Beauty At Work

The Evolution of Beauty and the Beauty of Innovation with Matt Ridley - S4 E2 (Part 2 of 2)

• Brandon Vaidyanathan

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In Episode 2 of this season, we explore the evolution of beauty (especially in birds) and the beauty of innovation, with guest Matt Ridley.

Matt Ridley's books have sold over a million copies, been translated into 31 languages and won several awards. His books include The Red Queen, Genome, The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything, How Innovation Works, and Viral: the search for the origin of covid-19 (co-authored with Alina Chan). His latest book is Birds, Sex, and Beauty.

He served the House of Lords between 2013 and 2021 and served on the science and technology select committee and the artificial intelligence select committee.

He was founding chairman of the International Centre for Life in Newcastle. He created the Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal in 2010 and was a columnist for the Times 2013-2018.

 He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives in Northumberland.

In this episode, we talk about:

  1. The myth of “disruptive innovation” and the overlooked beauty of incremental progress
  2. The real relationship between basic science and technology
  3. Why Ridley still calls himself a “rational optimist”
  4. Why freedom, not brilliance, is the secret sauce of innovation
  5. How universities and industry can collaborate to keep creativity alive


To learn more about Matt’s work, you can find him at: https://www.mattridley.co.uk/ 

Books and resources mentioned:

This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust.

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(Intro)

Brandon: Hey everybody, this is part two of my conversation with Matt Ridley. Please check out part one if you haven't already. In part one we traced Matt's journey from childhood bird watching to his lifelong fascination with evolution and explored why Darwin saw beauty as driving sexual selection.In this half we're going to shift from talking about evolution to human innovation. Matt is going to unpack for us why innovation is usually incremental rather than disruptive, why the myth of the lone inventor misleads us and how freedom and collaboration fuel progress. We also talk about the burdens of innovation from social media to artificial intelligence and why Matt is overall more bullish when it comes to innovation despite its challenges.Let's get started.

(interview)

Matt: So, in my book, How Innovation Works, I set out to try and understand what innovation is—why it happens, when and where it does, and what are the general themes that emerge from it. The way I did this — it was only once I'd started writing the book that I realized the right way to do this was to tell a bunch of stories. Each chapter has about 5 or 10 stories in it of innovations that were really significant—sometimes there were failures as well—and what are the lessons you can draw from them. The same lessons kept coming around again and again and again. Things like great inventors always talk about the importance of trial and error. They don't expect to get it right the first time; they need to do a bunch of experiments and fail. Things like it's not just about inventing a prototype; it's also about making it reliable, affordable, and available to people. There's a lot of innovation that goes into that. Jeff Bezos made e-commerce into something that we could all use, but he didn't invent it. He wouldn't claim to it. Things like the importance of serendipity. Quite often, inventors think they're inventing something, and then they invent something else. Stephanie Kwolek was the woman who invented bulletproof vests, Kevlar. That was not what she was trying to do at the time.

Brandon: Sure, yeah.

Matt: So these are the sort of themes that I pulled out. The overarching theme, I said in the end, was freedom. You actually need freedom to experiment, freedom to fail, freedom to try again, freedom to seek backing for your idea, freedom to move to a congenial regime where you can do these things—because quite often, inventors have to leave home and go somewhere else. That's the secret source, in my view, of how innovation works.

Brandon: Now, one of the things that seems to be an obstacle for a lot of us is this sort of lone inventor myth, right? I think when we think about innovation—even in companies and all the sort of business books that are written about innovation—I think part of the rationale is to be able to help you to figure out how to be innovative or help your company to figure out how to be innovative. I think it presents an idea of some kind of individual that is capable of being able to rationally, intentionally innovate. I think your account really contest that. It's much more of an evolutionary, unintentional — as you say, there's trial and error involved. Could you talk a little bit about, like, is it possible to sort of engineer innovation? Can a company or an individual learn how to be innovative?

Matt: Yes, I mean, there's no doubt that some firms get it right more often than others. I think the idea of the lone inventor is a great way to get into this topic because, always, it emerges that it's a much more gradual process than it looks. In other words, we give a Nobel Prize to the bloke who had the eureka moment. But actually, he was standing on the shoulders of other people. And even after his eureka moment, other people had to take his idea and develop it further. His or her—I'm not going to be sexist here. So that's one feature.

But the other feature, the way we've talked about innovation in the past has, in my view, misled people—young people in particular—into thinking that it's a special creativity, a sort of special juice that flows in the veins of these people that makes them into semi-gods, that these guys were so smart. We're actually putting kids off. We're saying, "You can't be one of these. You're not a genius." Actually, in the end, all you need is perseverance. Anyone can do that. So one of the things I want to do is democratize and demystify innovation and say — you know, Thomas Edison was one of the great inventors of all time. He came up with an enormous number of things only by setting up an innovation factory in which he employed some people who worked extraordinarily hard. He drove them like slaves almost. Their job was to do a ton of experiments. He tried 6,000 different types of plant material before he settled on a particular kind of Japanese bamboo for the filament of his lightbulb. Now, anyone can do that. You don't have to be clever to do that. You just have to stay up at night and get up early in the morning, all that kind of thing, not give up, or not settle for second best. These are the features.

My favorite example of this is a very, very well-known one, but it does tell the story beautifully. It's the invention of the airplane. This man named Samuel Langley—a very brilliant astrophysicist, head of the Smithsonian Institution, has the ear of the U.S. government—gets a $25,000 grant in 1903 to build the first airplane—because he knows exactly how to do it. He's way cleverer than everyone else. He doesn't need to talk to anyone. He does it in secret, then unveils his airplane, puts a bloke in it—not himself—and says, "Off you go." And the thing goes plop into the Potomac River. I mean, the government is furious. Langley is humiliated, and the whole thing is a disaster. Eight weeks later, on a sandy island off the coast of North Carolina, two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio—without a degree between them—succeeded where Langley had failed. Wright brothers had done differently from Langley. And nobody believes them, by the way, for several years, actually. There was a marvelous editorial in Scientific American saying, "Look, if two bicycle mechanics from Ohio have solved the problem of powered flight, don’t you think we’d know about it?"

Anyway, the point is: they had corresponded with people all around the world—people who were working with gliders, with box kites, with wind tunnels, with birds—picking other people's brains. Then they'd done a ton of experiments. They'd done years of experiments with gliders. During this, for example, they'd work out how you turn right and left in the air, which nobody had thought about before. They solved that problem with gliders, not with powered flight. And only then after four years of this did they try sticking a small engine on one of these things—and the rest is history. You too could be a Wright brother. All you've got to do is spend every day for six months, for four years, tinkering with a glider on a beach, on a mosquito-ridden shore, living in a crummy hut with your sister cooking meals for you. She had a degree, interestingly. And you're away. Of course, what kind of is what people are doing now? I mean, I don't think if you really got to the bottom of the secret behind AI today, you would find necessarily, well, this is unfair. I was going to say, you won't find brilliant people. Of course, you will. But no more brilliant than other people.

Brandon: Right. Yeah, I know. I think there's certainly something luring about that sort of myth. That was a genius and a heroic story, and maybe it's inspiring for some. It does seem to pose an obstacle for us to think about our own capacities for innovation. There are a couple of other sorts of myths, perhaps. I mean, one is that innovation is necessarily disruptive. The concept of Clay Christensen's idea of disruptive innovation has really captured the imagination of Silicon Valley, for instance. Or that necessity is the mother of invention, or that you need some kind of crisis or a war to really generate innovation. You, I think, dispelled both of these. Could you talk a bit about them?

Matt: Yes, I think the search for being a disruptor has slightly misled people. Clay Christensen may be partly responsible for that. I'm not blaming him, but he's captured the point. Because an awful lot of what’s gone on in my lifetime—with, for example, the internet or Moore’s Law, this kind of thing—is about just inch-by-inch improving something and making it very slightly better. At a certain point, it reaches the point where digital photography blows Kodak out of the water, or the smartphone blows Nokia out of the water, Nokia having blown landlines out of the water. So there are disruptions. But I think if you're constantly expecting to be the disruptor, you'll mislead. You're much better off trying to find an incremental improvement that you can build on. What was the second point you made in that question? Because I wanted to come back to—

Brandon: It was about necessity and war, those sorts of things.

Matt: I really looked hard into the history of the computer during World War II, because there is a bit of a legend out there that it was the need to track the trajectories of artillery shells and decipher German-coded messages that brought the computer into being. I came to the conclusion that it's the opposite. That actually, the Annus Mirabilis—the miracle year for the computer, if there was such a thing—is 1937, when, both in Germany and in Iowa and in a couple of other places, there were remarkable breakthroughs towards the sort of programmable machine that we ended up with—which, had they been able to come together over the next few years, would have led to spectacular computing in the 1940s.

Instead of which, you've got these secret projects going on that didn't even know about each other. So there's cheering in Britain. But in America, there's an amazing bit of work going on in Philadelphia with a non-electronic but programmable computer. There's another remaining amazing bit of work going on at Harvard with an electronic but non-programmable computer. And you're longing for these two to get together, but they're not allowed to know about each other because of wartime secrecy. There is one man going between the two who does know about both—Johnny von Neumann. He is, of course, a key figure in all of this. So what you end up with is, yeah, you get some devices that calculate the trajectories of artillery shells. Well, can't we think of something more exciting to do with the computer? If we'd have peace time, I think we would have. I mean, sure, radar probably got accelerated by war. Nuclear weapons certainly did, and various other things. But I think the counterfactual of what the 1940s would have looked like if it had been a peaceful decade is not an easy one to tell. It might have been an incredibly interesting and productive decade. We might have ended up with advances in aeronautics and everything else that was fantastic, but just less more peaceful.

Brandon: Yeah, I know. I think it's an important one for us to think about, right? Another problem that I've been thinking about and I've been talking to a number of scientists over the past few years, one story that comes up often is the idea that you need to defend basic science mainly because it is going to result in serendipitous innovation in the future—sort of in making the case for why we should fund basic science and not just chase after say innovation. But I think you have a counter argument to that as well. I think you have an account of innovation that doesn't quite happen in this way, that it's not always a result of after the fact serendipity that results from some previous basic science.

Matt: Well, I have two problems with that argument. The first is that it devalues basic science. Frankly, if the only reason we're doing astrophysics is in case it allows us to invent non-stick frying pans, then that's not good enough. The holes are interesting in themselves. It's a terrible pity if we're just going to measure the value of basic science as something that provides the input to technology. Because sometimes it does. But surely, it's a higher calling than that. I mean, I think the discoveries of science are humanity's greatest achievement, bar none. I'd rather have deep geological time and space and double helix than Shakespeare and Rembrandt, frankly. I've got that both, but yeah.

Brandon: There's a profound beauty in both of them, right? Yeah.

Matt: If you look at the history of technology, it does not always start with science. The arrow quite often goes the other way. The science of thermodynamics came out of the steam engine, not vice versa. A lot of cybernetics and things like that came out of computing, not vice versa. You don't need to understand the principles of something to invent it. Quite often, we don't.

There's a lovely recent example, which is gene editing—this CRISPR technology for editing genes, which is basically a bacterial immune system that we've adapted to turn into a tool to make precise changes in genes. That began life as a discovery in a university, but only because the university at Alicante, in Spain, was studying salt-loving organisms—because there was a big salt industry next door. It then moved into the yogurt industry. The industrial biochemists in the yogurt industry started looking at this because they realized they were looking at the bacterial immune system. In yogurt, bacteria are very important. You don't want them to get sick. So you want to understand how they defend themselves against viruses. And it was only after that that it goes back into a university in the form of Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, who've got the Nobel Prize, and also a guy in Lithuania who did the same work at the same time. They say, "Hang on. We can repurpose this tool to change the genes in cells." Then a guy at MIT says, "I can even do it in mammalian cells, and therefore in human beings." That work is indeed done in universities. It does lead to a great technology that is now being applied in medicine.

So that one has jumped between academia and industry in a sort of two-way fashion. That's a much more typical pattern, actually. Scientists discover something; people apply it. The application needs scientists to explain what's going on. That leads to another insight and so on. Rather than the linear model of the job of scientists is to feed pure knowledge into the top of a pipe, and out the bottom of the pipe comes technology.

Brandon: Yeah, that's very helpful. One of the things we're trying to explore in this season of the podcast is not just the beauty of innovation, but also its burdens. I wonder if you might be able to say something about the downsides, unintended consequences, challenges, et cetera, of our innovations. Particularly, AI is one that everyone's talking about these days and the kind of risks it poses, et cetera.

Matt: Social media is one of the great innovations of my lifetime. At first, I thought it was simply wonderful. And it was a repost to those who said computing is a lonely process. Actually, what were teenagers using their smartphones for rampant social engagement? And so it's the opposite of lonely. Also, it was going to enable us to see each other's point of view. Do you remember that? It's a marvelous thing, I can look at what anybody thinks on anything. I won't remain stuck in my own silo. Gosh, it didn't quite work out that way, did it? Some of the things people said about social media in the early days of the 21st century were very similar to what some of the things they said about radio in the 1920s—very utopian. And radio, again, brilliant, wonderful technology. But the dictators kind of made use of it. Mussolini, Hitler, and so on. Those are both examples of technologies that we thought were going to be unalloyed goods, but turned out to be a mixture of good and bad.

I wouldn't want to disinvent social media. I wouldn't want to go back to a world without it. I think the good does outweigh the bad, and I think the same of radio. But I do think we need to — in radio, we kind of learned how to tame it so that it wasn't just being used by demagogues to stir people up. We kind of need to learn to tame social media. I suspect the same will be true of AI, in that it will mostly be good. It will speed up and bring down the cost of drug discovery, treatment. It'll help people who are bad at things more than people who are good at things. I mean, it's already doing that. It's improving the linguistic skills of people who have trouble writing, much more than it's improving people who are good at writing. So it's a leveling-up phenomenon, not a down one.

So I'm very utopian in many of the things I think about AI, but I'm also acutely aware that it's being used to produce some very nasty hallucinations, weird effects. And it's not impossible that it'll turn malevolent. I'm generally not that worried about the malevolent AI point—not as much as some people. Because I think they don't understand evolution. Evolution is a competitive process. There's no reason why a malevolent AI should necessarily become a monopolist. Malevolent viruses or parasites don't take over the world. They are a problem in the world, but they don't win out altogether. I don't see AI monopolies developing. I think what we'll see is AI diversity, which will include some malevolent actors but also some much more benevolent ones. So in that sense, I am, as you can tell, much more of an optimist about AI than a pessimist. But it's not going to be without its bumps along the road.

Brandon: Sure. Yeah, I know. I mean, I think one of the big concerns is that it's deskilling us in a number of important ways. I wonder whether some of the conditions for our capacity to innovate are perhaps being threatened by or eroded by some of these new technologies, along with, say, the political and economic systems that are set up.

Matt: It's going to do the innovating for us, so we don't need innovations.

Brandon: You talk about freedom as being a critical factor for innovation. Could you talk about — perhaps, if you could maybe change one thing or emphasize one direction in which universities, firms, and governments could shift things in order to improve our capacity for innovation, what could that look like?

Matt: It's a really good question. I don't think I've got a silver bullet of an answer. If I did, I'd probably patent it and not go on podcast and blab about.

Brandon: Right. You wouldn't be sharing it freely with others.

Matt: Well, no, I don't really believe in patent. Actually, I'm not a great fan of intellectual property as an incentive for innovation.

Brandon: Could you say a word about that, actually? Because that is another controversial point.

Matt: Yes. You can obviously make an argument that if you don't get some kind of monopoly profit from your innovation, you're not going to do it. But if you look at the actual history of the world, on the whole, patents quite often get in the way. Because they give one person way too much credit—not his predecessors and successors—and he then spends an awful lot of his energy defending his patents in courts. The guy, Samuel Morse, who invented the telegraph, ruined his life by suing everybody for the rest of his life because they had infringed his patent. The Wright brothers actually did something pretty similar. Marconi did the same. It can be a distraction pursuing your patents. Also, when patents expire, you tend to get a flourishing of innovation. The 3D printing patents have recently expired, and that has resulted in a surge of new applications of that technology.

So, on the whole, I think we have made intellectual property too restrictive and too easily used in a defensive rather than an offensive way. We've had whole industries, basically the software industry, where patents haven't played a role at all. Nobody has bothered trying to patent innovations in software mostly over the last 50 years. It's not quite true, but it's mostly true. Because it was just far too fast moving a field, so out of date, that your patent was useless.

Copyright, which is a form of patent, is something I obviously benefit from. My books are copyrighted. But I think in the counterfactual world where I didn't have copyright, I'd still write books. I'd have to find a different way of making money out of them, like live performance on radio shows like yourself, or you'd pay me.

Brandon: Sure. Sorry.

Matt: Because that's what musicians have done. They've stopped being able to rake in the money from CDs, and they have to go and do live gigs instead.

Brandon: Exactly.

Matt: They're not exactly stopping doing it, are they? Whereas, thanks to a change in the law in Britain—copying what Europeans did, at the behest of American corporations—my grandchildren will be earning money from the sales of my books, if they're still in print, 70 years after my death. What did they do to deserve that? They don't even exist yet. They've certainly not contributed. That's not the incentive why I write a book—is so that my grandchildren will have a few tens of pounds in 60 years' time. More than 60 because I'm still alive, more than 70. You can see that I get quite exercised on the question of intellectual property. I think we've taken it too far and made it too restrictive.

But back to what we should do, which was your question, first of all, teach this point: that anybody can innovate, that it's a question of perseverance and experiment, not genius. Second, teach the point that it's incremental, not disruptive most of the time. We shouldn't be trying to invent the next search engine or the next AI. You should just be trying to marginally improve something that's out there and produce a decent product. Thirdly, get away from this linear model that the purpose of science is to feed innovation. Try and set up a two-way system between industry and academia. If I ran a university, I would encourage professors to go off and work in industry and then come back; students to do the same; industrial leaders to come and teach in universities. I would be swapping people with the private sector the whole time. I think that's going to be a really better way of achieving innovation than having these two very separate worlds.

Brandon: That's amazing. Great. Matt, thank you so much for your insights. Is there anything else that you might want to share with our audience? Perhaps a point about your books that you wish people had asked you in podcasts and no one's asking you. Anything you really want to communicate that you've not been able to perhaps satisfactorily do so?

Matt: I don't think so. I think I've banged on long enough. You've asked some very nice questions, which I greatly appreciate, so I'm quite happy to leave it at that. I actually recorded the audio book for this last book. I enjoyed doing it. It took three days in a studio. I wasn't very good at it. I made a lot of mistakes, but the kind editors cleaned that up. I listen to more audio books than I read books now. I think that is a big part of the future of books—people in the car, people at night who can't sleep, people doing other things, people going for walks. I think the era of the audiobook is a really interesting phenomenon, much more important now than the eBook. 20 years ago, we were all talking about the eBook. Now we're talking about the audiobook.

Brandon: Yeah, well, I listen to your How Innovation Works on audio, which I thought was really lovely.

Matt: Oh, I recorded that one too. You're right. That was at the start of the pandemic, so I was locked in my linen cupboard.

Brandon: Yeah, not very comfortable. But wow. Yeah, it's great. I really, really enjoyed that. Matt, is there anything that you're working on these days, a new book on the horizon, perhaps, or anything you want to share with our viewers and listeners?

Matt: I'm working on another book, but I'm not talking about it yet because it's not coming together yet.

Brandon: Okay. Great. Well, where can we point our audience to, to learn more about you and about what you're working on?

Matt: I do maintain a website, but not very well. I'm on Twitter @mattwridley. But also, I'm increasingly working with a website called the Rational Optimist Society, which is based on a phrase I used for one of my books. There's some great stuff about innovation and technology on that site.

Brandon: Fantastic. Well, Matt, thank you. It's been an honor.

Matt: Thank you. You've asked some lovely questions, and it's been really nice to talk to you.

(outro)

Brandon: All right, folks. That's a wrap for this episode. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with someone who would find it of interest. Also, please subscribe and leave us a review if you haven't already. Thanks, and see you next time.