George Basalla challenges the popular notion that technological advances arise from the efforts of a few heroic individuals who produce a series of revolutionary inventions that owe little or nothing to the technological past. Does that mean that in a soccer match the goal scored by an individual player be replaced by the whole team’s name. We all know that games like soccer are group games and the performance of the team is more important than the individual, yet being there at the right place in the right time to score the goal is equally important. Even though Faraday and others contributed to Einstein’s theory of relativity, it was his genius which solved the jigsaw puzzle. Personally I feel both the cumulative and the individual is equally important and they complement each other at different times. Sometimes the individual contributes to the whole and at other times the whole is responsible in the development of the self. In the process there is evolution of technology taking place for sure but whether the human race is evolving through it is arguable.
It is really interesting to know that the belief: humans are driven to invent new artifacts in order to meet basic biological needs such as food, shelter, and defense can be a false one. What is reasonable, where do we stop? Things that were reasonable or good at a time may not be desirable today. Man invented the wheel so that he could save himself from walking. Today he has made treadmill so that he can walk and keep himself healthy. Fire, fuel, industrialization that was a boon to mankind is now resulting in global warming. Should we now reverse the process here as well?? Who should contribute here the individual or the collective? To what extent should we develop technology that it becomes a threat to the ecology?
Diamond too like Basalla agrees that most of the inventions are made as a result of tinkering or as byproducts of other products. However I really don’t agree to the fact that why the dominant powers of the last 500 years have been West Europeans rather than the East Asians? Areas in which major civilizations arose had geographical features conducive to the formation of large, stable, isolated empires which faced no external pressure to correct policies that led to stagnation. On the other hand, Europe’s many natural barriers divided it into competing nation-states and this competition forced the European nations to encourage innovation and avoid technological stagnation. Rather I would argue that there were parallel innovations taking place which the rest of the world was not aware of. Like Basalla said, pottery was developed in different places completely disconnected to each other.
Waste: This is a pretty interesting way of looking at consumerism. I really like the way how advertisers make a commodity more cool and desirable. Why buying a diamond during inflation is a better status symbol than when there is a slump. However I was thinking about fortune at the bottom of the pyramid. How about making the product commonplace and thus more people consume it and overall mass consumerism spreads. Wouldn’t it be a better place to live if all people enjoyed the benefits equally? After all when I am buying a Porsche I am allowing the manufacturers and the factory workers to reap some benefit, can’t it be percolated to more than a handful?
