By Futurist Thomas Frey
The Innovation Myth
We love our inventor stories.
Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Steve Jobs invented the smartphone. Lone geniuses having breakthrough moments that changed the world.
These stories are emotionally satisfying. They give us heroes to admire. They make innovation feel comprehensible—the result of exceptional individuals making exceptional leaps.
They’re also fundamentally false.
A maximally curious AI doesn’t accept “Edison invented the light bulb” as an answer. It asks: What came before that? What made Edison’s invention possible? What ideas did he build on? What technologies enabled those ideas? What came before those technologies?
When you trace innovation backward through infinite layers of intellectual ancestry, something remarkable happens: the lone genius disappears. In their place, you find vast networks of prior thinkers, stretching back centuries, each contributing small pieces that eventually converged into what we call an “invention.”
The Archaeology of Ideas applies maximum curiosity to intellectual history. It traces every concept, every innovation, every thought back through complete chains of influence to the origins of human knowledge.
And in the process, it destroys our comfortable myths about creativity, ownership, and originality.
Continue reading… “Maximum Curiosity Part 5 – The Archaeology of Ideas: Tracing Every Thought Back to First Principles”