Uh huh. Facebook is a new kind of social interaction. You can Google stuff too. Ok. Where is the evidence that innovation is diminishing? Maybe it's just me, but there are a few clues to suggest that we are living at a time when technological innovation is occurring at a pace faster than any previous point in human history. And a really fascinating idea itself is what if this guy doesn't like Facebook but is afraid to say so. I'll explain that. Now, it sounds incredible. It sounds insane. It sounds mad. Maybe things are changing just a bit too fast for him to feel comfortable, and being and evolutionary biologist, he's using the tools he has to explain his feelings. Ok, that's a bit harsh. But really, where is the evidence for this argument? Actually, his idea that creativity is rooted in a random process sounds reasonable.
Jared Diamond argues convincingly that innovation has to happen when the climate is right for it, and that's certainly random. He doesn't argue that it's a simple process, to be sure, but I think he misses the social aspect of it. Yeah, the printing press was invented in Sumeria a gajillion years ago and nobody did anything with it, and that's an argument that innovation is random. The Sumerian system was used by one or two accountants for their internal books, though. They had an active disincentive to spread that around. The Holy Word of God? Yeah, we want that EVERYWHERE. Thus we call it the Gutenberg Press. I think social media/the internet provide the leveraging factor of the Gutenberg Press to simple tools like the Sumerian coins. Is that "stifling innovation?" I think it's lowering the bar for what we propagate. I'm not going to say that's a good thing or a bad thing, though.
I agree with that. IMO a question that's worth asking (and I haven't found a good treatment of it) is: to what end? And, I don't mean anything about right or wrong, or good or bad for the human spirit, or even good or bad for us as a species. Speaking from a physical standpoint, we seem to time and time again work to lower the energy state of some aspect of living, but I am not sure what that is. Or maybe we aren't getting to lower energy states at all, but we are caught in some sort of behavioral eddy, just going around and around... For example, we make something that saves time, so we get busier doing something else, and then we find ways to do that faster, so we get busier doing something else... I've been incubating this half-baked theory that consciousness is anxiety based on environmental challenges, and that our technological efforts are motivated to minimize this anxiety, but I'm not so sure. I'm starting to think that progress is actually something else entirely. Maybe something that is not changing us at all. It's simply satisfying an urge that earned us an evolutionary advantage, but nothing more.
Hey, look: http://www.ishmael.org/ows.cfm I think Ishmael might annoy me too! You would think that given that higher self-awareness was part of our evolutionary advantage, we could use it to keep our other 'assets' in check. Educate the hell out of everyone. It's our only hope.