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Technological development paths (and opportunity)
Looking back at an issue of an alumni magazine from last year, I found an emerging technology showcase/conference is advertised on a sheet stuck to the cover.
"As you can see from our past honorees, we have a pretty good track record." Pictures of past honorees who have gone on to do famous things are shown.
This raises a question: Are the technologies developed or promoted by these people necessarily that special that those technologies were the keys to the future?
No, I don't think so. The world has quite a bit more flexibility than we usually think it does. A lot of supposedly emerging leaders have fallen by the wayside while a lot of unexpected entities have risen to prominence.
What actually determines the success of the greats ideas among these technologies, beyond perhaps an initial selection by quality, is that these people are better connected. Millions, if not billions, of people on this Earth have what may be great ideas. But before we know for sure that they're great ideas, we're uncertain about their prospects. If you were an investor, what would you do? Of course, the most easily accessible choices are the ones that you are already aware of. Wealth and technology are still unable to trump mental retrievability.
In other words, the world's civilizations and path dependencies are built on, quite frankly, people who have more resources (socially and materially) to make stuff happen. We're probably doing a little better on par with democratizing opportunity than we did back in the days of such things as feudalism, but we still have a ways to go before we really have "equal opportunity" anywhere.
Discuss.