>We don't know enough about ourselves to know what the problems are anymore.
Agreed.
Many would say this is because the process of online communication has not really been "pushed forward".
We discouraged email years ago in favor of walled communication in social media communities. There are literally trillions of epic conversations happening in places where they'll never get seen or shared beyond within those communities...
Those communities also ratio (in many ways) the ability for ideas to be found and seen by others within and outside of those communities, and also incentivize others word-wide to parrot and copy ideas from the original authors and then present them as their own, without properly crediting or attributing the original author...
This is exactly where the conflict to real innovation that was meant for the Internet resides.
I think there have been plenty of problem-solving innovations, but there's a sort of 'market efficiency' effect on innovations that require less complexity. Once the kitchen knife was invented, any sort of slicer-dicer tool is just a rehashing of the knife concept. However, when the problems get more complex (E.G., the automation arm that anneals metal is now utilizing neural networks to make sure the kitchen knife does not have deformities), actual solutions are harder to recognize. HVAC can make your building safer from the pandemic, but it usually comes down to whether your boss wants to pay for it. Remote work can be effective, but it needs healthy hours and employee trust to do well. Those are human issues that you can't necessarily innovate away.
This is a massive over-simplification. The issue isn't that people are not innovating, it's that there are long routes to delivery for many things.
Medical changes take years to test and approve; AI takes ages to adapt; hundreds of companies already produce innovative products that are simply unknown and even air-conditioning companies can't exactly perform a 5 minute tweak to something to clean ventilation systems, any changes are likely to require training, availability of tradespeople, significant disruption and then ongoing maintenance costs.
Agreed, it's part of a much larger discussion, with limits on web real estate, getting to the point quickly and being succinct becomes more and more important.
There surely are ground breaking innovations every day, but especially lately, the unremarkable ones push them out of the way in favor of quick headlines that spur impulse-driven investment.
We all probably can recall how popular an effort to "catapult" very rich and famous people into the outer atmosphere was and still is, while we have already travelled to the moon, decades prior at that.... Whether any of the things getting the most public recognition and funding these days really be considered as "game changing innovation" is the real question raised.
It is more profitable to convince consumers that a previously unrecognized thing is a problem that needs solving. Then your 'solution' can be the best and only one available. For previously recognized problems there is so much pesky competition.
Indeed we have, and a large part of what has happened is that the governments have drastically cut down on basic R&D in science.
Our best researchers are wasting half or more of their time chasing one tiny bit of research grant after another so that they can continue for a couple more months of work - how do you expect actual results to appear from that burst-like work? We need to fund scientific research in a more sustainable way, and that soon.
And of those brilliant minds who don't want to subject themselves to that kind of bull dung because they want to, say, start a family and want a stable life with a decent wage, most end up working for Facebook to sell ads or for financial traders. Neither of which is in any kind productive to the progress of society.
And the global mega-corporations that used to fund their own massive research institutions also seem to have lost their way, especially as R&D spending isn't received well by the stock markets...
> And the global mega-corporations that used to fund their own massive research institutions also seem to have lost their way, especially as R&D spending isn't received well by the stock markets...
Agreed.
This is the plot here... We're becoming so driven to cater every business towards investment driven goals that we don't realize how much it's strangling epic innovation that does good. Massive financial growth and market dominance of companies that do not truly innovate will only advance many of the negativity and problems we experience with the quality and reliability of consumer products, environmental destruction, erosion of worker protections and family life, and so much more.
In all honesty, I disagree entirely. I see innovative stuff all the time. It strikes me that if you treat everything innovative with cynicism you can state it in that way:
- antibiotics: just better drugs
- GMO crops or the Green Revolution: just being more deliberate about what people did for thousands of years
- going to space: we can barely go under the sea, this is just that but up
- the Internet: phones, you've invented phones
- phones: talking to people, you've invented talking
- talking: just grunting with more sounds
There is a lot of wonderful stuff going on in the world, but if you filter to stuff you can dismiss, you're just going to see everything as worthless.
This is a common thing a lot of people find really hard to understand. A good critic isn't one who places the bar so high that nothing meets it. A good critic is one who can separate exceptional from mundane. If nothing is exceptional, it is likely the problem is that you're not good at determining whether something is. Just in a Bayesian sense, if your barometer says it's 1 atm literally everywhere, more likely the barometer is broken than that pressure has equalized everywhere in the universe.
We haven't had a single new class of antibiotics discovered for well over 30 years [1]. And now, especially since humanity was dumb enough to use reserve antibiotics in farm animals, we're looking at a disaster.
It's an oversimplification, but I'm glad its being said.
I think what's driving it is that
1. The internet brought a ton of actual amazing innovation.
2. Because people are correctly excited about it, this brought marketing opportunities.
3. Today, it is profitable to market stuff that superficially appears to be like that older, actual innovation, but is not innovative in the slightest. This is happening SO much, that it's crowding out (the marketing and spreading of) real innovation.
While that's verifiable as true, that doesn't mean that innovation isn't still happening. Does that mean the author's issue is around the communication of innovation (vs. Marketing-speak) or is it still about the innovation itself?
I mean, I'm thinking it's that chasm between "whoa, genuinely cool new internet things" and then "using the internet to sell the snake oil and marketing." which is driving the sentiment.
On aspect (and there or others) is that industrial isomorphisms have now become really strong, for instance, from "best practices" or benchmarking, this means that generally copy & paste is often the preferred approach in business. Naturally, innovation is then not (so) high on the agenda.
I wouldn't say so. The innovation of new things that actually solve problems in a meaningful way is not going to be bandied about on twitter for all to see and consume. Meaningful solutions to hard problems are usually kinda yucky to approach and understand at first.
You are going to have to actively seek out these efforts. I assure you, there is more innovation occurring in technology today than ever before. The only problem is that there is also more noise than ever before too. I use HN to help cut through a lot of that noise.
This is true - there have been major advances in battery powered tools in the last few years but unless you’re in the industry or following them directly you probably haven’t seen them. Tools that four years ago were jokes in batteries are now doing fine, and it’s not only battery improvements.
There is more money to be made in the small than the big. Tesla/space-x is an exception, but this is why much of the innovation seems to be in ai, software, medicine, apps, etc. Smaller tech is cheaper, easier to scale.
> The MetaVerse is a rehash of the Sims (or any other networked RPG game you can pick with avatars) which has now been out for ages, Clubhouse was basically an Internet conference call, WhatsApp is basically a group text/social media rehash, Twitch is basically a video stream and live chat site, and IG stories and TikTok are just a faster way to scroll through mostly edited/reposted YouTube video content, Most web conference tools are all pretty much Facebook with Skype on top of it, And Web 3 often looks like the absolute
How incredibly reductive, evident by the “basically” and “just” minimizations of innovative apps. When twitch was launched in 2011 was it “basically” a streaming platform? Was WhatsApp, with its launch date in 2009 “just” another chat app? Are the content sharing, file sharing, whiteboarding, breakout rooms, panels, background effects, automated transcription of Teams and zoom not a significant improvement over the days of Skype?
Sure, it’s easy to look back 10 years and say X is just Y, cause it’s been around for 10 years!
Honestly - I don't know what people see different about table-top RPGs, they're essentially just rehashed Homeric epics with an uninspired interactive element. /s
The saying "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." is extremely relevant here - nearly all science and innovation is iterative (and this is a good thing as it allows us to progress without relying on occasionally having a universe-brained Leonardo DaVinci simply pull innovation out of thin-air). Dramatic and sudden breakthroughs aren't the norm, the norm is slow improvement and refining, building something that's a little bit better than what you used last year and sharing it with your coworkers and that form of innovation should get a lot more praise than it usually does.
Plus, there's the consideration of adding value with a quality experience itself being innovative. Dropbox is "just" a VCS. Slack is "just" IRC. Yet, no one had effectively executed the idea of providing those as a managed service with a focus on UX. That seems obviously non-innovative now, and to some people it even looked like it wasn't solving a problem when it was new[1], but in practice they solved real problems that people actually had with such solutions in a way that wasn't previously available, i.e. "innovative".
That said, Meta's take on the metaverse concept falls short in many ways compared to what VRChat's been doing for years.
> Sure, it’s easy to look back 10 years and say X is just Y, cause it’s been around for 10 years!
Exactly. If the author published this in 2008 he would be saying "the iPhone is just a rehash of Blackberry but with a touch screen." If he published it in 2004 he would say, "the Blackberry is just a rehash of Palm but with a tiny keyboard." I don't know what came before Palm but you get the picture: innovation is clearly a cumulative process.
Besides, the value of unifying recent (or even ancient) technologies in a new way should not be overlooked.
This is why the Olympics have different classes of medals for achievement...
These days though, we reward far too many bronze medal winners with the most profit and investment.
Praising and being content with small victories is not the way to achieve gold... Praising large victories, and noting when they aren't happening enough is the way to inspire more gold medal winners AND the way to generate a lot more silver and bronze medal winners.
To be as to the point as I can about it, you can take a stock 94' PT cruiser (which was very adventurous undertaking during it's initial release year mind you) and put a spoiler, very cool paint job, and even neon lights on it in 2022, but it's not going to win any drag races without a major overhaul.
The small innovations and bolt-ons just aren't cutting it.
Adding to the authors point; I think there's quite a bit of innovation through maintenance. Reducing the tech debt in existing infrastructure eg. education, transport, etc
I have a gut feeling that societal cohesiveness is somehow lost through 'profit-driven' maintenance.
In all seriousness, I don't know what impossibly high bar this article is setting for "new things" but innovation happens every day in software engineering - I'm not saying each one of us is accomplishing Turing level stuff on a daily basis, but somewhere somebody is definitely creating something brand new right now - and something that's highly useful. New packages and libraries are constantly rolled out that try and approach problems from different angles - whether these are branded as innovative is entirely a matter of opinion but I'm of the camp that building a tool that makes someone's life easier that didn't previously exist is easily in the camp of an innovation.
But, if your standard for innovation is the polio vaccine (or other once in a decade or once in a century discoveries) then yea - we probably have gone two years without a once in a decade innovation - simply because probability.
> Who cares if innovation happens in ink pens if no good novels are written?
The people who got ink on their fingers writing bad novels with the old pens. Not every innovation needs to directly impact everybody - and maybe some of those bad novel authors decided to become novel authors because the pens got easier to use and maybe they could have written a good novel.
That new thing feeling is pretty darn subjective - smart phones never felt new to me. I used a flip phone and a tablet for a long time, the tablet was basically a more portable laptop - and when I actually got a smart phone it was just a slightly smaller tablet.
We have not stopped "innovating new things", this is a far more innovative time than any in history, with maybe an exception or two. I think this is a situation where the person just doesn't see the innovation happening, or understand what innovation is. What we do have is a lack of giant, obvious innovations. Horse to cars was big. Horses to telephones was big. Planes were big. Asphalt roads where big.
We don't have a lot of this going on - or more specifically, going from a rural farm life to industrial city life was a single huge step, and now any huge steps get buried in the massive crush of other innovation.
Going from nothing to 1 of something is an infinite step. Going from a million of something to 2 million is paltry in comparison, but 1,000,000 is much bigger than 1.
The author makes innovation out to be something akin to "if we focus on this, then it will change", but that's not how this typically works. Most development is based on smaller improvements and discoveries made years in the past. And those take time to mature and scale.
Sometimes they converge around the same time and it looks transformational. More often though, they are slowly incorporated into the progressive change we enjoy.
It's also likely that areas that are important to him, just don't have a market. It doesn't mean people aren't innovating, it just means that resource allocation towards innovation went to other areas (for good or bad).
The author is more making out innovation to be lacking.
In particular, why aren’t these problems solved?
> No one has innovated a cost effective way to update office ventilation properly, and workspaces to prevent the spread of contaminants, no one has made highly comfortable yet very inexpensive N95 masks, no one has invented a fool-proof vaccination that completely prevents infection...
> No one has innovated a cost effective way to update office ventilation properly
This isn't an easy problem but we definitely have a plethora of ways to solve office ventilation, it's just that most of them require air ducts which are expensive as all heck to boot strap to existing buildings that lack them - and most of the economic designs for central air involve air recycling (because that's good for the environment) while, during a pandemic, we probably want to focus more on air evacuation. The one area we've realized a highly effective ventilation system that is designed to operate in a closed loop is on airplanes but that system is pretty radically different than what we run in offices because, again, it's not super cost effective.
When it comes to N95 masks I've worn extremely comfortable disposable and effective masks - but they have been pricey like most disposable things - and N95 masks (from what I've seen) simply can't be sterilized properly after use and continue to be N95 masks - you might be able to make pandemic specific masks that are effectively N95 masks by forcefully sterilizing the outer surface with UV occasionally but they'll fail to be conventional N95 masks that block harmful particulates - so a cheap, comfortable, universal solution is out of reach... a cheap comfortable specialized solution is probably accomplishable, but then, after all that innovation, you'd need to handle the real uphill battle - making your mask an acceptable alternative to all the politicians everywhere who are hesitant to embrace new things in the middle of a pandemic.
Regarding the fool-proof vaccination - you know how immortality is that dream we keep futilely pursuing? Human bodies are hard to understand, we're no where near the point of having a needle full of a liquid-x that can regrow limbs and cure cancer - bodies are highly variable and we've come up with some absolutely amazing vaccines. Just because the efficacy isn't 100% doesn't mean you can sit there saying "Welp, that was a total failure".
In all of these areas we're currently making advances - but new ground breaking once a century discoveries don't happen every year.
>> The author makes innovation out to be something akin to "if we focus on this, then it will change", but that's not how this typically works.
This is correct. It's not like money and focus don't help, but you can't construct innovation where you want it, when you want it.
Particularly the idea that we haven't been "innovating hard enough" on vaccines is just silly. It was a innovation that let us have anything at all on the timelines we experienced.
It's fairly disingenuous to put those problems as examples.
> No one has innovated a cost effective way to update office ventilation properly,
I can find HEPA air filters in Amazon for less than $100.
> no one has made highly comfortable yet very inexpensive N95 masks,
The N95 masks I use are fairly comfortable. However, a N95 mask must be well fitted to provide protection, which means it has to be tight, which means it won't be highly comfortable. This is a physical limitation of the problem, no amount of innovation can avoid the fact that you need a tight seal.
> no one has invented a fool-proof vaccination that completely prevents infection
The mRNA vaccines are a great example of a pretty cool innovation. It doesn't completely prevent infection, yeah, but no vaccine does that. Having a vaccine in a year and a half, widely available, when the initial estimates were of two years if we were lucky...
HEPA fiters are revolutionary, but they don't quite qualify as new innovation do they?
N95 masks have been around for ages as well. I have ideas of course on how they could be improved, as I am sure many others do, but it gets drowned out daily by all the nonsense of debating whether masks are even effective... We can't deny that politicizing mask effectiveness is in the same distraction bag as flat earth debates, but somehow we all just shrug it off not realizing that it is what clouds real discussion about meaningful innovation.
No one is disparaging the innovation behind mRNA vaccines, that is not a related or accurate talking point, it's a side-track.
> no one has made highly comfortable yet very inexpensive N95 masks
Because faces have a huge range of variance so the only solution is custom make masks. Technologies like additive manufacturing could solve this but like all new technologies it will take time to bring the cost down. So really, why don't they make cheaper 3D printers? So simple!
> no one has invented a fool-proof vaccination that completely prevents infection
Literally impossible!
> No one has innovated a cost effective way to update office ventilation properly, and workspaces to prevent the spread of contaminants
I do think this hits a large point because I see it from the perspective of business. Much like FAANG, if a competitor came out with a better, cheaper product just buy them and destroy the product. Free market at it's finest.
I'm pretty sure there are a lot of people with ideas that could get us all further toward resolution of the problems cited above, but because of the nature of online "credit theft" and the dangers of sharing unprotected IP online, they won't spill it out here. ;)
> No one has innovated a cost effective way to update office ventilation properly,
Ventilation is building infrastructure, and building infrastructure is difficult. To use a software analogy, it's sort of like saying, "Why hasn't someone found a cost effective way to update mainframe software to support Unicode?" Basically, there's a lot of it, most of it's custom, and you have to work around things on a case-by-case basis. And a greenfield replacement is expensive. There are buildings in New York where the central heating dates back a century, and most of the people with the expertise to maintain it are over 70. (And they're second-generation legacy maintainers in some cases.) There's no cheap or easy way to update these buildings with better ventilation. Your best bet might be window units, but that poses plenty of challenges, too.
EDIT: Another commenter suggested HEPA filters, which may work for central air (if circulation is already good enough), or if you place them in standalone room units. I think the science on the latter looker promising when last I looked?
> no one has made highly comfortable yet very inexpensive N95 masks,
I've been pretty happy with the KF-94s from South Korea. I bought 20 masks each from several brands, tried them on, and ordered a big box of my favorites. Depending on your goals, there are also good N95s and KN-95s.
One of the challenges here is that many people want masks that work, and that means some kind of certification or inspection. But this means that most countries tend to standardize on one basic mask design backed up by government enforcement.
> no one has invented a fool-proof vaccination that completely prevents infection
This is a genuinely hard problem. Immunology is super complex, and every disease works differently. The particular challenge with coronaviruses, as I understand it, is that they reproduce in the nose extremely soon after initial infection. Mucosal antibodies have certain limitations compared to other antibodies, and it's hard for the body to ramp up a defense inside of 24 to 36 hours.
But we have just seen the golden age of vaccine innovation.
There is vast innovation granted, but with it comes huge cost because it's often investor driven... It's why we see patches and workarounds to problems far more than true fixes now more than ever.
True innovation in ventilation to mitigate Covid would look something like an inexpensive UV light air purification unit that can be mounted over the air intake of a home heating system... Many of us bought blacklights at Spencer Gifts back in the early 90s, but somehow relative lights are marked now as a "new innovation" and a high price tag is slapped on every solution involving it, along with cameras, internet connectivity, and even robotics...
This is a very generalized means of elaborating on problem cited here of course... A much bigger conversation on this could be made.
It seems also a bit like the author is heavily relying on popular media to tell him what/where innovation is happening. Popular media - even science coverage - trends towards fast and immediate - so internet speed startups get the most attention.
Real science R&D innovation is relatively slow and full of failures and false starts. Peter Thiel made a big stink about where are flying cars but then proceeded to invest in a bunch of normal incremental improvement type startups (DTC, finch etc.). Even where Founders Fund did invest in true science - there's not much to talk about since real R&D is a slog.
If the author took the time to do actual research into innovation and took a long view - there's a lot more happening.
Improving social media without taxing content creators (and crediting and paying creators fairly) doesn't have a market?
Making music streaming fair to artists doesn't have a market?
Improving the quality of consumer goods on a wide-scale-basis doesn't have a market?
Not creating tons of toxic landfills filled with discarded lithium batteries from electric cars doesn't have a market?
Not wasting tons of resources, money, and not polluting the environment for space tourism in favor of improving education and living conditions of third world countries... Doesn't have a market?
These aren't just "individual personal" concerns.
We don't need gradual global transformation in my opinion. We need more drastic and game-changing innovation towards better goals.
The things you describe aren't areas where a traditional "market" can make much of a difference.
COVID mitigation is the closest, and...we've seen lots of innovation there, frankly. The damn disease has only existed for just over two years, and we've seen a variety of vaccines and at least a few different effective treatments appear.
Basically every other innovation you name is all about challenging powerful incumbents to improve things for ordinary people and/or the planet...and no, there's no "market" for that. Markets are terrible for that. The powerful incumbents are great at bending markets to protect the status quo, and ordinary people and the planet don't have much sway over them.
That's why we have things like regulation, antitrust laws, and government-funded science. What we need is to give them better teeth.
Could it be that certain technologies has made some areas of innovations looks fast and easy to do that we expect other areas to make the same progress in the same amount of time and effort?
Yes, indirectly, by grinding the wrong goals. Not only that, I’m not sure that we have even begun the education process required for finding problems or innovating.
> Remote work life during quarantine has been stressful for many. The problem is that we're still clearly not past the Covid threat, and a rush to bring everyone back together to spur economic activity downtown (based on tax revenue it will generate) will create a lot of technical debt, unexpected health care costs, and loss of life and capacity in many categories from top to bottom if it is timed wrong.
Innovation and problem-solving are two very, very different things. You can have the former without the latter but generally not the latter without the former.
"Problems" to solve IMO come down to basic human necessities:
- How do we get more people food for a lower cost?
- How do we get more people shelter for a lower cost?
- How do we make more people less sick for a lower cost?
Everything past that is basically a "luxury", AKA innovation for the sake of entertainment/discovery/challenge/socialization. Also, people tend to pay for entertainment/luxuries, whereas providing access to necessities for a lower cost doesn't have as high of a profit margin. Ergo, less reason to innovate.
That's the exact opposite conclusion. All of the innovations happened for the profitable things. The conclusion is that we need to make solving problems, that we want to be solved, profitable.
And how do "we" change the profitability equation? If it were more profitable to do more social good, then more companies would be doing more social good. It seems like we agree on that.
Why, then, isn't it profitable to do right now, and what solutions exist to make it so?
Wikipedia looks like an encyclopedia. But I think it's better understood at the world's largest text-based MMORPG. The terrain is pages. The weapon is edits. Battles rage constantly. Anybody who has spent time on it knows the massive amounts of drama behind the scenes. But almost as a side effect, the encyclopedia gradually ratchets forward.
Maybe it's better to see tech like that? Vast sums of money are scooped up and channeled by investors, all seeking advantage over one another. Most of that money is wasted, as is most of the effort it pays for. But occasionally, in dribs and drabs, innovation almost accidentally happens.
In both cases, if we could deploy the resources involved effectively, we could get a lot more done. But until somebody figures that very hard problem out, we can live with the fact that everything kinda sucks but things still keep getting slowly better.
> Most of the new innovation we've seen in the past years have created BRAND NEW problems (when they originally promised us they would FIX PROBLEMS for us) if you look closely enough at them. Cough... Social Media... Cough...
This is the same with pretty much all innovation - even things like the invention of agriculture can be argued to have caused more problems than it solved (Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens makes this point).
Laptops and smartphones made computing portable, but then has people taking their work home with them and increasing stress. Robotics help manufacture things, but also put people out of jobs. The car helps us get around but also contributes to global warming. I just don't think the implied view that "old innovation never used to create brand new problems" is true.
Can’t remember who originally said this: ‘Computers are great at solving problems. Mostly the problems that they created.’ Kind of like the Simpsons quote about booze.
The reference is to the artificial problems they create out of nowhere, especially the highly destructive ones, not the problems that cannot be helped.
Social media for example has created serious problems with mental health of users, which could be eased dramatically if engagement and exposure wasn't gamified and manipulated, and if there was less of a focus on engagement and closed content.
Many laptops and smartphones are now rendered obsolete quickly by software updates as new models are released every year by manufacturers, this creates a huge pile of waste that in turn pollutes the environment.
Most of the negative aspects that have made product reliability and quality decline, along with dramatic price inflation are market-driven...
The better way to counter market-driven innovation (in just one of many possible aspects mind you) is to create enduring and properly-priced products that don't get thrown away each year (at the expense of record profit) obviously.
I guess my point is that you can point to almost any piece of technology, from the advent of agriculture to the flatscreen TV, and say that it created problems.
Replacing old problems with new problems is probably an inherent part of technological advancement and innovation, you just hope the benefit is worth the cost (it would be great to find technologies that just solve problems with no cost, but that’s not what you see in history).
Cars also made us less healthy and more overweight since we don’t walk as much. They are also a leading cause of death when they crash into other objects.
Robotics on the other hand is a good example of how technology is applied to maximize profits at the expense of people. Same could be said about social media which largely exists to gather information about people and sell it to marketers. The internet as a library to access information introduced a great convenience but it is trending toward a paywall mode that makes information harder to access (a regression).
The article is largely cynical, but there is much to be cynical about when it comes to the latest developments in technology. Overall the cynicism is justified.
Many of the smartest minds are dedicating themselves to Wall Street and Silicon Valley under the direction of the questionable leaders of large tech companies that are largely focused on artificial intelligence (for surveillance and marketing purposes) and social media (also for surveillance and marketing purposes). There are some outliers like Elon Musk, but they are in small number.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadAgreed.
Many would say this is because the process of online communication has not really been "pushed forward".
We discouraged email years ago in favor of walled communication in social media communities. There are literally trillions of epic conversations happening in places where they'll never get seen or shared beyond within those communities...
Those communities also ratio (in many ways) the ability for ideas to be found and seen by others within and outside of those communities, and also incentivize others word-wide to parrot and copy ideas from the original authors and then present them as their own, without properly crediting or attributing the original author...
This is exactly where the conflict to real innovation that was meant for the Internet resides.
Medical changes take years to test and approve; AI takes ages to adapt; hundreds of companies already produce innovative products that are simply unknown and even air-conditioning companies can't exactly perform a 5 minute tweak to something to clean ventilation systems, any changes are likely to require training, availability of tradespeople, significant disruption and then ongoing maintenance costs.
There surely are ground breaking innovations every day, but especially lately, the unremarkable ones push them out of the way in favor of quick headlines that spur impulse-driven investment.
We all probably can recall how popular an effort to "catapult" very rich and famous people into the outer atmosphere was and still is, while we have already travelled to the moon, decades prior at that.... Whether any of the things getting the most public recognition and funding these days really be considered as "game changing innovation" is the real question raised.
Our best researchers are wasting half or more of their time chasing one tiny bit of research grant after another so that they can continue for a couple more months of work - how do you expect actual results to appear from that burst-like work? We need to fund scientific research in a more sustainable way, and that soon.
And of those brilliant minds who don't want to subject themselves to that kind of bull dung because they want to, say, start a family and want a stable life with a decent wage, most end up working for Facebook to sell ads or for financial traders. Neither of which is in any kind productive to the progress of society.
And the global mega-corporations that used to fund their own massive research institutions also seem to have lost their way, especially as R&D spending isn't received well by the stock markets...
Agreed.
This is the plot here... We're becoming so driven to cater every business towards investment driven goals that we don't realize how much it's strangling epic innovation that does good. Massive financial growth and market dominance of companies that do not truly innovate will only advance many of the negativity and problems we experience with the quality and reliability of consumer products, environmental destruction, erosion of worker protections and family life, and so much more.
- antibiotics: just better drugs
- GMO crops or the Green Revolution: just being more deliberate about what people did for thousands of years
- going to space: we can barely go under the sea, this is just that but up
- the Internet: phones, you've invented phones
- phones: talking to people, you've invented talking
- talking: just grunting with more sounds
There is a lot of wonderful stuff going on in the world, but if you filter to stuff you can dismiss, you're just going to see everything as worthless.
This is a common thing a lot of people find really hard to understand. A good critic isn't one who places the bar so high that nothing meets it. A good critic is one who can separate exceptional from mundane. If nothing is exceptional, it is likely the problem is that you're not good at determining whether something is. Just in a Bayesian sense, if your barometer says it's 1 atm literally everywhere, more likely the barometer is broken than that pressure has equalized everywhere in the universe.
We haven't had a single new class of antibiotics discovered for well over 30 years [1]. And now, especially since humanity was dumb enough to use reserve antibiotics in farm animals, we're looking at a disaster.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02884-3
Haha! This is such an entertaining technique. I can see why people talk like this. It's pointlessly dismissive.
I think what's driving it is that
1. The internet brought a ton of actual amazing innovation.
2. Because people are correctly excited about it, this brought marketing opportunities.
3. Today, it is profitable to market stuff that superficially appears to be like that older, actual innovation, but is not innovative in the slightest. This is happening SO much, that it's crowding out (the marketing and spreading of) real innovation.
I think the author meant Second Life. Sims is not networked (as far as I know) and it's not a RPG.
I agree that Second Life sounds like a more direct parallel to ZuckVR
You are going to have to actively seek out these efforts. I assure you, there is more innovation occurring in technology today than ever before. The only problem is that there is also more noise than ever before too. I use HN to help cut through a lot of that noise.
How incredibly reductive, evident by the “basically” and “just” minimizations of innovative apps. When twitch was launched in 2011 was it “basically” a streaming platform? Was WhatsApp, with its launch date in 2009 “just” another chat app? Are the content sharing, file sharing, whiteboarding, breakout rooms, panels, background effects, automated transcription of Teams and zoom not a significant improvement over the days of Skype?
Sure, it’s easy to look back 10 years and say X is just Y, cause it’s been around for 10 years!
The saying "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." is extremely relevant here - nearly all science and innovation is iterative (and this is a good thing as it allows us to progress without relying on occasionally having a universe-brained Leonardo DaVinci simply pull innovation out of thin-air). Dramatic and sudden breakthroughs aren't the norm, the norm is slow improvement and refining, building something that's a little bit better than what you used last year and sharing it with your coworkers and that form of innovation should get a lot more praise than it usually does.
That said, Meta's take on the metaverse concept falls short in many ways compared to what VRChat's been doing for years.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Exactly. If the author published this in 2008 he would be saying "the iPhone is just a rehash of Blackberry but with a touch screen." If he published it in 2004 he would say, "the Blackberry is just a rehash of Palm but with a tiny keyboard." I don't know what came before Palm but you get the picture: innovation is clearly a cumulative process.
Besides, the value of unifying recent (or even ancient) technologies in a new way should not be overlooked.
These days though, we reward far too many bronze medal winners with the most profit and investment.
Praising and being content with small victories is not the way to achieve gold... Praising large victories, and noting when they aren't happening enough is the way to inspire more gold medal winners AND the way to generate a lot more silver and bronze medal winners.
The small innovations and bolt-ons just aren't cutting it.
I have a gut feeling that societal cohesiveness is somehow lost through 'profit-driven' maintenance.
In all seriousness, I don't know what impossibly high bar this article is setting for "new things" but innovation happens every day in software engineering - I'm not saying each one of us is accomplishing Turing level stuff on a daily basis, but somewhere somebody is definitely creating something brand new right now - and something that's highly useful. New packages and libraries are constantly rolled out that try and approach problems from different angles - whether these are branded as innovative is entirely a matter of opinion but I'm of the camp that building a tool that makes someone's life easier that didn't previously exist is easily in the camp of an innovation.
But, if your standard for innovation is the polio vaccine (or other once in a decade or once in a century discoveries) then yea - we probably have gone two years without a once in a decade innovation - simply because probability.
Things that feel new
> innovation happens every day in software engineering
Who cares if innovation happens in ink pens if no good novels are written?
The people who got ink on their fingers writing bad novels with the old pens. Not every innovation needs to directly impact everybody - and maybe some of those bad novel authors decided to become novel authors because the pens got easier to use and maybe they could have written a good novel.
That new thing feeling is pretty darn subjective - smart phones never felt new to me. I used a flip phone and a tablet for a long time, the tablet was basically a more portable laptop - and when I actually got a smart phone it was just a slightly smaller tablet.
We don't have a lot of this going on - or more specifically, going from a rural farm life to industrial city life was a single huge step, and now any huge steps get buried in the massive crush of other innovation.
Going from nothing to 1 of something is an infinite step. Going from a million of something to 2 million is paltry in comparison, but 1,000,000 is much bigger than 1.
There's only "no innovation" if you start with that conclusion and don't look for contrary examples.
Sometimes they converge around the same time and it looks transformational. More often though, they are slowly incorporated into the progressive change we enjoy.
It's also likely that areas that are important to him, just don't have a market. It doesn't mean people aren't innovating, it just means that resource allocation towards innovation went to other areas (for good or bad).
In particular, why aren’t these problems solved?
> No one has innovated a cost effective way to update office ventilation properly, and workspaces to prevent the spread of contaminants, no one has made highly comfortable yet very inexpensive N95 masks, no one has invented a fool-proof vaccination that completely prevents infection...
> No one has innovated a cost effective way to update office ventilation properly
This isn't an easy problem but we definitely have a plethora of ways to solve office ventilation, it's just that most of them require air ducts which are expensive as all heck to boot strap to existing buildings that lack them - and most of the economic designs for central air involve air recycling (because that's good for the environment) while, during a pandemic, we probably want to focus more on air evacuation. The one area we've realized a highly effective ventilation system that is designed to operate in a closed loop is on airplanes but that system is pretty radically different than what we run in offices because, again, it's not super cost effective.
When it comes to N95 masks I've worn extremely comfortable disposable and effective masks - but they have been pricey like most disposable things - and N95 masks (from what I've seen) simply can't be sterilized properly after use and continue to be N95 masks - you might be able to make pandemic specific masks that are effectively N95 masks by forcefully sterilizing the outer surface with UV occasionally but they'll fail to be conventional N95 masks that block harmful particulates - so a cheap, comfortable, universal solution is out of reach... a cheap comfortable specialized solution is probably accomplishable, but then, after all that innovation, you'd need to handle the real uphill battle - making your mask an acceptable alternative to all the politicians everywhere who are hesitant to embrace new things in the middle of a pandemic.
Regarding the fool-proof vaccination - you know how immortality is that dream we keep futilely pursuing? Human bodies are hard to understand, we're no where near the point of having a needle full of a liquid-x that can regrow limbs and cure cancer - bodies are highly variable and we've come up with some absolutely amazing vaccines. Just because the efficacy isn't 100% doesn't mean you can sit there saying "Welp, that was a total failure".
In all of these areas we're currently making advances - but new ground breaking once a century discoveries don't happen every year.
I think the poster already addressed this.
>> The author makes innovation out to be something akin to "if we focus on this, then it will change", but that's not how this typically works.
This is correct. It's not like money and focus don't help, but you can't construct innovation where you want it, when you want it.
Particularly the idea that we haven't been "innovating hard enough" on vaccines is just silly. It was a innovation that let us have anything at all on the timelines we experienced.
> No one has innovated a cost effective way to update office ventilation properly,
I can find HEPA air filters in Amazon for less than $100.
> no one has made highly comfortable yet very inexpensive N95 masks,
The N95 masks I use are fairly comfortable. However, a N95 mask must be well fitted to provide protection, which means it has to be tight, which means it won't be highly comfortable. This is a physical limitation of the problem, no amount of innovation can avoid the fact that you need a tight seal.
> no one has invented a fool-proof vaccination that completely prevents infection
The mRNA vaccines are a great example of a pretty cool innovation. It doesn't completely prevent infection, yeah, but no vaccine does that. Having a vaccine in a year and a half, widely available, when the initial estimates were of two years if we were lucky...
N95 masks have been around for ages as well. I have ideas of course on how they could be improved, as I am sure many others do, but it gets drowned out daily by all the nonsense of debating whether masks are even effective... We can't deny that politicizing mask effectiveness is in the same distraction bag as flat earth debates, but somehow we all just shrug it off not realizing that it is what clouds real discussion about meaningful innovation.
No one is disparaging the innovation behind mRNA vaccines, that is not a related or accurate talking point, it's a side-track.
Can you retrofit a house’s HVAC for positive pressure ventilation for $500?
Because faces have a huge range of variance so the only solution is custom make masks. Technologies like additive manufacturing could solve this but like all new technologies it will take time to bring the cost down. So really, why don't they make cheaper 3D printers? So simple!
> no one has invented a fool-proof vaccination that completely prevents infection
Literally impossible!
> No one has innovated a cost effective way to update office ventilation properly, and workspaces to prevent the spread of contaminants
I do think this hits a large point because I see it from the perspective of business. Much like FAANG, if a competitor came out with a better, cheaper product just buy them and destroy the product. Free market at it's finest.
Ventilation is building infrastructure, and building infrastructure is difficult. To use a software analogy, it's sort of like saying, "Why hasn't someone found a cost effective way to update mainframe software to support Unicode?" Basically, there's a lot of it, most of it's custom, and you have to work around things on a case-by-case basis. And a greenfield replacement is expensive. There are buildings in New York where the central heating dates back a century, and most of the people with the expertise to maintain it are over 70. (And they're second-generation legacy maintainers in some cases.) There's no cheap or easy way to update these buildings with better ventilation. Your best bet might be window units, but that poses plenty of challenges, too.
EDIT: Another commenter suggested HEPA filters, which may work for central air (if circulation is already good enough), or if you place them in standalone room units. I think the science on the latter looker promising when last I looked?
> no one has made highly comfortable yet very inexpensive N95 masks,
I've been pretty happy with the KF-94s from South Korea. I bought 20 masks each from several brands, tried them on, and ordered a big box of my favorites. Depending on your goals, there are also good N95s and KN-95s.
One of the challenges here is that many people want masks that work, and that means some kind of certification or inspection. But this means that most countries tend to standardize on one basic mask design backed up by government enforcement.
> no one has invented a fool-proof vaccination that completely prevents infection
This is a genuinely hard problem. Immunology is super complex, and every disease works differently. The particular challenge with coronaviruses, as I understand it, is that they reproduce in the nose extremely soon after initial infection. Mucosal antibodies have certain limitations compared to other antibodies, and it's hard for the body to ramp up a defense inside of 24 to 36 hours.
But we have just seen the golden age of vaccine innovation.
True innovation in ventilation to mitigate Covid would look something like an inexpensive UV light air purification unit that can be mounted over the air intake of a home heating system... Many of us bought blacklights at Spencer Gifts back in the early 90s, but somehow relative lights are marked now as a "new innovation" and a high price tag is slapped on every solution involving it, along with cameras, internet connectivity, and even robotics...
This is a very generalized means of elaborating on problem cited here of course... A much bigger conversation on this could be made.
Real science R&D innovation is relatively slow and full of failures and false starts. Peter Thiel made a big stink about where are flying cars but then proceeded to invest in a bunch of normal incremental improvement type startups (DTC, finch etc.). Even where Founders Fund did invest in true science - there's not much to talk about since real R&D is a slog.
If the author took the time to do actual research into innovation and took a long view - there's a lot more happening.
Improving social media without taxing content creators (and crediting and paying creators fairly) doesn't have a market?
Making music streaming fair to artists doesn't have a market?
Improving the quality of consumer goods on a wide-scale-basis doesn't have a market?
Not creating tons of toxic landfills filled with discarded lithium batteries from electric cars doesn't have a market?
Not wasting tons of resources, money, and not polluting the environment for space tourism in favor of improving education and living conditions of third world countries... Doesn't have a market?
These aren't just "individual personal" concerns.
We don't need gradual global transformation in my opinion. We need more drastic and game-changing innovation towards better goals.
COVID mitigation is the closest, and...we've seen lots of innovation there, frankly. The damn disease has only existed for just over two years, and we've seen a variety of vaccines and at least a few different effective treatments appear.
Basically every other innovation you name is all about challenging powerful incumbents to improve things for ordinary people and/or the planet...and no, there's no "market" for that. Markets are terrible for that. The powerful incumbents are great at bending markets to protect the status quo, and ordinary people and the planet don't have much sway over them.
That's why we have things like regulation, antitrust laws, and government-funded science. What we need is to give them better teeth.
Nuff said?
"Problems" to solve IMO come down to basic human necessities:
- How do we get more people food for a lower cost? - How do we get more people shelter for a lower cost? - How do we make more people less sick for a lower cost?
Everything past that is basically a "luxury", AKA innovation for the sake of entertainment/discovery/challenge/socialization. Also, people tend to pay for entertainment/luxuries, whereas providing access to necessities for a lower cost doesn't have as high of a profit margin. Ergo, less reason to innovate.
Why, then, isn't it profitable to do right now, and what solutions exist to make it so?
Wikipedia looks like an encyclopedia. But I think it's better understood at the world's largest text-based MMORPG. The terrain is pages. The weapon is edits. Battles rage constantly. Anybody who has spent time on it knows the massive amounts of drama behind the scenes. But almost as a side effect, the encyclopedia gradually ratchets forward.
Maybe it's better to see tech like that? Vast sums of money are scooped up and channeled by investors, all seeking advantage over one another. Most of that money is wasted, as is most of the effort it pays for. But occasionally, in dribs and drabs, innovation almost accidentally happens.
In both cases, if we could deploy the resources involved effectively, we could get a lot more done. But until somebody figures that very hard problem out, we can live with the fact that everything kinda sucks but things still keep getting slowly better.
This is the same with pretty much all innovation - even things like the invention of agriculture can be argued to have caused more problems than it solved (Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens makes this point).
Laptops and smartphones made computing portable, but then has people taking their work home with them and increasing stress. Robotics help manufacture things, but also put people out of jobs. The car helps us get around but also contributes to global warming. I just don't think the implied view that "old innovation never used to create brand new problems" is true.
Social media for example has created serious problems with mental health of users, which could be eased dramatically if engagement and exposure wasn't gamified and manipulated, and if there was less of a focus on engagement and closed content.
Many laptops and smartphones are now rendered obsolete quickly by software updates as new models are released every year by manufacturers, this creates a huge pile of waste that in turn pollutes the environment.
Most of the negative aspects that have made product reliability and quality decline, along with dramatic price inflation are market-driven...
The better way to counter market-driven innovation (in just one of many possible aspects mind you) is to create enduring and properly-priced products that don't get thrown away each year (at the expense of record profit) obviously.
Replacing old problems with new problems is probably an inherent part of technological advancement and innovation, you just hope the benefit is worth the cost (it would be great to find technologies that just solve problems with no cost, but that’s not what you see in history).
Robotics on the other hand is a good example of how technology is applied to maximize profits at the expense of people. Same could be said about social media which largely exists to gather information about people and sell it to marketers. The internet as a library to access information introduced a great convenience but it is trending toward a paywall mode that makes information harder to access (a regression).
The article is largely cynical, but there is much to be cynical about when it comes to the latest developments in technology. Overall the cynicism is justified.
Many of the smartest minds are dedicating themselves to Wall Street and Silicon Valley under the direction of the questionable leaders of large tech companies that are largely focused on artificial intelligence (for surveillance and marketing purposes) and social media (also for surveillance and marketing purposes). There are some outliers like Elon Musk, but they are in small number.