Nov 08, 2010 When Ideas Have Sex
This is the first post in a new series, produced by Frog Design, drawn from their publication, Design Mind. The theme of the current issue — from which this essay is drawn — is “And Now the Good News.” It presents ideas flowing from the most recent TED Global conference.
As I write this, two artifacts of roughly the same size and shape sit on my desk: a cordless mouse and a hand axe from the Middle Stone Age. Both are designed to fit the human grip. Both are technologies. Yet the difference between them is profound.
The hand axe represents a technology that did not change for a million years; it evolved slower than the human skeleton. The mouse will be obsolete in a few years. The axe consists of a single, natural substance. The mouse is a complex confection of metals, semiconductors, plastics, and lasers. The axe was made by a single individual. The mouse was made by thousands—perhaps millions—of people, each of whom played a small role in realizing the whole. Farmers grew the coffee that shippers transported and was consumed by oil riggers whose petroleum was used by refinery workers to make the plastic that was molded by factory workers for the mouse, which was assembled by other laborers for salespeople to sell to the retailer who sold it to me. Not one of them alone knows how to make a computer peripheral from scratch.
And yet, it is the mouse, not the hand axe, that is the key to understanding why human beings dominate the planet and why there has been such explosive prosperity and progress over the past 100,000 years. The knowledge of how to make the mouse—and so many other modern-day products—transcends the limitations of the human brain. Our ability to plan and to think and to communicate ideas through language may be impressive, but it still requires each of us to understand every idea that settles within our own skulls. When we moved away from self-sufficiency and began to work together, combining our knowledge, the consequence was far-reaching: We created things we could not and do not understand, from cordless mice to urban metropolises.
Cooperation turned us into specialists: I’ll do this job, you do that one. Specialization gave us incentives to innovate. Innovation led to yet more specialization and more ways of combining different specialized skills. Human intelligence became collective and cumulative to an extent that no other species can rival. (read the rest of the article here)