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Technological Genius Is Timeliness, Not Inspiration
Hugh Pickens writes "Ezra Klein has an interesting essay in the Washington Post about 'simultaneous invention,' where technology advances to the point that the next step is obvious to multiple people at once, and so they all push forward with the same or similar inventions. While the natural capabilities of human beings don't change much from year to year, their environments do, and so does the technology and store of knowledge they can access. 'The idea of the lone genius who has the eureka moment where they suddenly get a great idea that changes the world is not just the exception,' says Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, 'but almost nonexistent.' Consider Adam Goldberg's CU Community, created in 2003 at Columbia University, a social network that launched first and had cooler features than Facebook, with options for pictures and integrated blogging software. Klein writes, 'Zuckerberg's dominance can be attributed partly to the clean interface of his site, partly to the cachet of the Harvard name and partly to luck. But the difference between Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Goldberg was very small, while the difference between what Mark Zuckerberg could do and what the smartest college kid in 1999 could do was huge. It was the commons supporting them both that really mattered.'"
Actually, all of those examples you cite may have tanked because their inventors sold them. Think about it. Once the creative drive and the instinct to do what's cool leaves the product, and is replaced by a lot of investment money that wants to monetize the cool in order to realize ROI, what do you think happens?
I predict that Facebook will do well as long as Zuckerberg retains control over it. Once he is no longer in charge of things, it will falter.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
You know how in Asimov's Foundation one person planned what would happen over future generations? How he solved mathematically the equations of society? It was great science fiction.
There are people who actually believe that is possible. People like Niklas Luhmann are trying to figure out how to arrange such a society. BF Skinner was also a man who thought along those lines.
Now, to these people, technological advances are inevitable; based on sheer probability and mathematics, the wheel was 'destined' to be invented when it did, and so was Facebook. The actual geniuses themselves don't matter, since they would be replaced by another if they weren't around. It is in fact necessary for this to be so, at least to a certain degree, or their entire theory fall apart (how can you otherwise predict the arrival of a genius, a singular event?) The article is basing itself on this line of thought.
The problem I see with it is that genius actually does matter. If we all sit down and wait for new inventions because 'surely someone will do it' then no one will do it. A single person can change the course of a nation, and it is impossible to predict individual people (if a single person didn't matter, why would the Chinese government care so much about Liu XiaoBao?)
Qxe4
Nothing. No one needs your steam engine. No one is able to manufacture an internal combustion machine or even refine the gasoline for it. No one has any use for electricity. There is not enough copper being mined to make for a decent wiring. You are missing the whole infrastructure to create large amounts of steel. No one has an idea how to process iron into steel in an industrial process (again a game changing invention with at least two inventors: Henry Bessemer and William Kelly), and the process in a forge with remelting and reforging iron until it is malleable is slow and expensive.
It's the argument of someone who isn't a genius to claim that genius does not exist, or is really nothing special. Anyone can throw a football, or bang on a drum. Doing it with the practice and timing to actually entertain, or to reliably reach a wide receiver, or to achieve what Zuckerberg with the interface that people _accepted_ takes some noticeable skill.
Skill != Genius
Being able to entertain somebody with a drum or win a game with a football certainly takes skill. Skill that I do not have. But it does not take genius.
Building a nice website also takes skill. It's a skill that I do not have. But it does not take genius.
Genius is not skill, it is vision. It is seeing things that others cannot. You could argue that perhaps Babbage was a genius, since he saw a computing machine long before anyone else did. But Zuckerberg didn't build his website decades before anyone else. Other folks had the same idea at about the same time. Because it had become virtually obvious.
Which is the whole argument. That as technology progresses, and innovations pile atop innovations, it takes less and less vision to see something new. Until eventually it's right there in your face and somebody is going to "invent" it almost by accident.
"If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants."
If you stack up enough giants, anyone can see anything.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Well... you could improve manufacture of glass and/or ceramics, and totally own the market. You would know how silk is made and facilitate smuggling of the right insects. Same for growing spices in various parts of the world. Timekeeping technology, even just the mechanical kind, would make marine navigation much more accurate and safe. Then there are all sorts of medical stuff; even just the idea of disinfection and microorganisms would be a big breakthrough back then. And do not forget military technologies; all sorts of little improvements here and there, together with the money brought to your city-state by your inventions applied to production of luxury goods, could turn your area into a local economic/military hegemon.