When I was young, I used to think that if I want to really change the world, I have to do something really big. Something that Einstein did when he published the Theory of Relativity, or Musk when he founded SpaceX, Tesla, and Neuralink (which is my personal favorite). The idea of great people is very romantic, but it’s far from the full truth.
As Isac Newton told:
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants
Doing great things never was a one-man show. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is strongly built on the work of Lorentz, Maxwell, Newton, and many others. Without them, this mind-blowing theory about space and time was never born.
And what about the others whose names no one knows? Teachers and friends who inspire this great mind, or other scientists who wrote inspiring papers?
Ideas are living-like things, like viruses that infect our minds. They can mutate and crossover like the DNA in the living cell. This is a real evolution, and our mind is the environment, like a giant forest where the ideas live.
Our human world is strongly interconnected. This is what has raised us over all the other species. Thanks to the magic of the World Wide Web this connection is real-time nowadays. Human society is act like a giant computing cloud that runs ideas. Similar to the GPU clusters that train neural networks like GPT-3 or DALL-E. After the training, the final weights are manifesting on one of the machine's storage, but it is totally irrelevant which is this machine. The result is calculated by the whole GPU cluster. Every node is equally important.
And what about patents? Are they fair? The answer is yes and no. Patent and copyright systems incentivize inventions. Inventing something and getting a patent for it is something like mining a block on a PoW blockchain. Without the rewards, the system cannot work, but the ecosystem itself is run by all of the nodes. Everybody is needed.
From this perspective, open-source communities are fairer. You get much from the community, and you can contribute back. And when I say open-source, I mean open knowledge. People who write articles and make them available freely or make YouTube videos for everybody to learn something, or write Wikipedia articles are also part of the community. Open knowledge is the most effective form of ideas.
The favorite theme of time-travel movies is the butterfly effect. The time traveler goes back to the past and changes a very small detail. He does something that looks totally irrelevant, but this little change radically changes the future. Don’t forget that we are constantly traveling in time from the past to the future, and everything we do has a huge impact on the future, like the actions of the time traveler.
After this short brainstorming, what is the final answer? How to change the world?
The secret is that every great people are standing on other people's shoulders and every great invention is built from many small inventions. And when I say small, I mean really small things.
You write an inspiring article on HackerNoon about DAOs that will be read by 1000 people. Only one of your readers creates a DAO based on your article that can sponsor open medical research. Some years later the community of this DAO finds the treatment for cancer and make it freely available. Thousands of people are cured of cancer, thanks to the DAO that had never have been founded without your article. Butterfly effect…
So, how to change the world? Do good things. You don’t have to do big things, don’t have to invent anything big. Help others, teach people, be an engineer and join a cool company, contribute open source projects, or write articles to HackerNoon. Every single small thing can have a huge impact. Just do something cool…