The Archaeology of Innovation
In yet another mind-blowing seminar at the Long Now Foundation, Professor Sander E. van der Leeuw condensed millions of years of biological evolution, the archaeology of tools, cities and empires, and revolutions of innovation into a cogent socioecological presentation. He began by reviewing the research on short-term working memory (STWM) and encephalization as a metrics for quantifying human evolution and human development. For example, an adult human can keep approximately 7 concepts in short-term memory, STWM = 7 (+/- 2), while chimpanzees demonstrate an STWM of 3, which is the same as a human infant. By analyzing the complexity of tools made by human ancestors, van der Leeuw presented a timeline of STWM increasing in step with mastery over 2D and 3D concepts (e.g., blade lines and spear heads) and eventually composition and staged manufactoring, i.e., the 4th dimension of time. All of this was to make the point that we arrived at our current biological evolutionary state around 10,000 years ago and haven’t changed much since. This marks the begining of an era of innovation cycles that were not possible before such evolution and that are perhaps inescapable without further evolution.
The innovation cycles can be understood in the context of villages forming cities, and clusters of cities forming empires. Now imagine the abstraction of energy (e.g., food, water, infrastructure) going in to these increasingly complex organizations while innovation is coming out. Cities require energy and in turn support innovation; Innovation allows growth, which increases energy demand. If they fail to innovate (due to depleted resources or mounting infrastructure problems), then they collapse. Yet innovation leads to a cascade of new challenges that must be paced in order to manage the risk spectrum. It’s basically one great big Ponzi scheme, where we are wholly dependent on innovation. There is a perceptual cycle at work here as well. A cycle between us adapting to nature and adapting nature to us.
The major innovations thus far have been our mastery over spatial and temporal dimensions (tools, writing, agriculture, etc) and our mastery of energy (Industrial Revolution). We are now in the beginning of an Information Revolution, which must provide new solutions to the problems generated by past innovations. Can we effectively increase our STWM by reducing the dimensions of problem space using computation? Can we understand the phenomena of innovation itself to attempt sustainability? Can we distribute information control to the individual, allowing population densities to spread and define new city-concepts that are more robust? How will we manage the coming innovations in nanotech and biotech as a society? What new challenges will these innovations create?
