| Title | : | Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0262046385 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780262046381 |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 432 |
| Publication | : | Published November 2, 2021 |
The history of humanity is the history of big ideas that expand our frontiers--from the wheel to space flight, cave painting to the massively multiplayer game, monotheistic religion to quantum theory. And yet for the past few decades, apart from a rush of new gadgets and the explosion of digital technology, world-changing ideas have been harder to come by. Since the 1970s, big ideas have happened incrementally--recycled, focused in narrow bands of innovation. In this provocative book, Michael Bhaskar looks at why the flow of big, world-changing ideas has slowed, and what this means for the future.
Bhaskar argues that the challenge at the frontiers of knowledge has arisen not because we are unimaginative and bad at realizing big ideas but because we have already pushed so far. If we compare the world of our great-great-great-grandparents to ours today, we can see how a series of transformative ideas revolutionized almost everything in just a century and a half. But recently, because of short-termism, risk aversion, and fractious decision making, we have built a cautious, unimaginative world. Bhaskar shows how we can start to expand the frontier again by thinking big--embarking on the next Universal Declaration of Human Rightsor Apollo mission--and embracing change.
Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking Reviews
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DNF.
Michael, no matter how many statistics you put in to make the same point over and bloody over again, this book still won’t justify any of your arguments.
A bunch of stupid opinions from a tired, grumpy, old man.
Gave up as he wrote “much of what formerly constituted counterculture is now vapid, toothless, deracinated… music isn’t the heartland of a broiling subculture so much as an accessible, easily digestible menu to be sampled from at will.” -
Are we reaching the limit of progress?
Yes. We are spending more and more to get less and less. We have more researchers now but no ground breaking discoveries.
1. All the Low hanging fruits are taken
2. The new problems are much harder (space VS air travel), 3. It now takes much longer to learn what is already known and older researchers are not as creative…
4: Financialization causes investors to chase steady income from established companies. Retirement funds already are the biggest investors so aging societies become more and more risk averse
5. Universities play it safe, recruiting professors who think alike, publish lots of papers to improve their ranking. Einstein will not survive as a professor now
6. Competition breeds efforts in research spending. Sputnik moments gel the nation together and increase research spending.
7. We are still working to prove Einstein’s theory from the last century. Movie franchises are from last century (Spider-Man and Avenger comics, Star Wars). Art Noveau has already been discovered. There are no more new music genres. The list goes on.
No.
1. AI will help speed up solutions, not only in chess and Go but also in protein folding prediction.
2. Quantum computers will be able to do calculations at unthinkable speed.
3. Biotechnology with CRISPR will help us insert or change our defective genes easily.
4: international collaborations will improve research. More women and racial diversity will help the output in companies and universities.
Suggestions:
1. For individuals: have a hobby. Read outside your field. Meet different people for cross pollination of ideas. Be bold and try new things.
2. For schools; Montessori style self driven learning.
3. For companies, universities and countries: am encourage risk taking. Embrace failure as most will fail but some will succeed with explosive results.
4. Diversify the work teams.
A great book! -
So much fun. Where did all the big ideas go? Are they becoming irreversibly
harder to find? Are we witnessing a '
great stagnation', and how might we get out of it?
Facts and stats at firehose rate of delivery. Lighter on overarching theses / arguments — I would have appreciated more careful thinking about how and why working on speeding up 'big idea' generation could actually be a pressing priority, and also about the feasibility of especially long or irrecoverable stagnation. But this was hugely enjoyable; breathless and discursive enough never to drag. More ideas about ideas! -
I was not expecting to enjoy this book as much as I did. Michael Bhaskar did an incredible job writing a book about technology and innovation that didn’t bore the hell out of me. I typically don’t read these types of books, but I saw a lot of buzz about it before it came out. It took me a while to finally read it, but it’s amazing. The book discusses the history of innovation, where big ideas come from, and then it gets into some really interesting topics. Bhaskar discusses how the culture wars and cancel culture stifle innovation, and why that’s an issue. It also discusses the pros and cons of regulation and some of the issues with capitalism when it comes to regulation, which is an extremely important topic. To conclude the book, Bhaskar gives some suggestions and ideas so we can keep innovating, and it’s fantastic. I highly recommend this book.
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The idea that big discoveries have stagnated if not at all vanished always plagues any age. Laments of how the present era falls short of some imagined golden age fill countless books and this book marks the register as the 2021 iteration of that lament.
The only good thing I can say about this book is the writing, it's engaging and very easy to follow, but beyond that I didn't learn anything new from it. It reads like a meta narrative of things you've encountered before in magazines and blog posts. It didn't help that there is no unassailable metric to measure innovation or a big idea. Rising patents come close but they fail spectacularly when you factor in patent trolls. Bhaskar got around this issue by proposing we do a qualitative analysis instead. This is all good but then you can never ran away from the accusation that you are just passing off your biases as "qualitative judgement." Large swathes of this book turned into long laments about how the current state of academia stifles "big ideas" but then across centuries big ideas have always been stifled. Almost all big ideas have their creator being jailed or at worse burnt at the stake for heresy. Our era just buries them in paperwork and endless proposal writing to no end.
I for one will not join in the indictment of the current generation. Sometimes it is okay to make marginal gains and this current era gets a pat on the back for dedicating its energies towards social justice. A quest for fairness is far more admirable than some sweeping conclusions which will most likely be proven wrong in the next generation.
This book had a promising canvass but failed to deliver on a worthy sight. Years back I read a book written around a similar topic, I have regrettably forgotten the title, but that book's author instead of joining in the lament chose to write about ideas on the "cutting edge" where it's hard to make a call whether they are genius or advanced quackery. There were ideas on alternate theories to the meteor impact as a cause for dinosaur extinction (I have never fully bought it and prefer the volcanic theory instead), theories on the pre-big bang universe and many other truly interesting topics. This is how you prosecute this thesis but if you have a penchant for self righteous tirades, you can glean some content from this book. It is not a bad book, it just could have been better. -
Disclaimer: I personally know the author and have worked with him in the past.
The evolution of Michael as a writer is clear. From a deep and complex approach to the theory of publishing, he went on to write Curation, which is still to me the best book on content and digital I’ve found.
With Human Frontiers, he tackles an even bigger issue, such as the future of humanity and the limits we will have as society and culture.
I see the book as three different ones. The first one and longer is amazingly lucid and hard on us, almost negative. It’s the part that most impacted me. I had never read, what, 200 pages, telling me, to my face, that we are f***ed. With data and analysis. At that moment I purchased two new copies for two of my colleagues because I wanted them to see this part.
The second one is more optimistic, and, maybe, more “standard”, but nevertheless very well written. We have options to continue our evolution as a society as a whole, but we need to take responsibilities.
The third one, very short, was pure imagination. What could happen if all goes extremely well? Maybe because I was still deeply thinking about the first part, I didn’t truly enjoy it.
But even some days after finishing the first part, and after reading the whole book, I still find fascinating tidbits that are shaping my latest thinking and writing. I really recommend this work. -
First heard of this book via a radio interview in which the author alludes to a few interesting points which led me to buying the book.
Similar thoughts to many of the reviews here. The author makes a worthy attempt to back up their ideas through drawing across historical and current stats. The research makes for an interesting read for the first quarter of the book. But at some point, the book starts to waffle and it becomes incredibly difficult to follow what the chapter is trying to convey.
Because of this I found it difficult to complete the latter half of the book as the chapters drone on and jump about. There needs to be more structure and it could have been cut down to be more concise.
The idea of the book is great, the research is thorough but the delivery is all over the place. -
The first half of the book is pessimistic but thought-provoking. As a civilization, we seem to have reached a point of saturation in breakthrough ideas and technologies. Michael explores the reasons for this and it's fascinating.
In the second half, he does look at recent big ideas and explores ways we can break the innovation bottleneck. -
4.5 stars. Recommended reading!
