Progress is too important to leave it to scientists or business people
Neither business nor science alone can drive disruption — it’s the combination
Recently we’ve been thinking a lot about the progress of artificial intelligence. It’s kind of stalling. Or is it?
While the business world keeps touting progress almost at a weekly rate, the scientific community is getting increasingly skeptical. It comes across as if people with high positions in science almost feel obliged to dismiss the optimism in AI. Who is right? Most likely neither.
Let’s look at science first.
Scientists are not in the business of driving progress. They are optimizing for status within the scientific community. Status can be reached by getting appointed to a prestigious institution and/or achieving lots of publications and citations. Progress doesn’t really matter. In fact, it’s almost detrimental. The mentality amongst many scientists unfortunately is still that if something is useful it is probably not important enough to be spending time thinking about it.
You can’t blame them for being like that since that’s the environment scientists are living in. In fact, science as a profession is highly conservative since it defines itself by the methods in use. Results are secondary, method and tradition matter. It’s similar to the old guild system in Europe, which is actually not so surprising since science emerged around the same time as the guilds.
Guilds are professional organizations that attempt to protect the method or craft within a certain profession. For example, the smiths only admit new members to their guild if the individuals fulfill a list of stringent criteria. The same applies to all other guilds.
Science is very much like a guild and functions like that. You have to abide to a very strict hierarchy and you better not dare do something out of the box. You will get in trouble for that and risk being expelled from the guild. Just as Hugh Everett in one of the multiverses where he is still alive.
The point here is that science is not very good at progress because the inner workings of the profession actually make it even harder for individuals to disrupt stuff.
So how come we as a society still progress thanks to science if scientists are disincentivized to foster progress. The answer is that we can use the fruits of science to our advantage. Scientists are like good smiths that make amazing swords. They don’t fight the wars but they sure help us make progress in war.
We have to find a way to use the advancements in science and turn them into useful technologies. New technologies are the base of progress.
The best people to transform science into technology and eventually business are entrepreneurs. But what kind of entrepreneur?
Much like scientists, entrepreneurs are also bound by the code of conduct in their profession. For example, they are supposed to be practical and not have patience for academic talk. They are result oriented and focus on raising money and sweet talk politicians. These are attributes that make most scientists uncomfortable.
The problem with progress is you need both. You need an entrepreneur who has the patience to walk down the path of academics and somehow comes out on the other end with a useful method to transform science into into novel products and services. They have to be practical, results driven and intellectually resourceful. Unfortunately such people are scarce. But they do exist.
Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are examples. All of them have one thing in common. They disrupted industries and as a consequence of that fostered progress.
Progress is defined as “moving forward towards a destination”. In the context of business and science it means “moving forward towards something better”. The better refers to lower cost and/or better quality. Ideally cost go down dramatically while quality goes up at the same time.
People that can span the spectrum of entrepreneurs and academics are best suited to drive progress. It is our purpose to invest in such people.