Meeting of the Mind

Breakthrough myth crumbles away, revealing Blue Horizons

Col. Ted Hailes (U.S. Air Force, retired), at a presentation to the Arlington Technology Association [slides] on the Air Force Blue Horizons program, made a powerful statement:  the greatest impact on technological progress comes from the synergy of underlying disciplines, not prioritizing and defunding particular technologies.  In other words, advances are made by a lot of agents working together (intentionally or unintentionally), not attention-grabbing revolutionary Next Big Things.  Those do occur occasionally, but whether innovation is disruptive or not may depend on the scope of the analysis.

This is echoed in “Clive Thompson on The Breakthrough Myth,” an essay in the August 2001 Wired by Clive Thompson (who blogs at Collision Detection).  He credits Bill Buxton, “a pioneer in computer graphics who is now a principal researcher at Microsoft, with the “long nose theory” of innovation:  “Big ideas poke their noses into the world very slowly, easing gradually into view.”  Essentially, ideas that are good but insignificant can catch on, often in other domains, after a period of time.  Thus they have “surprising obviousness.”  In other words, upon the arrival of a novel idea or product, the evidence has been there.  To predict the future, Buxton recommends “prospecting and mining” fields of endeavor.  That word, “mining,” immediately suggests data mining, a technology only starting to be exploited–we see only the tip of the nose, so far.

The Blue Horizons model bears some resemblance to the decentralized structure of human brain processing:  there is some degree of localization, but scans of cognition representing the greatest human achievement show almost the whole cortex lighting up–a large neural network, which actually has high efficiency.