The Exchanges

Q I'm going to switch gears and talk a little bit about innovation. And one of the topics of your book is the difference between innovation and invention. Can you expand on that?

A Yes, I, I deliberately talk about innovation rather than invention, because I think we've talked a lot about inventors, about brilliant people who come up with bright ideas that change the world. I want to talk about innovation, which is the process by which a bright idea is turned into something practical, reliable, and available, and affordable for ordinary people. And that's a long slog, and it's a lot of hard work, and it's often more important, more difficult, Then the process of coming up with a good idea in the first place. And there are innovations that change the world dramatically, which don't actually depend on any inventions. Things like container shipping, which had an enormous impact on global trade by drastically cutting the cost of shipping goods overseas, which didn't involve any invention of a technology, of a new technology at all. It just involved a sort of change in the way we organize our ships. And a guy called Malcolm McLean gets most of the credit for that in the Trial and error slog of innovation rather than the lonely genius idea of invention was something I was trying to get at. There's quite a nice, uh, funny story that I tell in the book, um, which illustrates the point, which is a beaver and a rabbit looking at the Hoover Dam, and the beaver says to the rabbit, no, I didn't build it, but it is based on an idea of mine. And of course, getting from,…

AI assessment note: “innovation, which is the process by which a bright idea is turned into something practical”

Q Historically, at least when it comes to viruses and sort of our approach to them, it is very trench warfare. There's short-lived advantages, even when we get antibiotics or something, but the way out of that in the past has always been a symmetry of weaponry. Is that possible when it comes to viruses and bacteria and our humans?

A Yes, I think on the whole, we will win our battles against most pathogens, because we have so much possibility of ingenuity now, of human ingenuity to help us defeat them. We've only totally extinguished one major human disease, and that's smallpox, but boy, is that an important one. It's probably maybe the biggest killer of all, um, uh, certainly when you think that it was responsible for Um, killing the vast majority of the people who lived in the Americas when smallpox arrived with European contact. But we've reduced polio to almost extinction. We've done the same with a lot of other diseases. We've pretty well wiped them out. We're getting on top of malaria and HIV, et cetera. Now, you're absolutely right that we, we gain a hundred yards and then we lose 50 yards because the disease mutates or it finds a way around the issue, et cetera. But quite a lot of diseases, particularly those carried by insects or through water, have kind of given up on Western civilization. They can't get a toehold in our populations. They're still around in poor countries, but, um, you know, cholera, typhoid, uh, all these terrible killers from the past, um, yellow fever, malaria in the, in the Western world are not able to, uh, to mount offensives, uh, anymore. Um, and that's because we've cut off, you know, we've broken the cycle. We've cut off the way that we got infected. The one way that Path…

AI assessment note: “Yes, I think on the whole, we will win our battles against most pathogens”

Q and now we have teams, but your book, I mean, it clearly dispels that notion. It's always been people standing on the shoulders of others and going just a little bit farther with their ideas or even executing on the ideas and the combination of those two things. You need, you need good ideas, but they're necessary and not sufficient. How do you see the role of individuals versus teams?

A Yeah, well, to some extent, I'm trying to, uh, debunk the idea that lonely geniuses are what count in the world of innovation. We tend to hear people say things like the, you know, the reason a big population can be more innovative is because there's more chance of there being a genius. I don't think that's the way it works. I think what happens is that people share their ideas, exchange their ideas, collaborate, and what really counts is how well people are communicating with each other, not how clever they are as individuals. And to some extent, I'm trying to get away from the, this word creativity, which tends to imply that a special sort of juice runs in the vein of inventors that doesn't run in the vein of ordinary people. But if you, you know, if you look at the careers of people like Thomas Edison or Jeff Bezos, uh, or talk to any great innovators today, they all emphasize the importance of trial and error, failure of getting things wrong and starting again. And they also Emphasize the importance of collaboration. For me, the nicest story that illustrates this is the contrast between Samuel Langley and the, and the Wright brothers, two, two different teams trying to create the first powered airplane in 19 oh three. And Langley is very well connected, head of the Smithsonian Institution, an astronomer, um, gets a huge government grant to build an airplane, goes off and do…

AI assessment note: “debunk the idea that lonely geniuses are what count in the world of innovation”

Q If everybody's trying different ideas, to what extent are insights inevitable?

A Well, I'm fascinated by the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. I write about it in the book. I'm drawn upon the ideas of Kevin Kelly, who wrote a book called What Technology Wants, about how technology seems to decide what's going to be invented next by somebody. As I said, there were 21 different people who came up with the idea of the light bulb in the 18 seventies. There's even more people who came up with the idea of the search engine in the early 19 nineties. You rerun the tape without Sergey Brin meeting Larry Page, without Thomas Edison, and you still get light bulbs, you still get search engines. That makes it sound like innovation is totally inevitable. You know, people are totally dispensable. And of course that can't entirely be true, because we'd have had light bulbs hundreds of years before, uh, or something like that. But it does appear that there comes a moment when technologies are ripe, uh, when the, the combining, uh, technologies that, um, come together to make a new technology have reached the point where it's sort of inevitable that people will do so. What fascinates me is how few of those transitions we can see coming in advance. So again, take search engines. It looks, when you're looking backwards from here, it looks unbelievably obvious that search was going to be a really important part of the internet, um, that whoever cracked it and got us the bes…

AI assessment note: “it does appear that there comes a moment when technologies are ripe”

Q You mentioned in the book that innovation allows us to work with each other. Can you expand on what you meant by that?

A Well, I think the great theme of human history over millennia is that we become more specialized in what we produce and more diversified in what we consume. So compared with a self-sufficient farmer trying to, you know, grow all his own food and make all his own machines and so on, Someone like that has to work a huge number of hours to produce not a very high standard of living, because they're only consuming what they produce. Whereas today, most people work, whatever it might be, eight hours of the day at something terribly specialized. You know, they're not making everything they need. They're just doing one thing. They're making a podcast or whatever it might be. Then by selling that to other people, they then supply all their needs, and they then go off and spend the rest of the day consuming what other people have created for them, whether it be a movie or a meal or whatever. So actually, we're, we're setting up this network where we all work for each other, and a tiny, tiny fraction of your effort ends up making a big contribution to other people's, um, wellness. Um, there's a lovely essay that I often go back to called iPencil, written by an economist named Leonard Reed in It's written by a pencil, and the pencil is trying to understand its own origins. How did it come into the world? And it's researched it, and it's discovered that it's made of wood, and it's made of …

AI assessment note: “we become more specialized in what we produce and more diversified in what we consume”

Q also is highly regulated. So it makes me a bit skeptical as to the, the role of regulation and how that plays into things. Obviously it does. You also want the winners to come away winners. And increasingly we seem to want people to win, but not too much. I'm curious as to What policy implications that you see government should be thinking about to foster innovation within their societies?

A This is a very difficult question, and I don't think anyone's found the magic bullet in terms of government policies that will deliver innovation to a growing society. The main thing is to get the obstacles out the way, whether it's regulatory obstacles or, um, or other obstacles to innovation, just to, to, to clear the pitch for, for the innovations to have a free run. Um, uh, that feels to me the most important thing governments can do. Picking winners and saying, I want this technology to be developed by such and such a date has a pretty awful track record and is likely to end up by the losers picking the governments. In other words, you know, the wrong people end up getting the grants and the subsidies because they're very well politically connected rather than because they have the best plans. I think the way to solve that problem is to dangle a prize in front of entrepreneurs And say, if you invent a solution to this problem, you will get a reward. The reward needn't be a cash lump sum. Um, it could be, uh, for example, an advanced market commitment. The Gates Foundation did this with a vaccine for pneumococcus, saying if the pharmaceutical industry could come up with a vaccine for this disease, which kills children in poor countries, then, uh, don't worry. Although it looks unprofitable to invent such a thing, we will make sure you get properly rewarded by topping up the…

AI assessment note: “The main thing is to get the obstacles out the way”

Q And if you do what everybody else does, you're going to get the same results as everybody else. And that means a lot of failures specifically in our day and age of sort of public Failure. So you have to be, I think increasingly you have to be able to fail in public if you want to innovate. Can you take that further and expand on the implications of failure?

A Yeah. Jeff Bezos is interesting on this because he talks about the importance of swinging and missing, and if you're not swinging Hard enough and missing. Then you, uh, won't succeed in a big way. And the story of Amazon is, you can tell it. I tried to do this in the book. You can tell the story of Amazon as a series of disastrous failures. You know, they, they got all sorts of stuff wrong in the early days. Then they bought companies in the dot-com boom, which turned out to be flops, um, and all went bust. Uh, they tried to get into the toy business and it didn't work. Um, they made mistake after mistake, but every time they were just doing enough experiments so that one or two things would work and they were able to continue. And of course, eventually they became the biggest company in the world. It is vital to fail. Thomas Edison said, I haven't Failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that don't work. The difference between him and the 20 other people who invented the light bulb around the same time is that he was prepared to put in the slog of testing 6000 different types of plant material before settling on Japanese bamboo for the filament of his light bulb. Which would last a long time. Whereas the others weren't prepared to do quite so much, uh, failure as it were. So, um, that doesn't mean of course that every failure is simply a step towards success. Uh, and I write in the…

AI assessment note: “Jeff Bezos is interesting on this because he talks about the importance of swinging and missing”

Q Can you expand a little bit on the, we talked about this a bit earlier on the idea versus execution phase and to what extent they're, they're valuable to society and which is more valuable?

A Well, I, Tend to take the view that we overvalue the idea and undervalue the execution, the, the, the turning of the idea into a practical innovation. Because we put, you know, we put statues up to the people who discover the basic principle or the first prototype, but we then don't put statues up to the people who Build a business around making that device cheap. You know, can you, can you think of a, of a sort of monument to somebody just because they reduced the cost of something? Whereas in fact, if you look at say the history of electric lighting, it's come down spectacularly. So it's ludicrously cheap to light your house now compared with a hundred years ago or 200 years ago. And that's an innovation that Is extraordinarily valuable. I mean, the, the LED light that we all use now, which is both long lasting and very low energy, but produces very good, reliable light, is the result of a lot of people, some in Japan, some in, um, Europe, some in America, um, working incrementally over many years to, to perfect white LED lighting. And basically we don't, any of us know any of their names. But they have had an enormous impact on our lives. We make a fetish out of talking about the person who invented the first light bulb more than a hundred years ago. I've already talked about Thomas Edison, but actually the innovators still working on a technology like that are just as impor…

AI assessment note: “we overvalue the idea and undervalue the execution”

Q Yeah, I think that's definitely true, and they're sort of like the unsung heroes of the, of the world, right?

A Yes, I think that's true. To give an example of my favorite example of an unsung hero in the book, I write about the insecticide-treated mosquito net, the bed net that keeps mosquitoes away from you while you're asleep, and which is far, far more effective if it's been treated with insecticide. And this is the technology that reversed the increase in malaria. Malaria was going up until 2003. It's now going down as a cause of mortality in the world, going down pretty steeply. And it's entirely due to this, but not entirely, but it's nearly all due to this technology. It's more effective than anti-malarial drugs, um, more effective than draining swamps or spraying mosquitoes. So I said to myself, this is a really good technology. It's quite low tech. It's quite simple. It's quite cheap. It's very effective. Who invented it? You know, where'd it come from? I traced the story back to a sort of type written document from 1983 in Burkino Faso, uh, describing a very well designed experiment that a Frenchman named Frederick Darriott and his colleagues did. And I got in touch with Darriott in retirement and said, can you remind, you know, tell me how this came about and what, what happened. The experiment was, um, had unbelievably strong results. It showed that a mosquito net is quite good at keeping you from being bitten. An insecticide mosquito, treated mosquito net is very good. And …

AI assessment note: “To give an example of my favorite example of an unsung hero in the book”

Q is geographically concentrated. I mean, for the last 50 years it's been, say, Silicon Valley in California, and that seems to be coming to an end right now, and before that it was Victorian Britain, and then, you know, before that it was Renaissance Italy, um, and at some point it was probably ancient Greece and China. Why does it seem to happen only in one place at a time?

A This bushfire that breaks out for a number of decades in one place, and then breaks out somewhere else, it really baffles me actually, because it's not immediately obvious what's going on here. I mean, you can, you can come up with explanations for why California was so extraordinarily innovative. The, you know, the, the, the way you could, um, float companies and retain control, the, Amount of defense spending at Stanford University, the freedom, the sunshine, you know, the number of immigrants, you know, there's all sorts of explanations. The general point you can make, and this applies to Renaissance Italy and, um, ancient Arabia and, Ancient China, and so on as well, uh, is that city states tend to be innovative, that, that, that independent, relatively small political units that are very vigorous traders with other places tend to be places where a lot of innovation happens. You know, Britain's moment in the sun was because it was part of an enormous network of free trade. Um, and, uh, that's because people will meet each other for the first time. Ideas will therefore meet each other. Profits will be made to be invested in things, um, incentives will be available, and a freedom to decide what to do. You know, most of humanity has spent most of the last few hundred years living under regimes that told them what they can do and can't do most of the time, you know, whether it …

AI assessment note: “independent, relatively small political units that are very vigorous traders with other places”

Q Are there ways that we can counter that, do you think?

A Yes, I think something similar happened with radio, um, in the 19 twenties, as I mentioned, radio played a big role in the rise of the dictators, and yet people had invested just as much utopian hope in it. I mean, some of the things written about radio when it was first invented are extraordinary, you know, saying this is going to result in world peace because everyone's going to hear each other's point of view. Um, we're never going to have a war again. Well, that didn't work out. Uh, and, and people like Hitler and Mussolini use radio very extensively to, to reinforce the prejudices of their, of their followers. And yet you and I don't think of radio as a source of evil in the world today. So it is possible to tame these technologies, to work out ways of living with them, to, to come up with cultural norms that Undo the bad stuff. And I have a feeling we're already doing it. I mean, if you just look at the sort of the, the way that the really nasty trolls, I don't think get the same traction today as they, um, uh, did 10 years ago. I might be wrong.

AI assessment note: “So it is possible to tame these technologies, to work out ways of living with them”

Q It's out of digital. I mean, there seems to be a lack of a visible lack of innovation anyways. Why does innovation seem to regularly work in some fields like digital and my phone and not on others, like say testing for a virus?

A Yeah, I'm very intrigued by this. Uh, we, we lived through a period of extraordinary innovation in, uh, digital, in software, in, uh, computers and communications. But we've actually lived through a period of stagnation with respect to innovation in, say, transport. Our grandparents had the opposite experience. You know, my grandparents were born at the turn of the 20th century. That was well after the telephone. They had the telephone throughout their lives, but they had almost no other communications and computing improvements that reached them before they died in In the 19 sixties. I've had the opposite experience, uh, but sorry, but they also had extraordinary changes in transport. You know, they were born before the motor car and the airplane, uh, and they died with the man on the moon and rockets in the air and supersonic, uh, jet fighters and all sorts of weird stuff, helicopters, you know, everything. In my lifetime, well, the seven four seven was invented when I was 11 years old. It was still in service until a few months ago. We've not got flying cars, jetpacks, routine space travel, all the things we were promised in the 19 fifties, but we have got incredible changes in computing and communications. Now, why is that? In some sense, it's, it's obviously a technological possibility. You know, the invention of the silicon transistor has had enormous consequences in one …

AI assessment note: “the invention of the silicon transistor has had enormous consequences in one field, but not in the other”