3 ms·
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 we
by 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 agoWhen 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.