One of the most intriguing books I’ve read of late is The Gift of Athena, by economic historian Joel Mokyr. Mokyr traces the rise of the industrial revolution and the important role of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution in increasing access to knowledge in society at large. Here’s his thesis in a nutshell:

“The central phenomenon of the modern age is that as an aggregate we know more. New knowledge developed in the past three centuries has created a great deal of social conflict and suffering, just as it was the origin of undreamt-of-wealth and security. It revolutionized the structures of firms and households, it altered the way people look and feel, how long they live, how many children they have, and how they spend their time. Every aspect of our material existence has been altered by our new knowledge.”

Mokyr argues that the phenomenal rate of knowledge accumulation and economic growth since the scientific revolution can be traced to the evolution of social networks comprised of individuals affiliated with universities, publishers, corporations, professional sciences, and kindred institutions. These social networks underpin an immensely complicated communications structure that pulls the dispersed knowledge of humanity together in a largely self-organizing fashion — delivering sustained improvements in technology and prosperity, despite the absence of any conscious, hierarchical direction.

It is worth underlining what a remarkable achievement this is, particularly when placed in historical context. Only a handful of generations ago, most individuals had to be jacks-of-all-trades in order to cope with the large variety of problems essential to survival, not least of which including eating and providing shelter. Prior to the industrial revolution, specialization came at the expense of the variety necessary for survival for all but the most wealthy individuals.

As markets grew, people specialized at the expense of more “general” knowledge. But the loss of general knowledge was made up by an increase in trade.

Today, no one person in society needs to know everything in order to survive. On the contrary, we are collectively better off if everyone specializes in knowing only a few things very well. For so long as we have low cost mechanisms for integrating specialized knowledge with other complementary knowledge, we will collectively know a great deal more with a highly granular division of labor than we could in a world of generalists.

Now with the rise of wikinomics and further advances in artificial intelligence and social networking we are seeing the rise of something akin to a global brain. Not a global brain in a spiritual sense, or a global brain in the sense that all of humanity will share one central nervous system; but a global brain in the sense that we will soon be able to almost effortlessly recombine the total sum of human knowledge(with the aid of artificial intelligence, of course) . We have observed for some time that the costs of creating, sharing and aggregating information have declined dramatically as improvements in storage, communications and collaboration technologies enhance our ability to find, retrieve, sort, evaluate, and filter the wealth of human knowledge. These trends seem set to continue to follow an exponential curve, pushing our accumulation of scientific knowledge and technical capability at an ever increasing rate.

I’ll admit that “a global brain” still seems like a fanciful concept, but it may not be as far off as we think. Mokyr’s book is historical and doesn’t spend enough time exploring how the knowledge revolution that he so admirably describes will play out in the future. Nevertheless, it’s a worthwhile read for anyone who wants to better appreciate the role of social networks in scientific progress, and in turn, how scientific progress fueled modern economic growth.