Why we innovate
If god created everything, then the act of creation is divine.
Now, I’m not religious to be honest. I’m half atheist and the other half agnostic but with a deep respect and curiosity to every religion or belief. Feel free to pick my brain about that at any moment and enlighten me if you can. Nonetheless, I’m convinced that if there where one thing to be named divine, it would be the act of creation.
To see something you’ve created rising as more than the sum of its parts, has something magical and majestic to it. You can understand all the individual pieces a creation is comprised of. But as soon as it animates the attribution of emotional value the human mind can give to it is tremendously more than the actual matter in front of you. Even more, when done properly the experience can be transcending to many more people experiencing the same feeling of awe.
This is the reason I’m completely in love with engineering. As an engineer (and in my case most of the time software engineer) you strive to master the ability to create something that wasn’t before, and now ‘lives’ amongst us. As something we can talk and reason about.
Every creation casts its shadow
When Robert Oppenheimer watched his creation coming to life, creating an immense reaction of energy, he observed the effect of his creation around him. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent.
Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds
A line from a Hindu scripture came to his mind. What he was observing was the theory of the atom bomb succeeding during the Trinity tests.
Every creation brings beautiful potential to the world, but also casts its shadow. And from each shadow, the necessity for improvement arrises to outdo the status quo. Within that infinite cycle we can always find one delightful sweet spot: the act of creation itself.
You might be tempted to think that we currently don’t face these issues. Technology took a sprint and if everything remained the same from now on, no shadows would be there to be seen right?
Let me give some contemporary examples.
Journalism and fake news
With the coming of the internet and with it, social media, we started ingesting a lot of superficial information of a wide variety. We scroll ourselves into infinity behind our mobile phones, reading the headlines without the need of reading the details.
It’s human nature to look at the thing that sticks out above all the rest. So it’s hard to differentiate yourself on depth in subjects. In order to make a living, it’s easier to publish superficial thrill seeking articles than to really understand the subject at hand and inform the audience.
Now let me be clear, I’m not accusing journalists here for one bit. But I am saying that the current technologies in place lead to a spread of shallow news that suffers from gluttony in terms of thrill. And are often malnutritiosly deprived of facts.
But the problem is though, that it becomes increasingly hard to form a complete and deep image for anybody involved. Algorithms dish out the information you like most, and therefore taints your information feed with a confirmation bias. The echo chamber effect. Once you think something is true, you’ll only hear evidence in favour of the made statements, and it’s hard to find any other (counter) information since you can’t search on what you don’t know, and the algorithms keep feeding you what you clicked on.
I’m not here to diss any of it. My point here is: We’ve created amazing technology advancements, and now we need to create even more advancements to make sure we feed all the right minds all the right sets of information in order to -as good as possible- remove the confirmation bias.
Law making and the speed of the public opinion
Another internet related example. Our government is still structured the way it was in 1848 when the Netherlands became a parliamentary democracy under constitutional monarchy. Of course things have changed and improvements have been made but the structure remains the same.
On the other hand, in 1988 the Netherlands got its first internet user, and we all know the pace in which the internet was adopted ever since. Before this moment life was relatively slow. But at this moment, the spread of information, mis-information, and therefore the public opinion goes at the speed of a bullet and there is no sign of stopping nor slowing down.
Everybody can educate theirselves, and voice their beliefs, educated guesses, opinions and plain trash towards one another.
Again, I’m not here dissing the way we create laws or communicate with each other. That was a beautiful invention. But we seem desperately in need of a new mechanism that is profoundly different and has the ability to objectively inform everyone no matter the level of expertise they currently possess. We need to innovate.
Now without leading the witness here, I thought of such a concept and wrote an article about it a while ago ;-). In case you’re interested: Dear lawmakers and leaders (Why and how we should and could do better at making decisions)
Dear future inventors
We need you. We need your passion, your drive to leave the world better than how you found it. We need you to fail in order to understand what works. We need exceptional bravery to challenge what we deem is right today. We need strength to stand tall, even when inventions lead to major changes for many people.
The majority of humans don’t like change. But ask them if they’d like to hand in their TV, Internet, Mobile, Social benefits, Toilet, etc etc, and they might realise that change is hard, but necessary for a better tomorrow.
I invite you to take the leap together! To keep innovating in the wake of the previous innovations. To lighten all the darker sides of man’s discovery. To boldly go where no one has gone before ;-)
