Preface

This book explains how to understand, create, and apply revolutions in business and technology.

A few years ago, my colleagues and I met at the Boston airport to discuss the future of our organization, an industry group in the field of telecommunications. We’d hired a professional moderator to lead the discussions, and at one point the moderator had us working on the significant inventions of the past thirty years, the innovations that had transformed telecommunications. We generated a timeline with some interesting items on it (you’ll see some of them in Chapter 1), and then the moderator asked a rather ho-hum, standard question just to move the conversation along: “What do these inventions have in common?”

The answer hit me like a flash of lighting: Each of the important inventions and revolutions in our field started, just as the subtitle of this book says, when people took things apart. The key innovations really had something in common—something exciting and unexpected. I jumped up and explained my idea to the group. Everyone nodded, but one person did nothing to show he’d even heard me. This person is a creative and highly competent individual, a technical person like me. I was concerned about his reaction; if he didn’t agree, then clearly I was missing something. Yet he just sat there, staring at the whiteboard without saying a thing.

“Don’t you agree with what I’m saying?” I asked.

“I’m figuring out how to use your idea to make money,” he replied.

That’s when I knew I was onto something important.

This book provides ideas, methods, and examples and shows you how to use them to create useful and exciting innovations. “Taking things apart creates revolutions” is the simple, one-line answer, but the more I looked into this relatively simple idea the more rich, the more interesting, and the more fun it became. I hope you’ll enjoy the rest of this book as I guide you through the details.

The main focus of the book is on business and technology. The ideas in this book apply across a wide range of activities; I’ve included discussions about government and economics, but have left out any mention of medicine, health care, or religion.

Part I of the book presents the fundamental ideas. This section discusses how taking things apart works, how to categorize the different ways of taking things apart, and some of the implications. Also included is information about the benefits to expect—the payoff that makes all the hard work worthwhile.

Part II of the book consists of case studies. Three revolutions in technology—dating from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries—provide examples of how these revolutions work in detail.

Part III provides strategies for how to cope with revolutions. There’s discussion on how to avoid being buried by an “avalanche” and warnings about strategies that simply don’t work, such as running in front of the onrushing avalanche and yelling at everyone to stop. There’s also a chapter about some up-and-coming revolutions—a few places where it’s possible to see the first “pebbles” that signal the oncoming avalanche.

Finally, a few things about what this book does not do. “Taking things apart” does create revolutions, but then again there are many revolutions that don’t fit this mold. The book doesn’t claim that all innovation, all technological revolutions, and all changes in human society are explained by this one theory. What I’m discussing is important, but not all-inclusive. There are at least three broad categories of revolutions.

One category is “replacement” revolutions, which start with the introduction of a replacement technology. An example of this is the steam engine, which replaced and/or supplemented the existing power sources: muscle, wind, and water. And then there are revolutions that start when someone invents completely “new physics” and introduces capabilities that simply weren’t there before—radios, X-rays, nuclear power plants, and radiation therapy. Both the “replacement” revolutions and the “new physics” revolutions are relatively scarce because they rely on scientific breakthroughs, and science doesn’t produce breakthroughs on a regular schedule.

But this book is about a third category of revolutions, revolutions that are far easier to create, revolutions that account for much of the progress we’ve seen in the past thirty years. These revolutions are based on taking things apart, a process I call disaggregation.…

Moshe Yudkowsky
Chicago, Illinois, USA