The Next Era of Invention
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/05/29
Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited as well as many other books and ebooks about topics in psychology, relationships, philosophy, economics, international affairs, and award-winning short fiction. He is former Visiting Professor of Psychology, Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russia and on the faculty of CIAPS (Commonwealth Institute for Advanced and Professional Studies). He is a columnist in Brussels Morning, was the Editor-in-Chief of Global Politician, and served as a columnist for Central Europe Review, PopMatters, eBookWeb, and Bellaonline, and as a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent. He was the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101. His YouTube channels garnered 80,000,000 views and 405,000 subscribers. Visit Sam’s Web site: http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today’s topic: the next era of invention; what is the next era of invention? The previous eras relied upon unusually bright, innovative, and persistent, persons, solo: Legitimate geniuses. We have moved more into a world of invention emphasizing teamwork and dollars alongside some coordination with narrow artificial intelligence or specified algorithms, programs.
Prof. Sam Vaknin: Mankind have always alternated between teamwork and the individual genius. I think that we should focus on the raw materials (inputs) and the outputs of innovation rather than on who and how we bring it about.
We are transitioning from the age of monetized attention to the age of reality engineering.
Cities amounted to the first make-belief, virtual reality. Urbanization and population growth led to the rise of the creative genius (auteur), and the emergence of the concept of the original (due to the need to be seen and noticed in the multitude).
Intellectual property followed 300 years ago when mechanical reproduction blurred the line between original and copy and dramatically reduced the marginal cost of copies.
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), by Walter Benjamin, is an essay of cultural criticism which proposes and explains that mechanical reproduction devalues the aura (uniqueness) of an objet d’art.
Since then, identity has become a big business: patents, copyrights, brands, and blockchain NFTs. Distributed ledgers as well as centralised records vouch for one’s identity and guarantee it.
The nonrivalrous zero marginal cost of digital goods has shifted the focus from manufacturing of tangibles to the manipulation of abstract symbols, the commodification of attention, and the emerging conundrum of discoverability.
Both individual creators and commercial enterprises reacted by interpellating potential consumers via propaganda and targeted advertising and by turning a profit via the aggregation of big data (targeting the demographics of attention).
These trends engendered self-sufficient disintermediated atomization – attention has been diverted to asocial online pursuits – and yielded an impaired reality testing (fantasy paracosms, virtual and augmented reality, and, soon, the metaverse).
The next frontiers are reality-like (pseudoreal) “real estate” and commodified but idiosyncratic menu-driven reality (the aforementioned metaverse).
Collaborative virtual realities will supplant physical ones and reality substitutes (sex dolls, intimacy apps) will proliferate. Tech behemoths, such as Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon will try to control the way we perceive reality and the immersive universes that we inhabit.
IRL AI will displace people as friends, advisors, interlocutors, lovers, and service providers. Users will construct online simulations and inhabit them. But this turn of events will also force the introduction of mandatory digital identities, hopefully based on blockchain rather than government regulation.
Jacobsen: What marks something as genuinely inventive rather than simply an update to some technology?
Vaknin: Truly innovative inventions profoundly change the way we live, communicate, work, make love, and interact. By this standard, neither the automobile nor the smartphone are veritable innovations: the former is a mere mechanized horse and the latter a derivative of the phone. But Bell’s telephone and the telegraph are examples of paradigm-shifting, reality-altering inventions.
Jacobsen: More fundamentally, what is the basic principle of invention, its nature?
Vaknin: Most groundbreaking inventions generate their own markets, fostering needs in consumers that they were unaware of. They also recombine the familiar (e.g., previous technologies) in ways that produce alien, unprecedented, and strange products or services. Finally, true inventions become indispensable in short order: it is hard to imagine a life without them and we pity our predecessors for having been deprived of their existence.
Schumpeter seemed to have captured the unsettling nature of innovation: unpredictable, unknown, unruly, troublesome, and ominous. Innovation often changes the inner dynamics of organizations and their internal power structure. It poses new demands on scarce resources. It provokes resistance and unrest. If mismanaged – it can spell doom rather than boom.
Yet, the truth is that no one knows why people innovate. The process of innovation has never been studied thoroughly – nor are the effects of innovation fully understood.
Jacobsen: What do you see as the most significant biotechnology invention in the history of the biological world?
Vaknin: Possibly CRISPR, the revolutionary gene editing technology. Sometimes, advances in speed and quantity do constitute a quantum leap.
Jacobsen: What has been the most worldview-shattering invention in human history?
Vaknin: The harnessing of fire, the ability to reignite it at will.
Jacobsen: How does the psychology of an inventive person work?
Vaknin: The typical inventor is solutions-oriented. S/he perceives a lack, deficiency, or lacuna and sets out to remedy it. Inventors are also possessed of a synoptic-panoramic view, able to discern the connective tissue that binds apparently disparate phenomena. Finally, a true inventor is able to transition seamlessly from the theoretical to practical, from the drawing board to testing, and thence to prototype.
Creative people are feared and hated, ostracized and punished, unless they are willing to clown themselves or dumb down and conform to the biases, prejudices, and errors of the masses.
High IQ does not translate into success in the absence of perseverance, agreeableness, industriousness, stability (self-regulation), humility, a capacity for teamwork (minimal empathy and respect for others), robust mental health, a social support network, and luck. Many geniuses are homeless or incarcerated and all but forgotten.
The reality testing of inventors is impaired: they perceive the world differently (possibly a sign of autism). Coupled with recklessness, a sense of fearless godlike immunity, it leads to exploratory behavior.
Originality, novelty, difference: synoptic connectivity appears schizotypal or even psychotic (Schizotypy). Eysenck linked psychoticism to creativity. Indeed, the creative burst is often disorganized initially (inspiration, intuition, dreams). Attention multitasking generates unexpected insights and synergies.
Impatience, grandiosity or contempt and condescension charcaterize inventors: convinced of their superiority, they tend to block out “noise” and ignore criticism. Lability and dysregulation are sources of inspiration. Proclivity for change, thrill-seeking, and risky conduct result in innovation.
These are the reasons that most innovators endure inordinate hardships in life, their resilience and perseverance tested to the breaking point.
Jacobsen: With the advent of some software capable of mimicking human capacities more, and performing in superhuman capacities – at least on paper in computational power, how is this changing the interaction of human beings with software to invent in more precise and creative ways?
Vaknin: We tend to mythologize the process of invention, to render it mystical and uniquely human. The truth is that it is an emergent artefact (epiphenomenon), the ineluctable outcome of complexity. At this stage, we are feeding computer models with humungous reams of raw data in the hope that irreducible interactions between the umpteen pieces of information will yield innovative insights and discoveries. The next phase will involve fine-tuning the inputs so as to allow artificial intelligence to work on its own and to seek data as well as outputs autonomously. At that stage, we would still be able to define the research agenda, but not for long.
Jacobsen: In line with Alan Turing’s views, who I agree with more than the ‘moderns’ in Western technology communities when engineered computational systems match our “feeble powers,” how will this change the world of invention?
Vaknin: We will be rendered obsolete. We would still maintain a parasitic, atomized, technologically self-sufficient kind of existence for a while, but then, like everything superfluous in Nature, we will wane and fade away. Hence my prediction of a Luddite counter-revolution which would seek to physically demolish or ban certain technologies, maybe justly so.
Jacobsen: How might the style of invention, or even the definition of invention itself, change with the precision and breadth future computation, and simulation, will bring to everything in our lives? Where, there might be the capacity of a constant roll of mini-invention increasingly in every facet of human life, similar to the infusion of – what we consider – ordinary technologies now.
Vaknin: The overwhelming vast majority of people are incapable of making use of the full set of features made available even by current technologies, let alone of innovating. I foresee “innovation engineers” whose job would be to cajole artificial intelligence codes and models into new discoveries. But innovation would become the domain of machines, not humans.
Jacobsen: How long until the technological world or the biological world make human beings, as an environmentally engineered (evolved) structure, neither entirely relevant to the business of the Earth nor the dominant conscious information processors on the planet?
Vaknin: I would be surprised if this would take longer than 50 years. With the exception of physical jobs like plumbing, AI would be perfectly capable of replacing and displacing us and doing a better job of it.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, and the happy final note, Sam.
Vaknin: You are welcome. Always delighted to spread doom!
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
In-Sight Publishing 