise. By spilling over, an innovation meets other innovations and mates with them. The history of the modern world is a history of ideas meeting, mixing, mating and mutating. And the reason that economic growth has accelerated so in the past two centuries is down to the fact that ideas have been mixing more than ever before. The result is gloriously unpredictable. When Charles Townes invented the laser in the 1950s, it was dismissed as ‘an invention looking for a job’. Well, it has now found an astonishing range of jobs nobody could have imagined, from sending telephone messages down fibreglass wires to reading music off discs to printing documents, to curing short sight.

End users, too, have joined in the mating frenzy. Adam Smith recounted the tale of a boy whose job was to open and close the valve on a steam engine and who, to save time, rigged up a device to do it for him. He no doubt went to his grave without imparting the idea to others, or would have done if not immortalised by the Scottish sage, but today he would have shared his ‘patch’ with like-minded others on a chat site. Today, the open-source software industry, with products such as Linux and Apache, is booming on the back of a massive wave of selflessness – programmers who share their improvements with each other freely. Even Microsoft is being forced to embrace open-source systems and ‘cloud computing’ – shared on the net – blurring the line between free and proprietary computing. After all, even the cleverest in-house programmer is unlikely to be as smart as the collective efforts of ten thousand users at the ‘bleeding edge’ of a new idea. Wikipedia is written by people who never expect to profit from what they do. The computer-game industry is increasingly being taken over by its players. In product after product on the internet, innovation is driven by what Eric von Hippel calls ‘free-revealing lead users’: customers who are happy to tell manufacturers of incremental improvements they can suggest, and of unexpected things they have found they can do with new products. Lead users are often happy to free-reveal, because they enjoy basking in the reputation of their peers. (Eric von Hippel, incidentally, practices what he preaches: you can read his books on his websites for free.)

This is not confined to software. When a surfer named Larry Stanley first modified his surfboard to make jumping possible without parting company from the board, he never dreamed of selling the idea, but he told everybody how to do it including the manufacturers of boards and now his innovations can be bought in the form of new surfboards. The greatest lead-user innovation of all was probably the World Wide Web, devised by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1991 to solve the problem of sharing particle physics data between computers. Incidentally, nobody has yet suggested that research in software and surfboards must be government-funded because innovation in them would not happen without subsidy.

In other words, we may soon be living in a post-capitalist, post-corporate world, where individuals are free to come together in temporary aggregations to share, collaborate and innovate, where websites enable people to find employers, employees, customers and clients anywhere in the world. This is also, as Geoffrey Miller reminds us, a world that will put ‘infinite production ability in the service of infinite human lust, gluttony, sloth, wrath, greed, envy and pride’. But that is roughly what the elite said about cars, cotton factories, and – I’m guessing now – wheat and hand axes too. The world is turning bottom-up again; the top-down years are coming to an end.

Infinite possibility

Were it not for this inexhaustible river of invention and discovery irrigating the fragile crop of human welfare, living standards would undoubtedly stagnate. Even with population tamed, fossil energy tapped and trade free, the human race could quickly discover the limits to growth if knowledge stopped growing. Trade would sort out who was best at making what; exchange could spread the division of labour to best effect, and fuel could amplify the efforts of every factory hand, but eventually there would be a slowing of growth. A menacing equilibrium would loom. In that sense, Ricardo and Mill were right. But so long as it can hop from country to country and from industry to industry, discovery is a fast-breeder chain reaction; innovation is a feedback loop; invention is a self-fulfilling prophecy. So equilibrium and stagnation are not only avoidable in a free-exchanging world; they are impossible.

Throughout history, though living standards might rise and fall, though population might boom and crash, knowledge was one thing that has showed inexorable upward progress. Fire, once invented, was never forgotten. The wheel came and never left. The bow and arrow has not been disinvented even though it is obsolete except in sport – it is better than ever. How to make a cup of coffee, why insulin cures diabetes and whether continental drift happens – it is a fair bet that somebody will know these things or be able to look them up for as long as there are people on the planet. We may have forgotten a few things along the way: nobody really knows how to use an Acheulean hand axe, and until recently nobody knew how to build a medieval siege catapult known as a trebuchet. (Trial-and-error by a Shropshire squire in the 1980s eventually produced full-scale trebuchets capable of tossing pianos more than 150 yards; only rock bands have since found a profitable application.) But these forgettings are dwarfed by the additions to knowledge. We have accumulated far more knowledge than we have lost. Not even the most determined pessimist would deny that his species collectively adds more and more to the aggregate store of human knowledge as each year passes.

Knowledge is not the same thing as material wealth. It is possible to mint new knowledge and yet do nothing for prosperity. The knowledge of how to fly a man to the moon, now nearly two generations old, has yet to enrich humankind much, urban myths about non-stick frying pans notwithstanding. The knowledge that Fermat’s Last Theorem is true, that quasars are distant galaxies – these may never increase gross domestic product, though contemplating them may enhance the quality of someone’s life. It is also possible to get rich without adding to the store of human knowledge, as many an African dictator, Russian kleptocrat or financial fraudster can tell you.

On the other hand, a piece of new knowledge lies behind every net advance in human economic welfare: the knowledge that electrons could be deputed to carry both energy and information makes possible almost everything I do, from boiling a kettle to sending a text message. The knowledge of how to pack pre-washed salad and save everybody time; the knowledge of how to vaccinate children against polio; the knowledge that insecticide-impregnated mosquito nets can prevent malaria; the knowledge that different-sized paper cups in coffee bars can still have the same-sized lids, saving cost in manufacture and confusion in the shop – a billion such pages of knowledge make up the book of human prosperity.

It was Paul Romer’s great achievement in the 1990s to rescue the discipline of economics from the century-long cul-de-sac into which it had driven by failing to incorporate innovation. From time to time its practitioners had tried to escape into theorems of increasing returns – Mill in the 1840s, Allyn Young in the 1920s, Joseph Schumpeter in the 1940s, Robert Solow in the 1950s – but not until Romer’s ‘new growth theory’ in the 1990s was economics fully back in the real world: a world where perpetual innovation brings brief bursts of profit through temporary monopoly to whoever can commandeer demand for new products or services, and long bursts of growth to everybody else who eventually gets to share the spilled-over idea. Robert Solow had concluded that innovation accounted for growth that could not be explained by an increase in labour, land or capital, but he saw innovation as an external force, a slice of luck that some economies had more of than others – his was Mill’s theory with calculus. Things like climate, geography and political institutions determined the rate of innovation – which is bad luck for land-locked tropical dictatorships – and not much could be done about them. Romer saw that innovation itself was an item of investment, that new, applied knowledge was itself a product. So long as people who are spending money on trying to find new ideas can profit from them before they pass them on, then increasing returns are possible.

The wonderful thing about knowledge is that it is genuinely limitless. There is not even a theoretical possibility of exhausting the supply of ideas, discoveries and inventions. This is the biggest cause of all for my optimism. It is a beautiful feature of information systems that they are far vaster than physical systems: the combinatorial vastness of the universe of possible ideas dwarfs the puny universe of physical things. As Paul Romer puts it, the number of different software programs that can be put on one-gigabyte hard disks is twenty-seven million times greater than the number of atoms in the universe. Or if you were to combine any four of the 100 chemical elements into different alloys and compounds in different proportions ranging from one to ten, you would have 330 billion possible chemical compounds and alloys to test, or enough to keep a team of researchers busy testing a thousand a day for a million years.