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Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?

• dazzawazza 17y ago
  It may not seem like a revolution but I think the micro loan model is a huge revolution. Not just because it lifts people from poverty and empowers. One of the most important things it does is show people in rich countries that poor people are both hard working and honest and are not in need of charity but are in need of help. We've been stuck in a cycle of giving charity to poor countries and nothing seems to be getting better. MLs have helped to break that cycle and empower ordinary people (not warlords, clerics or politicians). So I think that's an innovation :)
• csuper 17y ago
  Because all of the necessities are covered? Death by comfort?
  • dnsworks 17y ago
    But they aren't. Humanity is a social failure. The number of people who go without food, shelter, and basic healthcare in this world is pretty staggering.
    • fcu_1 17y ago
      Historically speaking, those people haven't been the main engines of innovation. The well educated and necessity-fulfilled crowd has apparently lost some of their competitive appetite. China and India should close the education gap in a decade or so and things should get interesting.
    • jacoblyles 17y ago
      The proportion of people who go without basic necessities is at or near an all time low.
      • dnsworks 17y ago
        And that somehow makes it better? Can you say with a straight face there's a good reason that anybody in this country should be homeless or hungry when we've spent a trillion dollars fighting enemies who weren't really enemies in the past decade?
• gprisament 17y ago
  The movie Idiocracy explains it all.
• makecheck 17y ago
  Part of the problem is that there are too many lock-in and obfuscation mechanisms in place: monopolies, patents (ironically created to "help" innovation), and legal nonsense making everything 1000% more complex than it often needs to be. How many people have jobs whose sole purpose is to sift through this crap: be it insurance forms, etc.? The argument is always, "well at least they have jobs"; when the reality is that it's not a good sign for society to have so many people with jobs that are not directly adding value. Part of the problem is the end of the Cold War. When the U.S. was interested in "beating" the Soviet Union to space travel, etc. there were lots of things going on. Now, perhaps China and India will step up to compete in this way and drive future developments. If there aren't superpowers, things slow down. Part of it is that some people just don't care where we are, versus where we could be. As crappy as life can be, the average quality of life still seems to be higher than at any point in the past. It seems that the majority of people stop demanding something better, once they are basically comfortable. (There are exceptions to that, of course.) These things all have side effects, such as fewer jobs, less chance of receiving a good education, etc., so that after awhile, a small problem becomes a big one.
• gkefalas 17y ago
  In terms of medical advances, there may not have been any major blockbuster disease cures found, but there were several very important advances & innovations. I'll crib from ABC News and call out a few that I think are impressive as a layperson: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Decade/genome-hormones-top-10-medical-advances-decade/story?id=9356853 http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Decade/genome-hormones-top-10-m... - Heart disease numbers dropped considerably: so many heart-related diseases and emergencies that previously would be fatal or have many more severe consequences are now survivable and livable. - Stem cell research: even with the lack of US/federal funding, stem cell research started to bear fruit, and looks to only grow from here. - Improved cancer survival rates for many types of cancers: Huge. We're a long way away from a real cure, but survival rates have never been higher. - Incredible advances in arthroscopic & noninvasive/outpatient surgery & procedures: In 2004-ish I blew out the "terrible triad" of knee ligaments; my surgery scars are just little dots. My brother had similar surgery just about 6-8 years prior to that, and he bears the ugly long scar over his kneecap. That's just gleaned from one decade-end retrospective article, and is just focused on medical advances. But also, stop and think back to the internet in 2000 versus where we are now. There's been a hell of a lot of innovation there, as well; think of all of the things that are now possible or even commonplace to do online that were merely a gleam in our minds a decade ago... If anything, just thinking about the pieces and foundations that were put in place throughout the 00s excites me for the possibilities of this next decade even more. It should be a very exciting time.
  • PieSquared 17y ago
    An anecdote about noninvasive surgery and such. My mother had a similar injury. She blew out ligaments on her right knee in 2002, and then one her left leg in 2008. Look at one leg, you see a big scar from the top of the knee to the bottom. Look at the other, you see pretty much nothing. (Also, it's great. You can endure that type of trauma twice, and still be participating in intense sports such as alpine skiing and such.)
  • dnsworks 17y ago
    I will definitely buy this. Stem cell research might be the one "world-changing" innovation that's happened since the dawn of the internet, but I don't know if we'll have a clear view of that for another decade. Arthroscopic surgery is also pretty awesome. So maybe it isn't all bleak. Maybe it's just the tech industry that has failed to do anything but sell us more crap, invade our privacy, and advertise us into submission.
• robryan 17y ago
  As a society we put a lot of effort at the moment into incremental improvement rather than completely new innovation. When TV, Cars, Computers, The Internet were invented they were all breaking new ground in innovation because they were big areas that helped with life. Now I think more smart people look at the way things are and can't see as many obvious things missing, so instead choose to incrementally improve what we have, either that or the goal is very ambitious and puts people off attempting, such as manned spaceflight beyond low earth orbit and a cure for cancer ect
  • evgen 17y ago
    When TV, cars, computers, etc. were invented they were breaking new ground because they were areas where the low-hanging fruit were within easy reach. The hard part, the one that took decades for each invention, was turning them from a neat curiosity into an indispensable part of daily life. I hate to break it to you, but "the Internet" may have been quite innovative for the first two or three decades of its existence, but it didn't mean jack shit to humanity. Back when midnight cabling runs through campus steam tunnels to deploy a SLIP line was "cutting edge" it may have seemed like the coolest thing in the world and an obvious game-changer to us at the time but it had absolutely zero impact on 99.9999999% of humanity. The past ten to fifteen years of so-called "incremental" improvement have turned a glorified research toy into useful and productive part of daily life for a large portion of the planet.
• shib71 17y ago
  Access to knowledge through things like open courseware and one laptop per child. These movements are in their infancy now as they get bigger the 00's will be known the decade they were born. Mobile phones (and the related communications) have gone from first world luxury to being more common than clean fresh water in many third world countries.
• brlewis 17y ago
  This has been a great decade for computing. 1.4MB removable storage was the norm 10 years ago. Right now I have incredibly fast 4GB removable storage in my pocket. Ten years ago we didn't have USB 2.0. Wireless protocols weren't as good. Digital cameras were mostly toys, and digital video was almost nonexistent. CVS was state-of-the-art version control. Hosting was expensive. I love 2010.
  • gkefalas 17y ago
    Agreed! Technology has continued to march on, and entirely new product categories have gone from "an idea"to gain popular usage. I mean, even just the advances in pure hardware and technology manufacturing are pretty impressive and have opened up so many more possibilities than what we had a decade ago.
• whatusername 17y ago
  The # of people lifted out of extreme poverty in China/India is pretty substantial. The Human Genome project and sequencing. Wikipedia is pretty substantial. All that information for free for everyone.
  • mechanical_fish 17y ago
    Lifting people out of poverty is pretty important. The biggest bang for the buck in "curing diseases" is getting more out of the cures we already have. Just because malaria is old news in the USA doesn't mean that it doesn't kill 1.5 to 3 million children per year. Remember, also, that a side effect of technological progress is complacency. These days we don't applaud when medical geniuses cure the pandemic flu within less than nine months of the first US case (have you noticed that there's an H1N1 vaccine now?); instead we complain that it wasn't cured far enough in advance. Or we allow statistically ignorant people to start moral panics about rare or nonexistent side effects of the new cure.
• drcode 17y ago
  I agree completely- I don't know why so many people insist that technological progress is improving at an exponential rate when the empirical evidence seems to contradict this so clearly.
  • mechanical_fish 17y ago
    ... and what empirical evidence would that be exactly? Surely, if it is empirical, you can cite it! Could you at least define what you mean by technological progress?
    • drcode 17y ago
      Cheaper food, better cars, faster computers, improved life expectancy, cheaper energy, better education, enhancements to human intelligence, better public transportation, more efficient manufacturing, better understanding of biology, better understanding of physics. Empirically, it seems to me all of the above have seen noticeable, but merely linear improvements in the last decade. (admittedly, computers are much faster for parallelizable algorithms, such as 3D graphics, but not for the majority of software which is serial in nature) "access to information", "density of storage" and "communications tools" are three that I think could be argued to have improved by an order of magnitude in the last decade. I would guess though that out of those, only "communications tools" will see similar dramatic changes in the next decade (cell phones and other communication links are still pretty crappy right now) I think the amount of information on the web in the next decade will increase, but at a surprisingly modes rate. (BTW- I hope I'm wrong and we have more exponential improvements to look forward to)
      • emmett 17y ago
        Exponential doesn't mean "growing really fast". Exponential means "growth by a fixed percentage per year". The economy grows exponentially at around 2-3% per year. What evidence do you have that things are improving linearly rather than exponentially?
        • 17y ago
• DTrejo 17y ago
  HN was created.
• gabrielroth 17y ago
  There were a lot of innovations in the financial sector in the last ten years, because that's where a lot of the incentive to innovate was coming from. Unfortunately, some of those innovations were very destructive, and most of the rest had no benefit to society. There were probably some new tools that resulted in more efficient allocation of capital, but those gains were swamped by the damage done.
• jsz0 17y ago
  I think you're being a bit too hard on humanity.. -Dozens of extrasolar planets discovered. -Confirmation of water on Mars. -Completed the principal construction of ISS -Cassini–Huygens -AIDS drug therapy drastically increasing life spans -US elects a black President -Lowest number of homicides in the US since the 1960s
  • dnsworks 17y ago
    I won't be impressed until humans no longer fgeel the need to point out that a leader is of a specific color. That's just proof that racism is very real. And Mr. Obama himself is filled with religious hatred, as seen by his turncoat stance on the "Defense Of Marriage Act" that he originally promised to repeal. A black man denying others equality is pretty messed up.
    • jacoblyles 17y ago
      I am pretty sure he is the first black man elected head of state in any country that is not majority black, and I know of no precedent of a leader being elected from any racial minority that makes up only 13% of a nation. Outside of cutting into people's brains and taking out in-group preferences that have existed since before the Cambrian explosion, I don't know what else you want us to do. Barack's election does say something about how far the power of racism has declined as a force in American society. Now the rest of the world, they are still racist as hell. Try pulling the same stunt in Japan, or France.
      • shabda 17y ago
        > Now the rest of the world, they are still racist as hell. Try pulling the same stunt in Japan, or France. And thats statement is not racists at all > I know of no precedent of a leader being elected from any racial minority that makes up only 13% of a nation. India. We currently have a Sikh PM(religious minority, 1.3%, from wikipedia), our last President was Muslim(13.43%). There have been 3 Presidents of India, from religious minority groups below 13%. Thats not racial minority, of course, but afaik, US is yet to have a non Christian president? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_India http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_India
• jacquesm 17y ago
  I think it may be that you simply have enough bandwidth to do whatever it is that you want to do, would you be willing to pay a premium to get more ? I have 20Mbps here and 90% of the time I'm under 10% usage. And I consider myself a pretty heavy internet user. Innovation is probably not measured very well by looking at your DSL upload speed. A decade ago your pc would have been running at 3 to 400 MHz tops (single core!), have 32M of ram and maybe a 40G drive (if you had the money). By those measures the price of storage and of processing has come down considerably. (edit: and don't forget the SSD revolution that is about to become true, if you like spinning media have a good look at them because they're about to go extinct). And then there are lots of fields outside computing where we have advanced tremendously in the last decade, one of my favorites is the 'camera pill'. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3606947/ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3606947/ But there are plenty of others.
  • dnsworks 17y ago
    It's an imbalance. I've never really needed more than 5mbps down, but I NEED 20mbps up or greater for my daily interest in the internet, mainly video and photography. Broadband is just another case where status quo has been maintained by lobbying and corporate bulling at the cost of losing our competitive edge and restricting our ability to grow. Cheaper isn't terribly exciting, it's just .. well, cheaper. As to more storage, memory and processing power, so what? My desktop still feels as sluggish and kludgy as it did a decade ago. The use case changed. Browsers are still awful, maybe not in direct feature for feature comparison, but how we use them now (flash, ajax, multiple tabs) they're just as slow and unreliable.
    • jacquesm 17y ago
      Ask around, when I was living in Toronto I found out that a neighbouring company had pulled in fiber, they let me piggyback on to theirs for a relatively low fee. If you need it then I assume it's work related so you probably have some budget available. You'd be surprised how much fiber has been pulled in metropolitan areas. If you're in the sticks or some small town then it's a different matter, but you could conceivably do something with channel bonding, or ask your ISP how many dineros they want for a symmetrical arrangement.
• tigerthink 17y ago
  Google Maps is pretty cool.
• epochwolf 17y ago
  Well we have wikipedia now. I think that's a huge leap forward.
• ynniv 17y ago
  Any increases in privacy, civil rights, human rights, intolerance? These are ancient problems... don't expect a quick fix, especially via technology. http://www.ted.com/talks/billy_graham_on_technology_faith_and_suffering.html http://www.ted.com/talks/billy_graham_on_technology_faith_an...
• lmkg 17y ago
  I, for one, agree that the pace of technological innovation has somewhat slowed down of recently. Compared to nuclear energy, television, the space race, the complete eradication of small pox, personal computers, test tube babies, and the internet, the last 10 years seem a little disappointing. Modern miracles like the iphone and even-faster broadband and faster JavaScript engines seems like incremental improvements rather than major breakthroughs like quantum computing or true AI or whatever. On the other hand, a lot of people are trying and succeeding and changing people's everyday lives with the technology we have, so maybe it's good that we've had a little breather for industry to catch up to science, as it were. Technological development in the United States between WWII and the last decade was propelled by a couple of conditions that don't exist currently, most notably the Cold War spurring billions of federal dollars into technological research and a few big-ass monopolies dumping billions of dollars into long-term research. The Space Race raised the profile of science and math education in the US, and quite a lot of modern technology has roots in the space program or military programs, including a lot of CS-related technologies. The internet was a military project, and the US has had AI run their logistics since 1991. A lot of industrial-type innovations, including manufacturing and deployment operations, nuclear technology, and the first digital computers even trace back to WWII. The US government was also a huge early adopter of computing technologies like mainframes, spurring private development. Meanwhile a few large monopolies had major research labs, most infamously Bell and IBM. I'll be the first to admit that monopolies have drawbacks and usually aren't a good thing, but because they didn't have to worry so much about quarterly earnings they dumped massive amounts of revenue into long-term strategies. Such research investments are arguably important primary causes of desktop computers and our national communications infrastructure. Google and Microsoft seem to have assumed these mantles. Microsoft, for its part, is putting a lot of work into more fundamental research, although we haven't seen a big payoff yet. Google seems to spend a lot of time on pet projects like Wave. That's probably an unfair assessment, but their long-term horizons are more on the order of 18-month product cycles than 10-year research projects. So that's my take on it. The military-industrial complex and industrial monopolies allowed for massive projects to create big-ass breakthroughs. Without those drivers, academic research has delved into political infighting for funding and companies have become myopic so our view of 'innovation' becomes faster paced, but incremental rather than revolutionary. There's been more focus on use and users, but at the cost of fundamental developments. Whether this is "better" is anyone's guess. Faster incremental improvements get to market faster and therefore affect day-to-day life more, but my personal opinion is that the pendulum ought to swing back towards the breakthroughs, at least temporarily, to give the rabid markets something big and juicy to improve upon some time soon.
• slvrspoon 17y ago
  i work with a hacker startup focused on impact of these issues and there is a ton of info there: http://www.givewell.net http://www.givewell.net
• tungstenfurnace 17y ago
  Affluent people are aggressively hooked on entertainment and stress-based productivity, which has dampened creativity and optimism somewhat, imo. One field generating a lot of exciting discoveries seems to be materials science.
• jodrellblank 17y ago
  I'm in bed typing on a triple radio, camera, touch, motion, sound and proximity sensitive phone so I can't easily get links for citations from the wotld's first distibuted volunteer enyclopedia, but I think I read there that Guinea worm infection is well on the way to being the next eradicated disease, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation. I think you have rose tinted glasses on the past - in 2000 I was at university where they ran NT4 with Netscape, and was rocking a Celeron 433, with a new USB1 100Mb zip drive. Now a 4Gb pen drive holds 400x more and costs 1/25th the price and tranfers data faster. New cars today can have vision recognition blind spot checkers, radar based cruise control, pedestrian sensors, brake appliers, regenerative brakes, head up displays, Internet connections, all in ordinary models not 100k luxury ones. The UK has migrated to digital TV and Radio. In 1999 I bought a VHS recorder, now HDD recorders are standard. In 2000 there was nothing as good as Skype, train times were on paper in stations, airport checkins had queues, maps were paper based, polyphonic ringtones on phones were fancy, the HP200lx was the netbook of choice, the L prize for LED lights was nowhere to be seen, nor were snooks or really Amazon and Internet shopping and consumer reviewing on such a grand scale. Joule Biotechnologies, the LHC, ITunes university, the idea of an OLPC, virtual machines all absent. China, new fastest train recently. Now, if I had the cash, I could put a deposit down for a personal space flight! I hear you on the computer still chugging thing, but don't want Netscape back.
• samstokes 17y ago
  Smartphones are transformative. They're already affecting popular culture and will do so even more as they become more widespread. (One simple example: arranging to meet a friend at a location new to one or both of you can be more spontaneous if you both have GPS-enabled local search.) I suspect most of the changes are for the better, although I'm sure there's an argument to the contrary.