My Five Favorite Inventions

Below is a list of five inventions that I was communicating to another person in a fevered nap dream that I thought were the most important inventions that humanity has ever created.

Keep in mind that this list is highly subjective, idiosyncratic, biased and probably not at all correct given the fact that it did surface in a dream.

In fact, right after I told this dreamed up person my list, they went off to a nearby church and started blasting Kendrick Lamar songs, and I walked alone in the other direction. So I guess they didn't even like the list.

I woke up and decided to expand on some of these items and give them some context as to what I think about them as a waking person who is conscious of his actions.

1) Writing - A Lucky Break

What an amazing stroke of luck that the human epiglottis had enough distinct noises (but not too many) to be able to be turned into a finite list of symbolic phonetic characters.

What another stroke of fantastic luck, that the human brain can re-translate these symbols back into sounds and meaning that we can understand throughout space and time.

The result is writing: so powerful that most don't do it, but we all live inside of it due to reading.

2) Books - The Optimal Delivery Method

I think books are close to the perfect invention that humanity has ever created.

A single book can cover so much ground. A library of them can connect us to a near-infinite and constantly growing well of human knowledge.

Reading is the safest way of becoming someone else. For a period of time, you're not you, and the writer of the book isn't them. It's something else.

A conversation between a reader, an author, an editor, and a publisher, held over years and hundreds of pages. Perfect.

I am an unapologetic defender of reading – so much so in fact that I posted a whole series on it where it got reposted to Metafilter and I got called a snob by many people in no uncertain terms.

However, I shall stick to my guns. I think books are fantastic. And I won't apologize for it! Books need defenders in an era of short form computation!

Speaking of computers...

3) Computers - Upstream and Downstream of Computation

An invention born of the concept of computation that births new computational patterns. Computers inside of computers. Turtles, all the way down.

Quite a mind-boggler, computers!

One of my major beliefs that I hold deeply is that most code has yet to be written.

In the brief 80 years since computers were invented (1945 - 2025) to this post, we have accomplished so much, and yet I firmly believe that the Aristotle of programming, the Shakespeare of programming, or the Maya Angelou of programming—in the way that they exist in writing—won't be born for centuries, if not millennia.

The current data structures and paradigms of computing are but the primordial goo of what computation will evolve into in the future. The space has not yet been explored.

A computer is an indispensable companion as well as an indefatigable foe for humanity.

However, as powerful as computation will become, it pales in comparison to...

4) Oblivion (the Concept of)

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, we didn't invent Oblivion.

Oblivion was around before us, it's around during us (read: right now!!), and it will be around after us.

It's always at the edges of our imagination, the l'appel du vide, the lingering and limitless abyss.

The bravest among us have tried to describe Oblivion, to map out something that can't truly be mapped or understood.

And yet, the concept of Oblivion and our relationship to it is truly mankind's best gift.

There is nothing you can do that is so great or so terrible that it will outstrip Oblivion.

It is Oblivion that allows us to hold on tight to what is fleeting (life, liberty, freedom), but it is also Oblivion that allows us to let go when it is our time to let go.

How blessed are we to be in a local world that exists inside a greater world, and that everything can co-exist with nothing?

And for those of us who blindly stick our hands into Oblivion, sometimes we pull out something cool...

5) Design

I was listening to a podcast by Time Sensitive with Sara Amari Walker while at the gym recently, and she said a line that's really been bouncing around in my head.

"The universe we live in allows for design."

Like the other inventions on this list, this seems to just be a lucky break.

The fact that the universe has atomic features that can be composed into larger composites wasn't necessarily a guarantee.

In fact, in a universe that didn't allow for design, numbers one through three on this list are moot and you wouldn't be reading this (Oblivion would still exist, though, so there's that I guess).

And again, it's even luckier that we can imagine these composites during our brief mortal lives and create them over and over and over again. We are unstoppable designers, and universal explainers (Deutsch)!

Deeply integral concepts that I meditate on frequently as it pertains to design: affordances from the work of Donald Norman, living patterns from the work of Christopher Alexander, data structures from the work of Donald Knuth.

Conclusion

Most (all?) of the inventions on this list weren't created in the way that we like to imagine inventions to be created - some eureka moment from some person in a lab that gets passed down and turns society into utopia.

Indeed, many of these inventions were co-designed by mankind and the universe that we live in. But I think that that is truly what makes invention great, and probably what I was trying to get across to this fever-dream-hypothetical-person is that invention isn't a one-way stop where you create something once and only once.

Great Invention should catalyze a future in which more inventions can be created by creating systems that allow for more Great Inventions.

By being grateful to the systems that already exist and seeking to understand them, we actively participate in a world that has given us so much. And still has so much to give.

I'll end on this. I was recently thinking about how fascinating it is that a single planet (Earth) can maintain so many different incentives from so many different types of people, animals, and non-organic entities. People who will never meet either because of distance or era. People who want to study colors, people who want to ride horses, people who want to change how we perceive mathematics, people who want to worship God, people who want to post political memes from their bedroom – for some reason, the planet supports them all.

And the Great Inventions they discover.