Fortune interviewed Google’s Larry Page, who is one of those guys who really has a nice handle on the big picture.. Like his partner Sergey Brin, Page is one of a small but growing group of very smart, very wealthy, and very innovative business leaders who are shaping not only the way *they* do business but the way the rest of us live our lives.

Page offers some direct and simple advice - we need more people thinking and working on innovations and solutions. He’s right of course. My view is that a combination of politics, bureaucracy, and human inadequacies stand in the way of innovation. Evolution did not reward highly experimental, rational thinking as well as short term emotional responses. For example while Neanderthal Ned was carefully thinking about better ways to get away from the Lion pack who lived nearby, Neanderthal Bob simply ran for the hills or sharpened his spears. Bob went on to populate our world while thinker Ned simply became … dinner.

Silly simplifications aside, humans are not particularly well equipped to be high order problem solving and we never will be. Fortunately for us we can now rely on machines to handle the calculation parts of the equations. Unfortunately for us machine intelligence will have to improve very dramatically before it can do all the work. Until then we’ll need to do a better job of identifying key problems and starting to frame solutions to those problems, as well as trying to think in ways that identify general patterns of solutions to problems we cannot even see yet.