Are new ideas getting harder to find? Interview with Michael Bhaskar
The stagnation in the production of ideas poses a serious threat to human progress. Why is this the case, and what can be done about it?
Sometimes you come across books that command so much of what you are interested in. That triangulates many of the half-thought, mild musings inside your head. For me, Michael Bhaskar’s latest book does this, and more.
In Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking, the writer and entrepreneur asks how society is doing at producing ideas, and what we must do to prevent what looks like a catastrophic slowdown in ideation progress.
With a staggering grasp on topics ranging from economics, to technology, to cultural theory, Bhaskar distills a key thesis to us. Ideas are what drive human progress, yet many indicators tell us we are in a period of “great stagnation”. The golden ticket out, Bhaskar believes, lies in the latest technological revolution. Only then, will new ideas become much, much easier to find.
In a really wide-ranging conversation, Michael and I unpacked the ideas in the book further. Covering everything from the productivity J-curve, to drum and bass, I am fairly confident that you will learn at least a thing or two from this conversation.
TW: What motivated you to write this book, one that's so laser-focused on ideas, in the first place?
MB: I guess the wider project that this book is part of is asking the question: how do we come up with radically new ideas in almost any domain? How do we have, or achieve, or realise an idea that has never been done before?
And that's the question I'm really interested in, because it seems that the essence of how you jump forward as a civilization is through new ideas.
So I was very interested in that question, and through a long series of winding paths that then took me to thinking about how we are doing on that front. That led to finding a whole load of research of people who were quite sceptical that we were a society that was really accelerating on every single aspect of our developments, and so I just started to look at that.
It just seemed to me that there was so much discussion, but it was a very scattered discussion.There are people who are looking at science and saying, “well there are problems in science now”, people who were looking at political theory and saying “we don't really have any new ideas”, and so what I was interested in was to try and draw everything together into one one picture.
At the core of it, it became about ideas, not just about technology. It's not just about scientific papers, it's not just about new artistic genres behind all that.
And so before I could answer the question of where new ideas come from, I needed to work out how we are doing at coming up with new ideas, and what are the prospects for the future.
TW: A central part of your thesis in the book rests around the “great stagnation” and the story that tells about the potential slowdown in idea production. Could you please elaborate for the readers what the “great stagnation” is, and how it relates to idea production?
MB: There are two elements to this, both of which refer to the great stagnation. The first element is the great stagnation as an economic event. And essentially the argument claims that from the early 1970s, long term growth rates in the economy decline compared to the post-War boom years. After decades of entrenched, high-growth, that seems to just wane, despite the fact that you have lots of new technologies coming on board.
What that means is that the growth in productivity is a lot lower than it was. And people flesh this out by saying that maybe a lot of these technologies that came through in the late 20th century are focused in information and communications, whereas in previous areas, these technologies would sprawl across every area of human endeavour.
They look at things like patent classes. They look at things like new business creation. They look at measures of dynamism in the economy. There are all of these ways that you can measure economic output, and on every level that you do actually measure it does look as if the years, let's say, 1970 to 2020, are much more stagnant than the 50 years previously.
The thinkers who are most associated with it and probably Tyler Cowen and Robert Gordon. Yet you also have people who are on the opposite ends of the ideological spectrum who say that the promise of technology has been much more limited than people thought. David Graeber, the great anthropologist said that, but so does Peter Thiel, the libertarian investor and entrepreneur.
Then I attempt to look at this more broadly and try to see if that economic and technological stagnation perhaps matched, just across the entire spectrum of ideas and I think there are some signs that that is.
TW: And that reminds me, particularly as you get on to the later parts of your book, of the idea of the productivity J-curve that Erik Brynjolfsson talks about. This idea that there's all this investment in AI and all these other technologies now, but the benefits still haven’t materialised. We still have not seen these big advancements that a lot of people have said will emerge. And the argument that certain people make with the productivity J-curve, is that they're building up these intangible assets now, and you see some of that with driverless cars for example, or lab grown meat. Where it hasn’t necessarily hit the market yet, but when it does it's going to be this massive uptick the other way and deliver immense returns.
MB: I think that is a really, really important thing to say. When you look at that 50 year period, 1970 to 2020, I think you can undoubtedly say that even if there are elements of the stagnation thesis that you disagree with, it's very hard to say that it was this incredible revolutionary boom time on every measure.
And that's true in areas that are far from technology as well. One example that I give in the book is human rights, which is a classic ‘big idea’. People have talked about human rights for about two centuries. But at the international level, nothing much happened.
Then suddenly, in the years after the Second World War, you had this extraordinary push at the UN, which got the Declaration of Human Rights.
And that's the kind of J-curve of ideas, in the sense that you've got intellectuals talking and writing and arguing about this stuff for a long time. Then as you go through time , perhaps you know you have occasional things that have massive achievements like the American and French Revolution. I guess in the early 20th century you had a few new laws and ideas about welfare, and so on. Then bam! After the Second World War, you just get this extraordinary moment where it's realised at an international level. That's like a J-curve of ideas, and we will see this happen again with technology.
TW: Your book’s reference to cultural homogeneity reminded me of Mark Fisher’s lecture on “the slow cancellation of the future”. Here, Fisher claimed that the lack of new music and popular culture being produced was a result of a lack of competing visions for alternative political and economic systems of organisation. Do you agree with this statement, or is something else driving this cultural malaise?
MB: Yeah, I was familiar with Mark Fisher's work on it but I hadn’t read this lecture. However, this resonates incredibly with me. He's another person who's making this point, and really powerfully.
I think he's partially right in that there is this kind of extraordinary lack of new ideological thinking in the world. There is sort of no such thing as an original ideology anymore, and a lot of people might say, well great, ideologies have been pretty harmful.
But equally, does that mean that we reached a kind of Fukuyama style end state where you've either got authoritarian nation states and liberal democratic nation states, and that's just going to be it forever? That’s definitely part of it.
And I think that perhaps the mechanism is simply that you just can't constantly come up with infinite new ideologies or new cultural forms that are radically different. Once you have done punk, and it's this kind of shocking act of rebellion, and the rebellion is the kind of the core idea of it. Well, you can't just do that again 30 years later and expect it to have exactly the same impact.
TW: What’s quite interesting is that people may say that the advent of electronic music does shake that up a lot. People think it does open up these new iterations of sound, which could potentially back up your key thesis that advanced technologies is a real way out of this slowdown.
MB: But equally Tom, electronic music probably dates to the late 70s, early 80s. One of the genres of music that I really like is drum and bass. And basically everybody in the drum and bass world is still kind of recapitulating a style that basically was born in the UK from about 1992 to 1996. And there hasn't really been a kind of decisive advance within the field since that.
TW: Yeah, we'll talk about later, I'm a massive DnB fan as well.
MB: So, do you agree with my assessment?
TW: I think so. I mean, a lot of modern drum bass has perhaps slightly left it's jungle-ish foundations, but I definitely find at the moment that there's very little I've listened to recently that sounds really new and really fresh. But I imagine in the early 2000s in the UK dubstep scene when the likes of Burial came into the world that things felt genuinely authentic.
MB: Yeah, I think that's fair, actually. When that sound was out it did feel unbelievably new and different.
TW: Is there just a measurement problem? Are we just not recording progress in the correct way, and actually, if we did, ideas that we initially thought less important would actually carry more weight? In 200 years will we not just look back and think we were measuring it all wrong?
MB: The first thing I'll say is yes, there is a definite measurement problem. With these questions that I'm trying to ask, are all big ideas slowing down or speeding up, how are they likely to do in future? It's almost inherently impossible to measure that.
Even though I will be the first to say there is no kind of clean measurement here, It's just about looking at as many different factors as you can, adding them up and trying to form a view. So I'm looking at a really broad range of metrics from the numbers of papers published, to how much they're cited, to then much more subjective factors about how people might respond to a new scientific discovery today as opposed to 200 years ago.
But because there is no precise measurement I'd be very open to the fact that we are missing key dimensions of both progress and stagnation.
And again, it comes back to that point that we made earlier and about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In 1942, at the height of World War Two, it would have seemed absolutely impossible to almost everyone in the world that before the decade was out, you'd have the nations of the world come together to universally declare such a thing as human rights. That would have just seemed absolutely fanciful, and yet it happened.
TW: Are there any countries or cultures that you think are innovating best in the idea space and that we could learn from?
MB: Well, I think the big one that I obviously discuss is China. I really think that the impact of China moving to the frontier of human ideas as a whole is potentially one of the single greatest events that has happened in history, in terms of what it means for humanity.
China's rise is often seen as a kind of geopolitical and economic factor. But people forget quite how much it's putting into things like science.
They have more scientific citations and papers published than any other country now. They're investing vast amounts in everything from quantum computing to missions to the moon.
And it's not just about science and technology either. They’ve built 500 Confucius Institutes around the world. They have the 1000 talents program, which is just sucking in researchers.
So I think this is a huge thing. Yet obviously, at the same time, China is taking a very very different approach to the West. They are cracking down on free discussion, they do not want tech companies just doing their own thing. So it's gonna be a very different mode.
In the book I say there are three areas, three elements to having an idea. You've got the conception of the idea where you come up with it. You've then got the execution of the idea when you prove it or create a prototype of something, or you write a paper. And then you have the realisation of the idea when it's commonly accepted around the world.
And I think China is just going to be unbelievably effective at executing and giving purchase to ideas. The West has struggled with this, and I think its model is going to struggle to come up with radical new ideas.
But that's kind of okay when you've got so many other countries that are also moving to the frontier at the same time with very different models, such as India and the rise of African economies.
TW: Azheem Azhar’s book, Exponential, came out the same week as yours. I think there is a lot of crossover in the themes and ideas discussed, although there are subtle differences in your arguments. I was wondering what your thoughts were on the sort of arguments put forward by Azheem and how they compare to yours?
MB: I'm a massive fan of Azheem’s, and have been a subscriber to Exponential View for years now. At first I thought that they're quite divergent, but actually ended up thinking that they are quite complimentary.
And I think the key thing for me is that Azheem posits the existence of something called the exponential age, but actually this has really only existed since about 2010.
And that I think is core to his argument, that the beginning of such an exponential age proper is very recent. And one of my key arguments for what is going to lead to a massive shift in ideas is that we've got this new toolkit coming, which overlaps quite a lot with what he sees as the core exponential technologies.
So I think, on the surface, he's sort of saying “oh wow, there's this boom and exponential age” and I'm saying, “oh there's a great stagnation”. But actually, what both of us are arguing is that the most important changes are surprisingly recent and we haven't even seen the results of it yet.
TW: Yeah, my reading was that he had thought this age had already come, whereas you believed such an age is around the corner.
You correctly, in my opinion, outline the importance of institutions in helping to shape progress. What does an institution like ARIA need in order to succeed?
MB: So the story of ideas is actually partially the development and growth of institutions to support and come up with those ideas. And when you look at history, the two kind of march in lockstep. We get many more and bigger institutions for delivering ideas just as we get many more ideas.
ARIA needs a few things. One, it needs a complete hands off, and a zero tolerance approach to bureaucracy and box-ticking.
It needs that because it needs to be able to take risks that are essentially unacceptable to most bureaucracies. It needs to be able to just fund random people seemingly for very long amounts of time.
All of this also needs to have a huge tolerance for failure, and appetite for risk. And I think the only way you get that is if you essentially just just remove all the traditional checks and balances, and that's really, really difficult to do.
So, if I was doing it, I would be essentially giving it a large budget, guaranteed over a long period of time.
TW: How much is a large budget?
MB: I would certainly give it an annual budget in the order of hundreds of millions of pounds to support this work.I would even give it more than that because I really care about these things and think they are incredibly important.
I think another thing that it should do is be willing to experiment. So a lot of people are essentially looking at the science behind grant making, and so on, and trying to find ways to improve it.
But most organisations aren't rigorously experimenting like that, and then implementing new processes. So it would be amazing if you had a significant funder of radical new ideas that was also constantly experimenting and learning with its own techniques. An organisation of that kind of scale that is committed to that I think would be fantastic.
The truth is, though, all of those things are incredibly easy to just say in an interview like this. Actually enacting them institutionally, with hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayer money, is a colossally difficult thing to achieve. And it really does require vast amounts of discipline and vision in order to do that.
TW: A lot of the hope that is pinned to the thesis of the book and its recommendations is around the revolutionary potential of AI and other emerging technologies that will help shift these frontiers further. But as you mentioned, there is disagreement around the extent to which these technologies will live up to the hype. So what if they just remain hype? What would you advocate then based upon your analysis? Do we build these institutions around the low hanging fruits? Or do we focus on changing the way that we understand progress? Bleak final question, I know!
MB: In the end, if we cannot realise a radical sort of new set of technologies and they all remain just pure hype, then ultimately we are destined for stagnation and probably collapse. That is the pessimistic truth.
Resources are limited on the planet. The population will peak. So honestly, if this all does turn out to be hype, and let’s say maybe AI gets a bit further down its current track and then reaches some hard limits which actually don't get us very far, then our fate is stagnation.
Stagnation, for humanity, is not a stable state. Eventually, it will tend towards disastrous outcomes. So it is a worry.
People don't tend to worry about the stagnation of ideas, in the way they worry about most things, but actually at the grandest macro level of all, it is basically the most important question. It contains all of the other questions about climate change and various other existential risks.
And to me, humanity is predicated on generating and delivering new ideas that are capable of overcoming those questions. And if we can't, then yes, unfortunately we are probably doomed.
TW: Finally, any shout outs to thinkers or areas that you think deserve more attention?
MB: Biotech is one of the areas for me. So much discussion revolves around AI and its ethics/societal impacts, but actually in the near term the biotech revolution is arguably more salient, and receiving comparably little discussion.
Rather than name individual people, I would also advise that more people invested in a disciplinary niche went out of it more and explored another. Every single person should find something that you normally wouldn’t give the time of day and give it a read!
Michael Bhaskar’s Human Frontiers is available at all good bookstores. He can be found on twitter as @michaelbhaskar.
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