Just finished reading Ridley's article on innovation. Interesting read and fascinating title. I like the optimism in his view point of innovation as an unstoppable force.
"...But so long as it can hop from country to country and from industry to industry, discovery is a fast-breeder chain reaction; innovation is a feedback loop; invention is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Equilibrium and stagnation are not only avoidable in a free-exchanging world. They are impossible. "
A very interesting and counter intuitive argument he made was that historically, most innovations and technological changes came out before or without the theoretical contribution of the scientists. I will post my reflections on this later. Here is an excerpt from his article:
"...It used to be popular to argue that the European scientific revolution of the 17th century unleashed the rational curiosity of the educated classes, whose theories were then applied in the form of new technologies, which in turn allowed standards of living to rise. But history shows this account is backward. Few of the inventions that made the industrial revolution owed anything to theory.
It is true that England had a scientific revolution in the late 1600s, but the influence of scientists like Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke on what happened in England’s manufacturing industry in the following century was negligible. The industry that was transformed first and most, cotton spinning and weaving, was of little interest to scientists. The jennies, gins, frames, mules, and looms that revolutionized the working of cotton were invented by tinkering businessmen, not thinking boffins. It has been said that nothing in their designs would have puzzled Archimedes.
Even the later stages of the industrial revolution are replete with examples of technologies that were developed in remarkable ignorance of why they worked. This was especially true in the biological world. Aspirin was curing headaches for more than a century before anybody had the faintest idea of how. Penicillin’s ability to kill bacteria was finally understood around the time bacteria learned to defeat it.
Most technological change comes from attempts to improve existing technology. It happens on the shop floor among apprentices and mechanics or in the workplace among the users of computer programs, and only rarely as a result of the application and transfer of knowledge from the ivory tower...."
