[khebab]

I'm surprised that this book has not been reviewed before in this forum. It is not directly related to PO but it addresses a broader issue about how society generates enough "ingenuity" in order to face new challenges. Most of the PO counter-arguments are based on the belief that Technology will solve all our problems, our science is powerful. We will always produce enough ingenuity to face new challenges regardless of how difficult the challenge is. The problem is that producing enough ingenuity requires a lot of energy, time and social stability which are running out.

There is a web site about this book: The Ingenuity Gap
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')Can we solve the problems of the future? Thomas Homer-Dixon tackles this question in a groundbreaking study of a world becoming too complex and too fast-paced to manage.

The challenges we face converge, intertwine, and often remain largely beyond our understanding. Most of us suspect that the "experts" don't really know what's going on and that as a species we've released forces that are neither managed nor manageable. This is the ingenuity gap, the critical gap between our need for ideas to solve complex problems and our actual supply of those ideas.

Poor countries are particularly vulnerable to ingenuity gaps, but our own rich countries are no longer immune, and we're all caught dangerously between a soaring requirement for ingenuity and an increasingly uncertain supply. As the gap widens, the result can be political disintegration and violent upheaval.

With riveting anecdotes and lucid argument, Thomas Homer-Dixon uses

his ingenuity theory to suggest how we might approach these problems -- in our own lives, our thinking, our businesses, and our societies.

[Dvanharn]

The limits imposed by technological and scientific complexity, along with the basic tenets of ecology and sustainability, are part of the foundation of my personal philosophy of life. In a parallel thought train to your post, khebab, I am acutely aware that the number of significant, basic scientific and technical discoveries, theories, inventions, and developments was vastly greater in the past with respect to the numbers of people working in the fields of science, research & development, and technology. In fact, many great scientific discoveries were made by men for whom science was a hobby (or more precisely, for whom science was an avocation, not a full-time career).

Most corporate research and development today focuses on searching in the "obscure corners" of well-developed scientific and engineering fields at great expense. Some of the most important modern technology such as personal computers were developed in underfunded and small-scale situations. Technical wizard Steve Wozniak and marketing genius Steve Jobs started Apple Computer in a garage. The PC was the result of an obscure and lightly-funded small group of engineers from IBM assigned to make a personal computer from off-the-shelf parts in a hurry while the bulk of the company's money was spent on mainframes. Bill Gates was a college student who took another early coder's work and developed MS-DOS.

The corporate environment is great for developing and marketing technology, but not for innovation. Witness Microsoft, who markets themselves as innovators, yet the company was built and grown into a giant based on the innovations of others - almost all of Microsoft's "innovations" were bought or stolen from individuals or small groups of real innovators.

It is my opinion that many of the great discoveries and significant breakthroughs in science and technology come from motivated individuals. Corporations can refine technologies when they see a profit, but capitalism is not the driver for innovation in the form of basic research - which is where most breakthroughs occur.

I need to find a good book on this subject, because I find it fascinating. In particular, one that lists significant breakthroughs in science and engineering, and the stories behind them - not just the top ten, but a thorough review of the history of science and engineering. Guess I'll have to do some "research" myself!

As we approach peak oil, there are thousands of "promising" ideas and technologies out there, but unless they actually make it to be useful in a practical, cost-effective application, they are just that - promising ideas. BiGG seems to be the peakoil.com resident expert expert on potential of unfulfilled promises. It is obvious to many of us that BiGG and his fellow cornucopians fail to grasp the both the sense of scale and delicate balance and interdependence of the global human and physical environment, and the basic fragility of tottering economic foundation that would be needed to support the necessary changes. They look at bits and peices of the picture, but never seem to grasp an overview of the enormous complexity of our world - both the natural and the human aspects of it, and the fact that failure in one critical component can bring the whole system down.

Dave

[Jack]

There's an old stock market saying - when you make a profit, it's due to skill. When you lose, it's due to luck.

We have a number of interesting technologies - antibiotics, for example. They were discovered by a lucky accident. But notice we have yet to find a cure for viral infections. We have nuclear fission, but breathless news releases aside, we've failed after 50 years to produce net energy from a controlled fusion reaction. And then there's AI - we keep talking about artificial intelligence and predicting it will give us robots that can do marvelous things, but we're a long way from a machine that can do windows, wash dishes, and cook a decent creme brulee'.

And it takes a long time before a discovery turns into a widely useful technology. Some 60 years ago, a doctor noticed that a pilot who had a piece of an aircraft canopy embedded in his eye could still see. From this came the cataract operation - and, after all this time, it's a simple outpatient procedure. The laser (discovered in 1960) we use in our DVD's took decades to develop, as did the transistor (circa the 1950's).

Will some miraculous discovery save us from inconvenience? Perhaps - but I surely wouldn't care to bet on it.

[khebab]

One aspect that makes this book interesting, in my opinion, is that it was derived directly from the author's academic writing about environment, scarcity and violence
(Thomas Homer-Dixon - Academic Writing). He has also published in another recent book about energy issues: Fueling the Future: How the Battle over Energy is ChangingEverything (his chapter is available online: Bringing Ingenuity to Energy). Some quotes:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'C')apitalist societies are therefore constantly engaged in demand creation. They must socialize their citizens to be insatiable consumers (the "walking appetites" of the neoclassical economic model discussed above). Advanced capitalism can only survive if it generates constantly rising material expectations and, in turn, chronic material discontent within the economically active population, despite increasing material abundance.