Washington Post
July 18, 2010
Early in this sprawling and ambitious volume, futurist Matt Ridley compares a modern computer mouse to a hand axe from the Middle Stone Age. Both artifacts have been designed to fit into a human hand, but there the similarities end. One is the product of a single person's ingenuity and labor -- and of a single substance -- while the other is a complex amalgam of materials and labor and strands of human cleverness. No single person knows how to make a computer mouse from scratch, yet it's as ordinary as that flint axe was half-a-million years ago. Ridley uses this example to illustrate the idea of the collective brain, a core concept in this rosy view of human progress. At some point in human pre-history, Ridley argues, people began to recognize the severe limitations of self-sufficiency. They started specializing their talents and efforts and swapping their services, creating a communal intellect that sparked innovation and progress. Indeed, that simple but profound shift in human sensibility has led to unprecedented prosperity, leisure, peace and liberty -- trends that will only accelerate in the century ahead.
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