Know that it’s possible
Walk into any school, college, or university and you will find students learning how to do things. They are learning how to do long division, lay bricks, or operate a microscope. They are rarely taught about all the other things that people have been learning to do.
Knowing what things are possible is often more important than knowing how to do the things yourself. The greatest invention of our civilisation is specialisation. You learn to harvest crops whilst I learn to hunt animals. But there are a lot of people and a lot of specialisations. It’s hard to keep track.
From watching property shows, reading articles, seeing people do DIY, and so on, we largely know what is possible in the world of home construction. We know that it’s possible to have a wall knocked-through or electrical sockets moved, and we know that in order to do that we should hire a builder, a plasterer, an electrician, a plumber etc.
But do you know when you should hire a mathematician? What’s possible in the world of 3D printing? The latest advances in AI? Probably not, and you are a lot more informed than most people. This is a major gap in our education system. I don’t care that our politicians can’t do long division themselves, I do care that they don’t know that safe nuclear power is possible.
Some of the world’s leading companies exist because someone brought together technologies in disparate areas to do something new. Many booksellers existed before Jeff Bezos, but he was one of the first to realise that the internet made a whole new business model possible. Today half the AI industry is just trying to answer the question ‘what is possible with AI?’. The same is true for scientific breakthroughs when someone from discipline A sees a technique from discipline B and realises that it could work for their problems too. Often what separates an expert from a layman is exactly this knowledge of what is possible and what is not (a famous xkcd cartoon illustrates this nicely).
In science and engineering, there are problems which are regarded as near impossible to solve. Sometimes someone comes along and proves that they are in fact solvable, but they don’t reveal exactly how. SpaceX figuring out how to land a rocket is a good example of this. Other people are then able to solve the problem, not because they have learned anything new about how to solve it, but just because they know now that it is solvable somehow and therefore that their assumptions or approach must be wrong.
Science and invention focuses on expanding our collective knowledge of what is possible, but for those advances to truly be applied, we need to personally know what is possible.
J. Dudley