Progress Creates Interdependence

At the core of innovation is usefulness. It provides us with new ways of operating and organizing or greater, more effective ways of doing the old. The impact on our lives is enabling us to do more work—to be more productive. Innovation makes the world more orderly and less random but infinitely more complex. Because of this, we become more specialized in what we produce and more diversified in what we consume. Self-sufficiency is traded for mutually beneficial collaboration. As a result, the world gets more output through the interdependence needed to support the knowledge of progress.

Innovation has created a cycle of self-sufficiency and interdependence. During an economic downturn, there’s a retreat towards self-reliance. In economic advances brought on by innovations, an increase in interdependent cooperation comes because we specialize more in services but buy everything else. This cycle creates a lasting theme across human history. The narrowing of work and broadening of everything else. Put another way, there’s a gradual increase in specialization and a diversification in consumption. Something that increases specialization or diversifies consumption lasts through these cycles. Self-sufficiency comes and goes.

In Robert Pirsig's Lila, a character stares at a manhole cover and contemplates the "staggeringly complex underground networks" beneath Manhattan—electric power, telephone lines, water pipes, gas lines, sewage, subways, TV cables. "It was spooky how it all worked with an intelligence of its own that was way beyond the intelligence of any person," Pirsig writes. No single person knows how to fix all these systems. Yet someone knows how to fix each one. And there's a system for finding that person, and a system for finding that system. This is the trade we've made: self-sufficiency for what the character calls "the Giant"—the cohesive force holding countless specialized systems together. We narrow our expertise to a sliver of knowledge while broadening our consumption to include the work of thousands of specialists we'll never meet. The plumber doesn't generate his own electricity. The electrician doesn't grow his own food. The farmer doesn't build his own tractor. Innovation, at its core, is this: making us more productive by making us more interdependent, trading the simplicity of doing everything ourselves for the complexity of relying on everyone else.