About this item
From the New York Times-bestselling author, a new volume on the history of human ingenuity - and its attendant breakthroughs and busts.The world is never finished catching up with Vaclav Smil. In his latest and perhaps most readable book, Invention and Innovation, the prolific author - a favorite of Bill Gates - pens an insightful and fact-filled jaunt through the history of human invention. Impatient with the hype that so often accompanies innovation, Smil offers in this book a clear-eyed corrective to the overpromises that accompany everything from new cures for diseases to AI. He reminds us that even after we go quite far along the invention-development-application 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 harm.
About the Author
Ph. D. (Geography, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences of Pennsylvania State University, 1971; RNDr. , Charles University, Prague, 1965) , is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and in 2010 was named by as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers.
