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Up to now, this has been the way you were obliged to play the game. From a social point of view, innovation has been a case of having to take the occasionally rough with the generally smooth, partly because of the interactive nature of invention described above, and partly because for centuries we have lived in a directionless culture of scarcity. At no time was there either need or resources available to share the intellectual wealth beyond a select few. There was no point, for instance, in teaching literacy to the masses without an adequate number of printing presses to provide them with texts. In any case, prior to the Age of Exploration and the Industrial Revolution, there would have been little a literate majority could have done job-wise. Innovation has, all along, been an elite-driven, top-down thing. For much of history, the task of the individual innovator, working for some entity, state or private, and with privileged access to the contemporary store of facts, has been to satisfy the planning requirements of a king or CEO or politburo. The rest of us were not consulted.
To a large extent this is still so today. For any invention to succeed in the marketplace, it has to be some kind of surprise. Most of all for the competitor. And then for the consumer. As a result, invention (with Descartes's help) has given us a world nobody could have forecast and few can understand because of the esoteric process of innovation and the fact that it has never been subject to general social audit.
This may soon become a thing of the past. As Ray Kurzweil observes in his essay (beginning on page 114), information technology may be on the verge of removing the nitty-gritty, time-wasting, reductionist noodling from the human diary, leaving us freer to indulge in what our connective brains are best at: using the information webs to run connective scenarios based on what options for change present themselves at any given time, deciding what direction we want to go in and leaving it to the reductionist programs of our machines to get on with it.
One consequence might be that we finally recognize history's Great Innovators for what they were: the products of a culture of scarcity that taught us to regard them and their talents as rare. That they were (and are) specially talented is not in doubt here. But semi-intelligent information technology and the transition of a culture from one of information scarcity to one of abundance may for the first time allow all the rest of us into the invention game. Then technology will provide the nuts-and-bolts backup to give shape to whatever any imaginative brain can conceive. And there are more than 6 billion imaginative brains out there across the planet waiting for the opportunity. As this special report amply illustrates, it is already happening.
James Burke is the author of Circles and other books