When Ideas have Sex – Matt Ridley

July 18th, 2010 12:51 am

Here’s a brilliant talk from author Matt Ridley at TED Oxford about the power of collaboration and exchange to create ideas.

Matt suggests that recent human progress is down to the combination of multiple ideas or ideas having sex using the biological metaphor.

Matt highlights the significant shift from making things for ourselves like simple tools, to today’s computer mouse, where millions of people are all making things for us.

This happened when human beings started to exchange between groups which happened around 100,000 years ago- people were trading before they were farming.

He quotes from the economist Leonard Reed, that no one knows how to make complete things anymore, we’ve gone beyond the capacity of individuals and it’s now all about the collective brain.

Technological progress is coming from the exchange, meeting and mating of ideas which is such a powerful force that it will conquer many of the major challenges that lie ahead.

Jeff Busby says:

July 18, 2010 at 1:00 am

It is to our detriment that we allow laws which permit private interest, to patent and then bury the very technologies which might take us off the current road to oblivion. All knowledge is related. Einstein’s brilliant realizations, were built on his preoccupation with ideas which came before him, and where would physics be today without the modern scientist freedom to explore Einstein’s permutations? He said it best ‘The significant problems we face today cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we used when we created them.’ Get out of the box.