Does Steve Jobs Get Too Much Credit? 'Evolution' Author Ridley Says Maybe
Steve Jobs had a huge influence over the development of new technologies and the Internet, but let's not give him -- or any other tech guru -- too much credit, said Matt Ridley, author of The Evolution of Everything.
"We underestimate the degree to which the trends that affect us in the world and in business come from ordinary people interacting rather than from great individuals directing things from above," said Ridley.
Ridley's previous books include The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters and The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature. His books have sold more than one million copies in 30 languages worldwide.
Ridley said it is difficult to predict where the Internet is heading as it continues to evolve. One thing that is clear, however, is that the features of the Internet came from peer-to-peer networking among ordinary people.
"They didn't come from particularly brilliant discoveries or big businesses or government," said Ridley. "It's an emergent phenomenon and it's not finished yet. It's barely started."
Ridley said the government's role in developing new technologies or industries should be as referee, encouraging the survival of good ideas and the death of bad ones. Government should not, in his view, try to plan the outcome.
When it comes to health care, Ridley said it has to keep evolving to solve the huge problems facing the human race. That said, he is afraid that too much government interference will stifle innovation.
"You have got to have some kind of centralized direction of health care, but we've got to be careful to make sure that it doesn't get too monolithic and I think that's the worry about Obamacare," said Ridley, adding that the more centralized health care becomes, "the less experimentation you get and the less you discover what you are doing wrong and what you need to change through a process of evolutionary trial and error."
Finally, Ridley said both America and Europe are on the brink of a big change in the political process because of the democratization of the Internet. And he also said that inequality is decreasing globally due to the rapid gain of wealth in developing countries compared to a much slower rate in advanced nations. As for the rise of inequality in the U.S. and U.K., Ridley said it is more of a function of governmental policy creation than an evolutionary problem.
"Certain policies like restricting how easy it is to get building permits tend to help the haves at the expense of the have-nots, so I think one has to reexamine government policy to see how we are actually making the problem worse through policy decisions," said Ridley.