Why we cling to what works
Richard Buckminster Fuller was an architect, writer and philosopher. He was an optimist about our ingenuity and the power of our unfettered imagination, but he was also aware of our shortcomings and our tendency to make do. This is best illustrated by Buckminster Fuller’s analogy of a shipwreck in which all the lifeboats are gone. A drowning passenger spots a piano lid floating by and it is buoyant enough to support her weight. A piano lid is not the best-designed lifeboat, but she clings to it; in an emergency it will do.
Buckminster Fuller believed that we are clinging to a lot of piano lids, “accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means of solving a problem.”
There are many examples of old piano lids that have been replaced by something more robust, efficient and convenient thanks to innovation. Older readers may remember how cumbersome and inflexible the old Yellow Pages and telephone directories were. Paper newspapers, telegrams and letters are being rapidly displaced by digital alternatives, saving millions of trees and reducing landfill. Money in the form of coins and notes, which can easily be lost or stolen, is increasingly giving way to secure electronic payments.
Buckminster Fuller blamed the persistence of piano lids on our education system. He felt that, for historical reasons, education pushed people into specialisms that inhibited problem-solving. “Society operates on the theory that specialisation is the key to success,” he wrote, “not realizing that specialisation precludes comprehensive thinking.” He went on to suggest that if nature had intended us to be specialists, we would have been “born with one eye with a microscope attached to it.”
Buckminster Fuller argued that narrow specialisms not only discourage critical thinking and encourage short-sightedness, but also make it easier to assume that difficult problems are somebody else’s responsibility – usually government’s.
He was not alone in thinking that the case for specialisation was overstated. The Anglo-Hungarian philosopher Michael Polanyi thought the same way. He believed discovery often emerged when ideas flowed across established boundaries. This developed into a broader school of thought: that innovation frequently occurs when different disciplines collaborate and existing ideas are recombined in novel ways.
These ideas have been taken on board by universities and research institutions. The University of Cambridge, for example, has established interdisciplinary research centres spanning public health, artificial intelligence and energy. Similarly, UAE University has developed several interfaculty research centres, including the National Space Science and Technology Centre and the National Water and Energy Centre.
All of this is to say that, despite the increasing complexity of society, innovation is alive and well. Carl Vine of investment house M&G recently highlighted that there are piano lids even within the AI ecosystem. In layman’s terms, modern AI chips are like towns, with several buildings that require very fast roads between them. Taiwanese company TSMC’s solution is its CoWoS system, which places a giant silicon foundation, called an interposer, under all the buildings, carrying the equivalent of roads and utilities. Intel’s EMIB-T system dispenses with the large interposer/piano lid and instead uses small, high-speed bridges only between the chips that need to communicate. EMIB-T is expected to offer advantages in flexibility, power delivery and cost.
This is just one example of a piano lid and a possible solution within AI. We are still in the early stages of the technology and there may be many other piano lids to overcome before AI reaches its full potential. Advances in memory, photonics, packaging, software optimisation and entirely new computing architectures could all make AI radically more efficient and less expensive than it is today.
The stock market tends to extrapolate today’s winners into the future. If history is any guide this is a dangerous assumption. We recently wrote about the research of Professor Hendrik Bessembinder, which showed that only a small minority of listed companies created the vast majority of stock market wealth. Most stocks generate disappointing returns and many fail to beat short term cash returns. The implication is that corporate leadership is far less permanent than investors often assume. Once-dominant companies such as IBM, Kodak and Nokia all discovered that market leadership can prove surprisingly temporary.
Today’s AI leaders may continue to prosper, but innovation has a habit of arriving from unexpected and multidisciplinary directions. Just as the Yellow Pages gave way to search engines and digital payments displaced many cash transactions, tomorrow’s breakthroughs may challenge assumptions that currently seem unassailable. Fuller’s insight helps explain why. Investors often assume that today’s solutions are permanent, when they may merely be the piano lids of our age: useful, familiar and good enough for now, until somebody imagines a better lifeboat.
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