If the process of seeing differently is the process of first and foremost having awareness
of the fact that everything you do has an assumption, figuring out what those are—and
by the way, the best person to reveal your own assumptions to you is not yourself, it’s
usually someone else, hence the power of diversity, the importance of diversity.
Because not only does that diversity reveal your own assumptions to you, but it can also
complex-ify your assumptions.
Because we know from complex systems theory that the best solution is most likely to exist
within a complex search space, not a simple search space, simply because of statistics.
So whereas a simple search space is more adaptable, it’s more easy to adapt, it’s less likely
to contain the best solution.
So what we really want is a diversity of possibilities, a diversity of assumptions—which diverse
groups, for instance, enable.
But also diverse experience.
So one of the best ways to diversify, complex-ify your search space, your assumptions, is through
experience.
And one of the great ways to do that is actually through technology.
So we think about technology, and most of our technologies are good technologies.
But what defines a great technology?
What is a transformative technology?
The good technologies are the ones that enable us to do what we can already do faster, easier,
more efficiently.
And that’s because so much of our society focuses on efficiency.
It’s about maximizing performance.
We’re great engineers but we’re crap philosophers.
We’re very good at making things more efficient, but that’s only one side of innovation.We
also need the other side of innovation, which is creativity.
And so the best technologies are the ones—in my view—that make the invisible visible.
They enable us to see things that we could never have seen before.
They create assumptions.
They expand our space of assumptions.
We typically think, of course, of digital technologies, but we can also think of the
telescope, the microscope.
In fact we can even think of the sail.
So the sail was in one sense invented on the Nile, because the currents the wind go in
opposite directions.
So you could sail up current and then you could float back down.
But what the sail enables us to do was to travel, which meant we could see different
ecologies, different cultures.
Which, when approached in an open way, enabled us to not only challenge but expand our assumptions,
because we would have incorporated their biases into our own.
So you could view it in a different way.
The best transformative technologies enable us to travel.
But not just travel physically.
Travel in our minds.
So a book, writing, this also leads onto things like augmented reality and even virtual reality.
So in our case we’ve actually done experiments and created a whole platform in augmented
reality to see if we can explore how the brain makes meaning by engaging with a new layer
in the world.
Not to replace the real world but to expand it.
Another example is the feelSpace belt.
So what this was was a belt that was, in fact, a belt, right.
It went around your waist, and effectively what it did is it vibrated in the direction
of north, which effectively gave people the ability to see what they couldn’t see before.
They made the invisible visible.
And what happened is that people would consciously make reference—well initially they just
felt a vibration—and then they started incorporating it into their movement and into their navigation
consciously.But eventually it became unconscious to the point that when they actually removed
the belt they felt insecure.
So effectively they were almost turning people into birds, who are able to detect magnetic
north in their migrations.
And the brain was able to adapt and redefine normality based on this new information that
it was getting.
But not just the data, the meaning of the data by physically engaging with the world.
Because only in that sense did it come to literally make sense.