5 ms·

Silicon Valley hasn’t innovated since 1978

8 points by kick 7y ago

theamk 7y ago
So do we need massive, government funded research labs to create innovation? Or is it the case that “The most interesting technical work is being done by individuals and small groups”? Those seem like contradictory statements to me.
- acuozzo 7y ago
  Paradigm-shifting research can be conducted in both of these seemingly-contradictory environments. The most important common factor is freedom: the freedom to play; to experiment; to pursue whatever seems interesting; to fuck around. An individual conducting research during leisure time is certainly free to pursue whatever seems worthwhile. Similarly, an individual conducting research for an institution willing to lose gobs of money on the whims of its researchers (e.g. Bell Labs) is free to pursue whatever seems worthwhile. True invention of born of creativity and creativity is attenuated by even the lightest shackles.
danShumway 7y ago
> Somebody who had used an Alto in 1979 could travel through time and sit down at a modern PC and know basically how to do most tasks — they would think of a modern PC as a faster but less featureful stripped down Alto clone, like the Star was. I'm not sure what to say other than that this is completely absurd to me. It's very difficult for me to think about where to begin describing how much I disagree with that statement, I think it's almost a kind of wishful thinking. I guess the most charitable reading I can come up with is it's taking an extremely narrow view of innovation. My guess is if I brought up smartphones, the author would say that people had thought of those before 1978, even if they hadn't built them in a way ordinary people could use. Or, maybe they'd make the argument that smartphones were an evolution, and that they weren't a completely mind-blowing paradigm shift that fundamentally altered the world on the scale of the Internet -- and evolutions don't count. But, if that's your criteria for innovation, nobody has innovated in any industry or any public sphere since 1979. > Meanwhile, to somebody from 1940, home computer tech of 1980 would be mind-blowing. Such a person, even if they were in computing, would not be familiar with the concept of a programming language (since stored program computers didn’t exist yet). I can't think of any consumer-available technology or innovation that's happened in the last 40 years in any field of research that fits this criteria for me. The closest thing I can think of is quantum computing, which is a) a stretch to fit this definition, and b) being heavily invested into and researched by Silicon Valley companies like Google. I do know that in my personal lifetime, the way that computers and the Internet are used has evolved to such a degree that there are experiences I can't share with kids I know -- there are things I describe to them that they don't grok anymore. I do know that I regularly talk to people in their 50s and 60s that feel the same way about technology I'm familiar with. They don't feel like it's a minor evolution in access, they feel like it's a small-scale paradigm shift that they're almost not equipped to follow. If your criteria for innovation isn't that it be on the scale of "we invented programming", then it's undeniable that over the past 40 years society has been regularly changing at an almost alarming rate because of new technology. Purely looking around my desk right now, I'm seeing a digital art-station that's good enough that I no longer need to scan drawings, I'm seeing my smartphone, I'm seeing 2 Raspberry Pis, I'm seeing a pile of hard drives big enough to fundamentally change the way I think about data storage, I'm seeing a MIDI keyboard with good enough key-travel to substitute for a traditional piano, and I've got a free 3D rendering program open that's powerful enough to replicate the animation techniques Pixar was pioneering as recently as 1995.

8 points by kick 7y ago

So do we need massive, government funded research labs to create innovation? Or is it the case that “The most interesting technical work is being done by individuals and small groups”? Those seem like contradictory statements to me.

acuozzo 7y ago
Paradigm-shifting research can be conducted in both of these seemingly-contradictory environments. The most important common factor is freedom: the freedom to play; to experiment; to pursue whatever seems interesting; to fuck around. An individual conducting research during leisure time is certainly free to pursue whatever seems worthwhile. Similarly, an individual conducting research for an institution willing to lose gobs of money on the whims of its researchers (e.g. Bell Labs) is free to pursue whatever seems worthwhile. True invention of born of creativity and creativity is attenuated by even the lightest shackles.

danShumway 7y ago

> Somebody who had used an Alto in 1979 could travel through time and sit down at a modern PC and know basically how to do most tasks — they would think of a modern PC as a faster but less featureful stripped down Alto clone, like the Star was. I'm not sure what to say other than that this is completely absurd to me. It's very difficult for me to think about where to begin describing how much I disagree with that statement, I think it's almost a kind of wishful thinking. I guess the most charitable reading I can come up with is it's taking an extremely narrow view of innovation. My guess is if I brought up smartphones, the author would say that people had thought of those before 1978, even if they hadn't built them in a way ordinary people could use. Or, maybe they'd make the argument that smartphones were an evolution, and that they weren't a completely mind-blowing paradigm shift that fundamentally altered the world on the scale of the Internet -- and evolutions don't count. But, if that's your criteria for innovation, nobody has innovated in any industry or any public sphere since 1979. > Meanwhile, to somebody from 1940, home computer tech of 1980 would be mind-blowing. Such a person, even if they were in computing, would not be familiar with the concept of a programming language (since stored program computers didn’t exist yet). I can't think of any consumer-available technology or innovation that's happened in the last 40 years in any field of research that fits this criteria for me. The closest thing I can think of is quantum computing, which is a) a stretch to fit this definition, and b) being heavily invested into and researched by Silicon Valley companies like Google. I do know that in my personal lifetime, the way that computers and the Internet are used has evolved to such a degree that there are experiences I can't share with kids I know -- there are things I describe to them that they don't grok anymore. I do know that I regularly talk to people in their 50s and 60s that feel the same way about technology I'm familiar with. They don't feel like it's a minor evolution in access, they feel like it's a small-scale paradigm shift that they're almost not equipped to follow. If your criteria for innovation isn't that it be on the scale of "we invented programming", then it's undeniable that over the past 40 years society has been regularly changing at an almost alarming rate because of new technology. Purely looking around my desk right now, I'm seeing a digital art-station that's good enough that I no longer need to scan drawings, I'm seeing my smartphone, I'm seeing 2 Raspberry Pis, I'm seeing a pile of hard drives big enough to fundamentally change the way I think about data storage, I'm seeing a MIDI keyboard with good enough key-travel to substitute for a traditional piano, and I've got a free 3D rendering program open that's powerful enough to replicate the animation techniques Pixar was pioneering as recently as 1995.