20 REAL-LEADERS.COM / SUMMER 2022 MINDFULNESS Michael Bhaskar is a writer, researcher, and cofounder of Canelo Digital Publishing. He spent two years as a consultant writer-inresidence at DeepMind, a leading AI research lab. This is a summary of his new book Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking. bureaucratic box-ticking exercise, rather than what used to be freeblue-skies research. That kind of bureaucratic, safety-first, often intensely regulated atmosphere exists across institutions. This dovetails with my point about funding. It makes for an incredibly conservative atmosphere for experimenting with big ideas — the ideas that seem ambitious and crazy, and will often fail. The whole nature of what I’d call a series of populisms (from political populism to the need to get publicity) adds extra pressure. People are chasing eyeballs more than they’re looking for deep thoughts. The political atmosphere is polarizing opinions, such that there aren’t free spaces of investigation. All in all, when you start looking into how research is done, how it’s funded, and how it’s discussed, you start to get a sense that society doesn’t like big ideas. Society would much rather have things that have somewhat the pattern of a big idea, but ultimately don’t really do much. THE GREAT STAGNATION IS ENDING. WORK AT THE FRONTIER OF GLOBAL INNOVATION. Right now we are building a new tool set that is by far the most powerful set of tools humanity has ever had at its disposal. Artificial intelligence is one example; DeepMind, the AI company, has effectively solved the protein-folding problem, which was one of the longest-standing problems in biology. For 50 years, people have been trying to solve this, and not making much progress, but an approach that deploys cutting-edge machine-learning techniques can solve it. So this is a new tool set of AI, encompassing everything from synthetic biology, CRISPR, nanotechnology, VR, and so on. This new tool set is the outside factor that can change the way we see the world. It will change the ways we discover things and the technologies we build. All of those tools are big ideas themselves because if we deliver them, they’re the platform for the next 100 years of huge thinking. The world is converging at the frontier for the first time in history. If you look at the frontiers of knowledge or technology, it has always been in a few localized societies or civilizations. A bit of Europe, or perhaps a bit of China or the Arabian Peninsula, but the whole world has almost never been working at the frontier at one time. The extraordinary economic growth around the world, and the nature of the Internet, means that the capacity to work at the frontier is now global. Innovation isn’t going to be coming just from one corner. This has only come to the fore in the last 20 years, and it’s only now that we’re going to start feeling the effects. If you put together this new set of tools and this great convergence at the frontier, then it creates the ingredients for a Great Acceleration. It provides enough momentum beyond the fact that society is hostile, beyond the fact that ideas are getting harder to generate. It means that we are entering a new phase — and that’s incredibly exciting. n 4 WORK AT THE FRONTIER
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