One thing about America (and likely many other places) during the age of connectedness is that change happens at a greatly accelerated pace. In 2008, no Presidential candidate, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, would dare support gay marriage, yet here we are less than a decade later with its shift to legal status complete. While there was certainly a long effort by LGBT groups to secure that victory, it’s hard to believe that final push wouldn’t have taken far longer in an earlier era. 

Ideas spread quickly now. Not even science fiction can really keep up with science. Often that will be wonderful and occasionally not. 

It’s the same for corporations as it is for cultural issues. Google realizes it won’t dominate search for decades, that its fortunes will be destabilized much more quickly than Microsoft’s or Hewlett-Packard’s were. That’s why Google X is so important. If Google doesn’t truly become the AI company that Larry Page initially envisioned in the next decade or so, it will be in its dotage, a young adult in a retirement community.

From Tim Harford’s latest FT column, concerning the Alchemist Fallacy:

While alchemists never figured out how to turn lead into gold, other craftsmen did develop a process with much the same economic implications. They worked out how to transform silica sand, one of the most common materials on earth, into the beautiful, versatile material we know as glass. It has an astonishing variety of uses from fibre optics to microscopes to aeroplane fuselages. But while gold remains highly prized, glass is now so cheap that we use it as disposable packaging for water.

When it was possible to restrict access to the secret of glassmaking, the guardians of that knowledge profited. Venetian glassmakers were clustered together on the island of Murano, where sparks from the furnaces would not endanger Venice itself. Venice had less success in preventing the secrets of glassmaking from spreading. Despite being forbidden on pain of death to leave the state of Venice, some of Murano’s glassmakers sought fortunes elsewhere. The wealth that could be earned as a glassmaking monopolist in some distant city must have been worth the risk.

That is the way of new ideas: they have a tendency to spread. Business partners will fall out and set up as rivals. Employees will leave to establish their own businesses. Time-honoured techniques such as industrial espionage or reverse engineering will be deployed. Sometimes innovators are happy to give their ideas away for nothing, whether for noble reasons or commercial ones. But it is very hard to stop ideas spreading entirely.•