Effervescent and illuminating… the TED advisory board retreat.
Our brain spa catalyst:
“With benefit of hindsight, looking back over the past 30 years, what really happened?! What surprised us? What disappointed? What are the most significant trends that emerged that are continuing to shape our world? What new, perhaps unexpected, bodies of knowledge emerged? What new puzzles?
And what does this perspective tell us about the future? Dare we be optimistic? On what grounds? What should we be most fearful of? What are the under-reported facts, trends or technologies that will be pivotal in shaping the future? What is the hardest question you’re wrestling with? What are you most excited about?”
One of the participants brought a list of the top 25 inventions since 4 BCE and the invention of the wheel, a list that had been collaboratively compiled by several bright minds prior:
1) water filtration
2) inorganic fertilizer
3) electrification
4) indoor plumbing and sewage
5) vaccines and antibiotics
6) automobiles
7) printing press
8 ) pasteurization and refrigeration
9) flat currency and credit cards
10) telephone
11) integrated circuits
12) PC
13) Internet
14) Software programming
15) radio and television
16) Airplane
17) Search engines
18) Batteries
19) Eyeglasses
20) Cement and steel for construction
21) Assembly line
22) Standardized freight carriage
23) Atomic bomb
24) medical imaging
25) Genomic technologies
To rank the list, ask a test question for each pairing: if you had to give up one of two sequential items on the list, which would it be? If you would rather have fertilizer than clean water, then you’d swap 1 and 2 on the list.
And so, I disagreed with the consensus that came before us in that I would give up water filtration before I’d give up the scientific method. The scientific method was missing altogether (as a process innovation often overlooked in a sea of point products), but I suggested it should be number one. And would we want to include other process technologies like constitutional democracy or entrepreneurial finance? I also suggested that machine learning should be on the list if we look back to the present from the future. And some like “radio, television” would not stand the test of time as standalone concepts, increasingly irrelevant today.
Thinking 30 years into the past or future is difficult these days. Issac Asimov did it in 1964, predicting the cutting edge technology issues 50 years in the future, in the year 2014… I post some interesting tidbits below…
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