Individually stupid. Collectively brilliant

There is no single human being on the planet, who can build an entire computer mouse by herself.

Nobody single handedly has the requisite expertise to do all of the following things – to mine and refine the oil needed for creating the plastic case, to build the optical or tactile sensing mechanism, to program the interrupt that happens when the mouse pointer is clicked and so on.

It is humbling to realize this as you hold a mouse within the palm of your hand. At the same time, a thing that no single human being can create costs merely a handful of dollars. It is a marvel that most things we used today are both impossible to single handedly create and are priced at a bargain. So interconnected is our world.

Every person, just by himself, is stupid. The intelligence within an individual is overrated. It is only in the collective that we are smart enough to transcend this planet and turn into an inter-planetary species.

As a corollary, the smartest human beings are not those who are the most intelligent individuals. The smartest are those who can harness our collective intelligence.

Inspiration: The Rational Optimist