Human advancement is a history of productivity gains driven by discovery of new and cheaper sources of energy.
This is a repeating pattern: A new energy source is discovered, the tools to harness the energy are invented, humans realize massive productivity gains and are freed up to pursue more interesting ideas.
Innovation is the process of making those tools. Tools, ideas, processes, discoveries, inventions, advances in sciences can be considered under a single umbrella innovation. There are grand, game changing innovations once in a while and continous incremental improvements until the next game changing invention or discovery. All of this is innovation.
First, we figure out how to extract the energy cheaply, cheaper than the current dominant energy source. Next, the cheap energy makes possible great many tools that have not been considered before. If firewood is the dominant source of energy, we will not consider either the automobile or a bullet train.
The rate at which the tools and associated processes are invented is directly correlated to the communication networks in place at that time.
Bandwidth is the necessary infrastructure for communication.
Literacy brings people into the communication ecosystem. As we add more people to an ecosystem, the greater the returns due to network effects. Increasing the rate of communication accelerates innovation.
Energy
Fire and Firewood
Firewood as energy allowed us to invent cooking, freeing up tons of time to focus on other things. This is the start of human evolutionary leap, where we free ourselves from pursuit of food all day. Cooking brought biologic adaptations: 20% larger brain, 20% smaller gut to power; consume energy dense foods and digest easily making humans remarkably energy efficient and time efficient compared to rest of the animal kingdom. This happened 2 million years ago, the "invention" of cooking is accidental dropping of food following by incremental improvements.
Cattle
Harnessing animal energy, allowed us tremendous productivity gains in agriculture, starting in 10,000 BC. Many tools were invented to farm.
Coal
Coal started industrialization, continued by oil and gas. The current forms of energy, coal and hydro for base load, natural gas and oil for peak load, give us electricity. Electricity brought us great many tools to drive productivity gains.
Throughout the western world, appliances like washer, dryer and dishwasher freed up females. Until that point, females were disadvantaged due to the cultural norms.
Communication
Humans are different from most animals in that they collaborate to perform tasks. Communication enables collaboration. Communication is one-to-one (phone), one-to-many (book, newspaper, twitter status update, radio, TV), many-to-many (slashdot, discussion forums). Communication singularity is when humanity figures out a way to communicate in all these different forms at near zero cost.
Eye
A long time ago, humans decided to hunt bigger animals as a group. The biologic adaptation of eye, white scelera with dark iris allowed humans to gaze the direction of other members in the group, this is a very important communication and collaboration advancement.
Language
Spoken language gave us more efficient communication and collaboration tools, higher level tasks can be accomplished.
The communication networks are now based on spoken language, innovation (tools) can go on at a faster pace, what is seen elsewhere can be described.
Paper
Paper ushers in a new age of communication networks, drastically reducing the transaction costs of communication. A book is a specific use case of paper, an information store which can be mass published cheaply. Newspaper is another use-case which is a broadcast mechanism. We are now seeing not just tool inventions, but also process inventions, using the same invention for multiple use cases.
Telegram and Post
Reading Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, something stands out. Europe, in late 1880's has developed a fairly sophisticated system of one-to-one communcation. Letters and telegrams are delivered at least once a day to everyone in cities. This is as efficient as checking twitter account once a day. This rate of communication accelerates innovation. It is little wonder that Europe has single handedly run the industrial revolution.
Europe was able to colonize almost all of the world based on the new innovations, and the vastly superior communication infrastructures.
Telephone, Radio and TV
Telephone made possible vast advances. Specifically, vast organizations can be built leveraging telephone. We now see corporations that are large and collaborate across continents. Radio and TV are broadcast mechanisms, which are unfortunately controlled by goverment and need licenses and such.
Electronic
Electronic communication is driven by standards (http, email, api) and it is permission less. We are now pretty close to communication singularity. Any person can communicate with any other person, group or broadcast at zero cost. This is going to bring significant progress in many dimensions.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the necessary infrastructure for communication. Increasing bandwidth allows us to bring people to communcation ecosystems. High bandwidth allows more innovative uses of communication. Pigeon carriers, messengers by horse messengers are low bandwidth; not a lot of scope for innovative communication networks.
Literacy
Literacy brings people into a global communication ecosystem. As we add more people to an ecosystem, the greater the returns due to network effects. Increasing the rate of communication accelerates innovation.
Literacy reduces transaction costs of communication. Language, a cultural adaptation and an acquired skill, gives us abilities to communicate; literacy supercharges this ability and allows us to participate on a global communication ecosystem.
Humans have figured out knowledge is the most important thing, and figured out many ways to store and transmit this across generations. Each generation has immediate access to all the past knowledge. Literacy is the key to access this knowledge spanning all of mankind.
Cities and Mega-Regions
Cities are massive communities; network effects of communication ecosystems and collaboration on dizzying range of services drive innovations exponentially. Cities and mega-regions account for the majority of innovations.
Energy changes everything
Whoever reduces the cost of energy is the greatest benefactor of mankind. The story of humans is a story of discovering and harnessing cheaper and more efficient energy sources. We consume vast amounts of energy and build the tools and meta tools to manage this efficiently. My naive belief is that significant upheavals in mankind which propel a broad spectrum from being abused (colonization, slavery, etc) to being liberated is closely correlated to cheaper energy sources being discovered. Humans suddenly do not become enlightened and nice and let go of the abuses prevalent at that time in history. When the British Empire crumbled it is quiet likely that they realized oil and coal as energy sources instead of human labor. We have long surpassed material based serendipitous discoveries that give us cheaper energy.
The Future
We are still predominantly a coal based economy. Gas and oil drive a few key areas of the economy. Human advancement needs increasing amounts of energy and we have reached of limits of what coal, gas, etc can offer. In the decades to come, we will switch to a near inexhaustible source of energy, solar. Solar is now at cost parity with coal. This will usher in a new age for mankind. This will be an evolutionary leap. We already discovered the energy source, solar.
We need to increase the rate of innovation to figure out how to do solar cheaply. This can't be done by one person or a small group. We need at least a million people focused on this, kind of a Manhattan Project to do this quickly. We need to focus on literacy and on bandwidth. Building bandwidth infrastructure will allow us to bring everybody on this planet to participate in communication ecosystems. Literacy enables people to participate in the global communication ecosystems.
Fifty percent of world's population is in cities as of 2008. By 2030, five billion people will be in cities. This will increase the rate of innovation. By 2050, 6.4 billion people will be in cities.