These sorts of articles are pointless. If this guy has such a strong opinion, why doesn't he go innovate instead of telling other people to do it. Hypocrisy at its finest.
Disagree with the guy's opinion, but in his mind he is innovating. As a writer the way he contributes is by innovating culture and thought. He has seen an information inefficiency in the common belief that we are making huge technological gains, and his article is an attempt to fix that.
It seems disingenuous that this article completely ignores Google as a source of innovation in the last 15 years. A company which (pretty successfully) organizes the entirety of human knowledge, and lets you query it in milliseconds? Sounds like some pretty serious innovation to me...
More stuff indexed, for one thing, paper books and videos included. And hopefully, more intelligent interpretation of queries, though that's more debatable.
This is a very good point. Google is more accurate, and faster, but in the end it does the same thing. It helps the user find information on the web. It's not a great new idea, it's an improvement on an existing idea.
Sometimes a quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference. For example, motorcycles are just faster horses (in some ways worse, like for off-roading), but you could hardly argue they are the same thing. I would argue that google is substantially more useful than altavista, or dogpile, ever were.
And ultimately Altavista and Dogpile are irrelevant, because neither existed just a few years before Google. Web search is revolutionary; search engines before Google were just halting steps on the way. That is, the contention isn't that Google revolutionized web search, but that web search revolutionized the world.
The thing that made Google unique is that they ranked pages according to the links between them (i.e. PageRank), as opposed to more traditional document ranking methods that are keyword based.
As a result, Google found showed you content that people liked (and linked to). From the end-user's perspective, Google search was noticeably better and more relevant.
As far as I know, it was the first massive application of data mining graphs, which now drives social networking, content recommendations and more.
The algorithm is quite fascinating (from what we can infer). Using things like a markov chain to model results in Google shows a big jump from human-compiled results in early search engines - it's a new application of theoretical knowledge that has greatly enhanced society, and frankly shows a degree of automation that could be a basis machine intelligence.
Maybe the innovation is so powerful and so large that it basically become the background and ignored. We all take googling for granted and hardly remember a time when search engines literally don't work.
Fair point. It just seemed odd to use Procter & Gamble as an example of the most innovative companies while ignoring a < 15 year old company which now has a higher market cap than P&G (200M to 177M).
It's certainly an interesting perspective on things. I would argue that the internet has had an impact relative in scale to that of electricity or the car but it is true that things seem to have stalled.
Instead of working on world changing technologies using the amazing tools we have at our disposal we are building hundreds of photo sharing apps, check in apps, and social networks in the hope of a big exit (I guess Twitter & Facebook have changed communication so there are some exceptions).
I don't think this just applies to science/technology though. If you look at culture (music and art specifically) we are also in a bit of a slump compared to the early/mid 20th century.
It could be that this is a cyclical thing and societies naturally go through periods of rapid innovation and creation, and and other periods where change is minor.
Nb: It's easy to call out the author for being a hypocrite (why doesn't he do something world changing?) but that's not very productive. I have just agreed with him but I don't think I'm going to be the one who creates the next great invention. I'm sure most people want to change the world but it's easier and less risky to build a simple, high growth app or product with a high chance of making them a lot of money.
I find it quite hard to understand the reasoning of people that downplay the affect the internet has had on our lives.
I dont fall out of contact with the people I grew up with (at home or university / past jobs), I am flying out tomorrow to meet with good friends all of whom I would have never known if it wasnt for the internet, my career would not exist without the internet.
The worlds knowledge is now categorised conveniently into a website which you can download and carry around wherever you go, that was science fiction 30 years ago. Almost the entire population of the world has access to enough knowledge and resources that they can become a leading expert in pretty much any field they want to.
Sure we dont have our promised jetpacks and its easy to be dismissive because some people post inane stuff on twitter, but I find it really hard to believe the last 50 years is some form of lull in innovation, I cant imagine any other period of time being more exciting to live in.
We have computers in our pockets that send a signal to space to locate us anywhere on the planet within a couple of feet, then tell us how to get where we want to go. We can communicate instantly, instantly with people on the other side of the planet. We have a network of satellites orbiting our planet giving us constant information about our world. Not many people predicted these things in popular culture/popular sci fi.
These kinds of articles always seem like old people complaining that the future didn't turn out the way they expected. Instead of accepting that the biggest innovative breakthrough in the past 50 years was a global communication and information network, they complain that there hasn't been anything good happening.
The only problem with that criticism is that Neil Stephenson has known more about the internet earlier than nearly anyone commenting on this story. One of the central activities of 'team hero' in Cryptonomicon is laying undersea IP links. If you've read his books, it's obvious he has thought deeply about how the expansion of the internet affects everyone's lives.
Despite classic logics denial of authority, once you subordinate logic to observation (Bayes) then authority is actually a good positive indicator. Lack of authority however is a poor negative indicator. Long story short, authority only adds support indirectly, but that's useful more often than many would like to admit.
I think you're simplifying this into a pro/con dilemma. Stephenson is obviously very pro internet. So what he's pointing out is really a lack of ambition in using the new computational and communication toolkit we've built. Digital economies are fundamentally different, despite the bubbles using this to hype absurdly bad traditional business plans, this basic characteristic remains. We have not even begun to explore the implications of that.
We're too busy gratifying the desires born of an older world.
Instead of accepting that the biggest innovative breakthrough in the past 50 years was a global communication and information network, they complain that there hasn't been anything good happening.
And ironically, they do it via that very same network, without which their ideas would probably never be read by most of the people commenting in this discussion.
> ... that send a signal to space to locate us ...
Pedants corner: No they don't. Satellites in space broadcast a signal and the phones pick up multiple signals using incredibly precise timers (speed of light matters) to work out the position.
> Almost the entire population of the world has access to enough knowledge and resources that they can become a leading expert in pretty much any field they want to.
It is estimated that less than half of the world uses the internet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage. Having traveled the third world a bit, there are definitely huge swaths of civilization today that have not used the internet, and for whom even electricity is a luxury. Just because you have been greatly affected by the internet doesn't mean everyone has.
Reading HN while working in a non-tech field (by HN standards) I constantly notice techies projecting their hyper-connected, Reddit/Facebook/Foursquare-filtered bubble onto others. Not everyone gives a damn about internet startups. Most people don't think "engineer" means "computer programmer." Seventy-five percent of the US uses landline telephones and I bet even more have never heard of Yelp. It's actually a low-tech world out there.
I agree its very easy to project our own view on others, and I probably still do despite trying not to.
But I am speaking from experience spending quite a bit of time in Morocco and various other relatively poorer countries, where when internet cafes are available, become quite the community hub
I submitted this article not because I agreed with it but because I could not disagree with it. I am not satisfied with the internet as it is.
I feel like what we have in the internet currently is amazing. It really does help level the world a bit, information is all important and anything that acts like a superconductor for it makes information hoarding and abuse of asymmetry very difficult. But there is something missing. It's not quite all there. It's like it is stuck in an amazingness uncanny valley. It could be so much more. And looking at multiple societies across history, where for some reason the tendency is for advancement to just stop - I don't want progress to get stuck where it is because people are too satisfied with how good things are. Because they can be much better.
I just finished inhaling The Peace War and Marooned in Real time. It was written in 1984-86 but could have been written yesterday. The books explore not just what it would be like for one person to have the information of the world but also the productivity of a 20th century nation. We're at that critical stage between those two points now, and theres no reason to assume we will cross it. We could become too enamored with things that do not positively shift the gradient with respect to time.
For example, the book also had Visors as I/O. A more advanced version of Google's Visors. Google's Visor demo showed it hooked up to Google+. I was not impressed. Maybe I am not the target audience. But consider, a grammar for audio recognition of a graphing calculator is not hard to write. Hook that up with something like Wolfram Alpha, something that can plot rotate, recognize gestures; that would have been impressive. Or basic searches in wikipedia. But I suppose not good advertising for google.
Or imagine something that would be to the internet as Crysis 3 is to pong. Say, smart fashion. Tiny sensors embedded in clothes to measure things like temperature, ph levels, air pressure, wind speed, acceleration, etc. How much easier would physics be to teach if you could go outside and actually see magnetic fields. Throw a ball up and get told how many Newtons of force you used. The sensors could monitor health and connected to networks constant processing your biostats. Also free processing in the form of scattered monoliths (billed monthly with a basic allowance free). Every possible interaction involving information exchange (including money) between people or bureaucracies involve an API. Contracts in Haskell, Prolog or at least Python. Most regulation is done under noble intentions. But the human brain is just no good at using vast amounts of data and long chains of thought. With all the data from the APIs and computational contracts, the damage from unintended consequences would be minimized. Progress could increase in speed.
These of course, are nothing concrete. But they are not so far fetched either. It is close, a perpetual 5 years away. So many amazing things are at the verge of occurring: 3D printing, ubiquitous computing, organ printing, synthetic biology, computer aided experiment design, questioning of p-values, more quantitative approaches to medicine and biology, cleaner nuclear fission, more efficient photovoltaics, organic circuits, asteroid mining. They are all on the verge, if we can push then the future really will be amazing. But only if we push. And possibly if we invent a Theory for Effective Preemptive and Efficient Interaction with Lumbering Disconnected Bureaucracies that works.
Whenever I see the internet I see what it could be. And I am not satisfied. Maybe that is the correct opinion to hold.
> I cant imagine any other period of time being more exciting to live in.
You must be very much lacking imagination. Greek philosophers century, Chinese warring states, Italian Renaissance, French Lumieres, Worldwide exploration, all off them must have been much more exciting time. Discovering a new country with unknown people and animals, risking your own life and your team's every single day... Don't tell me it compares with inventing yet another way to procrastinate on the Web.
Particularly coming from a relatively poor family, I wouldn't need to think twice. Those experiences would be great but statistically you would have died young with an uneventful life, likely never hearing about and definitely not seeing these amazing new places/things being discovered
The Era of Warring States...covers the Iron Age period from about 475 BC to the reunification of China under the Qin Dynasty in 221 BC. [1]
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the period roughly from the 14th to the 17th century [2]
The Age of Discovery...was a period in history starting in the early 15th century and continuing into the early 17th century [3]
The examples you've provided are all compressed due to our lense being distant on a time scale. The information age, by comparison, is ~30 years old, and has led to the ability of half of the world to access knowledge that before now was hardly available to world leaders. The sheer scale of the population that the information age has impacted and will impact makes it much more exciting than the examples you cite. The fact that people of most social classes are taking part in the changes we're seeing makes it truly revolutionary.
What a stupid article, short, vague and resentful.
Most industries are getting disrupted and mainstream doesn't notice. The ripple effect takes a long time to reach incumbents – they can still get loans and legislations catered to keep them afloat for a few more years.
The problem of "low innovation" in relation to the internet seems to be a problem of infrastructure.
Building Google lead to building Google maps which is now leading to building a self driving car which is a problem that when/if it is solved will save millions of lives and billions of dollars.
Not a perfect example, but it is an instance of not being albe to solve important problems without the necessary infrastructure.
Another example is lack of cash - governments are not doing things like going to space.
Moving cash into the hands of private people has allowed those people to start exploring space.
But where are the other examples? What other companies are doing similar things? This isn't just rhetorical. I'm sure plenty of companies are doing exciting things that don't get decent reporting. (I guess folding@home is one example.)
Caedium is building an easy to use, cloud based Computational flow dynamics(CFD) simulation tool[0]
Computer aided engineering tools in the cloud might be the missing link between the internet and real life innovation.
They could extremely reduce the price of of a (simulated) first prototype , and enable entry to small or crazy ideas.
But the major tool vendors don't hurry to offer affordable tools in the cloud, because their revenue models works differently[1]. There's probably a place for a few start-ups there.
Over the past 30 years we haven't seen breakthru innovation in transportation, energy, medicine, and many other fields. This point has been made by Peter Theil and others.
That may be true, but look at some recent developments. Self-driving cars, synthetic biology, thorium reactors, commercial space, 3d printing - not to mention the rapid evolution of internet and mobile technologies. Further afield, people are working on quantum computing, memristors, AI algorithms, and more.
All of these developments could make a big impact. Seems to me that we've got plenty of advances ahead of us.
Over the past 30 years we haven't seen breakthru innovation in transportation, energy, medicine, and many other fields.
We haven't?
What proportion of the electricity supplied in your country came from renewable sources 30 years ago?
How much did we know about human genetics and, for example, the potential of stem cells, 30 years ago?
If I wanted to go to Paris 30 years ago, it required a flight or a boat trip, not to mention the connections to and from the airport or ferry port on either end. Today I can walk to my local railway station in a few minutes, take a train down to London, walk to the station next door, take another train that goes under a tunnel all the way under the English Channel, and get off that train in Paris.
I think some people claim innovation isn't happening just because it's happening too slowly for them to notice in their everyday lives.
The author begins by making the case that innovation was at a peak in the early 20th century, but has been largely stagnant at the start of the 21st century. It's a provocative question, but I believe it's a symptom of a real underlying cause. To answer him more directly: Innovation will ramp up when the influence of moneyed interests on legislative priorities begins to wane.
An interesting and, I believe, a truly important thing happened for innovation at the beginning of the 20th century, the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt. He demanded transparency from food suppliers, broke up Standard Oil and worked hard to restrain the power and influence of large corporations. We need another T.R. for innovation to thrive.
In just this past year, there have been numerous anti-competitive legislative initiatives that we can point to. Each one lobbied for and backed by entrenched oligopolies that are actively trying to put the clamps on innovation. This is happening at both the federal (PIPA/SOPA, CISPA, patent wars, AT&T/T-Mobile Merger) and local level (Bans on Municipal Broadband).
In his book, "The Master Switch", Tim Wu tells a great story about a device invented at Bell Labs capable of recording a callers voice if the attached phone was not answered. The year was 1934, but the magnetic recording tape, used in answering machines and computer storage devices, did not become widely available until decades later. The AT&T monopoly chose to keep this new technology a secret, fearing that it would cannibalize their profitable business model. If nothing else, this story demonstrates the type of bureaucratic mindset that prevents entrenched corporate interests from making the kind of leaps that come from hungry entrepreneurs and government funded research. As a reader of HN, I would guess that this is already clearer to you than most.
I think this article is misguided in that there has been lots of innovation in the tech sector that has been overshadowed by silly things like "Instagram" that solve "cat picture problems" due to startup culture. The public face of innovation has not been dealing with hard problems, but people are working on them. There are several potential wide-ranging cancer treatments and someone came up with a potential cure for the common cold.
Our educational system and our culture must change if we are to get into a period where there is widespread innovation in dealing with hard problems instead of cat pictures. The internet will be a crucial part of that, and in the future, we will recognize the internet as being a source of cat pictures before we figured out how to use it to unlock our own potential.
I'm astonished that people think the Internet-era is low innovation. It's only been twenty years and we've gotten so much out of it (social networking, location-based services, real-time updates/news, vast pool of information).
I don't know about you guys but I think anyone who lived in the past would kill to be in this era.
There is simply a lower signal to noise ratio in regards to innovation. And yes, while there is a lot of noisy low-innovation internet companies, there are still more strong innovators now than there were 10 or 20 years ago. There is a low barrier to entry to the tech industry, and with that a great spectrum of the level of impact they make, and yet the opportunity and ease of access to an audience is greater than ever before.
Nothing like this has ever been able to happen. Innovation is continuing at an exponential rate, and I would hope Justin Fox would realize this as he books a last minute hotel via mobile app, rekindles a long lost friendship from school, and slips his tiny 90s-grade supercomputer into his pocket. All while selling his hobby romance novelas on his web marketed e-commerce site.
>Even beyond the technological challenges, there are lots of other obstacles to change. Stephenson, who has “devoted a shocking amount of time” lately to learning about alternative space-launch technologies, said at MIT that “the reason none of them happen turns out to be insurance.”
I submit that this (and related barriers) may be the primary reason for a lack of crazy innovation. Even though claiming a lack of innovation ignores the crazy amount of social changes the internet has brought us at every level.
Innovating in software right now runs the risk of patent lawsuits because you came up with something that someone else came up with.
Innovating in hardware right now runs the risk of falling afoul of a bajillion safety regulations you may not even be able to find out about.
Innovating in content right now runs the risk of being squashed by the older players (RIAA, MPAA, B&N, etc) because they don't like they way you looked in their direction.
Innovation is still happening, but yes, it could be faster if we'd just chuck all that and say "do whatever". The wild-west of creativity. We'd get our personal jetpacks and flying cars in a small handful of years at worst. But then again, there's another article on the front page that shows the danger of allowing this, the 'tiny, cheap, and dangerous' iphone charger: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3903705 . (tl;dr: the $2.79 charger might kill you)
Honestly, I doubt we can have both innovation and safety. Ever. There is very likely a happier middle ground than where we are now, but they're almost precisely opposed to each other.
I don't think the Internet is the problem. Rather, it is an unfortunate catalyst for certain negative effects and serves to amplify others.
One such effect is that many political and legal systems in the West are broken. The general population is apathetic because their voices are so readily ignored by those in power, and special interest groups call the shots. That results in things like an excessively burdensome intellectual property regime, which instead of promoting the development of new ideas and the creation of new products and services by those with meaningful contributions to make, often serves to defend the dying business models of entrenched old players against competition from new players, while in practice offering little benefit to those new players in return because they lack the resources to exploit any advantages they might theoretically have.
Then you combine the resulting culture of resentment by consumers with technology to share creative works instantly, and you not only have a recipe for promoting piracy rather than providing the market with more constructive alternatives that reward the people whose hard work produces things we value (but not enough to bother paying for them, apparently), you also create an over-reaching sense of entitlement in society.
Another negative effect is the kind of education system that we have in many places today where the idea seems to be that no child can be seen to fail, yet it is considered somehow elitist to single out children at the top end of the academic bell curve for any kind of special treatment that would help them to take advantage of their gifts. Here in the UK, for example, we've seen an obvious reduction in the breadth and rigour of exams for at least a generation, and there is a kind of inverse snobbery about selective schools or, worse, schools that charge fees. Of course, those private schools can also use their greater financial resources to employ better educated and trained teachers, provide teaching in smaller groups, and otherwise exploit opportunities to offer a better education to their pupils, but we're supposed to ignore that because if we can't educate all of our children to that standard then damn it we're not going to educate anyone to that standard. Naturally, instead of recognising the obvious flaws in all of this and doing something about it, successive governments and educational institutions seem more concerned with being apologists for the situation, defending this year's school leavers and graduates, and pretending they only tolerate academic high-fliers.
So now we have 50% of the population going to university and, ignoring the significant but still relatively small proportion who now drop out before graduating, every other person has at least a bachelor's degree, and then when they leave university they expect that the same kinds of jobs will be waiting for all of them as were waiting for graduates a generation ago when perhaps 5-10% of the population got the same qualification. The reality is more likely to be a crash course in customer service management with practical training provided in a fast-moving environment (or flipping burgers, as we used to call it). This breeds further resentment, complaints about the high unemployment rate, and so on. Oh, and it also means that many children whose gifts are not academic but who might have made excellent tradesmen or carers or artists or any number of other socially valuable (and often quite financially lucrative, too) roles are pressured into getting certificates that will never be of any real use to them and working 9-5 (sorry, 8-5 or 9-6) in a dead-end office admin job. Did I mention the resentment problem?
There's a whole load more: raising at least one generation with very little respect for anything, the rapid erosion of privacy, the paranoia of governments about anything that might even resemble a possible threat to national security like studying physics, chemistry or engineering, and the list goes on. But this is already a very long post so I won't go into any m...
Bullshit. This utopian claptrap shows how out of touch nerds have become with reality. Everyone is being tricked into liking things - they like them, you don't, get over yourself, there is no conspiracy.
The thing is, not everyone is being tricked into liking things. In fact, opinion polls consistently show that most people don't like a lot of the factors I mentioned. The problem is that the people who supposedly represent the rest of us often don't behave in a way that truly reflects what the general public wants, because the inherent pressures in today's political and media complex push them in other directions.
The only "conspiracy" I saw spoken of was about the "Powers that Be" clinging to their position of power, using a bit of collaboration (such as lobbying, contracts, or collusion). People talking to each other in order to preserve the enormous amount of power they already have. That's only natural. Calling it "conspiracy" doesn't make it go away.
> we are breeding new generations who have no concept that anything worth doing requires hard work and commitment, and whose total career aspirations are to climb the middle management ladder as fast as possible
Bull. It's a common problem for older generations to besmirch younger generations for exactly the same stunts they pulled.
There are still soldiers, Olympians, prodigies, single parents, and many more examples of young people doing things that require a ton of dedication. Every week, Undercover Boss manages to find young people working their tails off to pay for school, medical bills, and work towards their dreams. Last night's episode featured a young man who wanted to be a choreographer but knew he needed schooling to make it; thus he was hauling huge carts of pretzels all over Philly every day to pay for classes.
And yes, there are people who hope to get to middle management as soon as possible. They have tons of motivations but they're no different than the last generation's ton of people who wanted to get stable union jobs. Most of them want to make a decent living to provide a roof and food for their children. The path to doing that has changed generation over generation, but it's still the same idea.
Certainly we can do things to help lift them up and help them innovate, but we're not going to make any progress by calling the next generations lazy.
There are small parts of this comment that I could nitpick, but overall, it really resonates with me.
I've been thinking a lot about how the internet can influence politics in a democratic society more directly. I suspect that there are enough people online organized around various communities to have a measurable impact, but the way voting and candidacy systems are a) not online, and b) tied to geography make it difficult to move into the real world.
Additionally I feel that attention spans on most internet communities is so short that backing something like a real movement or political change isn't really possible. In fact, most of the people I've met who actually care and are willing to make real changes also explicitly reject the internet due to perceived shallowness. They may be right or wrong, but I think the reality is that we have to convince people like that to care, because they're the ones that power movements.
I have a slightly different feeling of what the internet is doing for politics. It's a subtle change, but one which I think has outsized long-term effects.
Basically, my thesis is that we are generating more collective wisdom in the past. There are more "raw stories," and scandals are almost impossible to cover up once they're leaked to the public. Representation for all sides of an argument can be found whenever desired. The rabble-rousers of comment sections everywhere are always willing to debate, even if they usually aren't very good. As all age groups start to contribute, it becomes easier to get a "long view" of society now vs. in the past. And at the bare minimum, we have Wikipedia's record of reality, which may not be perfect, but on matters of political importance, is usually wrung dry of fallicious statements very quickly.
While this doesn't change the human condition - we're still going to act in dumb self-interest and get swayed with a lot of the same old tricks - a collective change in perception is a major factor for subsequent changes in action. Everyone says the voting public should be well-informed...and increasingly, they are!
But we're still in the "catch-up" phase. Although there are many obvious problems with society as we know it, that doesn't mean we've found answers yet.
I am nowhere near as optimistic as you are. One of the biggest problems I see with the way we interact online is that there are very few places* where people with differing viewpoints interact at a level of trying to learn from or understand one another. The result is that politics are even more fragmented than ever, and everybody feels more righteous and mistakenly better-informed, because they've never had to read and seriously and honestly consider an opposing viewpoint.
* Honestly HN is the closest I can think of, and it's skewed pretty heavily liberal with a touch of libertarian.
To anyone who doesn't know what his referring to when talking about selective education(UK). In the uk there used to be 11+ (you did it at 11) test, you passed the test you want to grammar school. You failed the test, you went to secondary modern, you learned metal work, plumbing, or typing for girls. Roughly 20% were selected for grammar education. Secondary moderns were badly funded to compared to grammar schools. This caused various problems, sometimes secondary moderns kids ended up doing better(Academically) than grammar school kids. So no one knew if it was actually any good for choosing schools or just socially divisive. It was a good indicator of future social class, pass and your middle class, don't and your working class.
As someone who goes still lives in a council who keeps grammar schools, but not secondary moderns. It is true that grammar kids are highly tutored for the 11+, that's what my parents did for me. That's how I got in. A lot of friends did too. As result it almost entirely composed of middle class kids who can afford to be tutored for the 11+.
Naturally there is a lot of lobbying by the middle class to bring back grammar schools across the country, because it is effectively free private school as long as you tutor your kids for the 11+.
When I refer to the middle class, I refer the UK definition of it, not the American. In the UK "middle class" roughly refers to upper middle class.
In my opinion it is basically a way for the middle class to divert funds to their own kids, from working class kids in a zero sum game for the education budget.
And trade work isn't financially rewarding, that's a myth. The average wage of a plumber or electrician is 27k, bang on average wage. The only places they get 50K+ is in areas of shortage. I.e Rural Areas.
You're quite right that the 11+ was a system that could be gamed, and people with lots of money would pay tutors to do it. One could make a similar argument about university admissions. However, it's also possible to pass the 11+ or get into Oxbridge or whatever academic "elite" measure you wish to use based on merit.
And it's not just about whether the school has more money. There have been plenty of government programmes over the years where schools could change their status in financially beneficial ways, and most if not all of them had nothing to do with being selective.
My concern is that academic ability tends to fit a bell curve. Most children will be somewhere near the middle, and will be able to progress at a similar pace. Towards either end of the bell curve, that stops working, and you need a more individually tailored approach to help each child maximise their potential. That's important to help children who have learning difficulties that can be at least partially overcome with one-on-one tuition, and it's just as important for children who are academically gifted but won't be able to take advantage of it or will even get bored and drop out if they aren't challenged at school. In recent years, there has been a lot of emphasis on special assistance for children with disadvantages, but it seems there's some sort of backlash against also trying to help children with advantages to make the most of them.
If you want a good way to stifle innovation within a society, holding back the smartest kids seems like a safe bet to me.
(In the interests of disclosure: I did go to grammar school and then study at Cambridge, and I did it without paying funny money to anyone. But I'm not really talking about me here, I'm thinking of a couple of friends who were far smarter than I ever was and who joined my school at 16. They had never really been challenged at their previous schools, perhaps because they were likely to get straight As anyway and there was no league table advantage in spending further resources on them. They caught up once they were working with teachers who were used to working with smart kids, but I've always wondered how many other kids didn't get in at either 11 or 16, never grew as much as they could have, never made it into the university they could have, and ultimately never received the education they deserved.)
Edit: Sorry, I forgot to address your other point:
And trade work isn't financially rewarding, that's a myth. The average wage of a plumber or electrician is 27k, bang on average wage. The only places they get 50K+ is in areas of shortage. I.e Rural Areas.
I think you're making my point for me there: in a generation when nearly half the population are coming out of education with a degree, a decent tradesman can still earn a comparable wage.
Also, since the trades are valuable practical skills, there is the chance to earn much more. There's a builder who's been buying up old places near where I live, knocking them down, rebuilding them with his mates, and then selling the new places for a very healthy price. The guy our landlord sends to do maintenance work from time to time runs a couple of businesses doing different things, and from what he's said if he bundled everything in together they might have to register for VAT. The threshold for compulsory registration is something like £77k at the moment, and while that's based on revenue before taxes etc. are paid on it, it still translates to a very respectable salary. When we had an electrician out a few months ago, the cost for him and his apprentice to so some basic work came out at a higher hourly rate than I've ever earned but was consistent with what others had quoted for the job.
Not everyone in the trades is going to get rich, to be sure. But there are plenty of people in the trades who are earning a relatively good wage based on their practical skills. As long as they're doing a good job, I have no problem with that at all, by the way. But why mess around pushing them to study academic subjects they might...
Considering the average wage is also includes part time work, and lots of non-skilled jobs, AKA student jobs which drag the average down. I should hope a skilled full time worker, would earn significantly more than the average wage considering they have to support a family.
There are tons of dodgy plumbing and electrician scam schools(http://www.plumbing-school.co.uk/), which perpetuate the myth of 50K+ wages. It's in their interest, and it's entirely false. You end with a crappy nvq and no work but they get government grants to train you. I wish people would actually do the research.
You also have to separate wages, and profits when talking about this. Wages are what you can sell your labour for, to other companies relatively risk free. However profits require risk. Most of these high achieving plumbers money comes from the profit his company makes and not via his wages. That's why they always mention their self employed.
What this means, you have to run business and take a lot of risk in order to get that sort of money as a plumber. You could end up bankrupt, and that would not happen via wages. While educated people can obtain a lot of money with relatively little risk via wages. For example the barclay brothers took on enormous risk in order to get where they were. While someone who went to oxbridge and then into a Investment banking graduate scheme doing underwriting took on relatively little risk. They will probably never be at risk of having their home taken away, and being declared bankrupt. However the barclay brothers had to use massive amounts of leverage(Mortgages, Business loans etc) and risk to come from home decorators to owning a business empire.
I also have to mention intelligence is fluid - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15369851. Trying to work out who's smart and who's not is difficult. Achievers may end being terrible, dumb kids may end up being pretty smart over the course of a lifetime.
I know lots of people who went to new universities, who have very good jobs(At my work place). Some of them went onto old universities to complete MSc and MBA degrees and ended up with distinctions. Don't be so small minded, it's like you've been reading right wing tabloid press.
Please remember that you brought the distinction between wages and other forms of financial benefit into the discussion, not me. All I'm saying is that someone skilled in a useful trade can make a decent living without being pushed down the academic route. Of course those who go into business for themselves will have to risk more but can achieve higher returns; that's true in almost any industry. And of course there are snake oil salesmen offering worthless "training" or "credentials"; that's true in almost any industry as well. But high incomes for freelance tradesmen aren't the myth you claim them to be; multiple people who've done work on my home within the past couple of years are an existence proof of well-compensated tradesmen, and others were quoting similar rates.
As for fluid intelligence, perhaps things do change at different times for different people, but I don't think I'm going to set aside the general expectation that smart kids will do better if they are challenged at school based on one study of about 30 kids where a few of them moved significantly in one direction or the other between the ages of 14 and 18. I don't see why the two hypotheses are incompatible anyway.
I agree that a very large number of the problems are social, but I disagree that they're not being solved because "the system works to prevent those people from getting into positions where they can fix it."
I mean, hell, just strike up a conversation at the pub and you'll find people who "have a very clear about why" everything is broken. Everyone has a pet theory that they're sure is correct. And in that sense the system is doing exactly what we want it to do: it's keeping out the infallibilists, the people who will advance their pet theories in spite of people on all sides pointing out the problems with it. No matter how well-intentioned those people are, it's a very bad idea to hand them the Big Stick of Government if they're going to keep wielding it when we want them to stop. And it's particularly bad if they intend to make sweeping changes - if we're going to be futzing with such powerful structures, we should be taking baby steps!
It's much safer for us to keep the government populated with vote-seeking politicians, and instead to turn out attention to where it should be, which is getting the solutions into the culture. If the electorate all want a particular change, then the politicians will make that change. And if they don't all want a particular change then we shouldn't be imposing it on them. And if they don't care, we should persuade them to - "X doesn't affect you directly, but it will help us make Y cheaper for you" can be effective. If the change really does make a better world for everyone - and not just advancing the interests of one group at the expense of another - then it should be possible to show them that.
I mean, heck, in the US there's an oil billionaire who funds billboards that just advertise "being confident" or "having perseverance." How cool is that? As cultural engineering goes it's pretty crude, but it's a damn good start.
And if your response to this post is "but changing culture is practically impossible," then, well. I think you just found your lack of innovation ;-)
I mean, hell, just strike up a conversation at the pub and you'll find people who "have a very clear about why" everything is broken. Everyone has a pet theory that they're sure is correct. And in that sense the system is doing exactly what we want it to do: it's keeping out the infallibilists, the people who will advance their pet theories in spite of people on all sides pointing out the problems with it.
Of course if we're going to get anywhere we have to distinguish strong, uninformed opinions from strong, well-informed ones. But consider the problems with dumbing down the education system. It's not as if the people recruiting new graduates into the professions and complaining that they immediately have to send them for remedial training these days are making it up. There's nothing in it for universities to complain that new students arriving to study the sciences don't have enough maths to complete their first year any more. Every year, schools and government ministers trot out the same kinds of argument about better teaching methods and pupils working harder to justify the ever-rising percentages of candidates receiving top grades. They look pretty foolish next to a critic holding up an 'A' level exam paper that pupils used to take before leaving school at 18 in one hand, and a first year university exam paper taken at 19 from a decade later with essentially the same question on it, or the equivalent with an old 'O' level paper that kids would have taken at 16 a generation ago with more demanding questions than an 'A' level paper kids take at 18 today.
You can only bury your head in the sand for so long before bad things start to happen, but successive governments who want everyone to be seen to succeed have been pushing the education establishment in this direction for a long time, and most of the teachers who knew better have retired by now. The only victims in this will be the children, and to some extent the new generation of teachers who are doing their best and perhaps do have some genuinely improved teaching methods to offer, yet who are perpetually vilified for being part of a system that is not their fault.
It's much safer for us to keep the government populated with vote-seeking politicians, and instead to turn out attention to where it should be, which is getting the solutions into the culture. If the electorate all want a particular change, then the politicians will make that change.
Unfortunately, the corrolation between vote-seeking behaviour and doing what the people collectively want isn't very strong in the current system. Here in the UK, we've been to war for a decade, a war that everyone saw coming and that brought literally millions onto the streets in protest, a war based on false evidence given by political leaders who have suffered little if any adverse consequences personally and who show no remorse for their actions. That's about as serious as it gets.
Of course, it's also against the law to sing "Happy Birthday" to your child in public, drive at 75mph on a completely clear motorway on Christmas morning, or smoke a joint in the privacy of your own home. I realise that the anti-Happy-Birthday lobby is a strong one, but that's going a little far. (And when the government did consult on fixing copyright, and close to 100% of the responses received from the public came down the same way on copyright term extension, Sir Cliff won anyway.)
There is a reason that "campaign finance reform" or whatever you call it locally is always on the political agenda but never gets anywhere. When all you have is an election every few years, and between elections there is no power of recall or ability to force a referendum on a single issue or other strong check on government authority, money talks louder than any concerned individual because a good campaign will win over enough less concerned individuals to make a bigger difference. And that's before you even get to our special kind of politics in Europe where if something isn't palatable to the national electorate you just ki...
But consider the problems with dumbing down the education system. It's not as if the people recruiting new graduates into the professions and complaining that they immediately have to send them for remedial training these days are making it up. There's nothing in it for universities to complain that new students arriving to study the sciences don't have enough maths to complete their first year any more.
Absolutely, but they're a tiny force compared to the parents who all want to send their children to top universities and will vote for any government measure that claims to guarantee that. If a party proposed outlawing university entry requirements, the vast majority of parents would vote for it in a heartbeat and begin making plans to send their kids to Oxbridge or wherever. They don't understand that such a thing would cause those universities to no longer be top universities - at least from a career prospects point of view.
And that's my point: for successive governments to want "everyone to be seen to succeed," the electorate needs to be complicit in that. They have to see such things as success. If they didn't see University as inherently better than the alternatives - the result of thinking that more education is always good, and that formal institutions like universities are the only way to get more education - then they wouldn't consider a policy of increasing university intake to be valuable.
The only victims in this will be the children
The victims in this aren't the children: the victims are everyone. We all suffer from the system being broken. Some more directly than others - being unable to find competent workers is probably less upsetting than being pushed into enduring 3-4 years of timewasting - but everyone to some extent. And yes, that includes the politicians who, at the end of the day, want to buy quality products and to work with competent people, just like the rest of us.
Unfortunately, the corrolation between vote-seeking behaviour and doing what the people collectively want isn't very strong in the current system. Here in the UK, we've been to war for a decade, a war that everyone saw coming and that brought literally millions onto the streets in protest, a war based on false evidence given by political leaders who have suffered little if any adverse consequences personally and who show no remorse for their actions.
Hold on, there. We're talking about whether the government does what the people want or not; if it manipulates them into wanting something in particular, that's a separate issue, so the false evidence point isn't relevant here; many groups manipulate the public, not just the government. And "millions of protestors" do not make for a collective stance on an issue: the largest single anti-war protest was 1 million people in February 2003 - 2% of the population - but a month later YouGov were reporting that 50% of their survey group supported the war. Public opinion was at best divided - it was certainly not united behind one course of action while the government took another.
Anyway, one contentious counterexample does not a correlation make. Can you show a substantial trend of the government acting against majority polling figures across many issues?
Of course, it's also against the law to sing "Happy Birthday" to your child in public, drive at 75mph on a completely clear motorway on Christmas morning, or smoke a joint in the privacy of your own home.
Sure. But so what? They're not enforcing those laws. It's not ideal that they're on the books, but changing the books is expensive and it's better to spend the resources on making changes that are actually connected to the rest of the system. Considering purely what's statutory is taking things out of context.
Guess one of the problems is that it takes often a decade before a technology is mature and 'domesticated' by its users. You see sth on engadget and think you'll have it in your hands the next day but it takes years before you see it again so you have the feeling it takes ages before sth changes.
On a related note: it always strikes me that people devote a lot of time and money to sports and celebrities while cool tech is ignored. Imagine that all that time/money was devoted to science...
This reminds me of a story from a few years back. In short, the greatest minds of a generation are selling advertising (or are scamming investors). Who's left after that?
- Maybe the jetpack won't be needed because the internet makes it easier to do work without the need to commute (a way of work familiar to many HN readers i guess).
- The mars colony would prove a point more than being a revolution nowadays (same reason why we don't return to the moon much often).
- We 're not really worried about lack of energy sources either, because our sun will be bright enough for long, and the relevant science is known for almost a century
- Our chores been taken care by technology enough it seems, so we 're now feeding our brains. It's not very visible externally as the industrial transformation of the earth was, but the human brain has been upgraded significantly and irreversibly by the instant access to all the world's information.
I thought the article would be about why internet innovation is not that so fast paced anymore... i was wrong.
I actually disagree with most of the comments here, and agree with the article. I recently had the same realisation that the article author did: that much more innovation seemed to have happened in the years 1870-2010 than the years 1972-2012. http://blog.i.saac.me/post/based-on-the-exhaustion-of-opport...
I also degree with the people saying that the current legal system is the problem; in fact I don't think there's any way to speed up innovation at all. I think we're started to reach the limit of wealth-generating opportunities. The train, the telegraph, electricity, cars, factories -- these revolutionised people's lives. I think we're now getting close to peak "innovation" -- it's getting harder and harder to find new ways to seriously improve people's lives.
Smartphones and the internet have changed people's lives, too, but they're only major changes of the last few decades.
Now, a fair response might be -- we still don't have a cure for cancer! We still haven't colonised space! We still haven't built an AI! Nanorobots! 3D printing! And people are working on all those problems. And technologically, yes, they're much more complex and advanced than anything built in the industrial revolution.
But look at it from an economic point of view -- and I'm talking about the foundation of economics. Economics is based on value; human value. Stuff people want, as pg said.
I want a box on my desk that can print useful objects, but probably not as much as my great-great-grandfather wanted to be able to heat his home without having to burn things. We want a cure for cancer, but not as much as past generations wanted a cure for cholera, typhoid or the bubonic plague.
That's why processers keep getting faster but economic growth keeps slowing. Technology advances exponentially, but human wealth grows logistically. The natural limit is the limit of human happiness. Example: World economic growth is mostly driven by developing countries playing catch up to the West's living standards. Heck, even Adam Smith himself said that economic growth would only last a few centuries.
I guess each new iPhone app or Facebook game does make people marginally happier, the entertainment value does have economic value. But again, this is scraping the barrel of value creation. Are there still ways to majorly improve people's lives out there? Possibly, we're definitely not in utopia yet, but I think we'll need a new definition of wealth to get there.
I should really write up the above ideas into a proper blog post soon. Would be interested to hear people's opinions first.
Great, but there's still billions and billions of people who aren't participating in all that "innovation", mostly due to the local strongmen in their particular geographic area.
I don't have any answers, but it sure is frustrating that thousands of people will die today due to "solved" problems -- many from lack of food and water, of all things. :(
The innovations of the past century were easier for amateur inventors to build without capital. Think of the Wright Brothers - a couple of bicycle makers built the first powered aircraft.
Could the equivalent pair of bicycle mechanics build the first reusable spaceship or electric flying car? Building a new space launch system will cost $500m+. Neither governments nor large aerospace firms are willing to take large risks with this amount of money. Incremental improvements to proven systems are much easier to justify.
I think crowd-funding and the Internet will lead to a new boom in innovation. The Pebble watch is a good example. The VC's turned them down, and now the public has pre-purchased $7m of Pebble watches in two weeks.
We need new forms of risk capital for inventors. VCs and governments are not going to fund enough high risk innovation. They both rejected my pitch for electric aviation saying it was "too ambitious for a startup" (http://electrictakeoff.com).
What about simulation ? wouldn't some kind of precise simulation of this idea would decrease risk, improve the design and be much cheaper to make than a first prototype ?
And then it would be much easier to get investment ?
I don't agree that's less demand or incentive to innovations: big cost reductions and productivity improvements are still richly rewarded.
Yes inventing new things is increasingly more complex, but there are ways to decrease this complexity. there's no wonder that there is a huge amount of software innovation, since the software field is deeply focused on decreasing complexity and enables new inventions.
> More prosaically, the 15 years since the internet became a major part of our lives has been marked here in the U.S. — birthplace of the internet — by mostly disappointing economic growth.
It seems like an old-fashioned viewpoint to conflate innovation and creativity with economic growth. If we're seeing more innovation, we must be spending more money, right? Well ... not so fast. Consider a classic Internet innovation, the search engine. It opens up worlds upon worlds of information to the common person's fingertips. But it only rarely convinces people to buy something extra. (It does make buying things easier, which is a big reason that ad revenues are so big, but it probably doesn't grow consumption all that much[0].)
For a better example, look at Wikipedia. Direct economic impact, measured in GDP growth? Hard to say. But it's tough to argue that Wikipedia isn't an awesome example of human creativity and collaboration, or that it hasn't made a big positive impact.
My argument: the Internet era has just made us more efficient. We can do more with less money. Economic growth is not desirable in and of itself -- only when it is a signal of increasing quality of life. The Internet has enabled greatly increased quality of life without an increase in spending.
I think this quote captures his implied response to your point:
»for decades, electricity had little effect on industrial productivity as manufacturers simply swapped out older energy sources for electric power but changed nothing about how they made things. It was only as new factories were built that took advantage of the unique properties of electric motors that a productivity boom ensued.
Wikipedia, Google, et al are innovations in the way the stock market or ECN were - undeniable leaps forward in the factors of production, i.e. allowing tangible innovation to happen.
These innovations, the latter in capital and former in information, hold their social value in the tangible progress they enable. What is enabled has not materialised with the force that was expected.
This will be an unpopular point on HackerNews, but most people live in the tangible world. That is why the iPhone and iPad have propelled Apple so far, so fast - it is a clear manifestation of tangible technological progress. The author laments that these factors of innovation are getting so much attention intrinsically at the expense of follow-on, arguably harder, tangible innovation.
> These innovations, the latter in capital and former in information, hold their social value in the tangible progress they enable. The author's point is that we are still waiting for that tangible progress that these information multipliers were expected to spore.
When it comes to commerce and trade, the internet has definitely had a real, tangible effect on our societies. The above examples are just some services that make it easier and cheaper to connect buyers and sellers, and that have rationalized delivery-chains which in turn led to massively cheaper prices for end consumers.
Finding things to buy has never been easier.
Finding buyers for your stuff has never been easier.
Finding the globally cheapest price for stuff has never been easier.
Hmm, I suppose I'm wiggling a bit here, but I'm tryin to pin down why, after quitting a job on Wall Street and checking out Silcon Valley I left with a feeling that the missions are largely superfluous (I'm less interested in delighting people than profoundly changing their realities).
Maybe tangible is the wrong word; perhaps innovating on the commanding heights of the economy is more apt. By this measure Google does qualify as a fundamental innovation as it retraces the market for information. The others, energy, materials, transportation, military, etc. are seeing incremental innovation but not yet breakthroughs. Exceptions may be held as graphene and carbon fibre, self-driving cars, automated weapons systems, etc.
Disclaimer: I am not Malcolm Gladwell; I love being delighted and don't want to weigh down one type of innovation under another. But I do think there are different types of innovation and that we need a balance. The balance today seems to be skewed, probably due to regulatory factors that will even themselves out in inter-generational and inter-superpower timescales, but skewed nonetheless.
You're right that the internet haven't brought much growth to the U.S., but it was an important part of the growth story in some parts of the world: india's outsourcing business, probably part of china's growth and probably growth in other places.
But yes, except economic growth , it has brought huge benefits.
I will try to put this in perhaps another way: The Internet doesn't have to spur economic growth, it can benefit end users directly. The fact that there can be a discussion on Reddit about the revolution in Egypt, that includes somebody from Egypt chiming in giving a first person account, that's astounding, but won't ever get reflected in money changing hands. It's direct value to the user. Money is just a store of value, sometimes you don't need to store it.
We have not dealt with the social effects of advertising-driven television, much less the Internet.
Empirically, change DID slow down a great deal with the advent of the Internet. If you listen to the hope buried in the regret of Pink Floyd's "Division Bell" ( which specifically refers to the Usenet postings of Publius ) can you feel anything but a great sadness for what might have been? Remember Usenet? It was amazing, for a while. Then they turned away...
The 4th paragraph is strikingly similar to an exchange between the characters Josh and Leo on The West Wing:
Leo McGarry: My generation never got the future it was promised... Thirty-five years later, cars, air travel is exactly the same. We don't even have the Concorde anymore. Technology stopped.
Josh Lyman: The personal computer...
Leo McGarry: A more efficient delivery system for gossip and pornography? Where's my jet pack, my colonies on the Moon?
It's really up to each of us to aim higher, solve a large problem. Peter Thiel does a much better job characterizing the problem than this author. Peter also offers solitons.
It's worthwhile to encourage everyone to aim higher. But this article comes off as a rant.
Q: When Will This Low-Innovation Internet Era End?
A: Imho, when innovation and production of material goods is as democratized by 3D Printing and similar technologies [1] as knowledge innovation and production was by the Internet.
I'm looking forward to the day the impedance mismatch between knowledge creation and tool/product creation is much reduced from the current state.
Good summary [1] by the Economist for anyone who hasn't read it.
103 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadAs a result, Google found showed you content that people liked (and linked to). From the end-user's perspective, Google search was noticeably better and more relevant.
As far as I know, it was the first massive application of data mining graphs, which now drives social networking, content recommendations and more.
What prevent us from innovating is not so much intelligence but social configuration of our society at that particular sector.
Instead of working on world changing technologies using the amazing tools we have at our disposal we are building hundreds of photo sharing apps, check in apps, and social networks in the hope of a big exit (I guess Twitter & Facebook have changed communication so there are some exceptions).
I don't think this just applies to science/technology though. If you look at culture (music and art specifically) we are also in a bit of a slump compared to the early/mid 20th century.
It could be that this is a cyclical thing and societies naturally go through periods of rapid innovation and creation, and and other periods where change is minor.
Nb: It's easy to call out the author for being a hypocrite (why doesn't he do something world changing?) but that's not very productive. I have just agreed with him but I don't think I'm going to be the one who creates the next great invention. I'm sure most people want to change the world but it's easier and less risky to build a simple, high growth app or product with a high chance of making them a lot of money.
I dont fall out of contact with the people I grew up with (at home or university / past jobs), I am flying out tomorrow to meet with good friends all of whom I would have never known if it wasnt for the internet, my career would not exist without the internet.
The worlds knowledge is now categorised conveniently into a website which you can download and carry around wherever you go, that was science fiction 30 years ago. Almost the entire population of the world has access to enough knowledge and resources that they can become a leading expert in pretty much any field they want to.
Sure we dont have our promised jetpacks and its easy to be dismissive because some people post inane stuff on twitter, but I find it really hard to believe the last 50 years is some form of lull in innovation, I cant imagine any other period of time being more exciting to live in.
These kinds of articles always seem like old people complaining that the future didn't turn out the way they expected. Instead of accepting that the biggest innovative breakthrough in the past 50 years was a global communication and information network, they complain that there hasn't been anything good happening.
You are entirely missing what he is saying.
"'Everything got put on hold for a generation,' while civilization digested the Internet and figured out what it could be used for.'"
So I still don't know the full context of the conversation, but that makes a lot more sense.
I think you're simplifying this into a pro/con dilemma. Stephenson is obviously very pro internet. So what he's pointing out is really a lack of ambition in using the new computational and communication toolkit we've built. Digital economies are fundamentally different, despite the bubbles using this to hype absurdly bad traditional business plans, this basic characteristic remains. We have not even begun to explore the implications of that.
We're too busy gratifying the desires born of an older world.
And ironically, they do it via that very same network, without which their ideas would probably never be read by most of the people commenting in this discussion.
Pedants corner: No they don't. Satellites in space broadcast a signal and the phones pick up multiple signals using incredibly precise timers (speed of light matters) to work out the position.
It is estimated that less than half of the world uses the internet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage. Having traveled the third world a bit, there are definitely huge swaths of civilization today that have not used the internet, and for whom even electricity is a luxury. Just because you have been greatly affected by the internet doesn't mean everyone has.
Reading HN while working in a non-tech field (by HN standards) I constantly notice techies projecting their hyper-connected, Reddit/Facebook/Foursquare-filtered bubble onto others. Not everyone gives a damn about internet startups. Most people don't think "engineer" means "computer programmer." Seventy-five percent of the US uses landline telephones and I bet even more have never heard of Yelp. It's actually a low-tech world out there.
But I am speaking from experience spending quite a bit of time in Morocco and various other relatively poorer countries, where when internet cafes are available, become quite the community hub
I feel like what we have in the internet currently is amazing. It really does help level the world a bit, information is all important and anything that acts like a superconductor for it makes information hoarding and abuse of asymmetry very difficult. But there is something missing. It's not quite all there. It's like it is stuck in an amazingness uncanny valley. It could be so much more. And looking at multiple societies across history, where for some reason the tendency is for advancement to just stop - I don't want progress to get stuck where it is because people are too satisfied with how good things are. Because they can be much better.
I just finished inhaling The Peace War and Marooned in Real time. It was written in 1984-86 but could have been written yesterday. The books explore not just what it would be like for one person to have the information of the world but also the productivity of a 20th century nation. We're at that critical stage between those two points now, and theres no reason to assume we will cross it. We could become too enamored with things that do not positively shift the gradient with respect to time.
For example, the book also had Visors as I/O. A more advanced version of Google's Visors. Google's Visor demo showed it hooked up to Google+. I was not impressed. Maybe I am not the target audience. But consider, a grammar for audio recognition of a graphing calculator is not hard to write. Hook that up with something like Wolfram Alpha, something that can plot rotate, recognize gestures; that would have been impressive. Or basic searches in wikipedia. But I suppose not good advertising for google.
Or imagine something that would be to the internet as Crysis 3 is to pong. Say, smart fashion. Tiny sensors embedded in clothes to measure things like temperature, ph levels, air pressure, wind speed, acceleration, etc. How much easier would physics be to teach if you could go outside and actually see magnetic fields. Throw a ball up and get told how many Newtons of force you used. The sensors could monitor health and connected to networks constant processing your biostats. Also free processing in the form of scattered monoliths (billed monthly with a basic allowance free). Every possible interaction involving information exchange (including money) between people or bureaucracies involve an API. Contracts in Haskell, Prolog or at least Python. Most regulation is done under noble intentions. But the human brain is just no good at using vast amounts of data and long chains of thought. With all the data from the APIs and computational contracts, the damage from unintended consequences would be minimized. Progress could increase in speed.
These of course, are nothing concrete. But they are not so far fetched either. It is close, a perpetual 5 years away. So many amazing things are at the verge of occurring: 3D printing, ubiquitous computing, organ printing, synthetic biology, computer aided experiment design, questioning of p-values, more quantitative approaches to medicine and biology, cleaner nuclear fission, more efficient photovoltaics, organic circuits, asteroid mining. They are all on the verge, if we can push then the future really will be amazing. But only if we push. And possibly if we invent a Theory for Effective Preemptive and Efficient Interaction with Lumbering Disconnected Bureaucracies that works.
Whenever I see the internet I see what it could be. And I am not satisfied. Maybe that is the correct opinion to hold.
You must be very much lacking imagination. Greek philosophers century, Chinese warring states, Italian Renaissance, French Lumieres, Worldwide exploration, all off them must have been much more exciting time. Discovering a new country with unknown people and animals, risking your own life and your team's every single day... Don't tell me it compares with inventing yet another way to procrastinate on the Web.
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the period roughly from the 14th to the 17th century [2]
The Age of Discovery...was a period in history starting in the early 15th century and continuing into the early 17th century [3]
The examples you've provided are all compressed due to our lense being distant on a time scale. The information age, by comparison, is ~30 years old, and has led to the ability of half of the world to access knowledge that before now was hardly available to world leaders. The sheer scale of the population that the information age has impacted and will impact makes it much more exciting than the examples you cite. The fact that people of most social classes are taking part in the changes we're seeing makes it truly revolutionary.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warring_States_Period [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Exploration
Most industries are getting disrupted and mainstream doesn't notice. The ripple effect takes a long time to reach incumbents – they can still get loans and legislations catered to keep them afloat for a few more years.
meh.
Building Google lead to building Google maps which is now leading to building a self driving car which is a problem that when/if it is solved will save millions of lives and billions of dollars.
Not a perfect example, but it is an instance of not being albe to solve important problems without the necessary infrastructure.
Another example is lack of cash - governments are not doing things like going to space.
Moving cash into the hands of private people has allowed those people to start exploring space.
But where are the other examples? What other companies are doing similar things? This isn't just rhetorical. I'm sure plenty of companies are doing exciting things that don't get decent reporting. (I guess folding@home is one example.)
Computer aided engineering tools in the cloud might be the missing link between the internet and real life innovation. They could extremely reduce the price of of a (simulated) first prototype , and enable entry to small or crazy ideas.
But the major tool vendors don't hurry to offer affordable tools in the cloud, because their revenue models works differently[1]. There's probably a place for a few start-ups there.
[0]http://www.symscape.com/blog/cfd-azure-cloud [1]http://caewatch.com/cae-in-the-cloud-just-hot-air/
That may be true, but look at some recent developments. Self-driving cars, synthetic biology, thorium reactors, commercial space, 3d printing - not to mention the rapid evolution of internet and mobile technologies. Further afield, people are working on quantum computing, memristors, AI algorithms, and more.
All of these developments could make a big impact. Seems to me that we've got plenty of advances ahead of us.
We haven't?
What proportion of the electricity supplied in your country came from renewable sources 30 years ago?
How much did we know about human genetics and, for example, the potential of stem cells, 30 years ago?
If I wanted to go to Paris 30 years ago, it required a flight or a boat trip, not to mention the connections to and from the airport or ferry port on either end. Today I can walk to my local railway station in a few minutes, take a train down to London, walk to the station next door, take another train that goes under a tunnel all the way under the English Channel, and get off that train in Paris.
I think some people claim innovation isn't happening just because it's happening too slowly for them to notice in their everyday lives.
An interesting and, I believe, a truly important thing happened for innovation at the beginning of the 20th century, the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt. He demanded transparency from food suppliers, broke up Standard Oil and worked hard to restrain the power and influence of large corporations. We need another T.R. for innovation to thrive.
In just this past year, there have been numerous anti-competitive legislative initiatives that we can point to. Each one lobbied for and backed by entrenched oligopolies that are actively trying to put the clamps on innovation. This is happening at both the federal (PIPA/SOPA, CISPA, patent wars, AT&T/T-Mobile Merger) and local level (Bans on Municipal Broadband).
In his book, "The Master Switch", Tim Wu tells a great story about a device invented at Bell Labs capable of recording a callers voice if the attached phone was not answered. The year was 1934, but the magnetic recording tape, used in answering machines and computer storage devices, did not become widely available until decades later. The AT&T monopoly chose to keep this new technology a secret, fearing that it would cannibalize their profitable business model. If nothing else, this story demonstrates the type of bureaucratic mindset that prevents entrenched corporate interests from making the kind of leaps that come from hungry entrepreneurs and government funded research. As a reader of HN, I would guess that this is already clearer to you than most.
Our educational system and our culture must change if we are to get into a period where there is widespread innovation in dealing with hard problems instead of cat pictures. The internet will be a crucial part of that, and in the future, we will recognize the internet as being a source of cat pictures before we figured out how to use it to unlock our own potential.
I don't know about you guys but I think anyone who lived in the past would kill to be in this era.
Nothing like this has ever been able to happen. Innovation is continuing at an exponential rate, and I would hope Justin Fox would realize this as he books a last minute hotel via mobile app, rekindles a long lost friendship from school, and slips his tiny 90s-grade supercomputer into his pocket. All while selling his hobby romance novelas on his web marketed e-commerce site.
I submit that this (and related barriers) may be the primary reason for a lack of crazy innovation. Even though claiming a lack of innovation ignores the crazy amount of social changes the internet has brought us at every level.
Innovating in software right now runs the risk of patent lawsuits because you came up with something that someone else came up with.
Innovating in hardware right now runs the risk of falling afoul of a bajillion safety regulations you may not even be able to find out about.
Innovating in content right now runs the risk of being squashed by the older players (RIAA, MPAA, B&N, etc) because they don't like they way you looked in their direction.
Innovation is still happening, but yes, it could be faster if we'd just chuck all that and say "do whatever". The wild-west of creativity. We'd get our personal jetpacks and flying cars in a small handful of years at worst. But then again, there's another article on the front page that shows the danger of allowing this, the 'tiny, cheap, and dangerous' iphone charger: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3903705 . (tl;dr: the $2.79 charger might kill you)
Honestly, I doubt we can have both innovation and safety. Ever. There is very likely a happier middle ground than where we are now, but they're almost precisely opposed to each other.
One such effect is that many political and legal systems in the West are broken. The general population is apathetic because their voices are so readily ignored by those in power, and special interest groups call the shots. That results in things like an excessively burdensome intellectual property regime, which instead of promoting the development of new ideas and the creation of new products and services by those with meaningful contributions to make, often serves to defend the dying business models of entrenched old players against competition from new players, while in practice offering little benefit to those new players in return because they lack the resources to exploit any advantages they might theoretically have.
Then you combine the resulting culture of resentment by consumers with technology to share creative works instantly, and you not only have a recipe for promoting piracy rather than providing the market with more constructive alternatives that reward the people whose hard work produces things we value (but not enough to bother paying for them, apparently), you also create an over-reaching sense of entitlement in society.
Another negative effect is the kind of education system that we have in many places today where the idea seems to be that no child can be seen to fail, yet it is considered somehow elitist to single out children at the top end of the academic bell curve for any kind of special treatment that would help them to take advantage of their gifts. Here in the UK, for example, we've seen an obvious reduction in the breadth and rigour of exams for at least a generation, and there is a kind of inverse snobbery about selective schools or, worse, schools that charge fees. Of course, those private schools can also use their greater financial resources to employ better educated and trained teachers, provide teaching in smaller groups, and otherwise exploit opportunities to offer a better education to their pupils, but we're supposed to ignore that because if we can't educate all of our children to that standard then damn it we're not going to educate anyone to that standard. Naturally, instead of recognising the obvious flaws in all of this and doing something about it, successive governments and educational institutions seem more concerned with being apologists for the situation, defending this year's school leavers and graduates, and pretending they only tolerate academic high-fliers.
So now we have 50% of the population going to university and, ignoring the significant but still relatively small proportion who now drop out before graduating, every other person has at least a bachelor's degree, and then when they leave university they expect that the same kinds of jobs will be waiting for all of them as were waiting for graduates a generation ago when perhaps 5-10% of the population got the same qualification. The reality is more likely to be a crash course in customer service management with practical training provided in a fast-moving environment (or flipping burgers, as we used to call it). This breeds further resentment, complaints about the high unemployment rate, and so on. Oh, and it also means that many children whose gifts are not academic but who might have made excellent tradesmen or carers or artists or any number of other socially valuable (and often quite financially lucrative, too) roles are pressured into getting certificates that will never be of any real use to them and working 9-5 (sorry, 8-5 or 9-6) in a dead-end office admin job. Did I mention the resentment problem?
There's a whole load more: raising at least one generation with very little respect for anything, the rapid erosion of privacy, the paranoia of governments about anything that might even resemble a possible threat to national security like studying physics, chemistry or engineering, and the list goes on. But this is already a very long post so I won't go into any m...
Or did you have something else in mind?
Bull. It's a common problem for older generations to besmirch younger generations for exactly the same stunts they pulled.
There are still soldiers, Olympians, prodigies, single parents, and many more examples of young people doing things that require a ton of dedication. Every week, Undercover Boss manages to find young people working their tails off to pay for school, medical bills, and work towards their dreams. Last night's episode featured a young man who wanted to be a choreographer but knew he needed schooling to make it; thus he was hauling huge carts of pretzels all over Philly every day to pay for classes.
And yes, there are people who hope to get to middle management as soon as possible. They have tons of motivations but they're no different than the last generation's ton of people who wanted to get stable union jobs. Most of them want to make a decent living to provide a roof and food for their children. The path to doing that has changed generation over generation, but it's still the same idea.
Certainly we can do things to help lift them up and help them innovate, but we're not going to make any progress by calling the next generations lazy.
I've been thinking a lot about how the internet can influence politics in a democratic society more directly. I suspect that there are enough people online organized around various communities to have a measurable impact, but the way voting and candidacy systems are a) not online, and b) tied to geography make it difficult to move into the real world.
Additionally I feel that attention spans on most internet communities is so short that backing something like a real movement or political change isn't really possible. In fact, most of the people I've met who actually care and are willing to make real changes also explicitly reject the internet due to perceived shallowness. They may be right or wrong, but I think the reality is that we have to convince people like that to care, because they're the ones that power movements.
Basically, my thesis is that we are generating more collective wisdom in the past. There are more "raw stories," and scandals are almost impossible to cover up once they're leaked to the public. Representation for all sides of an argument can be found whenever desired. The rabble-rousers of comment sections everywhere are always willing to debate, even if they usually aren't very good. As all age groups start to contribute, it becomes easier to get a "long view" of society now vs. in the past. And at the bare minimum, we have Wikipedia's record of reality, which may not be perfect, but on matters of political importance, is usually wrung dry of fallicious statements very quickly.
While this doesn't change the human condition - we're still going to act in dumb self-interest and get swayed with a lot of the same old tricks - a collective change in perception is a major factor for subsequent changes in action. Everyone says the voting public should be well-informed...and increasingly, they are!
But we're still in the "catch-up" phase. Although there are many obvious problems with society as we know it, that doesn't mean we've found answers yet.
* Honestly HN is the closest I can think of, and it's skewed pretty heavily liberal with a touch of libertarian.
Turned out the whole thing was based on the slightly dodgy research of cyrill burt(http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/burtaffair.shtml and http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/tripartite_education.ht...) on his work on the inhertbillity of iq. Basically he thought it was unlikely for working class kids to become middle class. So why bother?
As someone who goes still lives in a council who keeps grammar schools, but not secondary moderns. It is true that grammar kids are highly tutored for the 11+, that's what my parents did for me. That's how I got in. A lot of friends did too. As result it almost entirely composed of middle class kids who can afford to be tutored for the 11+.
Naturally there is a lot of lobbying by the middle class to bring back grammar schools across the country, because it is effectively free private school as long as you tutor your kids for the 11+.
When I refer to the middle class, I refer the UK definition of it, not the American. In the UK "middle class" roughly refers to upper middle class.
In my opinion it is basically a way for the middle class to divert funds to their own kids, from working class kids in a zero sum game for the education budget.
And trade work isn't financially rewarding, that's a myth. The average wage of a plumber or electrician is 27k, bang on average wage. The only places they get 50K+ is in areas of shortage. I.e Rural Areas.
For more information see
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/tripartite_education.ht...
and google it.
And it's not just about whether the school has more money. There have been plenty of government programmes over the years where schools could change their status in financially beneficial ways, and most if not all of them had nothing to do with being selective.
My concern is that academic ability tends to fit a bell curve. Most children will be somewhere near the middle, and will be able to progress at a similar pace. Towards either end of the bell curve, that stops working, and you need a more individually tailored approach to help each child maximise their potential. That's important to help children who have learning difficulties that can be at least partially overcome with one-on-one tuition, and it's just as important for children who are academically gifted but won't be able to take advantage of it or will even get bored and drop out if they aren't challenged at school. In recent years, there has been a lot of emphasis on special assistance for children with disadvantages, but it seems there's some sort of backlash against also trying to help children with advantages to make the most of them.
If you want a good way to stifle innovation within a society, holding back the smartest kids seems like a safe bet to me.
(In the interests of disclosure: I did go to grammar school and then study at Cambridge, and I did it without paying funny money to anyone. But I'm not really talking about me here, I'm thinking of a couple of friends who were far smarter than I ever was and who joined my school at 16. They had never really been challenged at their previous schools, perhaps because they were likely to get straight As anyway and there was no league table advantage in spending further resources on them. They caught up once they were working with teachers who were used to working with smart kids, but I've always wondered how many other kids didn't get in at either 11 or 16, never grew as much as they could have, never made it into the university they could have, and ultimately never received the education they deserved.)
Edit: Sorry, I forgot to address your other point:
And trade work isn't financially rewarding, that's a myth. The average wage of a plumber or electrician is 27k, bang on average wage. The only places they get 50K+ is in areas of shortage. I.e Rural Areas.
I think you're making my point for me there: in a generation when nearly half the population are coming out of education with a degree, a decent tradesman can still earn a comparable wage.
Also, since the trades are valuable practical skills, there is the chance to earn much more. There's a builder who's been buying up old places near where I live, knocking them down, rebuilding them with his mates, and then selling the new places for a very healthy price. The guy our landlord sends to do maintenance work from time to time runs a couple of businesses doing different things, and from what he's said if he bundled everything in together they might have to register for VAT. The threshold for compulsory registration is something like £77k at the moment, and while that's based on revenue before taxes etc. are paid on it, it still translates to a very respectable salary. When we had an electrician out a few months ago, the cost for him and his apprentice to so some basic work came out at a higher hourly rate than I've ever earned but was consistent with what others had quoted for the job.
Not everyone in the trades is going to get rich, to be sure. But there are plenty of people in the trades who are earning a relatively good wage based on their practical skills. As long as they're doing a good job, I have no problem with that at all, by the way. But why mess around pushing them to study academic subjects they might...
There are tons of dodgy plumbing and electrician scam schools(http://www.plumbing-school.co.uk/), which perpetuate the myth of 50K+ wages. It's in their interest, and it's entirely false. You end with a crappy nvq and no work but they get government grants to train you. I wish people would actually do the research.
You also have to separate wages, and profits when talking about this. Wages are what you can sell your labour for, to other companies relatively risk free. However profits require risk. Most of these high achieving plumbers money comes from the profit his company makes and not via his wages. That's why they always mention their self employed.
What this means, you have to run business and take a lot of risk in order to get that sort of money as a plumber. You could end up bankrupt, and that would not happen via wages. While educated people can obtain a lot of money with relatively little risk via wages. For example the barclay brothers took on enormous risk in order to get where they were. While someone who went to oxbridge and then into a Investment banking graduate scheme doing underwriting took on relatively little risk. They will probably never be at risk of having their home taken away, and being declared bankrupt. However the barclay brothers had to use massive amounts of leverage(Mortgages, Business loans etc) and risk to come from home decorators to owning a business empire.
I also have to mention intelligence is fluid - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15369851. Trying to work out who's smart and who's not is difficult. Achievers may end being terrible, dumb kids may end up being pretty smart over the course of a lifetime.
I know lots of people who went to new universities, who have very good jobs(At my work place). Some of them went onto old universities to complete MSc and MBA degrees and ended up with distinctions. Don't be so small minded, it's like you've been reading right wing tabloid press.
As for fluid intelligence, perhaps things do change at different times for different people, but I don't think I'm going to set aside the general expectation that smart kids will do better if they are challenged at school based on one study of about 30 kids where a few of them moved significantly in one direction or the other between the ages of 14 and 18. I don't see why the two hypotheses are incompatible anyway.
I mean, hell, just strike up a conversation at the pub and you'll find people who "have a very clear about why" everything is broken. Everyone has a pet theory that they're sure is correct. And in that sense the system is doing exactly what we want it to do: it's keeping out the infallibilists, the people who will advance their pet theories in spite of people on all sides pointing out the problems with it. No matter how well-intentioned those people are, it's a very bad idea to hand them the Big Stick of Government if they're going to keep wielding it when we want them to stop. And it's particularly bad if they intend to make sweeping changes - if we're going to be futzing with such powerful structures, we should be taking baby steps!
It's much safer for us to keep the government populated with vote-seeking politicians, and instead to turn out attention to where it should be, which is getting the solutions into the culture. If the electorate all want a particular change, then the politicians will make that change. And if they don't all want a particular change then we shouldn't be imposing it on them. And if they don't care, we should persuade them to - "X doesn't affect you directly, but it will help us make Y cheaper for you" can be effective. If the change really does make a better world for everyone - and not just advancing the interests of one group at the expense of another - then it should be possible to show them that.
I mean, heck, in the US there's an oil billionaire who funds billboards that just advertise "being confident" or "having perseverance." How cool is that? As cultural engineering goes it's pretty crude, but it's a damn good start.
And if your response to this post is "but changing culture is practically impossible," then, well. I think you just found your lack of innovation ;-)
Of course if we're going to get anywhere we have to distinguish strong, uninformed opinions from strong, well-informed ones. But consider the problems with dumbing down the education system. It's not as if the people recruiting new graduates into the professions and complaining that they immediately have to send them for remedial training these days are making it up. There's nothing in it for universities to complain that new students arriving to study the sciences don't have enough maths to complete their first year any more. Every year, schools and government ministers trot out the same kinds of argument about better teaching methods and pupils working harder to justify the ever-rising percentages of candidates receiving top grades. They look pretty foolish next to a critic holding up an 'A' level exam paper that pupils used to take before leaving school at 18 in one hand, and a first year university exam paper taken at 19 from a decade later with essentially the same question on it, or the equivalent with an old 'O' level paper that kids would have taken at 16 a generation ago with more demanding questions than an 'A' level paper kids take at 18 today.
You can only bury your head in the sand for so long before bad things start to happen, but successive governments who want everyone to be seen to succeed have been pushing the education establishment in this direction for a long time, and most of the teachers who knew better have retired by now. The only victims in this will be the children, and to some extent the new generation of teachers who are doing their best and perhaps do have some genuinely improved teaching methods to offer, yet who are perpetually vilified for being part of a system that is not their fault.
It's much safer for us to keep the government populated with vote-seeking politicians, and instead to turn out attention to where it should be, which is getting the solutions into the culture. If the electorate all want a particular change, then the politicians will make that change.
Unfortunately, the corrolation between vote-seeking behaviour and doing what the people collectively want isn't very strong in the current system. Here in the UK, we've been to war for a decade, a war that everyone saw coming and that brought literally millions onto the streets in protest, a war based on false evidence given by political leaders who have suffered little if any adverse consequences personally and who show no remorse for their actions. That's about as serious as it gets.
Of course, it's also against the law to sing "Happy Birthday" to your child in public, drive at 75mph on a completely clear motorway on Christmas morning, or smoke a joint in the privacy of your own home. I realise that the anti-Happy-Birthday lobby is a strong one, but that's going a little far. (And when the government did consult on fixing copyright, and close to 100% of the responses received from the public came down the same way on copyright term extension, Sir Cliff won anyway.)
There is a reason that "campaign finance reform" or whatever you call it locally is always on the political agenda but never gets anywhere. When all you have is an election every few years, and between elections there is no power of recall or ability to force a referendum on a single issue or other strong check on government authority, money talks louder than any concerned individual because a good campaign will win over enough less concerned individuals to make a bigger difference. And that's before you even get to our special kind of politics in Europe where if something isn't palatable to the national electorate you just ki...
Absolutely, but they're a tiny force compared to the parents who all want to send their children to top universities and will vote for any government measure that claims to guarantee that. If a party proposed outlawing university entry requirements, the vast majority of parents would vote for it in a heartbeat and begin making plans to send their kids to Oxbridge or wherever. They don't understand that such a thing would cause those universities to no longer be top universities - at least from a career prospects point of view.
And that's my point: for successive governments to want "everyone to be seen to succeed," the electorate needs to be complicit in that. They have to see such things as success. If they didn't see University as inherently better than the alternatives - the result of thinking that more education is always good, and that formal institutions like universities are the only way to get more education - then they wouldn't consider a policy of increasing university intake to be valuable.
The only victims in this will be the children
The victims in this aren't the children: the victims are everyone. We all suffer from the system being broken. Some more directly than others - being unable to find competent workers is probably less upsetting than being pushed into enduring 3-4 years of timewasting - but everyone to some extent. And yes, that includes the politicians who, at the end of the day, want to buy quality products and to work with competent people, just like the rest of us.
Unfortunately, the corrolation between vote-seeking behaviour and doing what the people collectively want isn't very strong in the current system. Here in the UK, we've been to war for a decade, a war that everyone saw coming and that brought literally millions onto the streets in protest, a war based on false evidence given by political leaders who have suffered little if any adverse consequences personally and who show no remorse for their actions.
Hold on, there. We're talking about whether the government does what the people want or not; if it manipulates them into wanting something in particular, that's a separate issue, so the false evidence point isn't relevant here; many groups manipulate the public, not just the government. And "millions of protestors" do not make for a collective stance on an issue: the largest single anti-war protest was 1 million people in February 2003 - 2% of the population - but a month later YouGov were reporting that 50% of their survey group supported the war. Public opinion was at best divided - it was certainly not united behind one course of action while the government took another.
Anyway, one contentious counterexample does not a correlation make. Can you show a substantial trend of the government acting against majority polling figures across many issues?
Of course, it's also against the law to sing "Happy Birthday" to your child in public, drive at 75mph on a completely clear motorway on Christmas morning, or smoke a joint in the privacy of your own home.
Sure. But so what? They're not enforcing those laws. It's not ideal that they're on the books, but changing the books is expensive and it's better to spend the resources on making changes that are actually connected to the rest of the system. Considering purely what's statutory is taking things out of context.
On a related note: it always strikes me that people devote a lot of time and money to sports and celebrities while cool tech is ignored. Imagine that all that time/money was devoted to science...
- The mars colony would prove a point more than being a revolution nowadays (same reason why we don't return to the moon much often).
- We 're not really worried about lack of energy sources either, because our sun will be bright enough for long, and the relevant science is known for almost a century
- Our chores been taken care by technology enough it seems, so we 're now feeding our brains. It's not very visible externally as the industrial transformation of the earth was, but the human brain has been upgraded significantly and irreversibly by the instant access to all the world's information.
I thought the article would be about why internet innovation is not that so fast paced anymore... i was wrong.
I also degree with the people saying that the current legal system is the problem; in fact I don't think there's any way to speed up innovation at all. I think we're started to reach the limit of wealth-generating opportunities. The train, the telegraph, electricity, cars, factories -- these revolutionised people's lives. I think we're now getting close to peak "innovation" -- it's getting harder and harder to find new ways to seriously improve people's lives. Smartphones and the internet have changed people's lives, too, but they're only major changes of the last few decades.
Now, a fair response might be -- we still don't have a cure for cancer! We still haven't colonised space! We still haven't built an AI! Nanorobots! 3D printing! And people are working on all those problems. And technologically, yes, they're much more complex and advanced than anything built in the industrial revolution.
But look at it from an economic point of view -- and I'm talking about the foundation of economics. Economics is based on value; human value. Stuff people want, as pg said.
I want a box on my desk that can print useful objects, but probably not as much as my great-great-grandfather wanted to be able to heat his home without having to burn things. We want a cure for cancer, but not as much as past generations wanted a cure for cholera, typhoid or the bubonic plague.
That's why processers keep getting faster but economic growth keeps slowing. Technology advances exponentially, but human wealth grows logistically. The natural limit is the limit of human happiness. Example: World economic growth is mostly driven by developing countries playing catch up to the West's living standards. Heck, even Adam Smith himself said that economic growth would only last a few centuries.
I guess each new iPhone app or Facebook game does make people marginally happier, the entertainment value does have economic value. But again, this is scraping the barrel of value creation. Are there still ways to majorly improve people's lives out there? Possibly, we're definitely not in utopia yet, but I think we'll need a new definition of wealth to get there.
I should really write up the above ideas into a proper blog post soon. Would be interested to hear people's opinions first.
I don't have any answers, but it sure is frustrating that thousands of people will die today due to "solved" problems -- many from lack of food and water, of all things. :(
Could the equivalent pair of bicycle mechanics build the first reusable spaceship or electric flying car? Building a new space launch system will cost $500m+. Neither governments nor large aerospace firms are willing to take large risks with this amount of money. Incremental improvements to proven systems are much easier to justify.
I think crowd-funding and the Internet will lead to a new boom in innovation. The Pebble watch is a good example. The VC's turned them down, and now the public has pre-purchased $7m of Pebble watches in two weeks.
We need new forms of risk capital for inventors. VCs and governments are not going to fund enough high risk innovation. They both rejected my pitch for electric aviation saying it was "too ambitious for a startup" (http://electrictakeoff.com).
And then it would be much easier to get investment ?
Yes inventing new things is increasingly more complex, but there are ways to decrease this complexity. there's no wonder that there is a huge amount of software innovation, since the software field is deeply focused on decreasing complexity and enables new inventions.
> More prosaically, the 15 years since the internet became a major part of our lives has been marked here in the U.S. — birthplace of the internet — by mostly disappointing economic growth.
It seems like an old-fashioned viewpoint to conflate innovation and creativity with economic growth. If we're seeing more innovation, we must be spending more money, right? Well ... not so fast. Consider a classic Internet innovation, the search engine. It opens up worlds upon worlds of information to the common person's fingertips. But it only rarely convinces people to buy something extra. (It does make buying things easier, which is a big reason that ad revenues are so big, but it probably doesn't grow consumption all that much[0].)
For a better example, look at Wikipedia. Direct economic impact, measured in GDP growth? Hard to say. But it's tough to argue that Wikipedia isn't an awesome example of human creativity and collaboration, or that it hasn't made a big positive impact.
My argument: the Internet era has just made us more efficient. We can do more with less money. Economic growth is not desirable in and of itself -- only when it is a signal of increasing quality of life. The Internet has enabled greatly increased quality of life without an increase in spending.
[0] (edit) Wild guess on my part. Could be wrong.
»for decades, electricity had little effect on industrial productivity as manufacturers simply swapped out older energy sources for electric power but changed nothing about how they made things. It was only as new factories were built that took advantage of the unique properties of electric motors that a productivity boom ensued.
Wikipedia, Google, et al are innovations in the way the stock market or ECN were - undeniable leaps forward in the factors of production, i.e. allowing tangible innovation to happen.
These innovations, the latter in capital and former in information, hold their social value in the tangible progress they enable. What is enabled has not materialised with the force that was expected.
This will be an unpopular point on HackerNews, but most people live in the tangible world. That is why the iPhone and iPad have propelled Apple so far, so fast - it is a clear manifestation of tangible technological progress. The author laments that these factors of innovation are getting so much attention intrinsically at the expense of follow-on, arguably harder, tangible innovation.
Ebay? Etsy? Kickstarter? Hipmunk? Netflix? Amazon?
When it comes to commerce and trade, the internet has definitely had a real, tangible effect on our societies. The above examples are just some services that make it easier and cheaper to connect buyers and sellers, and that have rationalized delivery-chains which in turn led to massively cheaper prices for end consumers.
Finding things to buy has never been easier. Finding buyers for your stuff has never been easier. Finding the globally cheapest price for stuff has never been easier.
Maybe tangible is the wrong word; perhaps innovating on the commanding heights of the economy is more apt. By this measure Google does qualify as a fundamental innovation as it retraces the market for information. The others, energy, materials, transportation, military, etc. are seeing incremental innovation but not yet breakthroughs. Exceptions may be held as graphene and carbon fibre, self-driving cars, automated weapons systems, etc.
Disclaimer: I am not Malcolm Gladwell; I love being delighted and don't want to weigh down one type of innovation under another. But I do think there are different types of innovation and that we need a balance. The balance today seems to be skewed, probably due to regulatory factors that will even themselves out in inter-generational and inter-superpower timescales, but skewed nonetheless.
But yes, except economic growth , it has brought huge benefits.
Empirically, change DID slow down a great deal with the advent of the Internet. If you listen to the hope buried in the regret of Pink Floyd's "Division Bell" ( which specifically refers to the Usenet postings of Publius ) can you feel anything but a great sadness for what might have been? Remember Usenet? It was amazing, for a while. Then they turned away...
Leo McGarry: My generation never got the future it was promised... Thirty-five years later, cars, air travel is exactly the same. We don't even have the Concorde anymore. Technology stopped.
Josh Lyman: The personal computer...
Leo McGarry: A more efficient delivery system for gossip and pornography? Where's my jet pack, my colonies on the Moon?
It's worthwhile to encourage everyone to aim higher. But this article comes off as a rant.
A: Imho, when innovation and production of material goods is as democratized by 3D Printing and similar technologies [1] as knowledge innovation and production was by the Internet.
I'm looking forward to the day the impedance mismatch between knowledge creation and tool/product creation is much reduced from the current state.
Good summary [1] by the Economist for anyone who hasn't read it.
1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3895690