I was recently idly watching the film based on Jules Verne’s novel, “Around the World in Eighty Days,” and realized a thought that perfectly fits our picture of the world. What do the gentleman Phileas Fogg and, say, Steve Jobs have in common? It seems like nothing. One is a fictional character from the Victorian era, the other is a real titan of Silicon Valley. But the point is that both pulled off a brilliant trick that’s available to each of us. And they didn’t need endless government grants or major scientific centers for this.
What was Fogg’s genius? Did he invent super-fast steamboats? Build a personal hyperloop? No! This guy didn’t invent anything himself. His bet became possible only because, by 1872, the world was already covered with ready infrastructure. Steamships were running, rails had been laid across America and India, telegraphs were buzzing. All of this was created by different people, different companies, at different times and for different purposes.
What did Fogg do? He simply looked at all these disparate pieces and first saw in them a single system. He didn’t just see “the ship to Suez” and “the train to Calcutta,” but a global transport network that could be “hacked”—that is, used not for its intended purpose (just getting from point A to point B), but for a crazy, ambitious task—flying around the planet on a bet. His breakthrough was in the new combination, not in a new invention. He was, essentially, a brilliant project manager who found synergy in what everyone else had lying under their feet.
And now let’s move to our time. Don’t we see the same thing happening with the greatest breakthroughs of the last 50 years? For example, the personal computer. It wasn’t an invention of something single. It was a brilliant combination of existing things: microprocessors, hard drives, monitors, keyboards, mice. The breakthrough was in the idea of putting it all together and placing it on a desk for an ordinary person. Or the internet—just a set of common rules (protocols), the language that already existing computers had agreed to communicate with each other. Genius was in creating this “language,” this universal interface. Don’t forget about smartphones. Steve Jobs, during the presentation of the first iPhone, said: “This isn’t one device. It’s three: a phone, a widescreen player, and an internet communicator.” Apple didn’t invent mobile communication, touchscreen displays, or GPS. They took the best that was already on the market, brilliantly combined it into one body, wrote intuitive software, and gave us the Swiss Army knife of the digital age.
The most important thing is that such breakthroughs don’t require an accelerator or a NASA budget. What’s needed is freedom of thought, observation, and the right to experiment. You, the reader of this post, can come up with tomorrow how to combine two known technologies and get something that will change the world.
What prevents this most of all? Of course, the good old bureaucracy. Imagine if Foggu had to get a visa for every border crossing, like residents of many countries with “weak” passports? He’d still be filling out an application somewhere in Mumbai. It’s state regulation, with its passion for “organizing,” “certifying,” and “checking,” that kills the very flexibility and speed needed for combinatorial breakthroughs. While officials are writing regulations on using drones to deliver pizza, free enthusiasts are already figuring out how to use those same drones and neural networks to monitor forest fires.
So, friends, the next great breakthrough is probably already here – just in the form of disparate parts. All the necessary technologies, services, and ideas are already on the table. What’s more, our project to find drugs to enhance violence inhibition was achieved with minimal means by analyzing existing neuroscience research and re-checking widely available animal drugs. And between you and me, ethology doesn’t end on the problem of violence, nor do our studies!
