How Could So Many Intelligent People Be

It Is Extraordinary How Safe Flying Has Become. You Are Now Statistically More Likely To Be Elected President Of The United States In Your Lifetime Than You Are To Die In A Plane Crash. What An Amazing Achievement As A Society! But What We End Up Focusing On Are The Catastrophic Failures That Are Incredibly Rare But Happen Every Now And Then.

In A Peer Network, No One Is Officially In Charge. It Doesn't Have A Command Hierarchy. It Doesn't Have A Boss. So, All The Decisions Are Somehow Made Collectively. The Control Of The System Is In The Hands Of Everyone Who Is A Part Of It.

Calculus, The Electrical Battery, The Telephone, The Steam Engine, The Radio - All These Groundbreaking Innovations Were Hit Upon By Multiple Inventors Working In Parallel With No Knowledge Of One Another.

It May Not Be Possible To 'win The Future,' In President Obama's Words, But If We're Going To Encourage More Innovation, It's Not Enough For Us To Just Dig In And Work Harder. We Also Need To Encourage Surprise And Serendipity. We Need To Play Each Other's Instruments.

Most New Movements Start This Way: Hundreds Or Thousands Of Individuals And Groups, Working In Different Fields And Different Locations, Start Thinking About Change Using A Common Language, Without Necessarily Recognizing Those Shared Values. You Just Start Following Your Own Vector, Propelled Along By People In Your Immediate Vicinity. And Then One Day, You Look Up And Realize That All Those Individual Trajectories Have Turned Into A Wave.