How Innovation Works by Matt Ridley

How Innovation Works by Matt Ridley

Author:Matt Ridley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-04-03T16:00:00+00:00


Their approach was in fact a melding of machine and human intelligence. Their algorithm relied on the billions of human judgments made by people when they created links from their own websites. It was an automated way to tap into the wisdom of humans – in other words, a higher form of human–computer symbiosis.

Bit by bit, they tweaked the programmes till they got better results. Both Page and Brin wanted to start a proper business, not just invent something that others would profit from, but Stanford insisted they publish, so in 1998 they produced their now famous paper ‘The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine’, which began: ‘In this paper, we present Google . . .’ With eager backing from venture capitalists they set up in a garage and began to build a business. Only later were they persuaded by the venture capitalist Andy Bechtolsheim to make advertising the central generator of revenue.

As with search engines, so social media took the world by surprise. I recall reviewing two books in the 1990s that forecast gloomily that the internet was going to make people antisocial. We were going to retreat into our bedrooms and play games, starting a spiral of social degradation of apocalyptic proportions. In fact, within a decade, the internet was being used for rampant social engagement on a massive scale. Today, teachers and parents worry about the incessant online social distraction that keeps children from studying, not to mention the risk of cyber-bullying and peer pressure.

Facebook launched in February 2004 as a Harvard University networking site. Mark Zuckerberg had been employed by two fellow students, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the previous November, to program a social-networking site called Harvard Connection, but had then developed his own version instead, called ‘the facebook’, got the financial backing of Eduardo Saverin and later Sean Parker and Peter Thiel, and took the idea commercial. The Winklevosses had a point when they sued him, but in the Wild West of digital innovation it was first past the post.

Social media took the world by surprise in another way too. Far from ushering in an era of utopian democratic enlightenment in which the world is flat, everybody is sharing and we all see each other’s point of view, it plunged us into a maze of echo chambers and filter bubbles in which we spend our time confirming our biases and railing against the opinions of others. It polarized, enraged, depressed, addicted and soured us.

Aza Raskin, who was one of the inventors of the ‘infinite scroll’, by which we can just keep rolling through our social media feeds for ever, now regrets that he did this. He says it was one of the first features of technology designed ‘not to help you but to keep you’. He now works to try to redirect the tech industry towards more beneficial and less addictive results. There seems little doubt that any information technology, when young, can have strong and unhelpful effects, but that it usually gets tamed.



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