adjacent possible Concepts

Where Good Ideas Come from: The Natural History of Innovation

by Steven Johnson · 5 Oct 2010 · 298pp · 81,200 words

, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete. I. THE ADJACENT POSSIBLE Sometime in the late 1870s, a Parisian obstetrician named Stephane Tarnier took a day off from his work at Maternité de Paris, the lying-in

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first-order reactions is vast, but it is a finite number, and it excludes most of the forms that now populate the biosphere. What the adjacent possible tells us is that at any moment the world is capable of extraordinary change, but only certain changes can happen. The strange and beautiful truth

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to the membranes that define the boundaries of modern cells. Once the fatty acids combine to form those bounded spheres, a new wing of the adjacent possible opens up, because those molecules implicitly create a fundamental division between the inside and outside of the sphere. This division is the very essence of

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back through the boundaries of the proto-cell. When the first fatty acids spontaneously formed those dual-layered membranes, they opened a door into the adjacent possible that would ultimately lead to nucleotide-based genetic code, and the power plants of the chloroplasts and mitochondria—the primary “inhabitants” of all modern cells

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again and again throughout the evolution of life. Indeed, one way to think about the path of evolution is as a continual exploration of the adjacent possible. When dinosaurs such as the velociraptor evolved a new bone called the semilunate carpal (the name comes from its half-moon shape), it enabled them

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their wrists with far more flexibility. In the short term, this gave them more dexterity as predators, but it also opened a door in the adjacent possible that would eventually lead, many millions of years later, to the evolution of wings and flight. When our ancestors evolved opposable thumbs, they opened up

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concept in part to illustrate a fascinating secular trend shared by both natural and human history: this relentless pushing back against the barricades of the adjacent possible. “Something has obviously happened in the past 4.8 billion years,” he writes. “The biosphere has expanded, indeed, more or less persistently exploded, into the

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ever-expanding adjacent possible. . . . It is more than slightly interesting that this fact is clearly true, that it is rarely remarked upon, and that we have no particular theory

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the first membrane. The history of life and human culture, then, can be told as the story of a gradual but relentless probing of the adjacent possible, each new innovation opening up new paths to explore. But some systems are more adept than others at exploring those possibility spaces. The mystery of

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paradox that we began with ultimately revolves around the question of why a coral reef ecosystem should be so adventurous in its exploration of the adjacent possible—so many different life forms sharing such a small space—while the surrounding waters of the ocean lack that same marvelous diversity. Similarly, the environments

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of big cities allow far more commercial exploration of the adjacent possible than towns or villages, allowing tradesmen and entrepreneurs to specialize in fields that would be unsustainable in smaller population centers. The Web has explored the

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most influential video delivery mechanisms on the planet. And now digital maps are unleashing their own cartographic revolutions. You can see the fingerprints of the adjacent possible in one of the most remarkable patterns in all of intellectual history, what scholars now call “the multiple”: A brilliant idea occurs to a scientist

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, technology that was itself only a few decades old in 1774. When those parts became available, the discovery of oxygen entered the realm of the adjacent possible. Isolating oxygen was, as the saying goes, “in the air,” but only because a specific set of prior discoveries and inventions had made that experiment

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thinkable. The adjacent possible is as much about limits as it is about openings. At every moment in the timeline of an expanding biosphere, there are doors that cannot

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in the present moment, couldn’t possibly have come up with. But the truth is that technological (and scientific) advances rarely break out of the adjacent possible; the history of cultural progress is, almost without exception, a story of one door leading to another door, exploring the palace one room at a

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exceeded anything else possible in Babbage’s time by several orders of magnitude. For all its complexity, however, the Difference Engine was well within the adjacent possible of Victorian technology. The second half of the nineteenth century saw a steady stream of improvements to mechanical calculation, many of them building on Babbage

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habit, almost a century later.) Babbage’s design for the Difference Engine was a work of genius, no doubt, but it did not transcend the adjacent possible of its day. The same cannot be said of Babbage’s other brilliant idea: the Analytical Engine, the great unfulfilled project of Babbage’s career

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calculating machine was a leap forward, to be sure, but as advanced as it was, the Difference Engine was still within the bounds of the adjacent possible, which is precisely why so many practical iterations of Babbage’s design emerged in the subsequent decades. But trying to create an Analytical Engine in

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urchin. The idea was right, but the environment wasn’t ready for it yet. All of us live inside our own private versions of the adjacent possible. In our work lives, in our creative pursuits, in the organizations that employ us, in the communities we inhabit—in all these different environments,

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: What kind of environment creates good ideas? The simplest way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts. Environments that

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this,” he says, and then points to the spare parts on the table, “using nothing but that.” The space gear on the table defines the adjacent possible for the problem of building a working carbon scrubber on a lunar module. The device they eventually concoct, dubbed the “mailbox,” performs beautifully. The canisters

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possibility for a specific problem. In a way, the engineers at Mission Control had it easier than most. Challenging problems don’t usually define their adjacent possible in such a clear, tangible way. Part of coming up with a good idea is discovering what those spare parts are, and ensuring that you

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adopting new configurations. A dense network incapable of forming new patterns is, by definition, incapable of change, incapable of probing at the edges of the adjacent possible. When a new idea pops into your head, the sense of novelty that makes the experience so magical has a direct correlate in the cells

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environments that share that same network signature: networks of ideas or people that mimic the neural networks of a mind exploring the boundaries of the adjacent possible. Certain environments enhance the brain’s natural capacity to make new links of association. But these patterns of connection are much older than the human

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atoms, it is hard to imagine how the first organisms would have evolved. Those four valence electrons allowed the prebiotic earth to explore its own adjacent possible, sifting through the long list of potential molecular combinations until it hit upon a series of stable chemical reactions that blossomed into the first organisms

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elements, those connective powers are likely to go to waste. All those spectacular polymer chains would remain unrealized, hidden behind the locked doors of the adjacent possible. Like carbon, the H2O molecule possesses several exceptional properties that make the medium of liquid water uniquely suited to sustain early life. The hydrogen bonds

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first lipids self-assembled, they unlocked a door that would ultimately lead to the cell membrane; when the first nucleotides formed, a wing of the adjacent possible opened that eventually traced a path to DNA. They were the first hints of life’s good idea. The computer scientist Christopher Langton observed several

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“edge of chaos”: the fertile zone between too much order and too much anarchy. (The notion is central to Stuart Kauffman’s idea of the adjacent possible, as well.) Langton sometimes uses the metaphor of different phases of matter—gas, liquid, solid—to describe these network states. Think of the behavior of

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: the patterns have stability, but they are incapable of change. But a liquid network creates a more promising environment for the system to explore the adjacent possible. New configurations can emerge through random connections formed between molecules, but the system isn’t so wildly unstable that it instantly destroys its new creations

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more good ideas lurking in the market than in the feudal castle. Cities and markets recruit more minds into the collective project of exploring the adjacent possible. As long as there is spillover between those minds, useful innovations will be more likely to appear and spread through the population at large. In

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failed to perceive in their initial training period. The work of dreams turns out to be a particularly chaotic, yet productive, way of exploring the adjacent possible. In a sense, dreams are the mind’s primordial soup: the medium that facilitates the serendipitous collisions of creative insight. And hunches are like those

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’s tendency to discover new ecological niches, new sources of energy. This is what Stuart Kauffman recognized when he first formulated the idea of the adjacent possible: that there is something like an essential drive in the biosphere to diversify into new ways of making a living. Scrambling together two distinct sets

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When de Forest twisted the wire into the shape of a grid and placed it between those two electrodes, he was unwittingly opening up the adjacent possible for the Analytical Engine that Charles Babbage had failed to produce sixty years before. The power of that new portal was apparent instantly: the first

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original connections than the groups that had only been given pure information. The “dissenting” actors prodded the other subjects into exploring new rooms in the adjacent possible, even though they were, technically speaking, adding incorrect data to the environment. Nemeth has gone on to document the same phenomenon at work in dozens

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embraced sexual reproduction for another reason: because sex helped harness the generative power of error while mitigating the risks. Sex keeps the door to the adjacent possible open by just a crack, so that we can adapt to the changing pressures or opportunities of our environment. By keeping the opening so narrow

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swim-fan origins, as in the flippers of seals and sea lions. If mutation and error and serendipity unlock new doors in the biosphere’s adjacent possible, exaptations help us explore the new possibilities that lurk behind those doors. A match you light to illuminate a darkened room turns out to have

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kingfishers and dragonflies and beetles can make a life for themselves. The platform builders and ecosystem engineers do not just open a door in the adjacent possible. They build an entire new floor. The cafeteria at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, had long been a site of

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understandable reasons, we like to talk about artistic innovations in terms of the way that they break the rules, open up new doors in the adjacent possible that lesser minds never even see. But genius requires genres. Flaubert and Joyce needed the genre of the bildungsroman to contort and undermine in Sentimental

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a locked room, cut off from the hunches and insights of your competition. But if you wanted to make a major new incursion into the adjacent possible, you needed company. Even more striking, though, is the explosion of fourth-quadrant activity. Why have so many good ideas flourished in the fourth quadrant

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,” and was partially inspired by a “pace-layered” drawing of civilization that I first encountered in Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn. CHAPTER 1: THE ADJACENT POSSIBLE For a history of the incubator, see Jeffrey Baker’s “The Incubator and the Medical Discovery of the Premature Infant.” The site Neonatology on the

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innovation, see Timothy Prestero’s “Better by Design.” Additional information on the NeoNurture device can be found at designthatmatters.org. Kauffman’s theory of the adjacent possible is outlined in his book Investigations. The social causes of multiple simultaneous discovery are outlined in Ogburn and Thomas’s “Are Inventions Inevitable?” The phenomenon

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. Zittrain, Jonathan L. The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Index Absolute zero Accounting, double-entry Adjacent possible for Analytical Engine of biosphere Darwin’s Paradox and error and of evolution exploring of jazz networks and in origins of life serendipity and of

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, Karl Benzene, structure of Bernardos, Nikolai Berners-Lee, Tim Berti, Gasparo Bessemer, Henry Bharat, Krishna Bible, Gutenberg Bicycles Bifocals Big Bang Bin Laden, Osama Biosphere, adjacent possible of Bı̄rūnı̄, Abū Rayhān al- Bishop, J. Michael BlackBerry Blood circulation Blood types Bohr, Niels Bose Acoustics Bouchon, Basile Boyle, Robert Brahe

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of China ancient Great Wall of movable type invented in smallpox inoculation in Chloroform Chomsky, Noam Chromosomes Chronic Disease Institute (Buffalo, New York) Chronometer Cities adjacent possible in ancient discarded spaces in Italian Renaissance subcultures of superlinear scaling of Clarkson, Martha Clausius, Rudolf Clinton, Bill Clocks, pendulum Collins, Wilkie Colt, Samuel Columbia

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Revolution in Victorian ENIAC Enlightenment Eno, Brian Enquire software application Enzymes Erdapfel Error inventions generated by noise and paradigm shifts and Ether Evans, Oliver Evolution adjacent possible in Darwin’s theory of of facial expressions mutation in see also Natural selection Exaptation in coffeehouse model in evolutionary theory in subcultures in shared

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, K. W. Williams, Evan Williams, Ken Wilson, H. A. Wilson, Robert Woodrow Wirth, Louis Woese, Carl World War I, World War II, World Wide Web adjacent possible of development of ecosystem of generative platform of geographic mashups on hunch database on marketplaces on news on politics and queries of(see also Google

So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

by Cal Newport · 17 Sep 2012 · 197pp · 60,477 words

chain of logic that helped me decode what Pardis did differently than Sarah and Jane. Big ideas, Johnson explained, are almost always discovered in the “adjacent possible,” a term borrowed from the complex-system biologist Stuart Kauffman, who used it to describe the spontaneous formation of complex chemical structures from simpler structures

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are those that can be made by combining the structures already in the soup. That is, the new chemicals are in the space of the adjacent possible defined by the current structures. When Johnson adopted the term, he shifted it from complex chemicals to cultural and scientific innovations. “We take the ideas

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possible new combinations of existing ideas. The reason important discoveries often happen multiple times, therefore, is that they only become possible once they enter the adjacent possible, at which point anyone surveying this space—that is, those who are the current cutting edge—will notice the same innovations waiting to happen. The

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tool in the needed experiments, became available. Once these two developments occurred, the isolation of oxygen became a big fat target in the newly defined adjacent possible—visible to anyone who happened to be looking in that direction. Two scientists—Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Joseph Priestley—were looking in this direction, and

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therefore both went on to conduct the necessary experiments independently but at nearly the same time. The adjacent possible also explains my earlier example of four researchers tackling the same obscure problem with the same obscure technique at the conference I attended. The specific

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time. Put in Johnson’s terms, this technique redefined the cutting edge in my corner of the academic world, and therefore it also redefined the adjacent possible, and in this new configuration the information dissemination problem, like the discovery of oxygen many centuries earlier, suddenly loomed as a big target waiting to

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understanding. I’m arguing that in reality, innovation is more systematic. We grind away to expand the cutting edge, opening up new problems in the adjacent possible to tackle and therefore expand the cutting edge some more, opening up more new problems, and so on. “The truth,” Johnson explains, “is that technological

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(and scientific) advances rarely break out of the adjacent possible.” As I mentioned, understanding the adjacent possible and its role in innovation is the first link in a chain of argument that explains how to identify a good career mission

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Mission Scientific breakthroughs, as we just learned, require that you first get to the cutting edge of your field. Only then can you see the adjacent possible beyond, the space where innovative ideas are almost always discovered. Here’s the leap I made as I pondered Pardis Sabeti around the same time

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Johnson’s theory of innovation: A good career mission is similar to a scientific breakthrough—it’s an innovation waiting to be discovered in the adjacent possible of your field. If you want to identify a mission for your working life, therefore, you must first get to the cutting edge—the only

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point as a new graduate student, she was much too far from the cutting edge to have any hope of surveying the adjacent possible, and if she can’t see the adjacent possible, she’s not likely to identify a compelling new direction for her work. According to Johnson’s theory, Sarah would have

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first mastering a promising niche—a task that may take years—and only then turning her attention to seeking a mission. This distance from the adjacent possible also tripped up Jane. She wanted to start a transformative non-profit that changed the way people live their lives. A successful non-profit, however

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with strong evidence for its effectiveness. Jane didn’t have such a philosophy. To find one, she would have needed a nice view of the adjacent possible in her corner of the non-profit sector, and this would have required that she first get to the cutting edge of efforts to better

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on a narrow collection of subjects for a potentially long time. Once you get to the cutting edge, however, and discover a mission in the adjacent possible, you must go after it with zeal: a “big” action. Pardis Sabeti thought small by focusing patiently for years on a narrow niche (the genetics

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first building mastery in your field. Drawing from the terminology of Steven Johnson, I argued that the best ideas for missions are found in the adjacent possible—the region just beyond the current cutting edge. To encounter these ideas, therefore, you must first get to that cutting edge, which in turn requires

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out, require two things. First you need career capital, which requires patience. Second, you need to be ceaselessly scanning your always-changing view of the adjacent possible in your field, looking for the next big idea. This requires a dedication to brainstorming and exposure to new ideas. Combined, these two commitments describe

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straight out of Steven Johnson’s book, Where Good Ideas Come From, which I introduced in Rule #4 when talking about his notion of the adjacent possible. According to Johnson, access to new ideas and to the “liquid networks” that facilitate their mixing and matching often provides the catalyst for breakthrough new

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general than a specific job and can span multiple positions. It provides an answer to the question “What should I do with my life?” the adjacent possible (introduced in Rule #4): A term taken from the science writer Steven Johnson, who took it from Stuart Kauffman, that helps explain the origin of

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the possible new combinations of existing ideas. The key observation is that you have to get to the cutting edge of a field before its adjacent possible—and the innovations it contains—becomes visible. In the context of career construction, it’s important to note that good career missions are also often

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found in the adjacent possible. The implication, therefore, is that if you want to find a mission in your career, you first need to get to the cutting edge of

With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don't Pay Enough

by Peter Barnes · 31 Jul 2014 · 151pp · 38,153 words

4. Extracted Rent 5. Recycled Rent 6. The Alaska Model 7. Dividends for All 8. Carbon Capping: A Cautionary Tale 9. From Here to the Adjacent Possible Join the Discussion Appendix: The Dividend Potential of Co-owned Wealth Notes Acknowledgments Index About the Author PREFACE I wrote this book because I’m

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American government agency has declared the atmosphere a commons owned by everyone in equal share. Thomas Paine would be proud. 9 From Here to the Adjacent Possible Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying

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crisis pushes them toward (or over) the chaotic edge. At such times, they either collapse or shift into what biologist Stuart Kauffman calls the “adjacent possible.”3 The adjacent possible isn’t simply whatever happens next. Rather, it’s a set of potential futures in which modified versions of the existing system lurk. Which

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. We can do this by imagining a preferred future and building support for it prior to the crisis. It’s important to distinguish between the adjacent possible and what might be called the incremental possible. By the latter I mean adjustments to the existing system that don’t require a serious crisis

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(aka a punctuation). Political debate in Washington rarely goes beyond this sort of possibility. The adjacent possible, by contrast, lies further in the future and requires a punctuation. It’s often said that pragmatists deal with the incremental possible while idealists fantasize

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about the adjacent possible. I don’t see it that way. I see preparing for the adjacent possible as a different form of pragmatism, a kind that looks further ahead. At certain times in history, it’s

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-Owned Electric Utilities, San Francisco,” 2012, 58, http://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Efile/G000/M031/K744/31744787.pdf. Chapter 9: From Here to the Adjacent Possible 1. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1942). 2. Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould, “Punctuated equilibria: An alternative to phyletic

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both. —Peter Barnes Point Reyes Station, California January 2014 INDEX A AARP (American Association of Retired Persons), 132 Absurd tax (Smith), 52 Acid rain, 99 Adjacent possible, 120–121 The Age of Reason (Paine), 8 Aggregate demand, 88–89 Agrarian Justice (Paine), 8, 70 Alaska model, 3, 69–77 pre-distribution in

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–42 Common Assets Trust in Vermont, 127–128 Common Sense (Paine), 7–8 Competition and monopolies, 51–52 Co-owned wealth. See also Dividends; Rent adjacent possible and, 121 audit of, 62 benefits, entitlement to, 62 components of, 60–61 defined, 11 at economy-wide level, 140–141 externalities and, 64 guidelines

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?

by Aaron Dignan · 1 Feb 2019 · 309pp · 81,975 words

at is the difference between closing the gap—trying to achieve a predetermined future state—and discovering what author Steven Johnson calls the adjacent possible. In his words, “The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in

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here for you. A whole new way of working is possible. Step into the space. Looping Earlier we talked about designing change to reveal the adjacent possible. Within organizations, we endeavor to do this through a process we call looping, inspired in part by Jason Little’s Lean Change Management. In our

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is stepping up and making decisions. They must not be natural leaders,” management observes. But what actually happened was that they skipped ahead of the adjacent possible. What this means is that we have to adjust our expectations to match our context and commitment. If your stakeholders are ready to move to

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restrictive. These somewhat counterintuitive aphorisms may help you avoid some common pitfalls. While you’re living in the now, managing the present, and revealing the adjacent possible, remember these ideas. When you feel stuck, they may help you find a path forward. Through Them, Not to Them Organizational change is high stakes

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people miss from that meeting that they can’t get another way. The space that this creates will allow individuals and teams to find the adjacent possible more easily. Then, as it emerges, allow or even amplify a new approach that is working well. Join the Resistance People resist change. That’s

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other teams into starting loops of their own. I jokingly refer to this as “looping the loops.” If the right conditions are in place, the adjacent possible will unfold. In our work, we’ve noticed at least three positive patterns that emerge on the heels of grassroots priming and looping. Confidence. When

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to the beginning of that print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader. adjacent possible, 189, 201 Administration Industrielle et Générale (Fayol), 24 advice process, 70, 72–73 Afshar, Vala, 119 Agile Manifesto, 19, 89, 182 agility, 19, 20, 28

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World

by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler · 3 Feb 2015 · 368pp · 96,825 words

us set the course, our history also tells us that we can wander in the desert of bad decisions for a mighty long time. “The adjacent possible” is theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman’s wonderful term for all the myriad paths unlocked by every novel discovery, the multitude of universes hidden inside something

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simple as an idea. 27 Abundance is one of those simple ideas. Its time has come. It is up to the bold to unlock this adjacent possible, to help humanity live up to our full exponential potential. AFTERWORD NEXT STEPS—HOW TO TAKE ACTION * * * It’s an exciting time. Every week, there

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/November 2007), http://www.innovation-america.org/dr-feynmans-small-idea. 26 AI with Shingles. 27 For arguably the best bit of writing on the adjacent possible, see Steven Johnson, “The Genius of the Tinkerer,” Wall Street Journal, September 25, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703989304575503730101860838. Also see “The

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Adjacent Possible: A Talk with Stuart A. Kauffman,” Edge.org, November 9, 2003, http://edge.org/conversation/the-adjacent-possible. INDEX * * * A note about the index: The pages referenced in this index refer to the page numbers

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

by Daniel C. Dennett · 7 Feb 2017 · 573pp · 157,767 words

work by a team of software engineers has not yet yielded a product says a lot about the difficulty of the problem. 20Evolution explores the “adjacent possible,” see Kauffman (2003). 21How can I speak of evolution, which famously has no foresight, being able or unable to predict anything? We can cash out

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of the principles of natural selection, but a novel extension of them, a new crane that adjusts evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffman’s concept of the adjacent possible: many more places in Design Space are adjacent to us because we have evolved the ability to think about them and either seek them or

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Invention: Will Artificial Intelligence Bring Us Utopia or Destruction?” New Yorker, November 23, 64–79. Kauffman, Stuart. 2003. “The Adjacent Possible.” Edge.org, November 9, https://edge.org/conversation/stuart_a_kauffman-the-adjacent-possible. Keller, Helen. 1908. The World I Live In. New York: Century. Kessler, M. A., and B. T. Werner. 2003

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adaptationism, 22, 80, 117, 249, 265 functions in, 29 Gould-Lewontin attack on, 29–30, 32 just-so stories and, 121 Adelson, Glenn, 48, 140 adjacent possible, 399 affordances, 101, 119, 128, 152, 233, 336, 356, 388 artifacts as, 135 brains as collectors of, 150, 165–71, 272, 274, 412 infants and

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

by Steven Johnson · 28 Sep 2014 · 243pp · 65,374 words

became imaginable in the middle of the nineteenth century. To use the wonderful phrase of the complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman, cold became part of the “adjacent possible” of that period. How do we explain this breakthrough? It’s not just a matter of a solitary genius coming up with a brilliant invention

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. The smartest mind in the world couldn’t invent a refrigerator in the middle of the seventeenth century. It simply wasn’t part of the adjacent possible at that moment. But by 1850, the pieces had come together. The first thing that had to happen seems almost comical to us today: we

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, not tangible. The best you could do was imitate sound with your own voice and instruments. The dream of recording the human voice entered the adjacent possible only after two key developments: one from physics, the other from anatomy. From about 1500 on, scientists began to work under the assumption that sound

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in July 1943 would certainly rank high on the list. Once again, our drive to reproduce the sound of the human voice had expanded the adjacent possible. For the first time, our experience of the world was becoming digital. — THE DIGITAL SAMPLES OF SIGSALY traveled across the Atlantic courtesy of another communications

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signal. Every genuinely new technology has a genuinely new way of breaking—and every now and then, those malfunctions open a new door in the adjacent possible. In the case of the vacuum tube, it trained our ears to enjoy a sound that would no doubt have made Lee De Forest recoil

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, were he around to see it today. And that’s because the toilet depends on new ideas and technology that have become part of the adjacent possible in the twentieth century, tools that hopefully can allow us to bypass the costly, labor-intensive work of building giant infrastructure projects. Leal needed microscopes

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the Dust Bowl era. They’re worth exploring because we are living through comparable revolutions today, set by the boundaries and opportunities of our own adjacent possible. Learning from the patterns of innovation that shaped society in the past can only help us navigate the future more successfully, even if our explanations

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, who were effectively a century ahead of just about every other human being on the planet? Most innovation happens in the present tense of the adjacent possible, working with the tools and concepts that are available in that time. But every now and then, some individual or group makes a leap that

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seems almost like time traveling. How do they do it? What allows them to see past the boundaries of the adjacent possible when their contemporaries fail to do so? That may be the greatest mystery of all. The conventional explanation is the all-purpose but somewhat circular

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the same time. Stay within the boundaries of your discipline, and you will have an easier time making incremental improvements, opening the doors of the adjacent possible that are directly available to you given the specifics of the historical moment. (There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. Progress depends on incremental

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the world slightly, you need focus and determination; you need to stay within the confines of a field and open the new doors in the adjacent possible one at a time. But if you want to be like Ada, if you want to have an “intuitive perception of hidden things”—well, in

Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum

by Lee Smolin · 31 Mar 2019 · 385pp · 98,015 words

in the next time step. Those events that might be next Kauffman calls the adjacent possible. The possible near-future events that make up the adjacent possible are not yet real, but they define and constrain what might be real. The adjacent possible of Schrödinger’s cat includes a live cat and a dead cat. It

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does not include a brontosaurus or an alien dog. So the elements of the adjacent possible have properties, even if the law of the excluded middle does not apply to them. As objects with properties, there are facts of the matter

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find the corresponding reference on your e-reader. academic community, 277 academic life, 94 acceleration, 297 actuality, possibility and, 177–78, 197–98, 200, 243 adjacent possible, 201 Against Method (Feyerbend), 173 Aharonov, Yakir, 118, 216 alternate geometry, 229 American Communist Party, 115n amplitude, 138 angular momentum, 77, 263n, 297 anti-realism

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation

by Kevin Roose · 9 Mar 2021 · 208pp · 57,602 words

think we need to resist the urge to push the AI conversation too far into the future. I’ve always loved the concept of the “adjacent possible,” a term coined by the evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffman to describe the way biological organisms evolve in gradual, incremental steps. The

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adjacent possible is a useful concept to apply to the world of technology, because it takes us out of the realm of sci-fi and narrows our

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robots flawlessly perform all human labor, freeing us all up to make art and play video games every day, is probably not part of the adjacent possible. But a world in which we use machine intelligence to reduce carbon emissions, find cures for rare diseases, and improve government services for low-income

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families might be. It’s on us—the people who love technology but worry about its use—to explore this adjacent possible and push for the best version of it. It’s also important not to get too discouraged, and to remember, despite all of our worries

The Knowledge Economy

by Roberto Mangabeira Unger · 19 Mar 2019 · 268pp · 75,490 words

by projecting or provoking its change in response to certain natural or staged interventions. We understand the phenomenon by subsuming it under a range of adjacent possibles: what it could become, or what we could turn it into. The approximation of production to imagination is the heart of the knowledge economy, and

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and negative capability. Production can develop by exploiting, thanks to these traits and powers, new products and possibilities of production at the penumbra of the adjacent possible. The less stark the contrast between supervisory and implementing responsibilities or, as a consequence, among specialized jobs of implementation, the better our chances of identifying

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the most distant steps; it is at once practical and prophetic. It seeks to provide or to evoke down payments, in the realm of the adjacent possible, for the redirection that it seeks, drawing energy from the association of ideals and interests with examples within grasp. In conceptual work, however, it may

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on an improbable history. Each social science has naturalized the organization of society, broken the link between insight into the actual and imagination of the adjacent possible, and evaded the work of structural understanding in its own way. The way taken by economics has been uniquely successful. As it was refounded by

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show the steps by which the established economics can expand its vision, enlarge its tools, and relate insight into the actual and imagination of the adjacent possible, given that to understand something is always to grasp what it can become. Even if his intentions are revolutionary, he must in effect practice radical

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and grasps it by subsuming it under a range of variations—of what the object of its attention could become in the realm of the adjacent possible. Imagination is freedom because it is transcendence in the workings of the mind. A form of production giving more space to the imagination than any