Subject: [SALT] History of innovation (Van der Leeuw talk)

Reply-To: services@longnow.org

The development of human mental ability can be tracked through the
progressive crafting of stone tools, Van der Leeuw explained. First
we learned to shape an edge---a line---then the surface, then the
whole volume of the tool, then the sophisticated sequence required to
make a superb spear point. It took 2 million years. But by 300,000
years ago the human brain had developed a sufficiently complex
short-term working memory to keep 7 (plus-or-minus 2) considerations
in mind at once. We could handle problems of multi-dimensionality.

The brain has not progressed since then, nor has needed to. The
skills of innovation moved on from the biological brain to social
constructs and modes of communication and information processing.
That bootstrapping process continues to this day. The cave paintings
show that cognitive agility reached the point of being able to reduce
3 dimensions to a representative 2 dimensions, for instance.

By the neolithic revolution of 10,000 years ago, we developed the
ability to shape voids---the interior of pots, baskets, and houses.
Tools could be made by assembling parts instead of just paring down
blanks of stone or wood. Problem solving in agriculture began to
span time, to be a form of investment.

Towns and then cities became humanity's innovation engine. Symbols
recorded in material form---tokens, accounting, and writing---spanned
time and space. Unruly cities disciplined themselves with laws and
administration. Then empires developed the ability to harvest the
bounty of far-flung communities in the form of treasure, and that led
to overreach. The Roman Empire was the first to degrade its world at
the local climate level, and it collapsed.

Around 1800, in Europe, energy constraints were finally conquered by
the harvesting of fossil fuels. Humans only need 100 watts to
survive, but every human now commands 10,000 watts. With that
leverage we built a global civilization. The innovative power of
urbanity has multiplied yet further with the coming of the internet.

But we have become "disturbance dependent." As our cities and
density of communications grow, they create ever more difficult
problems, for which we have to innovate ever more sophisticated
solutions. Technology is "the biggest Ponzi scheme of all."

As we become ever more adept at solving short-term problems, we shift
the risk to long-term problems---such as climate change---which do
not match the skills we have developed and know how to reward. We
are headed into a trap of our own devising. To get out of it, if we
can, will require a "battle with ourselves" to wholly redefine our
social structures and institutions to master the long term.

--Stewart Brand
--


Stewart Brand -- sb@gbn.org
The Long Now Foundation - http://www.longnow.org
Seminars & downloads: http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/

"This growing isolation and self-containment, exhibited by the other members of the unit and from which only the buoyant Riggs seemed immune, reminded Kerans of the slackening metabolism and biological withdrawal of all animal forms about to undergo a major metamorphosis. Sometimes he wondered what zone of transit he himself was entering, sure that his own withdrawal was symptomatic not of a dormant schizophrenia, but of a careful preparation for a radically new envirnoment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would merely be an encumbrance."