Why has the flow of big, world-changing ideas slowed down? A
provocative look at what happens next at the frontiers of human
knowledge.
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 Rights or Apollo mission--and embracing change.
