The Infinite Resource

the power of ideas on a finite planet

Ramez Naam 2013

In Charle's Kenny's "Getting Better", we learn that the world is getting better; education and lifespans up, birthrates down. Robert Wright's "Nonzero" describes continuing improvement in the past. Stewart Brand's "Whole Earth Discipline" describes the tools we will use to continue this improvement. C. K. Prahalad's "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid" shows how uplifting the world's poorest is the fastest way to make a profit. Matt Ridley's "The Rational Optimist" describes how specialization leads to prosperity, and how inventive human minds ("where ideas go to have sex") create new and beneficial specializations. Michael Neilsen's "Reinventing Discovery, The New Era of Networked Science", describes how the internet fosters collaboration - ideas having sex in digital networks. So why aren't more people aware of this? Arthur Herman's "The Idea of Decline in Western Civilization" shows us centuries of pessimism about the possibility of progress. and Virginia Postrel's "The Future and its Enemies" describes why - the future is created by the upwardly mobile, while the downwardly mobile try to freeze us in the past - including past visions of the future, like state communism or the Von Braun giant rocket manned planetary expeditions.

Ramez Namm is a cartographer of, example of, and reason for progress. Brought from Cairo to America by his parents at age 3, he led projects at Microsoft, started a nanotech molecular modelling company, wrote three science fiction novels, and the visionary non-fiction book "The Infinite Resource". Ramez has done (and will do) far more with his life than most men his age still living in Cairo - he is a product of opportunity, ambition (his parent's and his own), and global networking. The entrepreneurial history of the United States was written by recent immigrants and their children - the post-9/11 immigration restrictions may cost the US a generation of progress. Fortunately, ideas cross borders over the internet, and global progress will continue to accelerate, the US scrambling to keep up. We are fortunate that Ramez, along with many more of my friends and colleagues, got in before the gates closed.