To make sense of today’s blog post, you’ll need to first go purchase and read Kevin Kelly’s magnificent book What Technology Wants. And really, you should be reading that instead of coming here anyway. It’s one of those marvelous books that reshapes how you see the past, present, and future.
You’re back? That was fast. Now that you’ve read the book you know its central premise, which is that technology moves in a predetermined direction, built up from the prerequisite technologies that came before. Which is why almost every innovation is co-invented around the globe almost at the same time. And importantly for this blog post, it’s why our narrative that certain individuals are the ones who push humanity forward is false.
I want to argue that not only is the hero narrative of technology false, it’s also dangerous and counterproductive.
First, a reminder of a few examples from Kevin’s book. Calculus was co-invented separately. The theory of natural selection occurred to two people on opposite ends of the earth within mere decades of each other. Powered flight was a race so narrowly won that it is still in dispute!
The “inventor” of a thing usually comes down not to who first made or discovered a process, but who was the loudest about doing so, or who the media seized upon for being the most quotable, photogenic, shocking, absurd, etc. Ransom Olds invented and patented the assembly line, but Henry Ford not only refined it — he had better quips. And now the assembly line belongs to Ford in our popular imaginations.
The inventions that follow this pattern are so numerous that it might as well be all of them. Go research anything you know to be invented by one person, and you’ll begin pulling a very tangled thread. Even the most famous examples, with clear patent histories, are never what they seem. Every American school kid learns that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. You either memorized that or you got it wrong on a quiz at some point. Only some know that Eli got the idea from a slave named Sam. Fewer still know that Sam got the idea from his father. And nobody on Earth knows where Sam’s father got the idea or how many others were working on it concurrently.
The point is that our desire for hero worship and our sweeping tales of lone inventors changing the world is absolute nonsense. It’s garbage. Anyone who talks as if General Relativity would never have come to light without Einstein doesn’t know the first thing about how things come to light. They also probably don’t know about David Hilbert. All they know is how wonderful a story it is that a kid who failed his math classes (not true) and couldn’t get into college (also not true) worked in a patent office and came up with a theory so amazing that no one else could ever have thought of it (latter part definitely not true). It was a bonus that he had crazy hair and was immanently quotable.
All this brings us to a kitchen table where I’m sitting with one of the brightest minds and biggest hearts I’ve ever known, listening to how Elon Musk is one of the most important people who ever lived, because electric cars would never have existed without him. Not only was this conversation disappointing and wrong, it highlighted something for me as we pushed back and forth. Even when it’s accepted that Elon acquires companies rather than inventing anything, the same folks suggest that Elon’s antics are worth it because he makes progress quicker than we otherwise would.
This point I gladly grant. And looking back at the most colossal assholes of human history, they do have a tendency to get where they are going faster than people who are saddled with compassion, empathy, values, or an adherence to truth and laws. Cheaters, indeed, get ahead. Cutting corners shaves time. All of this is true.
But is it what we want?
Going back to Kevin’s book, we know that electric self-driving cars powered by a green grid are a technological certainty. How and when we arrive at that point are open for debate and modification. The current system that we’ve settled on is to reward jerks like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk for berating employees so that they might squeeze a little more juice out of them. By giving into our inherent hero worship and the very wrong narrative of how things are invented, we feel beholden to those who cut corners and break laws. We are blind to the fact that we could build different incentives and arrive at the same place just a little bit later while rewarding better behaved humans.
But nope. We’re in such a rush and have such a confused idea of how things are made, that we’d rather arrive early with assholes. And we only have ourselves to blame.
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