When it's a sharing and improvisational meeting, where you're riffing off other people's ideas, that actually can be productive.

If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.

This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It’s not that the network itself is smart; it’s that the individuals get smarter because they’re connected to the network.

We need to be sharing ideas of what to do when lots of people come here. We need to pick one to try and execute it sometime in the coming year.

What I'm saying is individuals have better ideas if they're connected to rich, diverse networks of other individuals. If you put yourself in an environment with lots of different perspectives, you yourself are going to have better, sharper, more original ideas. It's not that the network is smart.

Babbage had most of this system sketched out by 1837, but the first true computer to use this programmable architecture didn’t appear for more than a hundred years.