Description

The world is never finished catching up with Vaclav Smil In his latest and perhaps most readable book Invention and Innovation the prolific authora favorite of Bill Gatespens an insightful and factfilled jaunt through the history of invention Impatient with the hype that so often accompanies innovation Smil offers in this book a cleareyed corrective to the overpromises of new inventionsfrom cures for diseases to AI He reminds us that even after we go quite far along the inventiondevelopmentapplication trajectory we may never get anything real to deploy Or worse even after we have succeeded by introducing an invention its future may be marked by underperformance disappointment demise or outright harmDrawing on his vast breadth of scientific and historical knowledge Smil explains the difference between invention and innovation and looks not only at inventions that failed to dominate as promised such as the airship nuclear fission and supersonic flight but also at those that turned disastrous leaded gasoline DDT and chlorofluorocarbons And finally he offers a wish list of inventions that we most urgently need to confront the staggering challenges of the twentyfirst centuryFilled with engaging examples and pragmatic approaches this book is a sobering account of the folly that so often attends human ingenuityand how we can and must better align our expectations with reality