A Minority Voice Worth Cherishing in the Landscape of Ideas
I first met Jielin Dong in the late 1980s or early 1990s, when we were both studying in the United States. She struck me as a warm, spirited young woman with a tenacious approach to everything she did. Later, I left scholarly pursuits for business and began investing at a fund affiliated with American International Group (AIG), which took me back to China frequently. I heard that she, too, had become an entrepreneur and was often traveling between China and the United States. Yet our paths did not cross again until 2011, when I saw her at a meeting of the Thousand Talents Program. She told me she was now teaching and conducting research at a university. I was rather surprised: in China today, it is unusual for someone who has made money as an entrepreneur to return to the materially modest life of a researcher.
Not long ago, she sent me a message on WeChat asking whether I would write a foreword to her new book on the history of human scientific and technological innovation. I agreed without hesitation, partly because I thought the subject mattered to contemporary China, and partly out of curiosity: I wanted to see what this remarkable woman would write. She then began sending me the manuscript in installments. To my surprise, she had spent five years writing a work of some four to five hundred thousand Chinese characters.
In this book, Dong explores questions that many of us have considered: Why do people innovate in science and technology, and how do they do it? What are the most important innovations of our time? How will they change our future lives? Many excellent books examine the relationships between innovation and geography, culture, institutions, economics, and history. Max Weber’s celebrated The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, for example, examines the relationship between Protestant ethics and the emergence of the spirit of modern capitalism through the lens of religious values. What distinguishes Dong’s book is that she builds a new analytical framework on theories developed by earlier scholars in different fields. Combining extensive historical and contemporary datasets, she focuses on the relationship between scientific and technological innovation and people’s own desires and social needs.
The book offers many engaging discussions and insights into these questions. Dong identifies three long waves of scientific and technological revolution in human history. The Subsistence Revolution began more than ten thousand years ago, encompassing the Agricultural and Neolithic Revolutions. It established a new foundation for population growth and set farming and pastoral peoples on diverging paths. The Communication Revolution began five thousand years ago, with advances in writing, mathematics, information, and entertainment. It brought a leap in the production and transmission of knowledge, transformed social structures, and improved the efficiency of administration, marking the divergence between what have traditionally been called civilized and barbarian societies. The Efficiency Revolution began four hundred years ago and includes the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. The use of fossil fuels and the invention of power machinery, in particular, generated enormous increases in wealth. Modern society emerged from traditional society, and modernization gradually spread across the world.
Using both data and stories, Dong offers a penetrating analysis and comparison of the historical development of science and technology in China and Europe. She sees geography as the backdrop. Over the past two thousand years, the differences between their trajectories—and especially their divergence over the past few centuries—have arisen chiefly from three human factors: the preference and capacity for precision, as expressed in mathematics and logic; pluralism in ideas and political power; and the structure and dynamics of commercial systems. These three factors are also crucial to a society’s capacity for innovation today and in the future.
Dong makes some strikingly unconventional judgments about the future of science and technology. Over the past century, research investment and the number of researchers have increased dramatically. Yet according to the book’s database, the annual number of major scientific and technological firsts per person peaked around the 1920s and then declined markedly. Faster product turnover does not necessarily mean more major breakthroughs. Her analysis of Chinese scientific and technological history also departs from familiar accounts. Traditional Chinese technologies once led in several fields, but when science and technology are counted together and measured by the cumulative number of major firsts, Europe held the larger total over long periods. Looking ahead, she believes that AI and its development toward superintelligence (SI) may reverse the decline in major firsts per person and usher in a new industrial revolution. Yet rising output and wealth may not bring corresponding wage increases for most people; the price of many kinds of work that involve carrying out tasks may actually fall. Some of these judgments arise from statistics, while others are bold projections. All deserve serious discussion. A marketplace of views in which opinions line up too neatly is not necessarily a healthy one. Minority voices that offer grounded arguments and dare to propose different interpretations are especially worth cherishing in the landscape of ideas.