I'm currently reading Gordon MacKenzie's delightful book, Orbiting the Giant Hairball. Chapter 19 is the shortest, most insightful chapter I have read in some time. I will repeat it in its entirety for your reading pleasure:
Orville Wright did not have a pilot's license.
Following up on yesterday's post, I invite you to look at the logo to the right. Undoubtedly, it is one you have seen hundreds, if not thousands, of times. How many of you, however, have ever noticed the arrow between the "E" and "x." It is a wonderful example of negative space and I want you to think of it as a metaphor for training your mind to "see what isn't there."
Naturally, this led RAF officials to recommend that those areas of the plane be reinforced with extra armor. Wald, however, reached just the opposite conclusion. He argued that data was only being collected from the planes that had successfully completed their mission. It didn’t include those unlucky enough to be shot down in battle. Recognizing that this created a selection bias, Wald came to the counterintuitive conclusion that the parts of the returning planes that were not riddled with holes should be the areas that received additional fortification. Why? Because he understood that those areas of the aircraft that had been hit and yet still made it back were not critical to the mission’s success.
Wald was only able to do this by "seeing what wasn't there." He "saw" the aircraft that didn't return.
In his famous speech at Rice University where he declared that it was America’s intention to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, President Kennedy said “the greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds,” adding that “the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far outstrip our collective comprehension.”
Kennedy went on to offer a historical perspective for the magnitude of change society had experienced over the short course of human history. He asked his audience to condense the 50,000 years of man’s recorded history into the span of fifty years. Under this scenario, Kennedy noted that not much happened for the first forty years. Ten years ago, man emerged from his cave, and only five years ago did he learned to write. Christianity appeared two years ago, the printing press this year, and just two months ago the steam engine appeared. Last month electric lights, telephones, automobiles, and airplanes became available, and only last week did we develop penicillin, television, and nuclear weapons. To reach “the stars before midnight tonight,” Kennedy then poignantly added that Americans would have to “dispel old [and] new ignorance.”
Since achieving Kennedy’s goal in 1969, progress has continued exponentially. (Ironically, perhaps, with the exception of space exploration which, as Monday's 40th aniversary of the moon landing reminds us, has not made much progress.) Taking his historical analogy a little further, however, in the last proverbial "day" computers, biotechnology, the Internet, and the sequencing of the human genome have all appeared on the scene.
What Kennedy's analogy reminds us it that will need to continue to “dispel old ignorance” -- or continuously unlearn if you will -- only on a faster scale.
IBM recently announced that it has developed a new supercomputer capable of performing 1,000 
trillion calculations per second. It is a little hard to wrap your brain around such mind-boggling numbers, but last year I wrote an article discussing an IBM supercomputer that was capable of performing 70 trillion calculations per second. In the piece, I noted that if you had to perform a similar number of calculations (and assuming you could work 365/7/24) it would take you roughly 60 million years to perform what that supercomputer could do in one second.
Well, with this latest advance, it would now take you -- theoretically speaking -- about 800 million years. Of course, such a comparison is slightly ridiculous. What is not ridiculous, however, is what these supercomputers are doing and learning. With their immense electronic brains they are now designing new materials and products; creating new drugs; and helping us better understand everything from the human body and brain to how mankind is impacting the environment.
One implication of these new findings is that all of us will need to unlearn at a faster rate.
Marcel Proust once said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but 
in having new eyes.” I was reminded to this quote yesterday after reading John Markoff's insightful article on Pax Scientific -- a company that has applied biomimicry to create new industrial designs for everything from aerospace designs to parts for air conditioners.
What is so interesting about the article is that Pax Scientific has found it difficult to find a market for its product and technology in spite of the fact that it can often demonstrate double-digit increases in product efficiency.
The problem is not the technology, rather it is users inability to unlearn their old ways of doing business. Because they think they "know" what an airplane or air conditioner part should look like, they are unwilling to consider models that do not conform to their pre-conceived ideas. In short, they can't "see" with new eyes.
Those companies, however, that can unlearn the fastest should be able to achieve a competitive advantage in the commercial marketplace.
The Wall Street Journal has an interesting review of the new book, Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel. It is a history
of the world's first machine gun. Interestingly, although the gun was patented during the Civil War and Mr. Gatling urged the Union Army to adopt it -- arguing that it would "save lives, wounds and sickness, by lessening the numbers subjected to the perils of war" -- nobody listened. It wasn't until the Spanish-American War in 1898 -- almost 40 years after its invention -- that it was first deployed.
This little lesson in history is directly applicable to a new, modern weapon -- unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Recently, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates complained that the Air Force was not adopting the use of UAVs -- also known as drones -- fast enough. He further argued that the Air Force generals who weren't adopting the technology were unnecessarily putting airman's lives at risk.
Gates is right. UAV's can now fly for hours over enemy territory and, if necessary, fire and drop an assortment of weapons. Perhaps it is time that a great many Air Force generals who "learned" the importance of using fighters and bombers to engage and suppress the enemy now "unlearn" that behavior. The sooner they do, the fewer American lives the military will unnecessarily put at risk.
It is common knowledge that only about 20 percent of an iceberg floats above the waterline. Yet, if you are a ship captain, you need to concern yourself with the remaining 80 percent. If you don't, you could end up sharing a fate similar to that of Edward John Smith, the captain of the Titanic.
This "iceberg principle" does not, however, just apply to the shipping industry. In many scientific and technical fields, information is doubling at an astounding rate -- approximately every seven years. This means that by the year 2015 everything we know today about a field such as biology or physics will represent just half of our future knowledge; and in 14 years time, what we know today will represent a mere 25 percent. This vast assortment of new future knowledge will likely rip apart certain industries and businesses with the same effectiveness of the iceberg that sliced through the Titanic and dropped it to the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.
If you hope to survive, one thing likely to help you is to unlearn the habit of focusing on that portion of the "iceberg" which is above the waterline and start concerning yourself more with what you don't know today -- but will need to know in the future.
