The Logical Next
Look closely at history and you’ll see the simultaneous emergence of an idea in several places. Calculus, the discovery of oxygen, and many other key scientific concepts (please excuse the brevity, this is my “publish it Tuesday” entry) were discovered nearly simultaneously by individuals with varied backgrounds and skills. I see this in computing too: in Mac OS X, fsevents led to things like Time Machine; libdispatch made some ideas that had been kicking around for years not only easy, but damned near impossible not to do.
Steven Johnson (previously) and Kevin Kelly did a Radiolab podcast last fall with Robert Crulwich where they discussed “what technology wants”. In the middle of their conversation, they put a name to this idea: the “adjacent possible”. I like their name better than the “logical next”, but that’s beside the point.
Approach invention and discovery with this slant. See what interesting things can be created merely from an imaginative, combinatoric mash-up of today’s concepts and tools. (I can only think of computing ones for the moment, which is perhaps an indictment of my imagination, but bear with me:)
- JavaScript, but on the server: node.js.
- Java’s runtime plus sandboxing gives you a semi-managed code environment on your phone: Android.
- OS X, compiled for ARM: iOS.
What can you build today, right now, by taking a concept from one domain and a technology or technique from another? What would that change? Whose next great idea will you be the adjacent node of?
