adjacent possible

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So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport

adjacent possible, Apple II, bounce rate, business cycle, Byte Shop, Cal Newport, capital controls, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, deal flow, deliberate practice, do what you love, financial independence, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge worker, Mason jar, medical residency, new economy, passive income, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, renewable energy credits, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Bolles, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, web application, winner-take-all economy

“The truth,” Johnson explains, “is that technological (and scientific) advances rarely break out of the adjacent possible.” As I mentioned, understanding the adjacent possible and its role in innovation is the first link in a chain of argument that explains how to identify a good career mission. In the next section, I’ll forge the second link, which connects the world of scientific breakthroughs to the world of work. The Capital-Driven Mission Scientific breakthroughs, as we just learned, require that you first get to the cutting edge of your field. Only then can you see the adjacent possible beyond, the space where innovative ideas are almost always discovered.

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Big ideas, Johnson explained, are almost always discovered in the “adjacent possible,” a term borrowed from the complex-system biologist Stuart Kauffman, who used it to describe the spontaneous formation of complex chemical structures from simpler structures. Given a soup of chemical components sloshing and mixing together, noted Kauffman, lots of new chemicals will form. Not every new chemical, however, is equally likely. The new chemicals you’ll find are those that can be made by combining the structures already in the soup. That is, the new chemicals are in the space of the adjacent possible defined by the current structures.

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The isolation of oxygen as a component of air, to name one of Johnson’s examples of a multiple discovery, wasn’t possible until two things happened: First, scientists began to think about air as a substance containing elements, not just a void; and second, sensitive scales, a key tool in the needed experiments, became available. Once these two developments occurred, the isolation of oxygen became a big fat target in the newly defined adjacent possible—visible to anyone who happened to be looking in that direction. Two scientists—Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Joseph Priestley—were looking in this direction, and therefore both went on to conduct the necessary experiments independently but at nearly the same time. The adjacent possible also explains my earlier example of four researchers tackling the same obscure problem with the same obscure technique at the conference I attended. The specific technique applied in this case—a technique called randomized linear network coding—came to the attention of the computer scientists I work with only over the last two years, as researchers who study a related topic began to apply it successfully to thorny problems.

With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don't Pay Enough by Peter Barnes

adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, banks create money, basic income, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Mark Zuckerberg, Money creation, Network effects, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stuart Kauffman, the map is not the territory, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy

Political debate in Washington rarely goes beyond this sort of possibility. The adjacent possible, by contrast, lies further in the future and requires a punctuation. It’s often said that pragmatists deal with the incremental possible while idealists fantasize about the adjacent possible. I don’t see it that way. I see preparing for the adjacent possible as a different form of pragmatism, a kind that looks further ahead. At certain times in history, it’s not fantasy to think about adjacent possibilities—it’s pragmatic, strategic, and necessary. Now is such a time. In my mind, a market economy with liberty and dividends for all is a plausible adjacent possibility. I also believe that a crisis—more severe than that of 2008—isn’t far away and that we need to prepare for it.

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At such times, they either collapse or shift into what biologist Stuart Kauffman calls the “adjacent possible.”3 The adjacent possible isn’t simply whatever happens next. Rather, it’s a set of potential futures in which modified versions of the existing system lurk. Which of these versions eventually emerges is inherently unpredictable. But when the system includes humans, it’s possible for humans to affect the outcome. We can do this by imagining a preferred future and building support for it prior to the crisis. It’s important to distinguish between the adjacent possible and what might be called the incremental possible. By the latter I mean adjustments to the existing system that don’t require a serious crisis (aka a punctuation).

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—From the US Pledge of Allegiance For Jonathan Rowe CONTENTS Preface 1. A Simple Idea 2. The Tragedy of Our Middle Class 3. Fix the System, Not the Symptoms 4. Extracted Rent 5. Recycled Rent 6. The Alaska Model 7. Dividends for All 8. Carbon Capping: A Cautionary Tale 9. From Here to the Adjacent Possible Join the Discussion Appendix: The Dividend Potential of Co-owned Wealth Notes Acknowledgments Index About the Author PREFACE I wrote this book because I’m appalled by the decline of America’s middle class and outraged when our leaders mislead us about what we can and can’t do to stop it.

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

A. Roger Ekirch, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, big-box store, British Empire, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jacquard loom, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Live Aid, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, Murano, Venice glass, planetary scale, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, techno-determinism, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, walkable city, women in the workforce

They’re worth exploring because we are living through comparable revolutions today, set by the boundaries and opportunities of our own adjacent possible. Learning from the patterns of innovation that shaped society in the past can only help us navigate the future more successfully, even if our explanations of that past are not falsifiable in quite the same way that a scientific theory is. — BUT IF SIMULTANEOUS INVENTION is the rule, what about the exceptions? What about Babbage and Lovelace, who were effectively a century ahead of just about every other human being on the planet? Most innovation happens in the present tense of the adjacent possible, working with the tools and concepts that are available in that time.

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We invented agriculture and cities and aqueducts and the printing press, but cold was outside the boundaries of possibility for all those years. And yet somehow artificial cold became imaginable in the middle of the nineteenth century. To use the wonderful phrase of the complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman, cold became part of the “adjacent possible” of that period. How do we explain this breakthrough? It’s not just a matter of a solitary genius coming up with a brilliant invention because he or she is smarter than everyone else. And that’s because ideas are fundamentally networks of other ideas. We take the tools and metaphors and concepts and scientific understanding of our time, and we remix them into something new.

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We take the tools and metaphors and concepts and scientific understanding of our time, and we remix them into something new. But if you don’t have the right building blocks, you can’t make the breakthrough, however brilliant you might be. The smartest mind in the world couldn’t invent a refrigerator in the middle of the seventeenth century. It simply wasn’t part of the adjacent possible at that moment. But by 1850, the pieces had come together. The first thing that had to happen seems almost comical to us today: we had to discover that air was actually made of something, that it wasn’t just empty space between objects. In the 1600s, amateur scientists discovered a bizarre phenomenon: the vacuum, air that seemed actually to be composed of nothing and that behaved differently from normal air.

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

“Managing the present to actually create a new direction of travel is more important than creating false expectations about how things could be in the future.” What he’s getting at is the difference between closing the gap—trying to achieve a predetermined future state—and discovering what author Steven Johnson calls the adjacent possible. In his words, “The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.” The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.

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Worst of all, discovery and diagnosis in a large bureaucratic system are painfully slow. In the time it takes to design a survey, get it approved, send it out to your employees, nag them to fill it out, get the results back, average them out, and decide on your top three objectives . . . we can help dozens and dozens of teams explore and experience their own adjacent possibilities. Instead of diagnosis, we typically proceed with a process of experiential learning and dialogue we call priming. For catalysts, leaders, and teams who are willing, we want to challenge the basic assumptions we all hold about organizations and how we work in them. Most of us have not had the time to think about how we work, and why we work that way, in a long time (maybe ever).

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At the end of every priming experience, you’re extending an invitation, not a mandate: Join us. Try something. Start a conversation. Ask for help. We are here for you. A whole new way of working is possible. Step into the space. Looping Earlier we talked about designing change to reveal the adjacent possible. Within organizations, we endeavor to do this through a process we call looping, inspired in part by Jason Little’s Lean Change Management. In our work, a loop contains three stages that are practiced recursively: Sensing Tensions, Proposing Practices, and Conducting Experiments. The Looping Process Looping is at the heart of continuous participatory change.

The Knowledge Economy by Roberto Mangabeira Unger

additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, balance sheet recession, business cycle, collective bargaining, commoditize, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, first-past-the-post, full employment, global value chain, information asymmetry, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, means of production, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, post-Fordism, radical decentralization, savings glut, secular stagnation, side project, tacit knowledge, total factor productivity, transaction costs, union organizing, wealth creators

The image is the memory of a perception. The second operation is the one that Kant disregarded: transformative variation. We grasp a phenomenon by projecting or provoking its change in response to certain natural or staged interventions. We understand the phenomenon by subsuming it under a range of adjacent possibles: what it could become, or what we could turn it into. The approximation of production to imagination is the heart of the knowledge economy, and ever more so as it spreads and deepens. We can explore the affinity between production and imagination in two ways: with regard to the way of organizing work or the technical division of labor, and with respect to the relation between worker and machine.

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Under the knowledge economy, the way we work together—the technical division of labor—can begin to resemble the workings of the mind as imagination, and to take on each of its features: its nonmodular and nonformulaic traits and, as it develops more fully, its powers of recursive infinity and negative capability. Production can develop by exploiting, thanks to these traits and powers, new products and possibilities of production at the penumbra of the adjacent possible. The less stark the contrast between supervisory and implementing responsibilities or, as a consequence, among specialized jobs of implementation, the better our chances of identifying and realizing such possibilities. The productive plan is continuously revised by the work team in the course of being carried out.

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However, it is not the moderation or the extremism of our proposals that matter; it is the trajectory to which they belong, whether they are close to present arrangements or remote from them. The language of transformative politics regularly prefers to combine the earliest and the most distant steps; it is at once practical and prophetic. It seeks to provide or to evoke down payments, in the realm of the adjacent possible, for the redirection that it seeks, drawing energy from the association of ideals and interests with examples within grasp. In conceptual work, however, it may be most useful to define and discuss the direction at a middle range between the closest and the most distant steps. The politician and the prophet have reason to avoid the description of initiatives that exceed, but not too much, the reach of the theres that we can readily reach from here.

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

I also think we need to resist the urge to push the AI conversation too far into the future. I’ve always loved the concept of the “adjacent possible,” a term coined by the evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffman to describe the way biological organisms evolve in gradual, incremental steps. The adjacent possible is a useful concept to apply to the world of technology, because it takes us out of the realm of sci-fi and narrows our scope to more realistic outcomes. A world in which robots flawlessly perform all human labor, freeing us all up to make art and play video games every day, is probably not part of the adjacent possible. But a world in which we use machine intelligence to reduce carbon emissions, find cures for rare diseases, and improve government services for low-income families might be.

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But a world in which we use machine intelligence to reduce carbon emissions, find cures for rare diseases, and improve government services for low-income families might be. It’s on us—the people who love technology but worry about its use—to explore this adjacent possible and push for the best version of it. It’s also important not to get too discouraged, and to remember, despite all of our worries, that AI and automation could be unbelievably good for humankind, if we do it right. A world filled with AI could also be filled with human creativity, meaningful work, and strong communities. And it’s worth reminding ourselves that, historically, technological shocks have been followed by social progress, even if it’s taken a while.

Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum by Lee Smolin

adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Claude Shannon: information theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, Ernest Rutherford, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, Turing machine

Given the present state of the world, not everything can happen in the next time step. Those events that might be next Kauffman calls the adjacent possible. The possible near-future events that make up the adjacent possible are not yet real, but they define and constrain what might be real. The adjacent possible of Schrödinger’s cat includes a live cat and a dead cat. It does not include a brontosaurus or an alien dog. So the elements of the adjacent possible have properties, even if the law of the excluded middle does not apply to them. As objects with properties, there are facts of the matter about them.

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The link provided will take you to the beginning of that print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader. academic community, 277 academic life, 94 acceleration, 297 actuality, possibility and, 177–78, 197–98, 200, 243 adjacent possible, 201 Against Method (Feyerbend), 173 Aharonov, Yakir, 118, 216 alternate geometry, 229 American Communist Party, 115n amplitude, 138 angular momentum, 77, 263n, 297 anti-realism, xxvi, xxix, 8, 26, 94, 117, 175 of Bohr, 106 definition of, 297 electrons and, 85 nature and, xxv physics and, xxv quantum mechanics and, xxi approximations, 192 Arcadia (Stoppard), 15 Aspect, Alain, 45, 46, 49, 220 assumptions, 10 astronomy, 274 atomic bomb, 108 atomic laws, 251–52, 258 atomic scale, xvii, xx, 77, 91 atomic systems, wave function and, 141, 213 atoms, xiv, xv, xvii, 56, 71 behavior of, 129 Bohr on, 93 chemical properties of, 3 communication between, 46–47 configuration space of, 122–24, 123, 217–18 copies of, 248 decay of, 125 definition of, 297 density of, 73 electrons and, 78, 83 energy and, 77–78 ensemble of, 59 entanglement of, 252 freedom and, 246 gravity and, 74 Heisenberg on, 87 laws of, 251–52, 258 light and, 77–78 location of, 5 matter and, 72 measurement of, 195 molecules and, 3, 246–47 nucleus of, 74 observables of, 27 photons and, 195, 209–10 pilot wave theory and, 122 properties of, xvi, 5, 6–7 quantum mechanics and, 6, 62 quantum states of, 37–38 quantum teleportation, 186 radiation and, 52, 93, 125 realism and, 75 retrocausality, 216–17, 217 solar system and, 74 spacetime, 257–59 spectrum of, 59–60, 78 states of, 49–51, 60–61, 77–78, 146–47, 152 stationary states of, 77 superposition of, 4–5, 6–7, 50, 139–40, 146, 152, 156–57 true theory of, xxi water and, xv averages, 62–63 backgrounds cosmic microwave, 121 definition of, 297 dependence on, 264, 297 independence principle, 229, 264, 267, 297 spacetime and, 269 symmetry and, 264 Barbour, Julian, 201–3, 244 Bateson, Gregory, 191 Bayesian probabilities, 160–61, 163, 297 beables, 26–27, 206–7, 213, 218, 222, 224, 240 beliefs, 164, 205 Bell, John, xxviii, xxix, 26, 39, 41, 45, 47–49, 55, 56, 105, 220 hidden variables and, 184 restriction theorem, 184, 215, 235, 298 Bernstein, Herbert, xxviii, 25, 27 big bang, 221 biochemistry, 177 biology, quantum mechanics and, 3 black-body radiation, 79 black holes, 75, 134 Bohm, David, xxix, 105, 107–8 Bohr and, 113 communism and, 114–15 Einstein and, 108–11 guidance equation and, 109 measurement process, 117 Oppenheimer and, 112 pilot wave theory and, 109, 110, 116, 118 Princeton and, 113 theory of, 109–12 von Neumann and, 110 Bohmian mechanics.

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Feynman’s Small Idea,” Innovation 5, no. 5 (October/November 2007), http://www.innovation-america.org/dr-feynmans-small-idea. 26 AI with Shingles. 27 For arguably the best bit of writing on the adjacent possible, see Steven Johnson, “The Genius of the Tinkerer,” Wall Street Journal, September 25, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703989304575503730101860838. Also see “The Adjacent Possible: A Talk with Stuart A. Kauffman,” Edge.org, November 9, 2003, http://edge.org/conversation/the-adjacent-possible. INDEX * * * A note about the index: The pages referenced in this index refer to the page numbers in the print edition. Clicking on a page number will take you to the ebook location that corresponds to the beginning of that page in the print edition.

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But without bold leadership to help us set the course, our history also tells us that we can wander in the desert of bad decisions for a mighty long time. “The adjacent possible” is theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman’s wonderful term for all the myriad paths unlocked by every novel discovery, the multitude of universes hidden inside something as simple as an idea. 27 Abundance is one of those simple ideas. Its time has come. It is up to the bold to unlock this adjacent possible, to help humanity live up to our full exponential potential. AFTERWORD NEXT STEPS—HOW TO TAKE ACTION * * * It’s an exciting time.

The End of Nice: How to Be Human in a World Run by Robots (Kindle Single) by Richard Newton

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, future of work, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lolcat, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Paul Erdős, Paul Graham, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Tyler Cowen, Y Combinator

Or fail fast and start again. In this way the accelerators – and there are thousands of these around the world – churn out legions of disrupters who change the rules and language of business. More than this, each of these companies and each of the individuals inside are expanding and accelerating the limits of the adjacent possible. Desperately seeking failures And now it’s the folk who embody this depth of character that allows them to contemplate failure, sometimes publicly, continue anyway and keep striving that big corporates are trying to hire. It’s not just that these people have had the vision and flexibility to respond, pivot, and when necessary get up off the floor; it’s that they have had the resilience to weather the blow of actual failure.

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You need the spark of random interaction with other ideas. That’s where the action is. And this is Anti-Order. It’s the mess that comes from the clash of domains, the creative friction of different ideas, the surprising combinatorial alchemy and the mash-up of incongruent disciplines. This is the primordial soup of ideas. This is where the adjacent possible slams into you from the side and yells: “How did that feel?!” And you know? It feels invigorating. Creativity, as someone once said, is the offspring of copulating ideas. It is the esemplastic combination of two or more thoughts that haven’t been joined this way before. It’s how 1+1 = 3. It’s how you suddenly notice that the field in which you are expert could benefit from the addition of this new idea snatched from a completely different discipline.

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel C. Dennett

Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Build a better mousetrap, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, deep learning, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fermat's Last Theorem, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, information retrieval, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, language acquisition, megaproject, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes: 93–119. Katchadourian, Raffi. 2015. “The Doomsday Invention: Will Artificial Intelligence Bring Us Utopia or Destruction?” New Yorker, November 23, 64–79. Kauffman, Stuart. 2003. “The Adjacent Possible.” Edge.org, November 9, https://edge.org/conversation/stuart_a_kauffman-the-adjacent-possible. Keller, Helen. 1908. The World I Live In. New York: Century. Kessler, M. A., and B. T. Werner. 2003. “Self-Organization of Sorted Patterned Ground.” Science 299 (5605): 380–383. Kobayashi, Yutaka, and Norio Yamamura. 2003. “Evolution of Signal Emission by Non-infested Plants Growing Near Infested Plants to Avoid Future Risk.”

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The process of natural selection cannot “consider all things” and is always in the midst of redesign, so it is not guaranteed to find the optimal solution to any specific design problem posed, but it does amazingly well, typically better than intelligent human designers who are striving for optimal design. 19Legendary software designer Charles Simonyi, the principal creator of Microsoft Word, has devoted more than twenty years to the task of creating what he calls “Intentional Software,” which would ideally solve this problem or a valuable subset of these problems. The fact that several decades of high-quality work by a team of software engineers has not yet yielded a product says a lot about the difficulty of the problem. 20Evolution explores the “adjacent possible,” see Kauffman (2003). 21How can I speak of evolution, which famously has no foresight, being able or unable to predict anything? We can cash out this handy use of the intentional stance applied to evolution itself by saying, less memorably and instructively, that highly variable environments have no information about future environments for natural selection to (mindlessly) exploit (see chapter 6). 22The useful term Whig history refers to interpreting history as a story of progress, typically justifying the chain of events leading to the interpreter’s privileged vantage point.

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Of course if there really is nothing new under the sun, this is no limitation, but human imagination, the capacity we have to envision realities that are not accessible to us by simple hill climbing from where we currently are, does seem to be a major game-changer, permitting us to create, by foresighted design, opportunities and, ultimately, enterprises and artifacts that could not otherwise arise. A conscious human mind is not a miracle, not a violation of the principles of natural selection, but a novel extension of them, a new crane that adjusts evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffman’s concept of the adjacent possible: many more places in Design Space are adjacent to us because we have evolved the ability to think about them and either seek them or shun them. The unanswered question for Domingos and other exponents of deep learning is whether learning a sufficiently detailed and dynamic theory of agents with imagination and reason-giving capabilities would enable a system (a computer program, a Master Algorithm) to generate and exploit the abilities of such agents, that is to say, to generate all the morally relevant powers of a person.103 My view is (still) that deep learning will not give us—in the next fifty years—anything like the “superhuman intelligence” that has attracted so much alarmed attention recently (Bostrom 2014; earlier invocations are Moravec 1988; Kurzweil 2005; and Chalmers 2010; see also the annual Edge world question 2015; and Katchadourian 2015).

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community by Marc J. Dunkelman

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, Broken windows theory, business cycle, call centre, clean water, company town, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Brooks, delayed gratification, different worldview, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, helicopter parent, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, invention of movable type, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Richard Florida, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban decay, urban planning, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

His breakthrough was midwifed by his familiarity with Jenner’s previous work. The broad concept of vaccination—Pasteur’s sudden insight—was made possible by the application of an old idea to a new set of circumstances. He had taken a step into what the author Steven Johnson recently called the “adjacent possible.”4 By piecing together the bits of information available to him at the moment of invention, Pasteur moved one step up the chain of knowledge. His new thinking stood on a foundation provided by Jenner’s research, just as Jenner’s “aha!” moment had been prompted by the dairymaid’s common wisdom.

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Yet the combination of these and other equally familiar data in Newton’s theory of gravity changed mankind’s outlook on the world.6 The same process applies to the great inventions of the last few years—even though we may be inclined to give credit to the apparent genius of one person. The iPhone didn’t emerge sui generis out of Steve Jobs’s head. No team at Apple could have invented such a device in 1975, if only because the constituent ideas that merged to place a graphically integrated handheld device into the adjacent possible hadn’t yet been invented. A whole series of individual ideas—mobile phones, graphical interfaces, satellite connectivity—had to be blended and perfected simply to conceive of a phone like the one Apple eventually created. It’s not taking anything away from Jobs’s genius as a manager or Apple’s ingenuity as a firm to argue that their ideas flowed from separate “parent” work done beforehand.

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Fire Department Profile Through 2011,” National Fire Protection Association, October 2012. 38Wuthnow, Loose Connections, 17. 39Friedman and Mandelbaum, That Used to Be Us, xiii. Index Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text. abortion, 69, 114, 116 Abrams, Samuel, 139 academic scholarship, data in, 6–7 “adjacent possible,” 159 adolescents, 28–31, 215, 217, 224 sexual orientation of, 43 shift of social capital from middle rings by, 120–24 advertising, 38, 60, 102–3 advocacy organizations, 116–18 affluence, 48, 52–55, 67, 72, 83 affirmation, search for, 102–12, 126, 138 outer-ring relationships and, 107–12, 115 trade-offs and, 112, 115 African Americans, 79, 111, 137, 146 civil rights movement and, 23–24, 108–9 in Great Migration, 40–41, 43, 137 in interracial marriage, 68 agriculture, 15, 16, 20, 53, 82, 84, 233, 260n airlines, airports, xi, 25, 230 Alfa Romeo, 172 Allentown, Pa., 170–74 al Qaeda, 56 Alzheimer’s disease, 199–200, 206–7 American Age (American Century), unwinding of, xiv–xv, xviii, 152–53 American character, 11, 67, 213–14 undermining of, 4, 65, 72–73 American Dream, xiv, xviii, xx, 3, 21, 32, 65, 75, 83, 226–27, 235, 240 American exceptionalism, xiv, xviii, 82, 142, 177, 226–41 American Idol (TV show), 36–37 American Revolution, xii, xix, 81, 151, 157–58, 194, 247n Americorps, 213 Amherst, Sir Jeffrey, 157 anthropologists, 90–97 Apple, 10, 173, 64, 160 assembly lines, 53, 85 assisted-living facilities, 197, 203 Associated Press, 185 Atlanta, Ga., 136–37 Atlantic, 46, 199 Aung San Suu Kyi, 64 authenticity, personal, 64–66 automobile industry, 10, 172, 175, 205 autonomy, 68, 73 baby boomers, 6, 28, 127, 133, 197, 198, 205 bands (overnight camps), 92, 94, 95, 96 banks, xv, xvii, 180, 181 Barbados, 179–81, 191 basketball, 8–9, 11–12 Bell, Daniel, 249n Bellah, Robert, 65–66, 73, 81 Bell Labs, 164, 173 belongingness, 4–5, 74, 110 Bender, Thomas, 83–84, 138 Berg, Joel, 62 Beverly Hillbillies, The (TV show), 36 “be yourself,” 63–66, 73–74, 102–3, 149, 218 bigotry, 117, 149, 237 Big Sort, The (Bishop with Cushing), 48, 50, 95, 135, 147, 238 Big Three, the, 8–9 bin Laden, Osama, 56 biology, 90–94 Bipartisan Policy Center, 188–89 Birmingham, England, 166–67 Bishop, Bill, 47–48, 95, 124, 135, 147, 184, 189, 238 Bissell, Cassandra, 140 blacks, see African Americans blogs, 36, 37, 109–10, 187 Bosh, Chris, 8–9 Boston, Mass., 33, 55, 84 Bowling Alone (Putnam), 7, 97, 99–100, 113–16, 119, 120, 134–35, 141, 149, 151–52, 192, 193 brain, 90–92, 94, 98, 121, 143, 144–45, 223–24 Brazil, 178–79, 267n Brokaw, Tom, 70 “broken windows” theory, 150 Brooks, David, 46–47, 48, 229 Brown University, 163 budget, federal, xv–xvi Buffalo, N.Y., ix–xi, xviii, 97, 136, 137, 170, 196–97, 240 Buffett, Warren, 27 bureaucracy, 16, 52, 110, 194, 202, 203, 204, 206, 210 Burke, Edmund, 81, 232 Burt, Ronald, 165, 168, 266n buses, 33–35 Bush, George W., 47, 54, 67, 184, 255n business, xvii, 10, 16, 52, 131–32, 163–68, 175–76, 235 in Barbados vs.

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

Am I heading for a Lucretian swerve? Will I be forced to concede that the combinatorial vastness of the library of possible proteins makes it impossible for evolution to find ones that work? Far from it. We know that human innovation rarely designs things from scratch, but jumps from one technology to the ‘adjacent possible’ technology, recombining existing features. So it is taking small, incremental steps. And we know that the same is true of natural selection. So the mathematics is misleading. In a commonly used analogy, you are not assembling a Boeing 747 with a whirlwind in a scrapyard, you are adding one last rivet to an existing design.

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That’s the path Japan, South Korea, China, India, Mauritius and Brazil have followed in recent years, and it’s the path that Britain and America followed at a more leisurely pace in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This path dependence is obvious in some ways. There’s not much point in mining uranium till you have invented steel, cement, electricity and computing, and understood nuclear physics. Technology proceeds, like evolution, to the ‘adjacent possible’, a phrase coined by the evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffman. It does not leap far into the future. I recently tried to think of examples of inventions that came long after their time, that should have been invented much sooner than they were – things we take for granted now and that would have been great for our grandparents to have had.

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I made a similar point in my 2010 book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, in drawing attention to the similarity between the recombination of genes as a result of sex to produce biological novelty and the recombination of ideas as a result of trade to produce technological novelty: ‘ideas having sex’ explains why innovation has tended to happen in open societies indulging in enthusiastic free trade. The same year, Steven Berlin Johnson published Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, and developed the idea that the story of technology, like biological evolution, is a ‘gradual but relentless probing of the adjacent possible, each new innovation opening up new paths to explore’. The economics writer Tim Harford, in his 2011 book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure, pointed out that ‘trial and error is a tremendously powerful process for solving problems in a complex world, while expert leadership is not’.

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Clayton Christensen, data acquisition, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, do what you love, escalation ladder, fear of failure, Google Earth, haute couture, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, rolodex, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, SpaceShipOne, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, time dilation, Virgin Galactic, Walter Mischel, X Prize

Moore’s law is the reason why today’s smartphones are a thousand times faster and a million times cheaper than a supercomputer from the 1970s. Meanwhile, biotechnology—the category that underpins exoskeletons and other enhancement technologies—is currently accelerating at five times the speed of Moore’s Law. What is the adjacent possible for strap-on bionics? What promise do exoskeletons hold for the future of progression? What about flow hacking? Until recently, older and wiser meant creakier and slower. But with biotechnology expanding at an exponential rate, we can now refresh the physical line of development, while our cognitive and creative lines continue to grow.

…

In fact, Bigelow Aerospace, another private space company, is now developing an inflatable space hotel that’s scheduled for 2017 deployment. With these developments around the corner, having basic space evacuation procedures in place—including a supersonic-capable space suit—just seems to make sense. But if you want to really talk about the adjacent possible: the combination of Baumgartner’s success and the birth of the space tourism industry means that space diving could be the next extreme sport frontier. It sounds silly, of course, but it wasn’t too long ago that surfing a 100-foot wave or free-soloing Half Dome was equally ludicrous. Plus, consider the space-diving upside.

Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture by Designing the Mind, Ryan A Bush

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cognitive bias, cognitive load, correlation does not imply causation, data science, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, drug harm reduction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fundamental attribution error, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, impulse control, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, price anchoring, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, Walter Mischel

You work backwards from this vision, through broad strategies - all the way down to individual algorithmic optimizations, each of which is one small step toward that vision. When you practice psychitecture, you design your mind’s structures such that your goals come about naturally. You move to the adjacent possible using your highest ideals as your beacon. Psychitecture’s aim is to reform biologically ingrained habits and tendencies of all forms. It’s goal is to rewire the mental biases, distortions, and assumptions that cause us to make mistakes, the unnecessary suffering we fall victim to on a regular basis, the mentalities that hold us back in life, and the impulses that lead us away from our ideals.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Creative environments often rely on “liquid networks” where different ideas can collide in different configurations. They arrive through serendipity—we set out looking for the answer to one problem and find another—and as a result, ideas emerge frequently in places where random collision is more likely to occur. “Innovative environments,” he writes, “are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible”—the bisociated area in which existing ideas combine to produce new ones—“because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts.” His book is filled with examples of these environments, from primordial soup to coral reefs and high-tech offices, but Johnson continually returns to two: the city and the Web.

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking by Matthew Syed

adjacent possible, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, cognitive load, computer age, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, delayed gratification, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, invention of writing, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, market bubble, mass immigration, microbiome, Mitch Kapor, persistent metabolic adaptation, Peter Thiel, post-truth, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, tech worker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, vertical integration

This pattern applies to Facebook (which connected an existing web infrastructure with technology enabling people to build digital networks and share media) and Instagram (which linked Facebook’s most basic concepts with a smartphone application complete with the capacity to modify a photo with digital filters) and beyond. Recombination is the leitmotiv of digital innovation. With each new combination, fresh combinations loom into the terrain of what the biologist Stuart Kauffman calls ‘the adjacent possible’. New prospects open up, new vistas come into view. ‘Digital innovation is recombinant innovation in its purest form,’ Brynjolfsson and McAfee write. ‘Each development becomes a building block for future innovations . . . building blocks don’t ever get used up. In fact, they increase the opportunities for future recombinations.’15 But this leaves us with a critical question.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Accel partners aimed to comprehend entrepreneurs so thoroughly that they could complete their sentences and predict the next slide in their pitches. They spoke internally of the “90 percent rule.” An Accel investor should know 90 percent of what founders are going to say before they open their mouths to say it.[18] Accel’s specialist approach made it particularly adept at identifying what venture capitalists call “adjacent possibilities.” By embedding themselves in their respective sectors, sitting on boards of portfolio companies, and blending their direct observations with management-consultant-style analyses, Accel partners could anticipate the next logical advance in a technology. “Every deal should lead to the next deal,” was another Accel saying.[19] Swartz in particular liked to invest in successive iterations in a single product class.

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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A Abingworth, 89–90 academic tenure, 96, 431n Accel Capital, 122, 128–32, 249–61, 377, 436n dot-com bust, 184–85 Facebook, 195, 253–61, 264, 271, 272, 306, 380, 382 founding of, 128–29 gender issues, 272 Google, 182 Hailo, 357 Kleiner Perkins compared with, 210, 265, 270, 272 Myspace, 252–53 Portal Software, 174, 436n, 440n “prepared mind” approach of, 122, 128, 210, 250–51, 252, 308–9 Skype, 191, 251–52, 285–86 specialist approach of, 129–31, 221 Spotify, 289 UUNET, 135–39, 143–44, 286 Accel India, 324 Accel Telecom, 129–31, 435n, 436n activist investing, 60, 63, 66–69, 80, 81, 84 Adams, Rick, 132–44, 436n “adjacent possibilities,” 131 Adobe, 98 adventure capital, 17–18, 25–27 Airbnb, 302, 353 Andreessen Horowitz’s investment, 298 blitzscaling, 387 Sequoia Capital’s investment, 304, 315, 455n Alcorn, Allan, 425n Alibaba, 226–31, 232–34, 241–42, 392, 446–47n Chinese government actions against, 402 Goldman Sachs’s investment, 227–30, 232–34, 242, 377, 447n Hanguang 800, 402 IPO, 229 Son’s investment, 229–31, 446n Tiger’s investment, 285 “alienation,” 420n Altair, 20 Altman, Sam, 218, 318–19, 455n Amazon, 12, 170, 176, 185, 336, 388 Doerr’s investment, 179–80, 263 IPO, 13 American Research and Development (ARD), 25, 28–31, 51–52, 98 Digital Equipment, 28–29, 31, 36–37, 45, 419n, 420n Fairchild Semiconductor, 35 financial and legal structure of, 30–31, 41, 45, 51–52, 419n, 421–22n share price, 31, 420n America Online (AOL), 143, 152, 441n Ampersand, 312 Ampex, 26–27 “anchoring,” 310–11, 454n Andreessen, Marc, 290–300, 434n Facebook, 276–77 “It’s Time to Build,” 14 Mosaic, 20, 144–45, 146, 148, 237, 395 Netscape, 146–48, 150, 237, 277–78, 290 Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), 290–300, 311 Clubhouse, 14 Instagram, 213 Nicira, 293–95, 296, 379 Okta, 295–96, 379 Skype, 297–98, 299 Uber, 353–55, 378 Zenefits, 341–42 Anduril, 403–4 angel investing, 85, 175–76, 311, 316 Facebook, 198–99, 208 Google, 173–76, 178–79, 215 animal husbandry, 1–2, 4 Ante, Spencer, 29 Ant Group, 402 anti-skill thesis, 377–79 Apple, 82–91, 106, 379–80, 430n Abingworth’s investment, 89–90 IPO, 91, 160–61 Markkula’s investment, 84–87 Rock’s investment, 87–89, 90–91 Sequoia Capital’s investment, 83–84, 85–86, 90–91, 160, 430n Venrock’s investment, 86–87, 88, 90–91, 429n, 430n Apple I, 82 Apple II, 84–85 Arab oil embargo of 1973, 63–64 Archie, 20 ARD.

Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact by Steven Kotler

adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, Dennis Tito, epigenetics, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, interchangeable parts, Kevin Kelly, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, North Sea oil, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, theory of mind, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

In fact, Bigelow Aerospace, another private space company, is now developing an inflatable space hotel that’s scheduled for 2017 deployment. With these developments around the corner, having basic space evacuation procedures in place — including a supersonic-capable space suit — just seems to make sense. But if you want to really talk about the adjacent possible: The combination of Baumgartner’s success and the birth of the space tourism industry means that space diving could be the next extreme sport frontier. It sounds silly, of course, but it wasn’t too long ago that surfing a 100-foot wave or free-soloing Half Dome — two “impossible” feats lately accomplished — were equally ludicrous.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

And, perhaps most important, you can make sure that you have the ability to correct your mistakes. My earlier book, The Start-up of You, introduces the useful concept of “ABZ planning.” Entrepreneurs should always have a Plan A, a Plan B, and a Plan Z. Plan A is your best current plan; Plan B is an alternate plan, based on the “adjacent possible” to which you can pivot if Plan A isn’t working or you learn of an even better opportunity; Plan Z is your fallback plan for surviving a worst-case scenario. ABZ planning gives you multiple opportunities to recover from mistakes or setbacks. At my first start-up, SocialNet, we were delighted when we managed to hire a brilliant server engineer (Plan A).

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

Viewed purely in terms of the technological innovation at their disposal, the poets and painters of the early seventeenth century were living in the Stone Age compared to the high-tech bounty available to the composers. That extensive inventory of sonic tools illustrates how, from the very beginning, our appetite for music has been satisfied by engineering and mechanical craft as much as by artistic inspiration. The innovations that music inspired turned out to unlock other doors in the adjacent possible, in fields seemingly unrelated to music, the way the “Instrument Which Plays by Itself” carved out a pathway that led to textile design and computer software. Seeking out new sounds led us to create new tools—which invariably suggested new uses for those tools. Legendary violin maker Stradivari’s workshop Consider one of the most essential and commonly used inventions of the computer age: the QWERTY keyboard.

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman

23andMe, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biofilm, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data acquisition, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Garrett Hardin, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, market design, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, power law, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Satyajit Das, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, security theater, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, sugar pill, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Exaptations are too unpredictable and too dependent on the whole suite of living creatures to be analyzed and coded into properties of DNA sequences. Better, as the theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman proposes, to think of evolutionary dynamics as the exploration, in time, by the biosphere, of the adjacent possible. The same goes for the evolution of technologies, economies, and societies. The poverty of the conception that economic markets tend to unique equilibria, independent of their histories, shows the danger of thinking outside of time. Meanwhile the path dependence that economist Brian Arthur and others show is necessary to understand real markets illustrates the kind of insights that are gotten by thinking in time.

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All by Robert Elliott Smith

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, affirmative action, AI winter, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, post-truth, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

This complexity is unpredictable, yet it has patterns; unpredictable patterns may in fact be a characteristic of systems that we would call living systems. Stuart Kauffman has used mathematical models to show that living systems tend to evolve towards an edge of chaos: that point where their behaviour is maximally random while maintaining some structure. Existing at this edge allows the evolving system to retain the maximum number of adjacent possible states that it can change to at any moment, while still maintaining stable behaviours. This, rather than the drive towards some optima implied by ‘survival of the fittest’, appears to be the real characteristic of living systems; they change their apparent models and their criteria at any time as circumstance dictates, defying the very notion of fixed models and criteria.

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

He like opened his eyes really wide and said, “Yeah, you could do all that!” And so that was Odeo. Ev Williams: We didn’t know that other people were talking about the same idea. It turns out that audio distributed to iPods was what podcasting was, and it was starting to get some traction. Like a lot of inventions, the adjacent possible reveals itself and everybody sees it at the same time and thinks about it. And we told Noah: “Noah—you should totally do this!” And he was like, “That’s interesting…” Adam Rugel: Odeo was interesting. The idea was to be a network where you could consume podcasts. Dom Sagolla: Back in 2005, there weren’t a lot of people podcasting.