# Edge 1999 Full Quotation Curation This is a source-first local curation of the complete Edge Annual Question response cohort, *WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT INVENTION IN THE PAST TWO THOUSAND YEARS?*. It preserves every response row exposed by the aggregate archive as an indexed provenance object with contributor identity, response title, credentials when supplied by Edge, an exact representative extract, and its direct response page when the archive exposes one. It is a curation record rather than a claim that every extract has been promoted into Simple Reminders. - **Annual Question:** [WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT INVENTION IN THE PAST TWO THOUSAND YEARS?](https://www.edge.org/annual-question/what-is-the-most-important-invention-in-the-past-two-thousand-years) - **Aggregate response archive:** [View all responses](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-the-most-important-invention-in-the-past-two-thousand-years) - **Archive year:** 1999 - **Response rows represented:** 108 - **Rows with substantive textual extracts:** 108 - **Rows without a substantive extract:** 0 - **Institutional router:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] - **Promoted archive entries:** 0 - **Canonical reminder files linked:** 0 - **Not yet promoted:** 108 ## Editorial and provenance boundaries 1. Every extract below is copied from the downloaded Edge aggregate response archive and whitespace-normalized without changing its words. 2. The extract is representative, not a substitute for the full response; the linked response or aggregate page remains the provenance object. 3. Hypotheses, predictions, questions, provocations, and contested positions remain the contributor's claims rather than established facts. 4. Promotion into `reminders/` requires a separate standalone-passage, headline, category, source, routing, and reciprocal-link review. 5. This file records the entire archive cohort even when a response is outside the present consciousness-continuity and machine-succession trajectories. ## Complete response index ### EDGE1999-001 — Professor of biology at the Schumacher College — Brian Goodwin > The most important invention in the past two thousand years is the printing press. When William Caxton published 'The Canterbury Tales' in the 15th Century with his newly invented printing machine, he dramatically accelerated the separation of human culture from nature, eclipsing the direct experience of natural processes that continues in the oral tradition and replacing it by words on a page. This cut in two directions. (1) The power of nature diminished so that science and technology could start the systematic program of gaining knowledge for control of nature, liberating people from drudgery and freeing the imagination. (2) At the same time, nature was degraded to a set of mechanisms that humans could manipulate for their own purposes, and the 'rape of nature' began in earnest. We are now reaping twin harvests: vastly expanded potential for written communication through the internet, as in this exchange of views at the Edge web site; and a vastly degraded planet that won't support us much longer, as things are going. Can we use one to save us from the other? We can now connect with each other as never before; but what about nature? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biology at Schumacher College - **Extract length:** 192 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Professor of biology at the Schumacher College](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11963) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-002 — Founder of Brockman, Inc., a literary and software agency, President of Edge Foundation — Unattributed Edge contributor > In this new epistemology Ockham's Razor meets Gödel's Proof and the fabric of our habitual thinking is torn apart. Subject and object fuse. The individual self decreates. (See By The Late John Brockman). Reality passes into description and thus becomes invention. Such ideas, which appear destructive, liberate, allowing us to lay waste to the generalizations of previous epochs which we decreate by getting through the history of our words. As Wallace Stevens wrote: "The words of the world are the life of the world. It is the speech of truth in its true solitude: a nature that is created in what it says."* - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Founder of Brockman, Inc., a literary and software agency, President of Edge Foundation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11978) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-003 — Professor of Astronomy at the University of Sussex, England — John D. Barrow > John, The most important invention is the Indo-Arab counting system with 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 with its positional information content (so 111 means one hundred plus one ten plus one unit), zero symbol, and operator property that by adding a zero to the righthand end of a string multiplies the number by the base value of 10. This system of counting and enumeration is completely universal and lies at the foundation of all quantitative science, economics, and mathematics. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cosmologist; Physicist; Professor of Mathematical Science, Director, Millennium Mathematics Project, University of Cambridge; Author, The Book of Universes - **Extract length:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Professor of Astronomy at the University of Sussex, England](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11915) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-004 — Founder and director of Psi-Phi Communications — Todd Siler > My close-second candidate is E = mc2. When we learn to tap the full meaning of that piece of symbolic language, we'll create more than a Nuclear Age. "Matter is frozen energy," Einstein said, relating the essence of his insight into the mass-energy relationship. Similarly, language is frozen meaning. When we discover how to unleash the enormous energy in meaning by continually transforming information (data, ideas, knowledge, experience) in new contexts, we'll make a quantum leap in applying the power of language to achieve our boldest dreams. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder and director of Psi-Phi Communications - **Extract length:** 87 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Founder and director of Psi-Phi Communications](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11930) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-005 — Former book editor of Nature — Peter Tallack > Developed around 1000 AD in northern Europe, it allowed the region to be farmed efficiently and so, it could be argued, was responsible for the rise of civilization there. It also gave its possessors great war-making potential — think of knights in armour, for example. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** science editor of Weidenfeld & Nicholson - **Extract length:** 45 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Former book editor of Nature](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11946) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-006 — Editor in chief of Scientific American magazine — John Rennie > What I find so appealing about Volta's creation is that it had immense practical significance but also opened to us a world of physical phenomena that in themselves changed our understanding of the universe. Yet it was not a bolt-from-the blue inspiration; it pulled together other threads of discoveries by Volta's contemporaries. There's a lesson about greatness in there somewhere. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor-In-Chief, Scientific American - **Extract length:** 60 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Editor in chief of Scientific American magazine](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11793) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-007 — Professor of Chemistry at New York University — Robert Shapiro > The completion of the Human Genome Project will provide us with an understanding, at the molecular level, of human hereditary disease (much has already been learned about Huntington's disease, cystic fibrosis and others). Further, by the application of other tools from modern molecular biology, we shall be able to do something about these afflictions in the near future.They will be treated and, if society permits it, corrected at the genetic level. Beyond that, we shall come to understand, and perhaps control, many unfortunate aspects of the human condition that have until now been taken for granted, from baldness to aging. Ultimately, we may elect to rewrite our genetic text, changing ourselves and the way in which we experience the universe. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and Senior Research Scientist, New York University; Author, Planetary Dreams - **Extract length:** 120 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Professor of Chemistry at New York University](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11656) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-008 — Professor of Psychiatry, Director, ISR Evolution and Human Adaptation Program, The University of Michigan — Randolph Nesse > I suspect it is because text has a special relationship to the human mind. Printing is the third wave of the biggest innovation, the one that started with the co-evolution of language, thought and speech. Speech makes it possible to share and compare internal models of the external world, a capacity that gives huge selective advantages. But acoustic vibrations are ephemeral, fading in moments into questions about who said what, when. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research Professor of Life Sciences, Director (2014-2019), Center for Evolution and Medicine, Arizona State University; Author, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Professor of Psychiatry, Director, ISR Evolution and Human Adaptation Program, The University of Michigan](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11808) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-009 — Columnist at PC Magazine — John C. Dvorak > More interesting in this artificial discussion is how most of the participants, including myself, have chosen an invention from their particular specialty. Perhaps we should ask the question: what is the most insidious invention of the past 2000 years? How about specialization? Look at how insidious it is in this discussion. So much so that it's frightening. Change the topic! Discussing the most insidious inventions would be more fun than talking about the importance of hay, the concept of infinity or Goedel! Just think of the possibilities. We can nominate plastic, the stock market, roller pens, the vibrating dildo, sitcoms, the literary agent, Microsoft Visual BASIC, the animated cartoon, CNN, the wrist watch, roller blades, the spinach souffle. The possibilities are endless. Let's start over. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Columnist; Broadcaster in areas of technology and computing - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Columnist at PC Magazine](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11671) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-010 — Professor of physics and of mathematics at Columbia University — Brian Greene > The invention of the telescope and its subsequent refinement and use by Galileo marked the birth of the modern scientific method and set the stage for a dramatic reassessment of our place in the cosmos. A technological device revealed conclusively that there is so much more to the universe than is available to our unaided senses. And these revelations, in time, have established the unforeseen vastness of our dynamic, expanding universe, shown that our galaxy is but one among countless others, and introduced us to a wealth of exotic astrophysical structures. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Co-founder of the World Science Festival and Chairman, Science Festival Foundation; Professor of Mathematics & Physics, Columbia University; author, The Hidden Reality, The Fabric of the Cosmos, and The Elegant Universe - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Professor of physics and of mathematics at Columbia University](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11823) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-011 — Director of Science Programs at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation — Kenneth W. Ford > Well, this isn't very imaginative, but my choice-like that of several other contributors-is the pill. Here's my reasoning. The greatest invention of the last 2000 years is the one that is most likely to help avert the collapse of civilization in the next 2000. Electricity as a means of information and energy transport is a candidate. Modern medicine is a candidate. But what drives or exacerbates every major global problem is, ultimately, population growth. So whatever most effectively limits population growth is the greatest invention-and that's the pill, or contraception more generally. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Retired Director of the American Institute of Physics - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Director of Science Programs at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11686) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-012 — President of EDventure Holdings and editor of Release 1.0 — Esther Dyson > I'd say the notion that people can govern themselves, rather than being governed by someone who claims divine right. (I'm wrestling with that one myself right now, on the Internet.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Investor; Chairman, EDventure Holdings; Executive Founder, Wellville; Author: Release 2.0 - **Extract length:** 30 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [President of EDventure Holdings and editor of Release 1.0](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11838) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-013 — Physicist — Philip Brockman > Stephen Budiansky points to importance of "the domestication of the horse as a mount." The amazing fact is that mankind can learn new technology at an amazing pace. Thus, in a relatively short time after the introduction of the horse to America, the Apache were a great light cavalry. I would also agree with David Shaw re: "the steady accrual of both knowledge and technology that has accompanied the rigorous application of the scientific method over a surprisingly small number of human generations "; and with Stanislas Dehaene on the "concept of education." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Physicist](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11701) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-014 — Editor-In-Chief and co-founder of Feed — Steven Johnson > I think part of the problem here is the fact that inventions by nature are cumulative, and so when asked to pick out the single most important one, you're inevitably faced with a kind of infinite regress: if the automobile is the most important invention, then why not the combustible engine? (And so onŠ) In that spirit — and in the spirit of nominating things you happen to be working on professionally — I'd nominate the ultimate cumulative invention: the city. Or at least the modern city's role as an information storage and retrieval device. Before there were webs and telegraphs making information faster, there were cities bringing information physically closer together, and organizing it in intelligible ways. It's not a stretch to think of the original urban guilds as file directories on the storage device of the collective mind, combining disparate skills and knowledge bases and placing them into the appropriate slots. (Manuel De Landa has a wonderful riff on this in the first section of his new book, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor-In-Chief and co-founder of Feed - **Extract length:** 176 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Editor-In-Chief and co-founder of Feed](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11853) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-015 — Founder of Electric Minds — Howard Rheingold > Knowing how to turn knowledge into power is the most powerful form of knowledge. The mindsets, mindtools, and institutions that make massive technological progress possible are all part of an invisible cultural system — it is learned, not inherent, it was invented, not evolved, it hypnotizes you to see the world in a certain way. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Communications Expert; Author, Smart Mobs - **Extract length:** 55 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Founder of Electric Minds](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11716) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-016 — wrote The Hominid Gang: Behind the Scenes in the Search for Human Origins — Delta Willis > Had you asked two years ago I would have nominated the airplane, for it symbolizes the essence of invention by being composed of other inventions: the wheel, the bicycle, a glider, a prop, and a 12 horse power engine. The airplane is important because it diminishes our parochial view, it too changed the manner of warfare (Hey, nice bomber) and one can argue that it was an early form of the space shuttle. But if by important you mean sweeping, the utility of electricity is pivotal to so many things mundane and great, especially the broadcast of information, the A train, the monitors that tell me if my flight is delayed, this modern version of Gutenberg's press, and Les Paul's guitar. Thomas Edison received 389 patents for electric light and power, and Nikola Tesla patented his Apparatus for Transmitting Electrical Energy. Of course humans no more invented electricity than we invented flight, but utility is key. As I write I am preparing to go out for New Year's Eve, and packing a flashlight, just in case an old programming shut down code of 99 introduces us to the Y2K bug a year early. Should such a power failure occur then, the impact of electrical utility will be known. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Paleontologist; Author, Hominid Gang - **Extract length:** 208 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [wrote The Hominid Gang: Behind the Scenes in the Search for Human Origins](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11868) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-017 — Writer for The New York Times — George Johnson > Surely one of the most powerful earthly inventions has been the ability to represent any phenomenon with numbers — either analogue or digital — and then use this representation to predict outcomes in the real world. This information revolution actually began before the year zero with the Pythagoreans and has advanced through stages that include the invention of calculus and, most recently, boolean algebra and all the advantages of digital modeling. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author; The Cancer Chronicles, The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments; Columnist, The New York Times - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Writer for The New York Times](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11565) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-018 — Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley — George Lakoff > What is required for all other human inventions is the notion that one can actively, consciously construct new ideas. We take this for granted, but it is not a "natural" development. Three-year-old children have lots of ideas and even make up new ideas. But they do not have the Idea of an Idea that they can construct anew; they do not naturally arrive at the idea that making up new ideas is something people do. The Idea of an Idea is a cultural creation that children have to learn. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Fellow at The Rockridge Institute; Author, The Little Blue Book - **Extract length:** 89 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11731) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-019 — Professor at the Center for Neural Science, New York University — Joseph LeDoux > Inventions. My top runners in the area of physical inventions would have to be ways of harnessing energy, ways of moving around the world, and ways of communicating. And since the latter two depend on the first, I'd have to put my money on energy control and use. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Neural Science, Psychology, Psychiatry, and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, NYU; Director Emotional Brain Institute; Author, Anxious - **Extract length:** 48 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Professor at the Center for Neural Science, New York University](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11883) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-020 — Computer Scientist, is director of MIT's AI Lab — Rodney A. Brooks > The electric motor, in all its guises where electricty produces mechanical motion. The industrial revolution was restricted to places of work and shared production until the relatively small and clean electric motor enabled the adoption of its bounty into the home; for instance, refrigeration, automated cleaning, cooling, better heating, entertainment, mass data storage, home medical care, and more comfortable personal transportation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus); Former Director, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (1997-2007); Founder, CTO, Robust.AI; Author, Flesh and Machines - **Extract length:** 61 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Computer Scientist, is director of MIT's AI Lab](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11580) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-021 — Professor of Neurobiology and Psychology at the University of Maryland — Robert Provine > The discovery that children are not "miniature adults" led to a more humane society and was essential to tailoring educational programs to the developmental stage of the student. Universal schooling (and even the modern university) were born both of this increased appreciation of the special needs of children and necessity — the industrial revolution needed a cadre of trained workers, scientists and engineers. The complexity of modern technology and the associated acceleration of innovation demand a critical mass of creative minds and hands that cannot be provided by occasional virtuosi toiling in solitude. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Author, Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Professor of Neurobiology and Psychology at the University of Maryland](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11746) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-022 — Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin — Maria Lepowsky > I too offer a vote for the oral contraceptive pill. It is revolutionary for two reasons. First, it makes a quantum leap in the effectiveness of technologies for the control of human fertility — which are found in every known culture and likely date back more than a hundred millennia. The pill and subsequent devices have the potential for a revolutionary impact on the lives of women from puberty to menopause everywhere in the world, allowing women to control their own fertility and thus enabling members of half the human species to control their own adult lives. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11900) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-023 — Mills Professor of Philosophy of Mind at the University of California — John R. Searle > The most important invention of all time is the Neolithic Revolution. With the Neolithic Revolution, humanity found ways to grow crops systematically, and thus overcame both the instability and the fragility of life itself that went with hunter-gatherer ways of survival. Hunter-gatherers could neither stay in one place long enough to develop a stable civilization, nor could they count on being able to survive periods of drought and other forms of natural catastrophe. With the Neolithic revolution, both of these problems were solved, and civilization became a real possibility. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mills Professor of Philosophy of Mind at the University of California - **Extract length:** 89 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Mills Professor of Philosophy of Mind at the University of California](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11596) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-024 — Head of Research, BT Laboratories — Peter Cochrane > The Thermionic Valve by DeForest in 1915 really was the birth of the electronic age. Without this invention most of us would never have been born. Without electronics this planet would not be supporting the massive numbers of people now living in the West. We would not be able to communicate, compute, manufacture and distribute atoms on the scale we now enjoy. There would be no radio, TV, computers, Internet, modern medicine — engineering, international travel of any scale, atomic power and almost everything we currently take for granted. In fact our species and our civilisation would have stalled without this invention. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founding Partner, Formicio; Chairman & CEO, Cochrane Associates - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Head of Research, BT Laboratories](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11761) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-025 — Theoretical Physicist; Professor of Physics at the Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Pennsylvania State University — Lee Smolin > Telecommunications also gave rise to a question, which is what is it that remains the same when a signal is translated from sound waves to electrical impulses or electromagnetic waves. We have a name for the answer, it is information, but I do not have the impression that we really understand its implications. For example, using this concept some people are claiming that not only is it the case that some physical or mathematical systems can be represented in terms of another but that, there is some coding that would permit every sufficiently complicated physical or mathematical system to be represented in terms of any other. This of course, brings us back to Descartes, who wanted to understand the relationship between the mind and the brain. Certainly the concept of information is not the whole answer, but it does gives us a language in which to ask the question that was not available to Descartes. Nevertheless, without his first discovery of a correspondence between two systems of relations, we would not only lack the possibility of talking about information, we would not have most of mathematics, we would not have telecommunications and we would not have the computer. This the notion of a representation is not only the most important mathematical invention, it is the idea that made it possible to conceive of many of the other important inventions of the last few centuries. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution - **Extract length:** 234 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Theoretical Physicist; Professor of Physics at the Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Pennsylvania State University](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11611) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-026 — Professor and director of the Center for Neurobiology and Psychiatry at the University of California — Samuel Barondes > The great invention of the modern era is the invention of organized science — scientific societies and journals that foster the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge based on evidence rather than on authority or revelation. Before the invention of these organizations the accumulation of scientific knowledge was slow, because there were no established venues for criticism and education — essential social interactions at the heart of science. Now that these organizations (in the developed world) have become very large (necessitating the proliferation of many subdivisions, to allow for personal interactions on a human scale) they facilitate the unprecedented opportunities for collective knowledge and self knowledge that so many of us enjoy. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Neurobiology and Psychiatry, UCSF; Author, Making Sense of People - **Extract length:** 111 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Professor and director of the Center for Neurobiology and Psychiatry at the University of California](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11776) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-027 — Evolutionary Biologist — Paul W. Ewald > My nominee is the concept of evolution by selection (which encompasses natural selection, sexual selection, and the selective processes that generate cultural evolution). It offers the best explanation for what we are, where we came from, and the nature of life in the rest of the universe. It also explains why we invent and why we believe the inventions described in this list are important. It is the invention that explains invention. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biology, Amherst College; Author, Plague Time - **Extract length:** 72 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Evolutionary Biologist](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11626) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-028 — Post doctoral fellow in the Department Of Psychology, University Of Alberta — Chris Westbury > Nor do I nominate probability theory because it gave us for the first time a trustworthy tool for deciding how to apportion belief to multiple sources of evidence. Probability theory had even more fundamental epistemological implications whose importance is under-appreciated in our time because those implications are so seamlessly integrated into the foundations of our modern world view. Until the nineteenth century, the idea that there could exist deep regularities underlain by pure chance — regularities arising from distributions of events which were themselves the result of multifarious unmeasurable causes — was not only almost unknown (Aristotle had hinted at it, as he seems to have hinted at everything), but actually philosophically repugnant. It required the invention of probability theory to make this idea thinkable. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Post doctoral fellow in the Department Of Psychology, University Of Alberta - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Post doctoral fellow in the Department Of Psychology, University Of Alberta](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11792) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-029 — Senior Editor at Discover — Unattributed Edge contributor > I'd even go so far as to put the importance of the invention of waterworks on an evolutionary scale with things such as language. For hundreds of millions of years, life on land has been crafting new ways to extract and hold onto water. With plumbing, however, you don't go to the water — the water comes to you. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 59 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Senior Editor at Discover](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11641) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-030 — Theoretical physicist — Julian Barbour > If it had not been invented over three thousand years ago, I should have nominated the bell, but instead I choose the symphony orchestra. This is because, like the bell, it establishes a dramatic link between two seemingly disparate worlds — the material world of science and the world of the psyche and the arts. The symphony orchestra is surely important because it made possible classical music, the nomination of Howard Gardner. However, I choose it as a symbol for something that may yet be to come, like space travel, the choice of Reuben Hersh. What is more, I make my choice precisely because in just one point I disagree with Howard Gardner — classical music is crucially dependent on physical inventions: musical instruments. I have long been fascinated by one of the great conundrums of philosophy that was clearly recognized by Newton's contempories: If there is only a material world characterized by the so-called primary qualities such as extension, motion, and mass, how are we to explain our awareness of so many different secondary qualities such as colors, sounds, tastes, and smells? The material world has no need of them and can never explain them. Of course, we all know that science can now demonstrate how specific sensations are correlated with physical phenomena, but a correlation is not necessarily a cause — for both correlates may have a common cause — and still less is it an explanation. How can the vibrations of cat gut create in me the effect I experience when listening to Beethoven's quartets? Perhaps I am naïve, but I am a committed scientist. I cannot be content to regard the secondary qualities as epiphenomena. I think there could be a physics, far richer than the one we presently know, in which the secondary qualities are as real as electric charge. The bell and symphony orchestra call us to ponder higher things and wider possibilities, the domain where science is reconciled with the arts. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical physicist; Author, The Janus Point - **Extract length:** 328 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Theoretical physicist](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11323) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-031 — Director of the Human Origins Program, Dept. of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution in Washington — Richard Potts > Finally, flying machines have meant a global altering of how societies approach food and other resources, tying humanity together in a worldwide economy (resource exchange) driven by our interdependence. Two million years ago, the movement of resources (like food and stone tools) had become a development with extraordinary implications for human evolution. But even 2 thousand years ago, no one could have foreseen just how far this process of resource exchange has gone today — largely due to flying machines. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director of The Human Origins Program - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Director of the Human Origins Program, Dept. of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution in Washington](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11491) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-032 — attorney, is counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation — Mike Godwin > The most important invention in the last 2000 years has to be the moveable-type printing press. Cheap book production put the printed language in the hands of the masses and led directly to the rise of literacy. Once you have a large literate class, you see the democratic impulse flourish — even a moderately educated populace begins to make judgments about its rulers and its mode of government. Cheap book production also advances both scientific and historical knowledge by ensuring that valuable source documents are duplicated and preserved and (just as important, really) ensuring that those old documents are readable. Cheap book duplication makes it possible to quickly build a cadre of scientists and historians who've read the same works and thus share a common body of knowledge. Finally, moveable type makes it possible for the past to speak to the future en masse in a way that the evanescent oral tradition never could. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Contributing Editor at Reason - **Extract length:** 154 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [attorney, is counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11173) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-033 — Professor of Computer Science at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor — John H. Holland > Board games are found as artifacts of the earliest Egyptian dynasties, so they don't truly fall within the 2000 year limit, but they have undergone a rapid "adaptive radiation" in the last millennium. Thales' invention of logic (the manipulation of abstract tokens under fixed rules) was likely influenced by a knowledge of board games, and board games offered an early metaphoric guide for politics and war in both the East (Go) and the West (Chess). These insights, in turn, had much to do with transition from the belief that the world around us is controlled by the whims and personalities of gods to the outlook that the world can be described in lawlike fashion. In the 19th and 20th centuries board games became the inspiration for models, simulations and mathematics, ranging from genetics and evolution to markets and social interaction. Board games also offer a simple example of the recondite phenomenon called emergence — "much coming from little" — as when a fertilized egg yields a complex organism consisting of tens of billions of cells. And, via a mutation into video-games, board games offer the next generation an entry into the world of long horizons and rigorous thought — both in short supply in the current generation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of psychology and a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor - **Extract length:** 207 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Professor of Computer Science at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11338) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-034 — Ambrose Swasey Professor of Physics, Professor of Astronomy — Lawrence M. Krauss > If I take the word "important" to suggest an invention that will have "the greatest impact on the next 2000 years" (after all, it is the future that counts, not the pa st!),then the invention of the programmable computer seems to me to be the most important invention of the last 2000 years. ( I am not including in my list of possibilities here ideas and concepts, since I don't think they qualify as inventions, and I suspect that the intent of the question is to explore technology, not ideas...). While the printing press certainly revolutionized the world in its time, computers will govern everything we do in the next 20 centuries. The development of artificial intelligence will be profound, quantum computers may actually be built, and I am sympathetic to the idea I first heard expressed by my friend Frank Wilczek, that computers are the next phase of human evolution. Once self-aware, self-programmable computers become a reality, then I have a hard time seeing how humans can keep up without in some way integrating them into their own development. The only other invention that may come close is perhaps DNA sequencing, since it will undoubtedly lead to a new understanding and control of genetic and biology in a way which will alter what we mean by life. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist; Foundation Professor, School of Earth and Space Exploration and Physics Department, ASU; Author, The Greatest Story Ever Told . . . So Far - **Extract length:** 218 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Ambrose Swasey Professor of Physics, Professor of Astronomy](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11506) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-035 — research astronomer at the Joule Physics Laboratory at the University of Salford — Duncan Steel > One therefore has to think about what important means in the context of different people's lives. Right now the most important thing to a Denver Broncos fan (I write as they stand 13-0) is whether a perfect season is in the offing. Excuse me but isn't that totally insignificant to some starving child in Ethiopia; but it is the thing foremost in the mind of that Broncos fan, perhaps fatally-so: he may crash whilst driving to the next game at Mile High Stadium and lose his life, never getting to see his team romp the Superbowl again. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** research astronomer at the Joule Physics Laboratory at the University of Salford - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [research astronomer at the Joule Physics Laboratory at the University of Salford](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11188) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-036 — Film director and writer-producer — Bob Rafelson > Richard Gatling started with a cotton seed sowing machine and graduated to a weapon that rotated 10 barrels of 0.45 in bullets at a rate of 1000 rounds a minute. The Confederacy didn't purchase the thing 'til after the Civil War. But in the next several decades it was bought and used by powerful armies around the globe. Finally it proved its battle merit in Africa where it mowed down thousands of unsuspecting Zulus. The Gatling Gun was the first weapon of mass destruction. Moreover, it spawned the ongoing, if clumsy, debate about weapons being banned for the sake of mankind. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Film director and writer-producer - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Film director and writer-producer](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11355) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-037 — Computer scientist — John Mccarthy > The most important invention is the idea of continued scientific and technological progress. The individual who deserves the most credit for this is Francis Bacon. Before Bacon progress occurred but was sporadic, and most people did not expect to see new inventions in their lifetimes. The idea of continued scientific progress became institutionalized in the Academei dei Lincei, the Royal Society and other scientific academies. the idea of continued invention was institutionalized with the patent laws. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University - **Extract length:** 76 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Computer scientist](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11521) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-038 — Science Correspondent of The Economist and former deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph's technology — Tom Standage > Today, in the developed world at least, we think nothing of talking with people on the other side of the world. During the course of a normal working day, many people spend more time dealing with people remotely than they do face-to-face. The ubiquity of telecommunications technology has become deeply embedded in our culture. Of course, life has sped up as a result. But we watch TV and use telephones, fax machines and, increasingly, the Internet, almost unthinkingly. If the mark of an advanced technology is that it is indistinguishable from magic, then the mark of an important one is that it becomes invisible — that we fail to notice when we are using it. That makes the significance of telecommunications technology very easy to overlook, and underestimate. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Business Affairs Editor, The Economist; Author, The Edible History of the Humanity - **Extract length:** 128 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Science Correspondent of The Economist and former deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph's technology](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11203) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-039 — Professor of mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia — John Allen Paulos > Thanks for your invitation (and for your project in general). I'd respond more fully but the question seems too ill-defined to answer. (I guess I still have something of the reductionistic, literal mindset of a mathematician despite periodic forays into more nebulous realms.) An invention or innovation that becomes essential has a tendency also to become invisible as we, in a sense, "grow around" it. If I were forced to name something, I guess I would go with Gutenberg's movable type. And if I wanted to be puerilely self-referential, my choice for most important invention might be the notion of a precise question. (Nevertheless, I do see the value of vague ones as well.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** professor of mathematics at Temple University - **Extract length:** 114 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Professor of mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11371) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-040 — Writer and Television Producer — Karl Sabbagh > In fact I'll break the rules a third time by choosing two things — chairs and stairs. Apart from the fact that they rhyme, they also represent an imaginative leap by seeing the value to the human anatomy of an idealised platform in space at a certain height. A platform of, say, 7 inches would enable a person to raise himself towards some higher objective without undue effort, but that's as far as it goes. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Producer; Founder, Managing Director, Skyscraper Productions; Author, The Antisemitism Wars: How the British Media Failed Their Public - **Extract length:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Writer and Television Producer](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11536) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-041 — Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy/ Neuroscience/Psychology Program at Washington University in St Louis, St Louis, MO, USA — Andy Clark > A digital ecosystem is a kind of universe, realized in electronic media, in which we observe incremental evolution and complex interaction. The classic examples come from work in Artificial Life, such as Tom Ray'sTierra project in which strings of code compete for resources, such as CPU time, and in which cascades of strategies for success develop, with later ones exploiting the weaknesses and loopholes of their predecessors. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Cognitive Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK; Author, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind - **Extract length:** 67 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy/ Neuroscience/Psychology Program at Washington University in St Louis, St Louis, MO, USA](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11218) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-042 — Mathematician — Verena Huber-Dyson > Creating a bridge between the two archetypal fictions 0 and * it makes sense of them. It has become a tool in just about every branch of engineering and science. It provides a language for the formulation of laws and a method for constructing explanations, solutions and predictions. It is alive: its invention in the 17th century — by Leibniz and Newton independently — articulated a concept that had long been vaguely anticipated and applied implicitly, its development is still in progress, leading to the resolution of old puzzles (e.g., Zeno's Paradox) while raising new ones (e.g., the continuum hypothesis). Leibniz had been agonizing over what he called "the labyrinth of the continuum" but the 19th century put the infinitesimal calculus on a firm basis by analyzing the concepts of a limit and of infinity from a variety of view points. Nowadays we are blessed with new developments coming from the quarter of symbolic logic that arose out of a digital (0,1) modeling of rational arguing: non standard analysis vindicates Leibniz' use of "infinitely small" non-zero quantities. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** 1923-2016; Emeritus Professor, Formerly, Philosophy Department. University of Calgary, Alberta Canada - **Extract length:** 177 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Mathematician](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11386) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-043 — Professor of Psychology at Boston College — Ellen Winner > Howard Gardner and I are probably one of the few couples who replied to your request. Last night we were at a party and we mentioned this project. I said that Howard's and my choices (Western classical music, Howard; vs. anaesthesia, Ellen) showed how different we were, Howard the optimist, I the one who thinks of the grim side of life. At the party was Yo Yo Ma, who listened with interest and said, without skipping a beat, that our two choices were not so different, because "One is a form of the other." (Interpret that as you will “ I take it to mean that music is the ultimate escape from pain, but also perhaps that anaesthesia [when needed] is as pleasurable as music). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, Boston College; Author, How Art Works: A Psychological Exploration - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Professor of Psychology at Boston College](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11550) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-044 — researcher at the Institut National de la Santé studies cognitive neuropsychology of language and number processing in the human brain — Stanislas Dehaene > Our brain is nothing but a collection of networks of neurons and synapses that have been shaped by evolution to solve specific problems. Yet through education and culture, we have found ways to "recycle" those networks for other uses. With the invention of reading and writing, we recycle our visual system to do word reading. With the invention of mathematics, we apply our innate networks for number, space, and time to all sorts of problems beyond their original domain of relevance. Education is the key invention that enables all these rewirings to take place at a time when our brains are still optimally modifiable. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Collège de France, Paris; Author, How We Learn - **Extract length:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [researcher at the Institut National de la Santé studies cognitive neuropsychology of language and number processing in the human brain](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11233) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-045 — Professor Emeritus in the Dept. of Geology & Geophysics at the University of California — Garniss Curtis > The skulls of l0 skeletons found in Skhul Cave at the foot of Mt. Carmel in Israel in the l930's are similar in size and shape to modern Homo sapiens. These have been dated at 80,000 years. A similar skull found in a cave at Qafzeh, Israel has been dated at 9l,000 years. Having the same size brain capacity, of course, does not necessarily mean they had our same intelligence, although they were capable of making beautiful stone tools. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Geochronologist Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley - **Extract length:** 79 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Professor Emeritus in the Dept. of Geology & Geophysics at the University of California](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11401) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-046 — Editor emeritus of Nature; physicist — Sir John Maddox > In any case, there's no doubt in my mind that the invention of the differential calculus by Newton and, independently, by Leibnitz, was the outstanding invention of the past 2,000 years. The calculus made the whole of modern science what it is. Moreover, this was not a trivial invention. Newton know that velocity is the rate of change (with time) of distance (from Galileo, for example) and that acceleration is the rate of change of velocity (with time), but it was far from self-evident that these quantities could be inferred from the geometrical shapes of Kepler's orbits of the planets. Nowadays, of course, mere schoolboys (and girls) can play Newton's game — it's just a matter of "changing the variables", as they say. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor (Emeritus), Nature; Royal Commissions on environmental pollution and genetic manipulation - **Extract length:** 123 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Editor emeritus of Nature; physicist](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11248) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-047 — Paleoanthropologist, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan — Milford H. Wolpoff > Developments from hypotheses are the analogues of ontogeny, and there are various other processes that parallel the biological world such as the roles of randomness (first publications carry excess influence by virtue of being first, just as Microsoft systems succeed by being most common but not necessarily best), and punctuated equilibrium (scientific revolutions are complete replacement events). There are even biological-like terms like "memes" that may describe how hypotheses are transmitted. All and all, ever since when well before Neandertal times we hominids developed significantly complex culture, that extrasomatic way of transmitting hierarchically structured information, we have enjoyed (in the sense of the Chinese curse) interesting times. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan; Adjunct Associate Research Scientist, Museum of Anthropology - **Extract length:** 107 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Paleoanthropologist, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11417) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-048 — geoarchaeologist and works as chief physical scientist on many archaeological field projects in Mediterranean countries — Eberhard Zangger > However, I recall enjoying a particularly Romantic evening in the usually overcrowded, noisy Cretan tourist resort of Elounda. Some time passed before I realized what made this evening so special — a general power shut down had knocked out all fluorescent lighting and loudspeakers. Lanterns and kitchen stoves still worked — with gas. This brings me back to my original response to the question, what is the most important invention of the past two thousand years. Nothing worth mentioning. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Managing director of science communications - **Extract length:** 79 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [geoarchaeologist and works as chief physical scientist on many archaeological field projects in Mediterranean countries](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11263) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-049 — Editor of — Mark Jay Mirsky > Steven Rose speaks of inventions as concepts. It is in bringing ourselves back, again and again, to the concept of invention and in particular of the invention of symbol in the light of our fear, that I think both the human body and mind find themselves in a balance that allows them to experience that mysterious state that Plato called the "good" and the Bible referred to as "completed" or "perfect": or "quiet within oneself." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** writer and founder and editor of Fiction Magazine - **Extract length:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Editor of](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11432) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-050 — director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory — Leon M. Lederman > If we suggest anything other than the Printing Press, Brockman will cancel our Christmas bonuses and New Years Eve turkey. So: the greatest invention in the past two thousand years is the printing press. Next is the thermos bottle. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory - **Extract length:** 39 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11278) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-051 — Researcher at the CREA in Paris — Dan Sperber > I am afraid the answer I find compelling is a rather trivial one. The two most important inventions in the past two thousand years are the computer and the atomic bomb. The computer will bring about the greatest change to human life since the neolithic revolution, unless the bomb destroys human life altogether. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Social and Cognitive Scientist; CEU Budapest and CNRS Paris; Co-author (with Deirdre Wilson), Meaning and Relevance; and (with Hugo Mercier), The Enigma of Reason - **Extract length:** 53 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Researcher at the CREA in Paris](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11446) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-052 — evolutionary psychologist, is Associate Professor at Harvard University — Unattributed Edge contributor > I have two suggestions, both within the cut-off period. First, the electric light, born about 50 years before Joseph Swan put a patent on the incandescent lamp in 1878, and then Edison in 1879. Having lived in Africa, where one is often forced to read from fire light, electricity is a god send. Moreover, having invented the incandescent lamp, it didn't take too long to come up with the flashlight, another handy device for those of us working in dark jungles. My second suggestion for great inventions is the aspirin, invented, oddly enough in 1853 in France. Clearly, other medicines have been around, many of which serve comparable functions, but what a useful little pill. Among the Maasai in Kenya, headaches are treated with goat feces, a mud compact to the head. I prefer the aspirin personally. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 137 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [evolutionary psychologist, is Associate Professor at Harvard University](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11293) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-053 — Java evangelist and director of developer relations at Sun Microsystems — Lew Tucker > I would have to agree that Gutenberg's printing press is the most important invention in the past two thousand years because it changed forever the cost of knowledge distribution. What other inventions wouldn't have happened if the inventor didn't have access to books? In a sense I think we can trace many aspects of our information society back to this single invention. In it's electronic form on the web we see movable type and a yearning for information to be accessible and free. The web is taking the cost of distributing information down near zero. Gutenberg would be pleased to see where his invention has taken us. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director of JavaSoft's Corporate and ISV Relations for Sun Microsystems, Inc - **Extract length:** 107 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Java evangelist and director of developer relations at Sun Microsystems](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11461) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-054 — Professor of Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin — David M. Buss > "One criterion for "most important" is that which has most profoundly altered patterns of human mating. Changes in mating can affect the subsequent evolutionary course of the entire species, with cascading consequences for virtually every aspect of human life. Although many inventions have altered human mating over the past 2,000 years, television must rank among the most important. Television has changed status and prestige criteria, created instant celebrities, hastened the downfall of leaders, increased the importance of physical appearance, and accelerated the intensity of intrasexual mate competition — all of which have acutely transformed the nature of sexuality and mating and perhaps forever altered the evolutionary course of our species." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin; Author, When Men Behave Badly - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Professor of Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11308) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-055 — Science writer and communicator based in Copenhagen — Tor Nørretranders > The most influential invention in the past 2000 years has been the mirror: It has shown to each person how she or he appears to other persons on the planet. Before the widespread production and use of mirrors that came about in the Renaissance, humans could mirror themselves in lakes and metallic surfaces. But only with the installation of mirrors in everyday life did viewing oneself from the outside become a daily habit. This coincided with the advent of manners for eating, clothing and behaving. This again made possible the modern version of self-consciousness: Viewing oneself through the eyes of others, rather than just from the inside or through the eyes of God. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Writer; Speaker; Thinker, Copenhagen, Denmark - **Extract length:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Science writer and communicator based in Copenhagen](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11476) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-056 — Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Life, Inc. — Douglas Rushkoff > Without our ability to go back, erase, and try again, we'd have no scientific model, nor any way to evolve government, culture, or ethics. The eraser is our confessor, our absolver, and our time machine. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus - **Extract length:** 35 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Life, Inc.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11158) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-057 — Associate Professor of Medicinem National Autonomous University of Mexico — Antonio R. Cabral > In my opinion, the printing press comes second to languages as the most important invention in the past 20 centuries; this puts Johann Gutenberg (c.1400-1468) as the second most important inventor of all, since one can easily pinpoint him as the Father of the printed letter. Without a (written) language, specially when it conveys concepts and feelings, all cultures — scientific, literary or otherwise — would be all but a conceptless matter. The Third Culture simply could not breathe. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Medicine at the National Autonomous University of Mexico - **Extract length:** 79 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Associate Professor of Medicinem National Autonomous University of Mexico](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10855) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-058 — mathematical physicist working on quantum gravity using the techniques of higher-dimensional algebra — John Baez > How can we possibly pick the most important invention in the past two thousand years? The real biggies — language, fire, agriculture, art — came too soon. In the last two millennia our world has seen so many inventions that it's hard to think of one that stands above all the rest. The printing press? The computer? The A-bomb? After a bit of this, one is tempted to give a smart-aleck reply and back it up with the semblance of earnest reasoning: "Thousand Island dressing!" - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematical Physicist, U.C. Riverside - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [mathematical physicist working on quantum gravity using the techniques of higher-dimensional algebra](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11013) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-059 — executive editor of The New Yorker — Hendrik Hertzberg > I mean, doesn't it seem kind of obvious that printing — under which would be subsumed all forms of large-scale reproduction of the written word, from handmade wooden type to the computer and word-processing program I'm using to write this — was the most important invention of the past two thousand years? Printing led directly to mass literacy, democracy, the scientific revolution, cyberthis and cyberthat, and all those other good things. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Executive Editor, The New Yorker - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [executive editor of The New Yorker](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10870) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-060 — flutist whose latest album is Planet Flute — Viviana Guzman > Why hasn't anyone mentioned television??!! Is it too obvious? I think it's the single most powerful and manipulative tool ever invented. It's today's most important source of information and serves as a tremendous behavior patterning device. Since it's inception, crime has risen, sex has increased and the attendance at live performances has died. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Flutist - **Extract length:** 53 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [flutist whose latest album is Planet Flute](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11027) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-061 — writing about science and culture has appeared in The New York Times Magazine — David Berreby > Interesting question. My candidate would be: The concept of information as a commodity, a thing that can be bought and sold. It's an ancient invention, dating back to the day of the fleet footed messenger, but its enormous consequences had to wait for the acceleration of information-carrying technologies like the telegraph and the Internet. We're only now witnessing the cumulative impact, as the buying and selling of information begins to outweigh the buying and selling of stuff. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Journalist; Author, Us and Them - **Extract length:** 77 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [writing about science and culture has appeared in The New York Times Magazine](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10885) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-062 — Professor in the Biological Sciences Department at Stanford University — Stephen Schneider > Although not directly responsive to your question, the invention I really like — think we will really need — is a fusion of systems analysis with psychotherapy. But the new field of "systems therapy" is yet to be invented!, leaving me dangling uneasily between systems — and psycho-analysis. Perhaps, if armed with insights from tools that integrated physical, biological, social and psychological drivers of our behaviors across a range of scales, rather than always chugging merrily along in business as usual mode, we'd be more aware of the range of consequences of our unconsciousness. Then, if we continued to damage the collective or put the future at risk, at least that would be more of a choice and less of a surprise. With best wishes to all for the holiday season. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** climatologist, is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences - **Extract length:** 131 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Professor in the Biological Sciences Department at Stanford University](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11041) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-063 — Chief Architect, Microsoft Corporation — Charles Simonyi > In the spirit of completeness and risking chronocentrism big time, I nominate Public Key Cryptosystems as something invented during the last two thousand years and which will remain useful long after the printing press will exist only in the (electronic) history books next to the steam engine. PKC has three incredible properties: perfect privacy, perfect authentication, and a reliable carrier of value and contracts — like gold used to be. All this in the digital environment where information can be easily and perfectly stored and copied. At a single stroke PKC transformed our vision of the asymptotic result of information technology from the 1984-ish nightmare to a realistic and ultimately attractive cyberspace where identity and privacy are not lost, despite of our (and Orwell's) commonsense intuition to the contrary. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Software Engineer, Computer Scientist, Entrepreneur, Philanthropist - **Extract length:** 129 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Chief Architect, Microsoft Corporation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10899) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-064 — Editor of Nature — Philip Campbell > Thanks for the reminder. Here's my shot. Perhaps the most challengingly important inventions are those that open up new moral dilemmas, and thus make some people question whether the invention should have been allowed (or precursor discovery sought) in the first place. This even applies to Howard Gardner's suggestion of classical music: I would add Adorno's (I think) statement that, in contrast to some composers, it is impossible to find evil that could have been reinforced by any note written by Mozart. On the other hand, I believe Wagner is still banned in Israel. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor-in-Chief of Nature since 1995; Beginning summer 2018, he will become Editor-in-Chief of Springer Nature’s portfolio of journals, books and magazines - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Editor of Nature](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11055) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-065 — evolutionary biologist and the Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science at Oxford University — Richard Dawkins > Humanity's eyes have now been widened to see that the rainbow of visible light is only an infinitesimal slice of the full electromagnetic spectrum. Spectroscopy is unweaving the rainbow on a grand scale. If Keats had known what Newton's unweaving would lead to — the expansion of our human vision, inspired by the expanding universe — he could not have drunk that toast. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary Biologist; Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, Oxford; Author, Books Do Furnish a Life - **Extract length:** 63 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [evolutionary biologist and the Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science at Oxford University](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10756) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-066 — professor of astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton — Piet Hut > We have only set the first steps towards building artificial subjects. Just as our current artificial objects are vastly more complex than the first wheel or bow and arrow, our artificial subjects will grow more complex, powerful, and interesting over the centuries. But already we can see a glimmer of what lies ahead: our first attempts to build autonomous agents has taught us new concepts. As a result, we are now beginning to explore self-organizing ecological, economic, or social systems; areas of study where thing-like metaphors hopelessly fail. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** professor of astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton - **Extract length:** 88 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [professor of astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10913) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-067 — science writer — John Horgan > Okay, I'll bite. Has anyone nominated free will yet? The concept is more than 2,000 years old, but surely it deserves consideration as one of our most important inventions ever. Almost as soon as philosophers conceived of free will, they struggled to reconcile it with the materialistic, deterministic views of nature advanced by science. Epicurus insisted that there must be an element of randomness within nature that allows free will to exist. Lucretius called this randomness "the swerve." Modern free-willers find the swerve within chaos theory or quantum mechanics. None of these arguments are very convincing. Science has made it increasingly clear — to me, anyway — that free will is an illusion. But more even than God, it is a glorious, absolutely necessary illusion. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, Center for Science Writings, Stevens Institute of Technology - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [science writer](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11069) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-068 — evolutionary biologist and a member of the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University — David Haig > My suggestion for the most important invention of the last two millennia is the computer because of the way it extends the capacities of the human mind for accurately performing large numbers of calculations and for keeping track of and accessing vast bodies of data. As with any great invention, these enhanced abilities have a light and a dark side. As a scientist I am now able to answer questions that could not be answered prior to the computer. On the dark side is the loss of privacy and the enhanced potential for social control made possible by the ability to manipulate large databases of personal information. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** George Putnam Professor of Biology, Harvard University; Author, From Darwin to Derrida - **Extract length:** 107 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [evolutionary biologist and a member of the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10770) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-069 — Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of the West of England, Bristol — Susan Blackmore > Why? Because freedom from constant childbearing means that women can become meme-spreaders like men — working for their memes rather than their genes. This then means a change in the kinds of memes that propagate effectively, including all the memes of other inventions as well as the meme-spreading media, myths, science and the arts. In other words, it is important because it changes the whole of culture. Few single inventions have this effect on the whole meme pool. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Visiting Professor, University of Plymouth; Author, Consciousness: An Introduction - **Extract length:** 78 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of the West of England, Bristol](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10927) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-070 — physicist, is Associate Vice Provost for Research at Columbia University — Raphael Kasper > Why? Because it opened the possibility that knowledge (information, wisdom) could be disseminated beyond a small number of privileged individuals, thus permitting larger numbers to share or debate world-views and to build upon past and present ideas. Thus far, at least, new electronic technologies (radio, movies, television, computers) have been employed as extensions of this broadening of access to knowledge, altering the medium of exchange but not the concept. At some time in the future they may lead to more fundamental changes in the human condition, but not yet, I'm afraid. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** physicist, is Associate Vice Provost for Research at Columbia University and was Associate Director of the Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [physicist, is Associate Vice Provost for Research at Columbia University](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11084) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-071 — computer scientist — Christopher G. Langton > In the latter category, there are many brilliant candidates, but I think that Darwin's invention of the theory of evolution by natural selection outshines them all. It is perhaps the only truly general theory in Biology, a field much more complex than physics. If we discover life elsewhere in the universe it is likely to be the only biological theory that will carry over from our terrestrial biology. Darwin's theory reduced tremendously the complication of zoological data. Critically, as with the telescope, it has put tremendous pressure on the previous world-view to accommodate man as "merely" a part of a much larger nature. This pressure is still largely being resisted, but the outcome is clear. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** member of the External Faculty of the Santa Fe Institute - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [computer scientist](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10785) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-072 — Professor of Classical Studies and Vice Provost for Information Systems and Computing at the University of Pennsylvania — James J. O'Donnell > If you read through this growing list, you will see that people tend to discover that the most important invention in the last 2000 years is something they just happen to know a lot about. Well, I know a lot about some important inventions — like the codex book (and the consequent idea that a book can be a manual for living — that leads us to the 19th century and its dead ends) and like the computer (which gives us a model for ignoring the manual and just living by experiment), but I think it is quite undeniable that there is something far more important going on: effectual health care. Not just antibiotics, not just birth control, not just anesthesia (to say things mentioned here), but the underlying fundamental fact that we have learned to cross the scientific method with care for human beings and save lives. A thought experiment I like to have people play is this: review your own life and imagine what it would have been like without late 20th century health care. Would you still be alive today? An astonishingly large number of people get serious looks on their faces and admit they wouldn't: I wouldn't, that's for sure. It's medical techniques, it's antibiotics, but it's also vitamin pills and — in some ways most wondrously cost-effective of all — soap, as in the soap doctors use to wash their hands. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Classics Scholar, University Librarian, ASU; Author, Pagans - **Extract length:** 236 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Professor of Classical Studies and Vice Provost for Information Systems and Computing at the University of Pennsylvania](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10941) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-073 — professor of the sociology of sciences at MIT — Sherry Turkle > My candidate would be the idea of the unconscious, the notion that what we say and do and feel can spring from sources of which we are not aware, that our choices and the qualities of our relationships are deeply motivated by our histories. In recent years, the Freudian contribution has tended be seen as historical...something we have passed beyond...but I think that in large part this is because the most fundamental ideas of psychodynamics have passed into popular culture as a given. These ideas animate out understandings of who we are with our families, with our friends and work. They add a dimension to our understandings of what it is to be human that will become increasingly important as we confront world in which artificial intelligences are increasingly presented to us and our children as candidates for dialogue and relationship (this year's Furbies are only a beginning) — and we are compelled to a new level of reflection about what is special about being a person. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, MIT; Internet Culture Researcher; Author, The Empathy Diaries - **Extract length:** 167 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [professor of the sociology of sciences at MIT](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11098) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-074 — President of The Archer Group — Eric J. Hall > Quite a good question and some very interesting responses. However, I take a more pragmatic view. For me, the steam engine was the most important invention in the past two thousand years. The steam engine freed man and beast from physical labor. No other invention had so many different and versatile uses. Man could cut down entire forests to feed sawmills to build cities, quarry stone, propel trains and ships to make the world a smaller place, power factories, and generate electricity. Agrarian society was over and industrialism reigned. Most importantly, the steam engine created more leisure time for mankind. No longer was leisure a pastime for the idle rich. The pursuit of leisure and the changes it created in society far outstripped the first 18 centuries. Without the steam engine, our society would be radically different from today. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** CFO of rightscenter.com, Inc - **Extract length:** 139 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [President of The Archer Group](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10799) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-075 — theoretical psychologist — Nicholas Humphrey > The most important invention has been reading-glasses. They have effectively doubled the active life of everyone who reads or does fine work — and prevented the world being ruled by people under forty - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Emeritus Professor of Psychology, London School of Economics; Visiting Professor of Philosophy, New College of the Humanities; Senior Member, Darwin College, Cambridge; Author, Soul Dust - **Extract length:** 33 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [theoretical psychologist](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10955) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-076 — professor of psychology at Hope College — David G. Myers > Others in this science-minded group have appropriately mentioned the scientific method. Speaking for my discipline let me sharpen this: When it comes to thinking smart — to sifting reality from wishful thinking — one of the great all-time inventions is the control group. If we want to evaluate medical claims (from bloodletting to new drugs to touch therapy), to assess social programs, or to isolate influences on human behavior we construct a controlled reality. By random assignment we form people into equivalent groups which either receive some experience or not — thereby isolating the factor of interest. The power of the controlled experiment has meant the death of many wild and wacky claims, but also the flourishing of critical thinking and rationality. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Hope College; Co-author, Psychology, 11th Edition - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [professor of psychology at Hope College](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11114) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-077 — Professor, New Media Department of Film & Media, Hunter College — Clay Shirky > My vote for "The Most Important Invention In the Past Two Thousand Years" is Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. This single piece of mathematical jujitsu, proving unprovability, formally ended the strain of Western thought begun by Socrates and first fully fleshed out by Aristotle. The ancillary effects of that theory — a rejection of master narrative, an understanding that we will never know all the answers, an acceptance of contradiction, and an embrace of complexity — are just now making themselves felt in the dawn of the post complete world. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Social & Technology Network Topology Researcher; Adjunct Professor, NYU Graduate School of Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP); Author, Cognitive Surplus - **Extract length:** 88 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Professor, New Media Department of Film & Media, Hunter College](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10813) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-078 — computer scientist and musician, is a pioneer of virtual reality — Jaron Lanier > In truth, I'm not entirely convinced that I don't find good evidence of this creature in pre-Christian/Common-era texts. (Thomas Cahill thinks it was a gift from the Jews.) But it does seem that the sense of individual self, outfitted with moral responsibility, free will, consciousness, and — most importantly — neurotic self-obsession, at one time did not exist, and then did. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computer Scientist; Musician; Author, Who Owns The Future? - **Extract length:** 61 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [computer scientist and musician, is a pioneer of virtual reality](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10969) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-079 — adjunct professor of psychology, University of Massachusetts at Amherst — Arnold Trehub > In my opinion it is the invention by Otto von Guericke in 1660 of a machine which produced static electricity. This device was the primitive tool which unlocked our understanding and application of electricity. Modern power generation, communication, computation, and almost all of our most important analytic devices stand on the foundation of von Guericke's machine. A long line of basic intellectual formulations from electromagnetism to the bioelectric properties of brain mechanisms owe a debt to this invention. When we discover how the human brain creates the covert models of its own inventions, the structure and dynamics of the brain's own electrical activity will undoubtedly be an essential aspect of the explanation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Author, The Cognitive Brain - **Extract length:** 112 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [adjunct professor of psychology, University of Massachusetts at Amherst](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11128) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-080 — mathematician — Keith Devlin > In addition to its use in arithmetic and science, the Hindu-Arabic number system is the only genuinely universal language on Earth, apart perhaps for the Windows operating system, which has achieved the near universal adoption of a conceptually and technologically poor product by the sheer force of market dominance. (By contrast, the Hindu-Arabic number system gained worldwide acceptance because it is far better designed and much more efficient, for human usage, than any other number system.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician; Executive Director, H-STAR Institute, Stanford; Author, Finding Fibonacci - **Extract length:** 76 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [mathematician](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10827) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-081 — pioneer in Computational Neurobiology — Terrence J. Sejnowski > Technological advances in communication from clay tablets, to papyrus,to moveable type, to postscript have had a shaping influence on society and these are accelerating. Almost overnight, the accumulated knowledge of the world is crystallizing into a distributed digital archive. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computational Neuroscientist; Francis Crick Professor, the Salk Institute; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Co-author (with Patricia Churchland), The Computational Brain - **Extract length:** 39 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [pioneer in Computational Neurobiology](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10984) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-082 — cofounder and Vice-President of Global Business Network — Jay Ogilvy > From all we can tell from historians and anthropologists, every ancient society worshipped some god or other. Superstition ran rampant. Human beings denied their own freedom and autonomy by praising or blaming the gods for their fates. Not until some bold minds like Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud did it become thinkable, much less fashionable, to preach atheism. These were inventors of a new order, one that allowed human beings to make up our game as we go along, unfettered by superstitions about the will of the gods or fear of their punishment. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** a cofounder of GBN, a Partner in the Monitor Group of Companies - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [cofounder and Vice-President of Global Business Network](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11142) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-083 — President and CEO of Learn Technologies Interactive in New York City — Luyen Chou > I would have to vote for philosophical skepticism as the most important "invention" (if one thinks of invention as fabrication rather than discovery, as it is more archaically meant) of the past two thousand years. The notion that there is a "truth behind" things and a "bottom" to the matter has instilled in all of us, whether scientists, philosophers, theologians, or lay people, a maniacal obsession with improving our explanatory capabilities. As such skepticism can be seen as the driving force behind science and technology, modern conceptions of faith, the soul, and the other. Of course, one might argue that skepticism has been around for longer than two thousand years; but its characterization as a fundamental problem to be contended with before any constructive work can be done seems to me a peculiarly modern invention, a defining feature of our intensively self-conscious, post-Cartesian world. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Vice President, Product Strategy, Pearson - **Extract length:** 144 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [President and CEO of Learn Technologies Interactive in New York City](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10841) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-084 — physicist and computer scientist — W. Daniel Hillis > The clock is the embodiment of objectivity. It converted time from a personal experience into a reality independent of perception. It gave us a framework in which the laws of nature could be observed and quantified. The mechanism of the clock gave us a metaphor for self-governed operation of natural law. (The computer, with its mechanistic playing out of predetermined rules, is the direct descendant of the clock.) Once we were able to imagine the solar system as a clockwork automaton, the generalization to other aspects of nature was almost inevitable, and the process of Science began. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Computer Scientist, Co-Founder, Applied Invention.; Author, The Pattern on the Stone - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [physicist and computer scientist](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10999) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-085 — theoretical neurophysiologist on the faculty of the University of Washington School of Medicine — William H. Calvin > Computers, not for current reasons but because they're essential to prevent a collapse of civilization in the future. Computers may allow us to understand the earth's fickle climate and how it is affected by detours of the great ocean currents. These detours cause abrupt coolings within a decade that last for centuries, sure to set off massive warfare as the population downsizes to match the crop failures. "Natural" though these worldwide coolings have been in the past, with their forest fires and population crashes, they're not any more inevitable than local floods — if we learn enough about the nonlinear mechanisms in order to stabilize climate. Computer simulations are the key to a "preventative medicine" of climate, what may allow human scientific ingenuity to keep civilization from unraveling in another episode of cool, crash, and burn. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Neurobiologist; Affiliate Professor Emeritus, University of Washington; Author, Global Fever - **Extract length:** 136 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [theoretical neurophysiologist on the faculty of the University of Washington School of Medicine](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10579) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-086 — an artist, writer, and business man — Michael Nesmith > After reading the various answers to the question, I'm going to sneak through the door opened by Philip Anderson and nominate a discovery instead of an invention. And it is the Copernican Theory. Generally it was a counter-intuitive idea, and it ran opposite to the interpretation of senses (not to mention the Church) I mean, one could "see" the sun going across the sky. What could be more obvious than that? A nice move. It took a lot of intellectual courage, and taught us more than just what it said. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Existence is Non-Time, Non-Sequential, and Non-Objective - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [an artist, writer, and business man](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10727) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-087 — Waynflete Professor of Physiology, University of Oxford — Colin Blakemore > Why? Well, there are, of course, the well-rehearsed answers to that question. The pill did indeed fertilize the sexual liberation of the sixties, did stimulate feminism and the consequent erosion of conventional family structure in Western society — perhaps the most significant modification in human behaviour since the invention of shamanism. It did help to change our concept of the division of labour, to foster the beginnings of an utterly different attitude to the social role of women. But, arguably the important sequel of the pill is the growing conception that our bodies are servants of our minds, rather than vice versa. This relatively low-tech invention has triggered a cultural and cognitive revolution in our self-perception. It has contributed to our ability to accept organ transplantation, the notion of machine intelligence, gene therapy and even, eventually, germ-line genetic manipulation. It has shifted the quest of human beings from controlling their physical environment to controlling themselves — their own bodies and hence their physical destinies. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chief Executive, Medical Research Council;Waynflete Professor of Physiology, University of Oxford - **Extract length:** 164 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Waynflete Professor of Physiology, University of Oxford](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10468) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-088 — computer scientist and cognitive psychologist — Roger Schank > Shopping malls aren't gone yet but they will be. Why go to a store to buy music CDs any more? You can listen to samples of whatever you want and click a button for delivery while seated at home. Any object that needn't be felt and perused to be purchased will find no better delivery method than the internet. Newspapers? Not dead yet, but they will be. Pick an aspect of the way we live today and it will change radically in the coming years because of the internet. Life (and human interaction) in fifty years will be so different we will hardly recognize the social structures that will evolve. I don't know if we will be happier, but we will be better informed. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** CEO, Socratic Arts Inc.; John Evans Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Psychology and Education, Northwestern University; Author, Make School Meaningful-And Fun! - **Extract length:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [computer scientist and cognitive psychologist](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10591) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-089 — research staff member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center — Clifford Pickover > Today's Internet evolved from the tiny seed planted by Ts'ai Lun. Both paper and the Internet break the barriers of time and distance, and permit unprecedented growth and opportunity. In the next decade, communities formed by ideas will be as strong as those formed by geography. The Internet will dissolve away nations as we know them today. Humanity becomes a single hive mind, with a group intelligence, as geography becomes putty in the hands of the Internet sculptor. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, The Math Book, The Physics Book, and The Medical Book trilogy - **Extract length:** 78 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [research staff member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10728) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-090 — neurobiologist, is Professor of Biology and Director, Brain and Behaviour Research Group, The Open Universit — Steven Rose > I don't need a page. The answer is clear: inventions are concepts, not just technologies, so the most important are the concepts of democracy, of social justice, and the belief in the possibility of creating a society free from the oppressions of clas, race, and gender. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** neurobiologist, is Professor of Biology and Director, Brain and Behaviour Research Group - **Extract length:** 46 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [neurobiologist, is Professor of Biology and Director, Brain and Behaviour Research Group, The Open Universit](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10479) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-091 — Correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly — Stephen Budiansky > There is an inherent bias in all such surveys, because everyone strives to be original and surprising and so shuns the obvious but probably more correct answers — such as steel, or moveable type, or antibiotics, to name but three obvious things that have utterly transformed not only how people live but the way theyexperience life. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Journalist; Author, Journey to the Edge of Reason - **Extract length:** 56 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10603) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-092 — science writer, and a research associate of the American Museum of Natural History — Margaret Wertheim > Why electrification? For a start, one of my most vivid childhood memories is of my mother seemingly spending endless hours washing nappies and clothes by hand. The electric washing machine and other electric home gadgets (vacuum cleaners, fridges, food processors et cetera) have freed billions of women from the endless drudgery of heavy-duty housework. By bringing us light and heat and power on tap, electricity has truly transformed life — not just in the home, but in almost every industry. Modern manufacturing would be impossible without electricity. Ditto the modern office. The ability to literally transport power is, I think, the most revolutionary technology to come out of modern science. And of course, it is the ability to transport electric power at the micro level that has made possible silicon chips, and the attendant computer and information revolution. Far more than Einstein and Bohr, Faraday and Maxwell are the true "heroes" of the modern technological world. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** science writer and commentator - **Extract length:** 156 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [science writer, and a research associate of the American Museum of Natural History](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10742) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-093 — Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute — Joseph Traub > The Greeks believed we could understand the world rationally. But the scientific method requires that we ask questions of nature by experimentation. This has led to the science and technology that has transformed the world. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University; coauthor, Complexity and Information - **Extract length:** 35 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10490) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-094 — chairman and creative director of the TED — Richard Saul Wurman > ELECTRICITY CONTAINS THE WORD CITY — WHICH CERTAINLY IS OUR MOST COMPLEX INVENTION & FROM THE DENSITY OF HUMAN INTERACTION ALL ELSE FLOWS. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder, TED Conference; EG Conference; TEDMED Conferences; Architect, Cartographer; Author, Information Architects - **Extract length:** 23 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [chairman and creative director of the TED](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10616) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-095 — professor of psychology and education at the University of Chicago — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi > I always liked Lynn White's story about how the stirrup revolutionized warfare and made feudal society and culture possible. Or Lefebre des Noettes' argument about how the invention of the rudder made extensive sailing and the consequent expansion of Europe and its colonization of the world possible. But it's sobering to realize that it took us over one thousand years to realize the impact of these artifacts. So I am not at all sure we have at this time a good grip on what the most important inventions of the past millennia have been. Certainly the contraceptive pill is a good candidate, and so is the scientific method. I am also intrigued by the effects of such inventions as the flag — a symbol of belonging that millions will follow to ruin or victory independently of biological connectedness; or the social security cardthat signifies that we are not alone and our welfare is a joint problem for the community; or the invention ofcivil rights which however abused and misused is pointing us towards a notion of universal human dignity that might yet eclipse in importance all the technological marvels of the millennium. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Director, Quality of Life Research Center, Claremont Graduate University; Author, Flow - **Extract length:** 192 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [professor of psychology and education at the University of Chicago](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10501) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-096 — founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, cofounder of The Well — Stewart Brand > The most important cultural — hence all-embracing — invention is a religion. Only two major religions have been invented in the last two millennia, Christianity and Islam. Try to imagine the last two millennia, or the present, without them. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder, the Whole Earth Catalog; Co-founder, The Well; Co-Founder, The Long Now Foundation, and Revive & Restore; Author, Whole Earth Discipline - **Extract length:** 39 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, cofounder of The Well](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10628) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-097 — mathematician and computer scientist — Marvin Minsky > In his work on the foundations of chemistry, it occurred to Antoine Lavoisier (and also, I suppose to Joseph Priestly) that the smell of a chemical was not necessarily a 'property' of that chemical, but a property of some related chemical that had the form of a gas, which therefore could reach the nose of the observer. Thus solid sulfur itself has no smell, but its gaseous relatives, sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide have plenty of it. Perhaps this tiny insight was the key to the transformation of chemistry from a formerly incoherent field into the great science of the 19th and 20th centuries. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician; computer scientist; Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT; cofounder, MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; author, The Emotion Machine - **Extract length:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [mathematician and computer scientist](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10512) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-098 — leading authority in the field of Russian Aleut kayaks — George Dyson > Life and intelligence that achieves widespread distribution across the cosmos (and over time) may be expected to assume a digital representation, at least in some phases of the life cycle, to facilitate electromagnetic transmission, cross-platform compatibility, and long-term storage. This requires a local substrate. And we are doing our best, thanks to the proliferation of our current instantiation of the UTM (known as the PC) to help. When we establish contact with such an intelligence, will we receive instructions for building a machine to upload Jodie Foster? Probably not. The download will proceed the other way. To paraphrase Marvin Minsky: "Instead of sending a picture of a cat, there is one area in which they can send the cat itself." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Historian; Author, Analogia - **Extract length:** 120 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [leading authority in the field of Russian Aleut kayaks](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10642) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-099 — Nobel laureate physicist at Princeton and one of the leading theorists on superconductivity — Philip W. Anderson > The question is impossible to answer with one thing; one could for instance say with some justification "the germ theory of disease" but then that goes back to the microscope — otherwise no one would ever have seen a germ — and that to the lens, and eyeglasses may be as important as germs, ft as germs, and so on. But I will give you my entry; to the amazement of my colleagues who think of me as the ultimate antireductionist, I will suggest a very reductionist idea: the quantum theory, and I include emphatically quantum field theory. The quantum theory forces a revision of our mode of thinking which is far more profound than Newtonian mechanics or the Copernican revolution or relativity. In a sense it absolutely forces us not to be reductionist if we are to keep our sanity, since it tells us that we are made up of anonymous identical quanta of various quantum fields, so that only the whole has any identity or integrity. Yet it also tells us that we really completely know the rules of the game which all these particles and quanta are playing, so that if we are clever enough we can understand everything about ourselves and our world. Note that I said understand, not predict — the latter is really in principle impossible, for reasons which have little to do with the famous Uncertainty Principle and a lot to do with exponential explosions of computations. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Nobel Laureate; Physicist - **Extract length:** 244 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Nobel laureate physicist at Princeton and one of the leading theorists on superconductivity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10523) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-100 — president of Animatrix — Marney Morris > (Well John, you did say most important invention, not the one we should be most proud of). The invention (and detonation) of the atomic bomb has changed the world more profoundly than any other human development in the last 2000 years. In seconds, nearly 200,000 people were dead or dying in Hiroshima, and consciousness was forever changed on our planet. Although the arms race fueled our economy for a few more decades, the bomb set into motion a 'warfare stalemate'. With the ability to destroy our planet within the realm of possibility, we were forced to examine our rules of war, and seek new means of engagement to work out our differences. And although hundreds of wars are going on at any time on our planet, there are checks and balances, underscored by the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Interaction Design, Engineering Department, Stanford University - **Extract length:** 139 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [president of Animatrix](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10657) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-101 — professor emeritus at the University of matics — Reuben Hersh > Of course, it may be centuries before we know the full consequences of space travel. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor emeritus, University of New Mexico - **Extract length:** 15 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [professor emeritus at the University of matics](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10534) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-102 — Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology and Director of the Brain Perception Laboratory — Vilayanur Ramachandran > My personal favourite is the place value notation system combined with the use of a symbol 0 for Zero to denote a nonexistent number marks the birth of modern mathematics. I think this is the greatest invention, but I am being a little jingoistic—it was invented in India in the 4th or 5th century BC, systematised by Aryabhatta in the 4th century AD by the Indian Astronomer and then transmitted to the West via the Arabs. And Maths of course is essential for all science. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Professor & Director, Center for Brain and Cognition, UC, San Diego; Author, The Tell-Tale Brain - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology and Director of the Brain Perception Laboratory](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10671) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-103 — Professor of Education at Harvard University — Howard Gardner > Another good question! My perhaps eccentric but nonetheless heartfelt nomination is Western classical music, as epitomized in the compositions of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and above all Mozart. Music is a free invention of the human spirit, less dependent upon physical or physiological inventions than most other contrivances. Musical compositions in the Western tradition represent an incredible cerebral achievement, one that is not only appreciated but also imitated or elaborated upon wherever it travels. Most inventions — from nuclear energy to antibiotics - can be used for good or ill. Classical music has probably given more pleasure to more individuals, with less negative fallout, than any other human artifact. Finally, while no one can compose like Mozart and few can play like Heifetz or Casals, anyone who works at it can perform in a credible way — and, courtesy of software, even those of us unable to play an instrument or create a score can now add our own fragments to an ever expanding canon. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Author, A Synthesizing Mind - **Extract length:** 164 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Professor of Education at Harvard University](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10545) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-104 — biologist and BBC Radio Four broadcaster — Jeremy Cherfas > While we're about it, though, I'd like to take issue with Dan Dennett's choice of the battery. Granted it has enabled all the things he says it has (and I seriously considered nominating the Walkman — a bizarre idea, the tape recorder that doesn't record — as the invention with most impact on our lives) but at what cost? All extant batteries (though not fuel cells) are inherently polluting and wasteful. It takes something like six times more energy to make a Zinc-alkaline battery as the battery can store. I can't help but think that if a small portion of the effort that has gone into inventing "better" batteries had gone into, say, solar panels, our world and culture would be even more different. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biologist; Senior Science Writer, Bioversity International; Managing Director, Green Ink - **Extract length:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [biologist and BBC Radio Four broadcaster](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10685) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-105 — philosopher, is Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies — Daniel C. Dennett > The battery, the first major portable energy packet in the last few billion years. When simple prokaryotes acquired mitochondria several billion years ago, these amazingly efficient portable energy devices opened up Design Space to multicellular life of dazzling variety. Many metazoa developed complex nervous systems, which gave the planet eyes and ears for the first time, expanding the epistemic horizons of life by many orders of magnitude. The modest battery (and its sophisticated fuel cell descendants), by providing energy for autonomous, free-ranging, unplugged artifacts of dazzling variety, is already beginning to provide a similarly revolutionary cascade of developments. Politically, the transistor radio and cell phone are proving to be the most potent weapons against totalitarianism ever invented, since they destroy all hope of centralized control of information. By giving every individual autonomous prosthetic extensions of their senses (think of how camcorders are revolutionizing scientific data-gathering possibilities, for instance), batteries enable fundamental improvements in the epistemological architecture of our species. The explosion of science and technology that may eventually permit us to colonize space (or save our planet from a fatal collision) depends on our ability to store and extract electrical power ubiquitously. Our batteries are still no match for the mitochondrial ATP system — a healthy person with a backpack can climb over mountains for a week without refueling, something no robot could come close to doing — but they open up a new and different cornucopia of competences. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher; Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University; Author, From Bacteria to Bach and Back - **Extract length:** 239 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [philosopher, is Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10556) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-106 — professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California — Bart Kosko > Calculus lies at the heart of our modern world. Its equations led to the prediction of black holes. We built the first computers to run other calculus equations to predict where bombs would land. The recent evolution of calculus itself to the random version called "stochastic calculus" has led to how we price the mysterious financial "derivatives" contracts that underlie the global economy. Calculus has led us from seeing the world as what Democritus called mere "atoms and void" to seeing the world as atoms that move in a void that moves. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Information Scientist and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Law, University of Southern California; Author, Noise, Fuzzy Thinking - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10699) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-107 — Professor of Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton — Freeman Dyson > The most important invention of the last two thousand years was hay. In the classical world of Greece and Rome and in all earlier times, there was no hay. Civilization could exist only in warm climates where horses could stay alive through the winter by grazing. Without grass in winter you could not have horses, and without horses you could not have urban civilization. Some time during the so-called dark ages, some unknown genius invented hay, forests were turned into meadows, hay was reaped and stored, and civilization moved north over the Alps. So hay gave birth to Vienna and Paris and London and Berlin, and later to Moscow and New York. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Institute of Advanced Study; Author, Disturbing the Universe; Maker of Patterns - **Extract length:** 112 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Professor of Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10567) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE1999-108 — Professor, Departments of Anesthesiology and Psychology, University of Arizonan — Stuart Hameroff > The quantum nature of the critical effects of anesthesia may be a significant clue. Several current consciousness theories propose systemic quantum states in the brain, and as consciousness has historically been perceived as the contemporary vanguard of information processing (J.B.'s "technology = new perception") the advent of quantum computers will inevitably cast the mind as a quantum process. The mechanism of anesthesia suggests such a comparison will be more than mere metaphor. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Anesthesiology and Psychology Associate Director, Center for Consciousness Studies The University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona - **Extract length:** 72 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Professor, Departments of Anesthesiology and Psychology, University of Arizonan](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10713) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted