People want to do things more easily,
become more profitable, or simply 'do something new,' and
these are the seeds of innovation.
Today, the building blocks that people innovate with can be
far more complex than those in the past. You can create a more
interesting innovation out of an integrated circuit that
contains 42-million transistors today - a Pentium 4 - than you
could out of a few single discrete transistors 30 years ago.
Or today's building blocks can be far more basic (such as
using Atomic Force Microscopes to push individual atoms around
into just the right structure.) These differences in scale
determine, in part, why today's innovations seem more
dramatic.
But at its heart, innovation is a human concept, and it takes
good ideas and persuasion to convince people to adopt the
resulting changes. Machines don't (yet) innovate. And they
may never do so, unless they develop that spark of self-
awareness that (so far) uniquely characterizes living things.
Even if we get to the point where we convince our computers to
write their own programs, at this point it does not seem that
they will go beyond the goals that we set for them.
Pages:
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263