(2018-02-16) Steven Johnson's Cabinet Of Wonders Wonderland Edition

Steven Johnson's Cabinet Of Wonders: Wonderland Edition

a big part of the Wonderland argument is that those moments of delight often end up leading to inventions that do have a more conventional utility or purpose. (Tinkering with playful automatons just for the fun of it helped bring about both the industrial revolution and modern programmable computers, for instance.) The reason for this is that the search for new forms of delight and wonder forces us to explore and re-jigger the world around us, seeking out surprising new combinations. And those explorations sometimes stumble across ideas or technologies that can be put to use to solve practical problems