There’s an odd comfort we take in the word “smart” these days. Everything is a smart something, starting, of course with our phones. Between all things “smart” and “awesome” you might be tempted to think that we’ve got a decent handle on what Alvin Toffler called, nearly 45 years ago, “the dizzying disorientation brought on by premature arrival of the future.” We don’t.
There’s a persistent smart-spoiler that got me thinking on this topic: The Great Pyramid of Giza (Pyramid of Khufu).
Still a subject of study, but popularly resigned to mystery and fable… completed around 2650 BC, with enough stones to build 30 Empire State Buildings, each stone placed perfectly within 1/1000th of an inch of the other, and clocking a 3800 year reign as the world record for tallest structure. But, that’s not fable: It’s history, technology and science — stuff we’re good at.
It should be hard to muster even shallow feelings of “smart” in the shadow of this thing.
Tech & Science Don’t Matter As Much as We Think
Our modern relationship with technology and science is both triumphant and complex. We’ve only recently rid ourselves of a few pseudosciences. When the world ditched craniology, for example, we regressed, thankfully, to the mean of individual intelligence as a constant — intrinsic to humans. Every single person has access to “smart.”
As such, the science and technology that the Africans used to build pyramids shouldn’t escape us so thoroughly. We see the execution staring at us every day, but the science eludes reverse engineering up to this very moment. (Not that it hasn’t been tried in earnest…)
But, is solving big problems really about being smart enough to know technology or science? I don’t think so.
The status of “advanced civilization” must be defined more by collaboration than by any linear-historical concept of development or any given level of science or technology. (Truly advanced civilizations must see the latter as both necessary and grossly insufficient, without contradiction. If it were just a question of technology, where’s our pyramid?)
The 4th dynasty must have been one of the original, massive open data environments, given the scale and precision of knowledge discovery and transfer across hundreds of thousands of people, and not enslaved people, by the way. That’s well beyond our popular concept of “smart”, especially where we tend to use technology or scientific knowledge as a proxy for it.
Why This Matters: “Pyramid-Scale”
Try this search and variations of it: “solving the world’s most complex social problems.” We have a growing industry of the sharpest minds aiming right there. And that’s a good thing.
But, it’s also why the Great Pyramid example struck me, since it’s also billed as large and undecipherable. The problem is …they built it.
We can’t write off pyramid-scale achievement as fable while boldly claiming to be up to the task of solve the world’s problems.
If we are to advance this society, we have to access collective intelligence. That means technology driven as much by creating new human methods as it is by making tools. It means collaboration beyond popular notions of smart: “Just getting a lot of smart people in a group does not necessarily make a smart group,” says Tom Malone. And check out Scott Page for a few mind-blowing examples on the power of focusing different perspectives on a single tough problem surrounded by vague definitions.
The paradox that lurks behind all of this complexity is often… the simple solution. No shame in that. It makes for a good laugh among friends, “How easy was that?!!” Moving beyond the ego of smart and beyond the politics of engaging diverse perspectives would get us there.
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