Synopsis
To paraphrase Heidegger, to
build a new vision of the world, you first must understand what it means to
live in it.
 |
Clockwise:
Richard Feynman,
Vannevar Bush, Tim Berners-Lee
& Marshall
McLuhan
|
Successful people solve problems. Look at
any great fortune, whether it be Carnegie, Ford or Gates and you find that the
source of their vast accomplishment was a problem solved. Even more
prosaic executives spend most of their time solving one problem or another, with
greater or lesser skill.
The contrast in outcomes can be attributed
to the scale and difficulty of the problems they tackled. All too often,
we get so mired down in day-to-day challenges that the bigger issues fall by
the wayside, being left for another day which never seems to come. That,
in the final analysis, is the difference between the mundane and the sublime.
So we should pay special attention to those
whose ideas had impact far beyond their own lifespan. It is they who were
able to see not only the problems of their day, but ones that, although they
seemed minor or trivial at the time, would become consequential—even
determinant—in years to come. Here are four such men and what we can
learn from them.
Vannevar Bush and the Emerging
Frontier of Science
By any measure, Vannevar Bush was a man of
immense accomplishment. A professor at MIT who invented one of the first working computers, he also co-founded Raytheon, a US$30 billion
dollar company that prospers to this day.
Yet even these outsized achievements pale in
comparison to how Bush fundamentally changed the relationship of science to
greater society. In the late 1930’s, as the winds of war began to stir in
Europe, Bush saw that the coming conflict would not be won by bullets and bombs
alone. Science, he saw, would likely tip the balance between victory and
defeat.
As the war came to a close, President Roosevelt
asked Bush to write a report on how the success of the OSRD could be replicated
in peacetime. That report, Science: The EndlessFrontier, outlined a new vision of the relationship between public and
private investment, with government expanding scientific horizons and industry
developing new applications.
He wrote:
Basic
research leads to new knowledge. It provides scientific capital. It creates the
fund from which the practical applications of knowledge must be drawn. New
products and new processes do not appear full-grown. They are founded on new
principles and new conceptions, which in turn are painstakingly developed by
research in the purest realms of science
Oh, and he also wrote an essay in 1945 that not only laid out what would become
the Internet, but influenced many of the key pioneers who designed it.
Marshall McLuhan and the Global
Village
Where Vannevar Bush saw the transformative
potential of science, Marshal McLuhan was one of the first to see the subtle,
but undeniable influence of popular culture. While many at the time
thought of mass media as merely the flotsam and jetsam of the modern age,
he saw that the study of things like newspapers, radio and TV could yield
important insights.
Central to his ideas about culture was his
concept of media as “extensions of man.” Following this line of thought,
he argued that Gutenberg’s printing press not only played a role in spreading
information, but also in shaping human thought. Essentially, the medium is the message. Interestingly, these ideas led him to very much the same
place as Bush.
As he wrote in 1962*, nearly 30 years before the
invention of the World Wide Web:
The next medium,
whatever it is—it may be the extension of consciousness—will include television
as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an
art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance
retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s
encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of
a saleable kind.
McLuhan argued further that the new age of
electronic media would disrupt the private experience and specialization that
the dominance of printed media brought about and usher in a new era of
collective, transnational experience that he called the global village.
Anybody who watches global news networks or surfs the Web can see what he
meant.
Importantly, however, he did not see the global
village as a peaceful place. Rather than promoting widespread harmony and
understanding, he predicted that the ability to share experiences across vast
chasms of time and space would lead to a new form of tribalism, a result in a
“release of human power and aggressive violence” greater than ever in history.
It has become all too clear what he meant by that
as well.
Richard Feynman Sees “Plenty of Room
at the Bottom”
When Richard Feynman stepped
up to the podium to address the American Physical Society in 1959, he had
already gained a reputation as both an accomplished scientist and an iconoclast
(during his tenure at the Manhattan project, he became famous for his
safecracking and other pranks).
His talk, modestly titled There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom would launch a revolution in physics and engineering that
continues to play out to this day. Starting from a seemingly innocent
question about shrinking an encyclopedia down to the size of a postage stamp,
he proceeded over the next hour to invent the new field of nanotechnology.
The talk, which is surprisingly easy and fun to
read, also gives a fascinating window into how a genius thinks. After pondering the problem of shrinking things down to the
size of molecules, he proposes some solutions, then thinks some more about what
issues those ideas would create, proposes some more fixes and on and on until a
full picture emerged.
One of the most astounding things about Feynman
is that his creation of nanotechnology was not a one-off, but part of a larger
trend. He was also a pioneer
in parallel computing and did important
work in virology. All of this in addition to his day job as a
physicist, for which he won the Nobel prize in 1965.
Tim Berners-Lee Creates a Web of
Data
Tim Berners-Lee is most famous for his creation
of the World Wide Web. In November 1989, he created the three protocols—HTTP, URL and
HTML—that we now know as the “Web” and released his creation to the world,
refusing to patent it. Later, he helped set up the W3C consortium that
continues to govern and manage its growth and further development.
The truth is, however, that the Web wasn’t a
product of any great vision, but rather a solution to a particular problem that
he encountered at CERN.
Physicists would come there from all over the world, work for a period of
time and then leave. Unfortunately, they recorded their work in a
labyrinth of different platforms and protocols that didn’t work well together.
So Berners-Lee set out to solve that problem by
creating a universal medium that could link information together. He never
dreamed it would grow into what it did. If he had, he would have built it
differently. He wrote at length about these frustrations in his
memoir, Weaving the Web. Chief among them was the fact that while the Web connected
people, it did little for data.
So he envisioned a second web, which he called
the Semantic Web. Much like his earlier creation, the idea outstripped even what
he imagined for it. New protocols, such as Hadoop and Spark,
have made data central to how today’s technology functions. Increasingly,
we’re living in a semantic economy,
where information knows no bounds and everything connects.
The Best Way to Predict the Future
Is to Create It
Take a hard look at these four visionaries and
some common themes emerge. First, all except McLuhan took an active role
in bringing their ideas into realities. Bush played a central role in
implementing the scientific architecture he designed. Feynman offered
prizes for people who could make things at nanoscale and Berners-Lee continues
to take an active role at W3C.
Another commonality is that, while their ideas
didn’t meet with immediate acceptance, they stuck with them. McLuhan’s
ideas made him an outcast for much of his career until he became an
international celebrity in his fifties. Berners-Lee created the Web
partly out of frustration after the hypertext community wouldn’t pursue it.
Bush and Feynman met less resistance, but were already prominent in their
fields.
Probably most importantly, none of them were
following trends. Rather, they set out to uncover fundamental forces.
It was that quest for basic understanding that led them to ask questions
and find answers that nobody else could imagine at the time. They weren’t
just looking to solve the problems of their day, but sought out problems that
transcended time.
In effect, they were able to see the future
because they cared about it. Their motivation wasn’t to beat the market,
impress a client or attract funding for a startup, but to understand more about
how the universe functions and what could be made possible. In doing so,
they helped us see it too, so that we could also join in and make the world a
better place.
Or, to paraphrase Heidegger, to build a new vision of the world, you first must understand
what it means to live in it.
– Greg
*Note: After publishing this
article on Forbes, Andrew McLuhan, the grandson of Marshal McLuhan,
contacted me questioning the provenance of the quote I cited as coming from
1962. He says that it is, in fact, a combination of two separate quotes
from two different times. Here’a an excerpt of our discussion: “The
first part of the statement comes from a speech Marshall gave at a conference
in 1965 in Illinois called “Address at Vision 65”. The second part was taken
from a book by Bruce Powers and Marshall McLuhan, part of a recorded
conversation on page 143. It remains a bit of a mystery as to how the two
separate parts were cobbled together, and indeed why they were attributed to
the Gutenberg Galaxy. Coupland likely got it off the web, where it’s attributed
thus… and everyone along the line just assumes it must be a correct citation.”
Greg Satell is a popular speaker and
consultant. His first book Mapping Innovation, came out in 2017. Follow his
blog at Digital Tonto or on Twitter @DigitalTonto
