The Alchemy of Us – Ainissa Ramirez

The Alchemy of Us – by Ainissa Ramirez
Recommendation: 8/10. Date read: 12/22/20.

Details eight inventions—clocks, steel rails, copper communication cables, photographic film, light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips—and ties together not only how the invention came about, but how each invention came to shape humanity and culture. It’s an interesting examination of how technology is both a reflection of the environment it was born in and how it can alter the ways we think about and interact with the world for generations. Ramirez breathes life into each invention with stories from interesting figures throughout history—if you enjoy Bill Bryson, you’ll enjoy this. It’s also a sobering reminder of ethical considerations and responsibilities that those building technology have in our society.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Technology shapes us for generations:
Prose was shortened by the telegraph—removed all unnecessary words avoided flowery language and adjectives. Shaped American English. At a telegrapher’s office when news broke, there was a 15-minute limit and messages had to be brief (you were also charged per word). Led to code language in newsrooms (POTUS, SCOTUS, OK). 

Technology reflects biases of the time:
Early film was only developed to properly capture the characteristics and features of white individuals. Pictures of blacks were always underexposed and lost features of their faces/turned them into ink blots. 

“Technologies we make are not innocuous and their use is not always for the greater good. Technologies, such as photographic film, also capture the issues and beliefs and values of the times.” AR

“These devices capture the biases that exist in our world and, in turn, speak to whom a culture values. As our technologies become more pervasive in our lives, whom they were built for and optimized for will be an important discussion.” AR

Depth:
“If we were to read a book, we would be fully submerged in the details and nuance of another world and swim in the deep end. The internet, however, is a worldwide wading pool. We slosh in the superficial because we have reached a critical point for what our brains can hold.” AR

Creativity:
“Creativity is not just the warehousing of ideas, but a process of giving the brain time to simmer on these ideas. Creativity requires preparation, but it also needs incubation.” AR

Creativity requires you to be exposed to and absorb the world. But it also requires time alone so you’re able to achieve a state of relaxed concentration and give yourself the cycles to examine and reassemble the fragments in your own way. 

The way most use the internet hinders deep thinking: “Our hunting and gathering minds exist in an age where there is nothing to physically hunt or gather, so our brains get trapped in the cycle of hunting and gathering ‘follows’ and ‘likes’ on social media.”

How Innovation Works – Matt Ridley

How Innovation Works – by Matt Ridley
Recommendation: 8/10. Date read: 9/17/20.

Examines the role of innovation—an often misunderstood concept—in the modern age. He discusses the environmental conditions that promote innovation, how it differs from “invention,” and how our idea of a single moment of brilliance as the key to technological advances is flat out wrong. For those in technology who are on the ground floor doing the work, the message will be refreshing. Ridley emphasizes how iteration is the key to innovation—you have to get as many reps in as possible to turn an invention into something that’s both practical and affordable for widespread use. The story of innovation is one of incremental improvements and the freedom to exchange, experiment, imagine, invest, and fail.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Simultaneous Invention:
“Again and again, simultaneous invention marks the progress of technology as if there is something ripe about the moment. It does not necessarily imply plagiarism. In this case, the combination of better metalworking, more interest in mining and a scientific fascination with vacuums had come together in north-western Europe to make a rudimentary steam engine almost inevitable.”

“It was impossible for search engines not to be invented in the 1990s, and impossible for light bulbs not to be invented in the 1870s. They were inevitable. The state of the underlying technologies had reached the point where they would be bound to appear, no matter who was around.”

Brilliance vs. Hard Work:
“Vanity: people prefer to be thought brilliant rather than mere hard-working.”

Ingredients of Innovation:
Tolerance of error is critical: “Innovation is itself a product, the manufacturing of which is a team effort requiring trial and error.”

“The main ingredient in the secret sauce that leads to innovation is freedom. Freedom to exchange, experiment, imagine, invest and fail; freedom from the expropriation or restriction by chiefs, priests and thieves.” 

Revolution vs. Evolution:
Gradual improvements = key to iteration. “The history of turbines and electricity is profoundly gradual not marked by any sudden step changes…It was an evolution, not a series of revolutions. The key inventions along the way each built upon the previous one and made the next one possible.”

Innovation is the “product of incremental tinkering and trial and error by several people, not of brilliant leaps if imagination by a genius.” 

“Innovation is not an individual phenomenon, but a collective, incremental and messy network phenomenon.”

“The idea of a single moment of inspiration, of the apple landing on young Isaac Newton’s head, stirs the soul, even if it turns out to be apocryphal. In contrast, the idea that innovation occurs in fits and starts, with one person adapting a concept already in use and another figuring out how to make a profit from it, has little appeal.” Marc Levinson

“There is no day when you can say: computers did not exist the day before and did the day after, any more than you could say that one ape-person was an ape and her daughter was a person.”

The Arch of Innovation:
“The story of the internal-combustion engine displays the usual feature of an innovation: a long and deep prehistory characterized by failure; a shorter period marked by an improvement in affordability characterized by simultaneous patenting and rivalries; and a subsequent story of evolutionary improvement by trial and error.” 

“The simplest ingredients—which had always been there—can produce the most improbable outcome if combined in ingenious ways…just through the rearrangement of molecules and atoms in patterns far from thermodynamic equilibrium.” 

Opposition to Innovation:
“Big companies are bad at innovating, because they are too bureaucratic, have too big a vested interest in the status quo and stop paying attention to the interests, actual and potential, of their customers. Thus for innovation to flourish it is vital to have an economy that encourages or at least allows outsiders, challengers and disruptors to get a foothold. This means openness to competition, which historically is a surprisingly rare feature of most societies.”

Other characteristics that are in opposition to innovation: an appeal to safety, a degree of self-interest among vested interests, paranoia among the powerful.