Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure by Vaclav Smil, Vaclav Smil

Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure
Vaclav Smil, Vaclav Smil
Page: 232
Format: pdf, ePub, mobi, fb2
ISBN: 9780262048057
Publisher: MIT Press
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Overview

From the New York Times-bestselling author, a new volume on the history of human ingenuity—and its attendant breakthroughs and busts.

The world is never finished catching up with Vaclav Smil. In his latest and perhaps most readable book, Invention and Innovation, the prolific author—a favorite of Bill Gates—pens an insightful and fact-filled jaunt through the history of human invention. Impatient with the hype that so often accompanies innovation, Smil offers in this book a clear-eyed corrective to the overpromises that accompany everything from new cures for diseases to AI. He reminds us that even after we go quite far along the invention-development-application trajectory, we may never get anything real to deploy. Or worse, even after we have succeeded by introducing an invention, its future may be marked by underperformance, disappointment, demise, or outright harm.

Drawing on his vast breadth of scientific and historical knowledge, Smil explains the difference between invention and innovation. He then looks at three different types of inventions.

Inventions that failed to dominate as promised:
Airships Nuclear fission Supersonic flight 
 Inventions that turned disastrous:
Leaded gasoline DDT Chlorofluorocarbons 
 Inventions we have long been promised (and that would be highly beneficial):
Travel in vacuum (hyperloop) Nitrogen-fixing cereals Nuclear fusion 
 Finally, he offers a “wish list” of inventions that we most urgently need to confront the staggering challenges of the twenty-first century.

Filled with engaging examples and pragmatic approaches, this book is a sobering account of the folly that so often attends human ingenuity—and how we can, and must, better align our expectations with reality.

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