How much innovation is attributable to human inspiration, new ideas and risk-taking?
Conversely how much of what we call innovation is actually due a mix of Moore’s Law and network effects? Silicon Valley is a special place because smart people want to be around other smart people. Facebook is king because people are on Facebook so more and more join the social network.
Processor speeds increase at an exponential rate and machines can crunch more & more data — computers such as IBM’s Watson are marvels of processor speed, massive data storage and fast data recall.
But do ideas flowing from human ingenuity follow a similar pattern? Hardly.
We can ride the powerful wave of the big data revolution but this technology also provides the illusion that we humans are ‘smarter’ than before.