by Feed your head with a play by Pamela Olson

Created on: March 04, 2009   Last Updated: March 06, 2009

Upgrade Me Now, Please It is no longer a safe bet to assume that things will carry on as they have been up to now.

Look in the mirror. We may be genetically just about identical to our ancestors, but our brains have given us capabilities far beyond that of just being a biological human.

For example, anyone is as likely to invent something useful as anyone else is. Once something is invented, it's available to everyone. An idea is something that can be used by everyone and anyone. I'll pretend I traveled back in Time to 300,000 BC and met a Wilma Flintstone "{Time travel} is against reason, said Filby. What reason? said The Time Traveler?" H.G. Wells. If I took Wilma Flintstones's fur coat because I'm an animal rights activist; she would no longer have the coat. However, I did not take Wilma's idea of her coat. Wilma immediately replaced her fur coat with a faux fur coat. Wilma took my idea, no fur coat, combined it with her former idea, a fur coat, and came up with a new idea, a coat that looks like fur. Others than adopted my idea and Wilma's idea.

Because ideas can't be removed, ideas or inventions become more useful and powerful as a population becomes larger. Wilma had around a million humans in her time. Today, more than six billion humans have access to, and use, ideas. Economist Michael Kramer had an idea. His idea was that the rate of technological progress is proportional to the world's population. He made a very conservative start with his hypothesis by starting with one profoundly intelligent brilliant idea occurring per billion humans every year. In Wilma Flintstones's time, with the then around a million humans, that would be one brilliant idea every thousand years.

By the time there were a billion humans in 1800, that would be one brilliant idea every year, a stunning idea in itself. Kramer's idea matches the model unerringly well. Before 1798, technological progress was slow. That is the elegance of geometric progression versus arithmetic progression. By 1930, that would be one brilliant idea every six months. Today, that would be one brilliant idea every two months. That does not even take into account the everyday more mundane ideas constantly arising. Despite humanity's ever-increasing demand on resources, better technology seems to be winning the day.

Our individual rational behavior often backfires though with The Law of Unintended Consequences; and, it is not what is always best for everyone. It can, and has, produced irrational results for

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