Over the past millennium, particularly in the last two centuries, the world has witnessed extraordinary ideas across most human fields, from transcontinental flight to tuberculosis treatment, the invention of television, the automobile industry, electric lighting, quantum mechanics, civil rights, genetics, nuclear energy, jazz music, organ transplantation, the age of satellite launches, and much more. However, when we examine our current reality, we find a significant shift in the nature of ideas. Today, everyone relies on artificial ideas through digital technology in various fields.
Michael Bhaskar questions in his book “Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking” why the flow of big ideas that contribute to human advancement has slowed down. By “big ideas,” the author refers to those that represent breakthroughs in human life and impact the future. He discusses the current contraction of human boundaries, emphasizing that the concept of human limits encompasses much more than knowledge alone. There are discoveries and inventions that have led to tremendous human progress, and he also presents a vision for how big ideas can flow again in the future.
A Revolution in Ideas:
Humanity has experienced a significant revolution in ideas, with no limits for humans, and the history of humanity over the past millennium is filled with discoveries and achievements that seem like a natural part of the human system. The author clarifies that big ideas go through several distinct phases to ultimately become human achievements whose effects persist through the ages. These phases are:
- The Ideation Phase: Similar to Newton, who observed an apple tree leading to the law of gravity.
- The Implementation Phase: The stage where the idea is activated and presented to the world; if the concept remains purely in the mind, it does not become an invention.
- The Marketing Phase: The importance of this stage lies in the widespread adoption or acceptance of the idea.
The author does not overlook the role of chance in most discoveries. For instance, Robert Koch invented bacterial cultures after leaving potatoes outside to rot, and Columbus discovered America by accident.
Consequences of the Slowdown:
The author questions what types of social environments lead to the emergence or prevention of ideas and the incentives and institutions they shape. Many civilizations have experienced catastrophic collapses when their members believed life was stable, leading them to cease thinking and evolving. As dangers and crises accumulated—climate worsened, soil degraded, resources were exploited, and returns diminished before the collapse—they became culturally trapped, unable to fully recognize or address problems. This was not because they were unintelligent or unaware of arising issues; rather, they were devoid of solutions.
Based on the above, a range of risks threatening humanity has recently emerged, including global climate change, antibiotic resistance in viruses, depletion of natural resources such as freshwater and rare earth metals, halted economic growth, and the continued spread of cancer. In developed countries, over 17 million cancer patients are diagnosed each year, with this number expected to rise to 27.5 million by 2040. However, until recently, oncology had only three primary treatments: surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy—referred to as “cut, burn, and poison.” Many expensive drugs have poor track records, and all treatments come with side effects.
On the other hand, a form of immunotherapy has emerged, considered a promising treatment that could revolutionize the “war on cancer.” Some researchers even compare it to the discovery of penicillin, viewing it as a turning point that will change the field forever and alter human lives. However, the author believes that immunotherapy is not a sudden invention like other success stories; it required decades of desperate attempts and significant funding for research.
Artificial Ideas:
Quantum computing is a rapidly developing field, with institutions like Google and IBM investing billions to achieve “quantum supremacy,” the point where quantum computers begin performing impossible calculations for classical devices. Quantum computing has implications in diverse fields such as chemistry, cryptography, materials, pharmaceuticals, finance, and logistics.
The author highlights some recent modern ideas such as Google Maps, Zoom, Minecraft, and Spotify, which primarily rely on digital technology. He believes what is happening now represents a revolution of modernization and marginal innovation. For example, in politics, there is no radically new or ambitious conception of the world aimed at developing current political concepts; most programs, policies, and ideologies seek to adapt or improve the existing system.
The author is optimistic that the application of artificial intelligence could achieve critical advancements in the coming years. Generally, the field now focuses on machine learning approaches to solve fundamental problems. As technology and computational power evolve, the ability to glean new insights from data—beyond human perception—also increases.
The author states that humanity stands at a dangerous historical crossroads with remarkable new discoveries and achievements ranging from quantum biology, nanotechnology, parametric architecture, and exoplanet astronomy to governance, blockchain, and virtual worlds. However, after these successive discoveries and inventions, we now face a stagnation. He emphasizes some scientists’ and critics’ views, which culminate in our current experience of a “great intellectual famine.”
Potential Pathways:
The author indicates that the future of big ideas remains uncertain, but he outlines three potential pathways:
The Long Twilight Path: The most pessimistic trajectory, preceding decline and collapse. Civilizations have repeatedly faced setbacks from external shocks such as famine, disease, or invasion. Humanity may fall prey to any of these, even with the best tools available to combat them. He illustrates this with the fall of the Roman Empire to barbarians when it became increasingly dysfunctional, making it an easy target, thus ending the classical era and ushering in what was previously known as the Late Antiquity.
He proposes a hypothetical scenario where stagnation continues and new tools fail to meet the demands of saving humanity—from declining research productivity to indefinite postponements of new tools due to difficulties, with big new ideas becoming prohibitively expensive, while political experience becomes perilous, and the global population shrinks, pushing the global economy toward zero, especially amidst climate change.
The New Utopia: The most optimistic pathway, where the author posits that things could ideally proceed, theoretically presenting no reason preventing us from witnessing improvements in living standards akin to those experienced in recent centuries. Considering that the developing world is focused on bridging the gap with advanced economies, all major civilizations are operating within the bounds of knowledge, we could be on the verge of a new revolution in tools and technology, similar to the late 19th and early 20th centuries with artificial intelligence, quantum computing, 3D printing, synthetic biology, and neural interface technologies that connect computers to human brains.
The author also points to the optimism resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to the integration of global supply chains to provide vaccines against the pandemic and preserve humanity.
The Foggy or Neutral Path: This pathway indicates the generation of ideas but at a slow pace, with the outcomes of these ideas being uncertain. The central idea of this book is that the West currently spends much and achieves little because it repeatedly does the same things in the same ways. A global mix of ideas may break this stagnation and produce a new array of tools that could lead to a broader acceleration in the production of big ideas.
Suggestions for the Future:
The author proposes some suggestions for rejuvenating the flow of big ideas and achieving a better future:
First: Defining Tasks: Unifying efforts across all research and development processes, no matter how fraught with risks and challenges. Just as happened in the early 1950s when the United States decided to allocate part of its national output to establish NASA, which subsequently discovered the GPS system, invented prosthetics, and aided in the rise of the internet—resulting from heightened efforts and research.
Second: Diversity of Experimentation: Conducting more experiments and creating organizational space for risky trials, rather than squashing them under numerous committees or through excessive caution or vested interests.
Third: Revolutionizing Education: There is no room for complacency in simply delivering facts; it is essential to teach sciences that empower students to learn and explore independently, preparing them for independent thinking and allowing them to proactively connect the threads. It is also important to adopt teamwork approaches to help students support each other, thereby exponentially increasing their knowledge gains.
Fourth: Stimulating All Ideas: Reflecting the idea of governments offering incentive rewards to institutions capable of solving societal problems.
Fifth: Be Daring: Innovation is always fraught with risk; for example, Mrs. Mary Wortley Montagu, who introduced smallpox vaccination to Britain, first tried it on her son. Also, aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal was a significant inspiration to the Wright brothers for making decisions related to the first flight—who died from an accident involving one of his aircraft.
In conclusion, the author emphasizes that the current disruptions in the world and the pandemic should be leveraged for ambitious rethinking since risks often generate solutions. Human progress has resulted from conceptualizing big ideas and implementing them at an accelerated pace, as knowledge horizons have expanded, making fundamental forces like energy and evolution traceable, and unraveling the mystery of disease. After the end of the 20th century, Albert Einstein transformed fundamental categories like time and space into measurable quantities, leading culture into a revolution, making mass entertainment from television and radio programs a reality while progressively redefining the nature of art from impressionism to abstract expressionism.
Source:
Michael Bhaskar, Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking, The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 2021.
