8 ms·

Have we simply stopped the process of innovating new things that solve problems?

56 points by winternett 5y ago

unemphysbro 5y ago
Adding to the authors point; I think there's quite a bit of innovation through maintenance. Reducing the tech debt in existing infrastructure eg. education, transport, etc I have a gut feeling that societal cohesiveness is somehow lost through 'profit-driven' maintenance.
9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
Yes, indirectly, by grinding the wrong goals. Not only that, I’m not sure that we have even begun the education process required for finding problems or innovating.
Arubis 5y ago
No, but a lot of us figured out that it's currently a lot more profitable to sell to businesses than consumers.
rck 5y ago
Related: https://future.a16z.com/its-time-to-build/ https://future.a16z.com/its-time-to-build/
ericls 5y ago
We don't know enough about ourselves to know what the problems are anymore.
- kleer001 5y ago
  I would say most of the low hanging fruit is gone, but yea.
- kempbellt 5y ago
  A problem worthy of an innovative solution.
  - ericls 5y ago
    exactly, sometimes I think if somehow I could push our understanding of ourselves forward even a little bit further, I'd die with a smile.
- winternett 5y ago
  >We don't know enough about ourselves to know what the problems are anymore. Agreed. Many would say this is because the process of online communication has not really been "pushed forward". We discouraged email years ago in favor of walled communication in social media communities. There are literally trillions of epic conversations happening in places where they'll never get seen or shared beyond within those communities... Those communities also ratio (in many ways) the ability for ideas to be found and seen by others within and outside of those communities, and also incentivize others word-wide to parrot and copy ideas from the original authors and then present them as their own, without properly crediting or attributing the original author... This is exactly where the conflict to real innovation that was meant for the Internet resides.
q_andrew 5y ago
I think there have been plenty of problem-solving innovations, but there's a sort of 'market efficiency' effect on innovations that require less complexity. Once the kitchen knife was invented, any sort of slicer-dicer tool is just a rehashing of the knife concept. However, when the problems get more complex (E.G., the automation arm that anneals metal is now utilizing neural networks to make sure the kitchen knife does not have deformities), actual solutions are harder to recognize. HVAC can make your building safer from the pandemic, but it usually comes down to whether your boss wants to pay for it. Remote work can be effective, but it needs healthy hours and employee trust to do well. Those are human issues that you can't necessarily innovate away.
readingnews 5y ago
It takes a lot more effort to make tangible things that solve problems than it does to sell data to companies that will pay for it.
lbriner 5y ago
This is a massive over-simplification. The issue isn't that people are not innovating, it's that there are long routes to delivery for many things. Medical changes take years to test and approve; AI takes ages to adapt; hundreds of companies already produce innovative products that are simply unknown and even air-conditioning companies can't exactly perform a 5 minute tweak to something to clean ventilation systems, any changes are likely to require training, availability of tradespeople, significant disruption and then ongoing maintenance costs.
- winternett 5y ago
  Agreed, it's part of a much larger discussion, with limits on web real estate, getting to the point quickly and being succinct becomes more and more important. There surely are ground breaking innovations every day, but especially lately, the unremarkable ones push them out of the way in favor of quick headlines that spur impulse-driven investment. We all probably can recall how popular an effort to "catapult" very rich and famous people into the outer atmosphere was and still is, while we have already travelled to the moon, decades prior at that.... Whether any of the things getting the most public recognition and funding these days really be considered as "game changing innovation" is the real question raised.
dzdt 5y ago
It is more profitable to convince consumers that a previously unrecognized thing is a problem that needs solving. Then your 'solution' can be the best and only one available. For previously recognized problems there is so much pesky competition.
mschuster91 5y ago
Indeed we have, and a large part of what has happened is that the governments have drastically cut down on basic R&D in science. Our best researchers are wasting half or more of their time chasing one tiny bit of research grant after another so that they can continue for a couple more months of work - how do you expect actual results to appear from that burst-like work? We need to fund scientific research in a more sustainable way, and that soon. And of those brilliant minds who don't want to subject themselves to that kind of bull dung because they want to, say, start a family and want a stable life with a decent wage, most end up working for Facebook to sell ads or for financial traders. Neither of which is in any kind productive to the progress of society. And the global mega-corporations that used to fund their own massive research institutions also seem to have lost their way, especially as R&D spending isn't received well by the stock markets...
- winternett 5y ago
  > And the global mega-corporations that used to fund their own massive research institutions also seem to have lost their way, especially as R&D spending isn't received well by the stock markets... Agreed. This is the plot here... We're becoming so driven to cater every business towards investment driven goals that we don't realize how much it's strangling epic innovation that does good. Massive financial growth and market dominance of companies that do not truly innovate will only advance many of the negativity and problems we experience with the quality and reliability of consumer products, environmental destruction, erosion of worker protections and family life, and so much more.
renewiltord 5y ago
In all honesty, I disagree entirely. I see innovative stuff all the time. It strikes me that if you treat everything innovative with cynicism you can state it in that way: - antibiotics: just better drugs - GMO crops or the Green Revolution: just being more deliberate about what people did for thousands of years - going to space: we can barely go under the sea, this is just that but up - the Internet: phones, you've invented phones - phones: talking to people, you've invented talking - talking: just grunting with more sounds There is a lot of wonderful stuff going on in the world, but if you filter to stuff you can dismiss, you're just going to see everything as worthless. This is a common thing a lot of people find really hard to understand. A good critic isn't one who places the bar so high that nothing meets it. A good critic is one who can separate exceptional from mundane. If nothing is exceptional, it is likely the problem is that you're not good at determining whether something is. Just in a Bayesian sense, if your barometer says it's 1 atm literally everywhere, more likely the barometer is broken than that pressure has equalized everywhere in the universe.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > - antibiotics: just better drugs We haven't had a single new class of antibiotics discovered for well over 30 years [1]. And now, especially since humanity was dumb enough to use reserve antibiotics in farm animals, we're looking at a disaster. [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02884-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02884-3
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    "Antibiotics are just the same as the 2000 year old mould remedies employed in Ancient Egypt or India. Mould, you've invented mould." Haha! This is such an entertaining technique. I can see why people talk like this. It's pointlessly dismissive.
jrm4 5y ago
It's an oversimplification, but I'm glad its being said. I think what's driving it is that 1. The internet brought a ton of actual amazing innovation. 2. Because people are correctly excited about it, this brought marketing opportunities. 3. Today, it is profitable to market stuff that superficially appears to be like that older, actual innovation, but is not innovative in the slightest. This is happening SO much, that it's crowding out (the marketing and spreading of) real innovation.
- dkonofalski 5y ago
  While that's verifiable as true, that doesn't mean that innovation isn't still happening. Does that mean the author's issue is around the communication of innovation (vs. Marketing-speak) or is it still about the innovation itself?
  - jrm4 5y ago
    Right, but I think there might be a bit of, "if innovation happens in a forest and no one is around to hear it..." kinda thing going on.
- jimmaswell 5y ago
  Snake oil and overzealous/deceitful marketing are nothing new. I'm not sure anything fundamentally changed.
  - jrm4 5y ago
    I mean, I'm thinking it's that chasm between "whoa, genuinely cool new internet things" and then "using the internet to sell the snake oil and marketing." which is driving the sentiment.
skocznymroczny 5y ago
> The MetaVerse is a rehash of the Sims (or any other networked RPG game you can pick with avatars) which has now been out for ages I think the author meant Second Life. Sims is not networked (as far as I know) and it's not a RPG.
- ShroudedNight 5y ago
  There was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sims_Online https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sims_Online I agree that Second Life sounds like a more direct parallel to ZuckVR
- Mezzie 5y ago
  The Sims Online was a thing in the early 00s, and it was an MMORPG. That may be what the author is referring to.
RandomLensman 5y ago
On aspect (and there or others) is that industrial isomorphisms have now become really strong, for instance, from "best practices" or benchmarking, this means that generally copy & paste is often the preferred approach in business. Naturally, innovation is then not (so) high on the agenda.
bob1029 5y ago
I wouldn't say so. The innovation of new things that actually solve problems in a meaningful way is not going to be bandied about on twitter for all to see and consume. Meaningful solutions to hard problems are usually kinda yucky to approach and understand at first. You are going to have to actively seek out these efforts. I assure you, there is more innovation occurring in technology today than ever before. The only problem is that there is also more noise than ever before too. I use HN to help cut through a lot of that noise.
- bombcar 5y ago
  This is true - there have been major advances in battery powered tools in the last few years but unless you’re in the industry or following them directly you probably haven’t seen them. Tools that four years ago were jokes in batteries are now doing fine, and it’s not only battery improvements.
paulpauper 5y ago
There is more money to be made in the small than the big. Tesla/space-x is an exception, but this is why much of the innovation seems to be in ai, software, medicine, apps, etc. Smaller tech is cheaper, easier to scale.
rmahan 5y ago
> The MetaVerse is a rehash of the Sims (or any other networked RPG game you can pick with avatars) which has now been out for ages, Clubhouse was basically an Internet conference call, WhatsApp is basically a group text/social media rehash, Twitch is basically a video stream and live chat site, and IG stories and TikTok are just a faster way to scroll through mostly edited/reposted YouTube video content, Most web conference tools are all pretty much Facebook with Skype on top of it, And Web 3 often looks like the absolute How incredibly reductive, evident by the “basically” and “just” minimizations of innovative apps. When twitch was launched in 2011 was it “basically” a streaming platform? Was WhatsApp, with its launch date in 2009 “just” another chat app? Are the content sharing, file sharing, whiteboarding, breakout rooms, panels, background effects, automated transcription of Teams and zoom not a significant improvement over the days of Skype? Sure, it’s easy to look back 10 years and say X is just Y, cause it’s been around for 10 years!
- jdauriemma 5y ago
  The telephone is basically just talking
- munk-a 5y ago
  Honestly - I don't know what people see different about table-top RPGs, they're essentially just rehashed Homeric epics with an uninspired interactive element. /s The saying "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." is extremely relevant here - nearly all science and innovation is iterative (and this is a good thing as it allows us to progress without relying on occasionally having a universe-brained Leonardo DaVinci simply pull innovation out of thin-air). Dramatic and sudden breakthroughs aren't the norm, the norm is slow improvement and refining, building something that's a little bit better than what you used last year and sharing it with your coworkers and that form of innovation should get a lot more praise than it usually does.
- Bjartr 5y ago
  Plus, there's the consideration of adding value with a quality experience itself being innovative. Dropbox is "just" a VCS. Slack is "just" IRC. Yet, no one had effectively executed the idea of providing those as a managed service with a focus on UX. That seems obviously non-innovative now, and to some people it even looked like it wasn't solving a problem when it was new[1], but in practice they solved real problems that people actually had with such solutions in a way that wasn't previously available, i.e. "innovative". That said, Meta's take on the metaverse concept falls short in many ways compared to what VRChat's been doing for years. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants#Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants#Plot
munk-a 5y ago
No, next question. In all seriousness, I don't know what impossibly high bar this article is setting for "new things" but innovation happens every day in software engineering - I'm not saying each one of us is accomplishing Turing level stuff on a daily basis, but somewhere somebody is definitely creating something brand new right now - and something that's highly useful. New packages and libraries are constantly rolled out that try and approach problems from different angles - whether these are branded as innovative is entirely a matter of opinion but I'm of the camp that building a tool that makes someone's life easier that didn't previously exist is easily in the camp of an innovation. But, if your standard for innovation is the polio vaccine (or other once in a decade or once in a century discoveries) then yea - we probably have gone two years without a once in a decade innovation - simply because probability.
- jdrc 5y ago
  > "new things" Things that feel new > innovation happens every day in software engineering Who cares if innovation happens in ink pens if no good novels are written?
  - munk-a 5y ago
    > Who cares if innovation happens in ink pens if no good novels are written? The people who got ink on their fingers writing bad novels with the old pens. Not every innovation needs to directly impact everybody - and maybe some of those bad novel authors decided to become novel authors because the pens got easier to use and maybe they could have written a good novel. That new thing feeling is pretty darn subjective - smart phones never felt new to me. I used a flip phone and a tablet for a long time, the tablet was basically a more portable laptop - and when I actually got a smart phone it was just a slightly smaller tablet.
gilbetron 5y ago
We have not stopped "innovating new things", this is a far more innovative time than any in history, with maybe an exception or two. I think this is a situation where the person just doesn't see the innovation happening, or understand what innovation is. What we do have is a lack of giant, obvious innovations. Horse to cars was big. Horses to telephones was big. Planes were big. Asphalt roads where big. We don't have a lot of this going on - or more specifically, going from a rural farm life to industrial city life was a single huge step, and now any huge steps get buried in the massive crush of other innovation. Going from nothing to 1 of something is an infinite step. Going from a million of something to 2 million is paltry in comparison, but 1,000,000 is much bigger than 1.
- malfist 5y ago
  I think cell phones and smartphones are a great example of a horses -> cars in the modern time. There's only "no innovation" if you start with that conclusion and don't look for contrary examples.
  - kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
    And how we use our cell phones has undergone a sea change since 2010, though their form factor hasn’t changed dramatically since then.
- xixixao 5y ago
  SpaceX is trying (and already succeeding) to massively innovate spaceships. The only question is whether it will become really useful or not.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  So true. Innovations used to be highly visible in our streets, cities, and skies. Now the innovations are in our homes and pockets.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  Working from home for such a large part of the population has to be an asphalt roads moment.
mindtricks 5y ago
The author makes innovation out to be something akin to "if we focus on this, then it will change", but that's not how this typically works. Most development is based on smaller improvements and discoveries made years in the past. And those take time to mature and scale. Sometimes they converge around the same time and it looks transformational. More often though, they are slowly incorporated into the progressive change we enjoy. It's also likely that areas that are important to him, just don't have a market. It doesn't mean people aren't innovating, it just means that resource allocation towards innovation went to other areas (for good or bad).
- bombcar 5y ago
  Another large aspect is applying solutions from one problem space to another - a decent amount of “computerization” was this.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
  The author is more making out innovation to be lacking. In particular, why aren’t these problems solved? > No one has innovated a cost effective way to update office ventilation properly, and workspaces to prevent the spread of contaminants, no one has made highly comfortable yet very inexpensive N95 masks, no one has invented a fool-proof vaccination that completely prevents infection...
  - munk-a 5y ago
    Let me just add some emphasis... > No one has innovated a cost effective way to update office ventilation properly This isn't an easy problem but we definitely have a plethora of ways to solve office ventilation, it's just that most of them require air ducts which are expensive as all heck to boot strap to existing buildings that lack them - and most of the economic designs for central air involve air recycling (because that's good for the environment) while, during a pandemic, we probably want to focus more on air evacuation. The one area we've realized a highly effective ventilation system that is designed to operate in a closed loop is on airplanes but that system is pretty radically different than what we run in offices because, again, it's not super cost effective. When it comes to N95 masks I've worn extremely comfortable disposable and effective masks - but they have been pricey like most disposable things - and N95 masks (from what I've seen) simply can't be sterilized properly after use and continue to be N95 masks - you might be able to make pandemic specific masks that are effectively N95 masks by forcefully sterilizing the outer surface with UV occasionally but they'll fail to be conventional N95 masks that block harmful particulates - so a cheap, comfortable, universal solution is out of reach... a cheap comfortable specialized solution is probably accomplishable, but then, after all that innovation, you'd need to handle the real uphill battle - making your mask an acceptable alternative to all the politicians everywhere who are hesitant to embrace new things in the middle of a pandemic. Regarding the fool-proof vaccination - you know how immortality is that dream we keep futilely pursuing? Human bodies are hard to understand, we're no where near the point of having a needle full of a liquid-x that can regrow limbs and cure cancer - bodies are highly variable and we've come up with some absolutely amazing vaccines. Just because the efficacy isn't 100% doesn't mean you can sit there saying "Welp, that was a total failure". In all of these areas we're currently making advances - but new ground breaking once a century discoveries don't happen every year.
9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
> Remote work life during quarantine has been stressful for many. The problem is that we're still clearly not past the Covid threat, and a rush to bring everyone back together to spur economic activity downtown (based on tax revenue it will generate) will create a lot of technical debt, unexpected health care costs, and loss of life and capacity in many categories from top to bottom if it is timed wrong. Nuff said?
sp33k3rph433k 5y ago
Innovation and problem-solving are two very, very different things. You can have the former without the latter but generally not the latter without the former. "Problems" to solve IMO come down to basic human necessities: - How do we get more people food for a lower cost? - How do we get more people shelter for a lower cost? - How do we make more people less sick for a lower cost? Everything past that is basically a "luxury", AKA innovation for the sake of entertainment/discovery/challenge/socialization. Also, people tend to pay for entertainment/luxuries, whereas providing access to necessities for a lower cost doesn't have as high of a profit margin. Ergo, less reason to innovate.
- salt-thrower 5y ago
  In other words, relying purely on profit motives for beneficial innovation is a dead end.
  - xboxnolifes 5y ago
    That's the exact opposite conclusion. All of the innovations happened for the profitable things. The conclusion is that we need to make solving problems, that we want to be solved, profitable.
    - salt-thrower 5y ago
      And how do "we" change the profitability equation? If it were more profitable to do more social good, then more companies would be doing more social good. It seems like we agree on that. Why, then, isn't it profitable to do right now, and what solutions exist to make it so?
wpietri 5y ago
I have a theory! Bear with me for a sec. Wikipedia looks like an encyclopedia. But I think it's better understood at the world's largest text-based MMORPG. The terrain is pages. The weapon is edits. Battles rage constantly. Anybody who has spent time on it knows the massive amounts of drama behind the scenes. But almost as a side effect, the encyclopedia gradually ratchets forward. Maybe it's better to see tech like that? Vast sums of money are scooped up and channeled by investors, all seeking advantage over one another. Most of that money is wasted, as is most of the effort it pays for. But occasionally, in dribs and drabs, innovation almost accidentally happens. In both cases, if we could deploy the resources involved effectively, we could get a lot more done. But until somebody figures that very hard problem out, we can live with the fact that everything kinda sucks but things still keep getting slowly better.
Closi 5y ago
> Most of the new innovation we've seen in the past years have created BRAND NEW problems (when they originally promised us they would FIX PROBLEMS for us) if you look closely enough at them. Cough... Social Media... Cough... This is the same with pretty much all innovation - even things like the invention of agriculture can be argued to have caused more problems than it solved (Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens makes this point). Laptops and smartphones made computing portable, but then has people taking their work home with them and increasing stress. Robotics help manufacture things, but also put people out of jobs. The car helps us get around but also contributes to global warming. I just don't think the implied view that "old innovation never used to create brand new problems" is true.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  Can’t remember who originally said this: ‘Computers are great at solving problems. Mostly the problems that they created.’ Kind of like the Simpsons quote about booze.
- winternett 5y ago
  The reference is to the artificial problems they create out of nowhere, especially the highly destructive ones, not the problems that cannot be helped. Social media for example has created serious problems with mental health of users, which could be eased dramatically if engagement and exposure wasn't gamified and manipulated, and if there was less of a focus on engagement and closed content. Many laptops and smartphones are now rendered obsolete quickly by software updates as new models are released every year by manufacturers, this creates a huge pile of waste that in turn pollutes the environment. Most of the negative aspects that have made product reliability and quality decline, along with dramatic price inflation are market-driven... The better way to counter market-driven innovation (in just one of many possible aspects mind you) is to create enduring and properly-priced products that don't get thrown away each year (at the expense of record profit) obviously.
  - Closi 5y ago
    I guess my point is that you can point to almost any piece of technology, from the advent of agriculture to the flatscreen TV, and say that it created problems. Replacing old problems with new problems is probably an inherent part of technological advancement and innovation, you just hope the benefit is worth the cost (it would be great to find technologies that just solve problems with no cost, but that’s not what you see in history).
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
This is a good rant, and there’s nothing wrong with a good rant every now and then. I sometimes feel just like the author does. But on the optimistic side: - At some point the “…is just a slightly-better version of…” product changes to being a whole new ‘thing’ JUST because it is that much better / easier / prettier / cheaper. And when we step back we can see the increased impact from that. Maybe a whole new group of people now will use it. Maybe a new industry can take off because of it. - When we look at the past, we have the rosy glow of nostalgia, and we filter out all the worthless, bad, unappealing, and unreliable. I started using computers in the early 80s, and the market was jam-packed with half-baked hardly-usable knockoffs of every successful piece of hardware and software. Web 3.0 has nothing on Personal Computer 1.0!
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Eh, the critique that Silicon Valley basically was only solving the problems of a shut-in white male programmer was hilariously accurate for a solid 5 years before COVID hit. As long as there's a lot of money in rearranging the deck chairs of what is the "cool" social media site every 10 years, there's going to be a ton of "investment" in chasing that next big thing cycle. It's just fashion at this point. I eyeroll at Web3 and crypto and all of that. But somewhere in that flotsam is the nascent ideas of "better crypto" + "web" that may produce something that isn't akin to a turnkey total information dominance infrastructure for the next Putin wannabe authoritarian with more wits and less hairspray. Yeah there will be a lot of scamming. A lot. "Aaaand it's gone" will happen many many times. Is SV working on global warming, alternative energy, species extinction, habitat destruction, artificial meat/protein sources, better housing solutions, and the like? No, SV hasn't done that innovation for a while, since the money is chasing social networks and programmer shutin apps. Luckily, that is happening elsewhere. Like China, or the mystifying hated ElonMuskStan.
ska 5y ago
> Have we simply stopped the process of innovating new things that solve problems? This is a great example of support for Betteridge's law of headlines.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
Things have hidden complexity. Whether it's the actual object or how it relates to existing systems it's put in, or surprising economics, or simply complex supply chains. A lot of the time when you aren't seeing progress (e.g. 'its the future, so where are my jetpacks?' memes), it turns out that doing a thing in a worthwhile or economically feasible way is actually really hard. From the outside, it might look like making personal jetpacks for everyone is easier than transcribing youtube videos. After all there are videos of people using jetpack-like things going back many decades! Surely if it almost worked then, it must work now. That's how technology progresses, right? I'm convinced that most people making points like this think tech is like a video game, and all you have to do is put resource points into it. And don't even get started on all the innovations that they probably just aren't paying attention to. As if it's a total coincidence that more and more cancers are getting survivable over time.
nescioquid 5y ago
I think the latent idea in this article (though I'm not sure the author thinks this) is that innovation happens within a cultural and economic context which simultaneously enables and inhibits certain kinds of innovations. The industrial revolution could probably have happened in republican Rome -- they had factories, after all (peopled with artisans and slaves) -- but cultural and economic forces inhibited this. Today technology is focused on ad-tech and rent-seeking patterns -- these are our Roman factories. A better question might have been what sorts of technologies are blocked by our current cultural and economic regime?
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  > The industrial revolution could probably have happened in republican Rome Before the printing press and modern steel processing? Before newton and other fundamental physics and chemistry innovations?
  - nescioquid 5y ago
    Yes, my point is that cultural and economic forces inhibited further development along these lines. They had the engineering sophistication to create things like odometers (to accurately place mile markers), basic steam engines, concrete, etc. It may not have looked like an 18th-century industrial revolution, but something along those lines could have happened but for the cultural and economic forces at play.
jdrc 5y ago
Ask yourselves "how can one make money from their innovation"? It used to be that ads was the default option, at least in the beginning, not anymore. Nowadays most money goes to marketing and naturally the companies that get richest are the marketing companies. Innovation in payments must be a key here, but it is missing
theknocker 5y ago
groby_b 5y ago
I mean, sure, the world had just built a new vaccine in 20% of the usual time, using an entirely new platform, but other than that... And sure, understanding of the immune system has exploded by leaps and bounds in the last two years, but other than that... And fine, we now have a reusable launch platform giving us relatively cheap access to space, but other than that... OK, and carbon capture/terraforming are rapidly improving, but really, other than that... And quantum computing has progressed by leaps and bounds, but other than that... Sometimes, when this argument comes up, I feel like I'm in a Monty Python skit. I'm terribly sorry that CS applications in a work context aren't moving as fast as the author would like to. I would like to see progress there, too. But I really think that the extrapolation from that tiny domain to "nobody is inventing anything" is maybe failing because it's lacking a whole number of steps.
bokohut 5y ago
My personal stance is "no" as an entrepreneurial doer. While the masses consume the topic du jour served up in an all you can eat fashion by the very systems mentioned from the article there are those that still press on. Even before today's most recent topic du jour there still existed countless issues to which solutions are needed, some being extreme in both time and financing. As the world continues to move forward in time, do note that I did not say progress, over that passage of time will come new ideas and techniques from those who challenge themselves to solve their own problems first. The world is certain to be confronted with more and more challenges set by the diversity and growth of the world's population however even in the midst of the disagreements every single one of the world's inhabitants will still require the same exact resources to survive. Thus significant opportunities are everywhere, one just needs to focus their time.
throwoutway 5y ago
I’m reminded of an event 150 years ago where someone said “everything that can be invented, HAS been invented!” Claiming that is short-sided

56 points by winternett 5y ago

Adding to the authors point; I think there's quite a bit of innovation through maintenance. Reducing the tech debt in existing infrastructure eg. education, transport, etc I have a gut feeling that societal cohesiveness is somehow lost through 'profit-driven' maintenance.

9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago

Yes, indirectly, by grinding the wrong goals. Not only that, I’m not sure that we have even begun the education process required for finding problems or innovating.

Arubis 5y ago

No, but a lot of us figured out that it's currently a lot more profitable to sell to businesses than consumers.

rck 5y ago

Related: https://future.a16z.com/its-time-to-build/ https://future.a16z.com/its-time-to-build/

ericls 5y ago

We don't know enough about ourselves to know what the problems are anymore.

kleer001 5y ago
I would say most of the low hanging fruit is gone, but yea.
kempbellt 5y ago
A problem worthy of an innovative solution.
- ericls 5y ago
  exactly, sometimes I think if somehow I could push our understanding of ourselves forward even a little bit further, I'd die with a smile.
winternett 5y ago
>We don't know enough about ourselves to know what the problems are anymore. Agreed. Many would say this is because the process of online communication has not really been "pushed forward". We discouraged email years ago in favor of walled communication in social media communities. There are literally trillions of epic conversations happening in places where they'll never get seen or shared beyond within those communities... Those communities also ratio (in many ways) the ability for ideas to be found and seen by others within and outside of those communities, and also incentivize others word-wide to parrot and copy ideas from the original authors and then present them as their own, without properly crediting or attributing the original author... This is exactly where the conflict to real innovation that was meant for the Internet resides.

q_andrew 5y ago

I think there have been plenty of problem-solving innovations, but there's a sort of 'market efficiency' effect on innovations that require less complexity. Once the kitchen knife was invented, any sort of slicer-dicer tool is just a rehashing of the knife concept. However, when the problems get more complex (E.G., the automation arm that anneals metal is now utilizing neural networks to make sure the kitchen knife does not have deformities), actual solutions are harder to recognize. HVAC can make your building safer from the pandemic, but it usually comes down to whether your boss wants to pay for it. Remote work can be effective, but it needs healthy hours and employee trust to do well. Those are human issues that you can't necessarily innovate away.

readingnews 5y ago

It takes a lot more effort to make tangible things that solve problems than it does to sell data to companies that will pay for it.

lbriner 5y ago

This is a massive over-simplification. The issue isn't that people are not innovating, it's that there are long routes to delivery for many things. Medical changes take years to test and approve; AI takes ages to adapt; hundreds of companies already produce innovative products that are simply unknown and even air-conditioning companies can't exactly perform a 5 minute tweak to something to clean ventilation systems, any changes are likely to require training, availability of tradespeople, significant disruption and then ongoing maintenance costs.

winternett 5y ago
Agreed, it's part of a much larger discussion, with limits on web real estate, getting to the point quickly and being succinct becomes more and more important. There surely are ground breaking innovations every day, but especially lately, the unremarkable ones push them out of the way in favor of quick headlines that spur impulse-driven investment. We all probably can recall how popular an effort to "catapult" very rich and famous people into the outer atmosphere was and still is, while we have already travelled to the moon, decades prior at that.... Whether any of the things getting the most public recognition and funding these days really be considered as "game changing innovation" is the real question raised.

dzdt 5y ago

It is more profitable to convince consumers that a previously unrecognized thing is a problem that needs solving. Then your 'solution' can be the best and only one available. For previously recognized problems there is so much pesky competition.

mschuster91 5y ago

Indeed we have, and a large part of what has happened is that the governments have drastically cut down on basic R&D in science. Our best researchers are wasting half or more of their time chasing one tiny bit of research grant after another so that they can continue for a couple more months of work - how do you expect actual results to appear from that burst-like work? We need to fund scientific research in a more sustainable way, and that soon. And of those brilliant minds who don't want to subject themselves to that kind of bull dung because they want to, say, start a family and want a stable life with a decent wage, most end up working for Facebook to sell ads or for financial traders. Neither of which is in any kind productive to the progress of society. And the global mega-corporations that used to fund their own massive research institutions also seem to have lost their way, especially as R&D spending isn't received well by the stock markets...

winternett 5y ago
> And the global mega-corporations that used to fund their own massive research institutions also seem to have lost their way, especially as R&D spending isn't received well by the stock markets... Agreed. This is the plot here... We're becoming so driven to cater every business towards investment driven goals that we don't realize how much it's strangling epic innovation that does good. Massive financial growth and market dominance of companies that do not truly innovate will only advance many of the negativity and problems we experience with the quality and reliability of consumer products, environmental destruction, erosion of worker protections and family life, and so much more.

renewiltord 5y ago

In all honesty, I disagree entirely. I see innovative stuff all the time. It strikes me that if you treat everything innovative with cynicism you can state it in that way: - antibiotics: just better drugs - GMO crops or the Green Revolution: just being more deliberate about what people did for thousands of years - going to space: we can barely go under the sea, this is just that but up - the Internet: phones, you've invented phones - phones: talking to people, you've invented talking - talking: just grunting with more sounds There is a lot of wonderful stuff going on in the world, but if you filter to stuff you can dismiss, you're just going to see everything as worthless. This is a common thing a lot of people find really hard to understand. A good critic isn't one who places the bar so high that nothing meets it. A good critic is one who can separate exceptional from mundane. If nothing is exceptional, it is likely the problem is that you're not good at determining whether something is. Just in a Bayesian sense, if your barometer says it's 1 atm literally everywhere, more likely the barometer is broken than that pressure has equalized everywhere in the universe.

mschuster91 5y ago
> - antibiotics: just better drugs We haven't had a single new class of antibiotics discovered for well over 30 years [1]. And now, especially since humanity was dumb enough to use reserve antibiotics in farm animals, we're looking at a disaster. [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02884-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02884-3
- renewiltord 5y ago
  "Antibiotics are just the same as the 2000 year old mould remedies employed in Ancient Egypt or India. Mould, you've invented mould." Haha! This is such an entertaining technique. I can see why people talk like this. It's pointlessly dismissive.

jrm4 5y ago

It's an oversimplification, but I'm glad its being said. I think what's driving it is that 1. The internet brought a ton of actual amazing innovation. 2. Because people are correctly excited about it, this brought marketing opportunities. 3. Today, it is profitable to market stuff that superficially appears to be like that older, actual innovation, but is not innovative in the slightest. This is happening SO much, that it's crowding out (the marketing and spreading of) real innovation.

dkonofalski 5y ago
While that's verifiable as true, that doesn't mean that innovation isn't still happening. Does that mean the author's issue is around the communication of innovation (vs. Marketing-speak) or is it still about the innovation itself?
- jrm4 5y ago
  Right, but I think there might be a bit of, "if innovation happens in a forest and no one is around to hear it..." kinda thing going on.
jimmaswell 5y ago
Snake oil and overzealous/deceitful marketing are nothing new. I'm not sure anything fundamentally changed.
- jrm4 5y ago
  I mean, I'm thinking it's that chasm between "whoa, genuinely cool new internet things" and then "using the internet to sell the snake oil and marketing." which is driving the sentiment.

skocznymroczny 5y ago

> The MetaVerse is a rehash of the Sims (or any other networked RPG game you can pick with avatars) which has now been out for ages I think the author meant Second Life. Sims is not networked (as far as I know) and it's not a RPG.

ShroudedNight 5y ago
There was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sims_Online https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sims_Online I agree that Second Life sounds like a more direct parallel to ZuckVR
Mezzie 5y ago
The Sims Online was a thing in the early 00s, and it was an MMORPG. That may be what the author is referring to.

RandomLensman 5y ago

On aspect (and there or others) is that industrial isomorphisms have now become really strong, for instance, from "best practices" or benchmarking, this means that generally copy & paste is often the preferred approach in business. Naturally, innovation is then not (so) high on the agenda.

bob1029 5y ago

I wouldn't say so. The innovation of new things that actually solve problems in a meaningful way is not going to be bandied about on twitter for all to see and consume. Meaningful solutions to hard problems are usually kinda yucky to approach and understand at first. You are going to have to actively seek out these efforts. I assure you, there is more innovation occurring in technology today than ever before. The only problem is that there is also more noise than ever before too. I use HN to help cut through a lot of that noise.

bombcar 5y ago
This is true - there have been major advances in battery powered tools in the last few years but unless you’re in the industry or following them directly you probably haven’t seen them. Tools that four years ago were jokes in batteries are now doing fine, and it’s not only battery improvements.

paulpauper 5y ago

There is more money to be made in the small than the big. Tesla/space-x is an exception, but this is why much of the innovation seems to be in ai, software, medicine, apps, etc. Smaller tech is cheaper, easier to scale.

rmahan 5y ago

> The MetaVerse is a rehash of the Sims (or any other networked RPG game you can pick with avatars) which has now been out for ages, Clubhouse was basically an Internet conference call, WhatsApp is basically a group text/social media rehash, Twitch is basically a video stream and live chat site, and IG stories and TikTok are just a faster way to scroll through mostly edited/reposted YouTube video content, Most web conference tools are all pretty much Facebook with Skype on top of it, And Web 3 often looks like the absolute How incredibly reductive, evident by the “basically” and “just” minimizations of innovative apps. When twitch was launched in 2011 was it “basically” a streaming platform? Was WhatsApp, with its launch date in 2009 “just” another chat app? Are the content sharing, file sharing, whiteboarding, breakout rooms, panels, background effects, automated transcription of Teams and zoom not a significant improvement over the days of Skype? Sure, it’s easy to look back 10 years and say X is just Y, cause it’s been around for 10 years!

jdauriemma 5y ago
The telephone is basically just talking
munk-a 5y ago
Honestly - I don't know what people see different about table-top RPGs, they're essentially just rehashed Homeric epics with an uninspired interactive element. /s The saying "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." is extremely relevant here - nearly all science and innovation is iterative (and this is a good thing as it allows us to progress without relying on occasionally having a universe-brained Leonardo DaVinci simply pull innovation out of thin-air). Dramatic and sudden breakthroughs aren't the norm, the norm is slow improvement and refining, building something that's a little bit better than what you used last year and sharing it with your coworkers and that form of innovation should get a lot more praise than it usually does.
Bjartr 5y ago
Plus, there's the consideration of adding value with a quality experience itself being innovative. Dropbox is "just" a VCS. Slack is "just" IRC. Yet, no one had effectively executed the idea of providing those as a managed service with a focus on UX. That seems obviously non-innovative now, and to some people it even looked like it wasn't solving a problem when it was new[1], but in practice they solved real problems that people actually had with such solutions in a way that wasn't previously available, i.e. "innovative". That said, Meta's take on the metaverse concept falls short in many ways compared to what VRChat's been doing for years. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants#Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants#Plot

munk-a 5y ago

No, next question. In all seriousness, I don't know what impossibly high bar this article is setting for "new things" but innovation happens every day in software engineering - I'm not saying each one of us is accomplishing Turing level stuff on a daily basis, but somewhere somebody is definitely creating something brand new right now - and something that's highly useful. New packages and libraries are constantly rolled out that try and approach problems from different angles - whether these are branded as innovative is entirely a matter of opinion but I'm of the camp that building a tool that makes someone's life easier that didn't previously exist is easily in the camp of an innovation. But, if your standard for innovation is the polio vaccine (or other once in a decade or once in a century discoveries) then yea - we probably have gone two years without a once in a decade innovation - simply because probability.

jdrc 5y ago
> "new things" Things that feel new > innovation happens every day in software engineering Who cares if innovation happens in ink pens if no good novels are written?
- munk-a 5y ago
  > Who cares if innovation happens in ink pens if no good novels are written? The people who got ink on their fingers writing bad novels with the old pens. Not every innovation needs to directly impact everybody - and maybe some of those bad novel authors decided to become novel authors because the pens got easier to use and maybe they could have written a good novel. That new thing feeling is pretty darn subjective - smart phones never felt new to me. I used a flip phone and a tablet for a long time, the tablet was basically a more portable laptop - and when I actually got a smart phone it was just a slightly smaller tablet.

gilbetron 5y ago

We have not stopped "innovating new things", this is a far more innovative time than any in history, with maybe an exception or two. I think this is a situation where the person just doesn't see the innovation happening, or understand what innovation is. What we do have is a lack of giant, obvious innovations. Horse to cars was big. Horses to telephones was big. Planes were big. Asphalt roads where big. We don't have a lot of this going on - or more specifically, going from a rural farm life to industrial city life was a single huge step, and now any huge steps get buried in the massive crush of other innovation. Going from nothing to 1 of something is an infinite step. Going from a million of something to 2 million is paltry in comparison, but 1,000,000 is much bigger than 1.

malfist 5y ago
I think cell phones and smartphones are a great example of a horses -> cars in the modern time. There's only "no innovation" if you start with that conclusion and don't look for contrary examples.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  And how we use our cell phones has undergone a sea change since 2010, though their form factor hasn’t changed dramatically since then.
xixixao 5y ago
SpaceX is trying (and already succeeding) to massively innovate spaceships. The only question is whether it will become really useful or not.
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
So true. Innovations used to be highly visible in our streets, cities, and skies. Now the innovations are in our homes and pockets.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
Working from home for such a large part of the population has to be an asphalt roads moment.

mindtricks 5y ago

The author makes innovation out to be something akin to "if we focus on this, then it will change", but that's not how this typically works. Most development is based on smaller improvements and discoveries made years in the past. And those take time to mature and scale. Sometimes they converge around the same time and it looks transformational. More often though, they are slowly incorporated into the progressive change we enjoy. It's also likely that areas that are important to him, just don't have a market. It doesn't mean people aren't innovating, it just means that resource allocation towards innovation went to other areas (for good or bad).

bombcar 5y ago
Another large aspect is applying solutions from one problem space to another - a decent amount of “computerization” was this.
9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
The author is more making out innovation to be lacking. In particular, why aren’t these problems solved? > No one has innovated a cost effective way to update office ventilation properly, and workspaces to prevent the spread of contaminants, no one has made highly comfortable yet very inexpensive N95 masks, no one has invented a fool-proof vaccination that completely prevents infection...
- munk-a 5y ago
  Let me just add some emphasis... > No one has innovated a cost effective way to update office ventilation properly This isn't an easy problem but we definitely have a plethora of ways to solve office ventilation, it's just that most of them require air ducts which are expensive as all heck to boot strap to existing buildings that lack them - and most of the economic designs for central air involve air recycling (because that's good for the environment) while, during a pandemic, we probably want to focus more on air evacuation. The one area we've realized a highly effective ventilation system that is designed to operate in a closed loop is on airplanes but that system is pretty radically different than what we run in offices because, again, it's not super cost effective. When it comes to N95 masks I've worn extremely comfortable disposable and effective masks - but they have been pricey like most disposable things - and N95 masks (from what I've seen) simply can't be sterilized properly after use and continue to be N95 masks - you might be able to make pandemic specific masks that are effectively N95 masks by forcefully sterilizing the outer surface with UV occasionally but they'll fail to be conventional N95 masks that block harmful particulates - so a cheap, comfortable, universal solution is out of reach... a cheap comfortable specialized solution is probably accomplishable, but then, after all that innovation, you'd need to handle the real uphill battle - making your mask an acceptable alternative to all the politicians everywhere who are hesitant to embrace new things in the middle of a pandemic. Regarding the fool-proof vaccination - you know how immortality is that dream we keep futilely pursuing? Human bodies are hard to understand, we're no where near the point of having a needle full of a liquid-x that can regrow limbs and cure cancer - bodies are highly variable and we've come up with some absolutely amazing vaccines. Just because the efficacy isn't 100% doesn't mean you can sit there saying "Welp, that was a total failure". In all of these areas we're currently making advances - but new ground breaking once a century discoveries don't happen every year.

9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago

> Remote work life during quarantine has been stressful for many. The problem is that we're still clearly not past the Covid threat, and a rush to bring everyone back together to spur economic activity downtown (based on tax revenue it will generate) will create a lot of technical debt, unexpected health care costs, and loss of life and capacity in many categories from top to bottom if it is timed wrong. Nuff said?

sp33k3rph433k 5y ago

Innovation and problem-solving are two very, very different things. You can have the former without the latter but generally not the latter without the former. "Problems" to solve IMO come down to basic human necessities: - How do we get more people food for a lower cost? - How do we get more people shelter for a lower cost? - How do we make more people less sick for a lower cost? Everything past that is basically a "luxury", AKA innovation for the sake of entertainment/discovery/challenge/socialization. Also, people tend to pay for entertainment/luxuries, whereas providing access to necessities for a lower cost doesn't have as high of a profit margin. Ergo, less reason to innovate.

salt-thrower 5y ago
In other words, relying purely on profit motives for beneficial innovation is a dead end.
- xboxnolifes 5y ago
  That's the exact opposite conclusion. All of the innovations happened for the profitable things. The conclusion is that we need to make solving problems, that we want to be solved, profitable.
  - salt-thrower 5y ago
    And how do "we" change the profitability equation? If it were more profitable to do more social good, then more companies would be doing more social good. It seems like we agree on that. Why, then, isn't it profitable to do right now, and what solutions exist to make it so?

wpietri 5y ago

I have a theory! Bear with me for a sec. Wikipedia looks like an encyclopedia. But I think it's better understood at the world's largest text-based MMORPG. The terrain is pages. The weapon is edits. Battles rage constantly. Anybody who has spent time on it knows the massive amounts of drama behind the scenes. But almost as a side effect, the encyclopedia gradually ratchets forward. Maybe it's better to see tech like that? Vast sums of money are scooped up and channeled by investors, all seeking advantage over one another. Most of that money is wasted, as is most of the effort it pays for. But occasionally, in dribs and drabs, innovation almost accidentally happens. In both cases, if we could deploy the resources involved effectively, we could get a lot more done. But until somebody figures that very hard problem out, we can live with the fact that everything kinda sucks but things still keep getting slowly better.

Closi 5y ago

> Most of the new innovation we've seen in the past years have created BRAND NEW problems (when they originally promised us they would FIX PROBLEMS for us) if you look closely enough at them. Cough... Social Media... Cough... This is the same with pretty much all innovation - even things like the invention of agriculture can be argued to have caused more problems than it solved (Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens makes this point). Laptops and smartphones made computing portable, but then has people taking their work home with them and increasing stress. Robotics help manufacture things, but also put people out of jobs. The car helps us get around but also contributes to global warming. I just don't think the implied view that "old innovation never used to create brand new problems" is true.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
Can’t remember who originally said this: ‘Computers are great at solving problems. Mostly the problems that they created.’ Kind of like the Simpsons quote about booze.
winternett 5y ago
The reference is to the artificial problems they create out of nowhere, especially the highly destructive ones, not the problems that cannot be helped. Social media for example has created serious problems with mental health of users, which could be eased dramatically if engagement and exposure wasn't gamified and manipulated, and if there was less of a focus on engagement and closed content. Many laptops and smartphones are now rendered obsolete quickly by software updates as new models are released every year by manufacturers, this creates a huge pile of waste that in turn pollutes the environment. Most of the negative aspects that have made product reliability and quality decline, along with dramatic price inflation are market-driven... The better way to counter market-driven innovation (in just one of many possible aspects mind you) is to create enduring and properly-priced products that don't get thrown away each year (at the expense of record profit) obviously.
- Closi 5y ago
  I guess my point is that you can point to almost any piece of technology, from the advent of agriculture to the flatscreen TV, and say that it created problems. Replacing old problems with new problems is probably an inherent part of technological advancement and innovation, you just hope the benefit is worth the cost (it would be great to find technologies that just solve problems with no cost, but that’s not what you see in history).

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

This is a good rant, and there’s nothing wrong with a good rant every now and then. I sometimes feel just like the author does. But on the optimistic side: - At some point the “…is just a slightly-better version of…” product changes to being a whole new ‘thing’ JUST because it is that much better / easier / prettier / cheaper. And when we step back we can see the increased impact from that. Maybe a whole new group of people now will use it. Maybe a new industry can take off because of it. - When we look at the past, we have the rosy glow of nostalgia, and we filter out all the worthless, bad, unappealing, and unreliable. I started using computers in the early 80s, and the market was jam-packed with half-baked hardly-usable knockoffs of every successful piece of hardware and software. Web 3.0 has nothing on Personal Computer 1.0!

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

Eh, the critique that Silicon Valley basically was only solving the problems of a shut-in white male programmer was hilariously accurate for a solid 5 years before COVID hit. As long as there's a lot of money in rearranging the deck chairs of what is the "cool" social media site every 10 years, there's going to be a ton of "investment" in chasing that next big thing cycle. It's just fashion at this point. I eyeroll at Web3 and crypto and all of that. But somewhere in that flotsam is the nascent ideas of "better crypto" + "web" that may produce something that isn't akin to a turnkey total information dominance infrastructure for the next Putin wannabe authoritarian with more wits and less hairspray. Yeah there will be a lot of scamming. A lot. "Aaaand it's gone" will happen many many times. Is SV working on global warming, alternative energy, species extinction, habitat destruction, artificial meat/protein sources, better housing solutions, and the like? No, SV hasn't done that innovation for a while, since the money is chasing social networks and programmer shutin apps. Luckily, that is happening elsewhere. Like China, or the mystifying hated ElonMuskStan.

ska 5y ago

> Have we simply stopped the process of innovating new things that solve problems? This is a great example of support for Betteridge's law of headlines.

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

Things have hidden complexity. Whether it's the actual object or how it relates to existing systems it's put in, or surprising economics, or simply complex supply chains. A lot of the time when you aren't seeing progress (e.g. 'its the future, so where are my jetpacks?' memes), it turns out that doing a thing in a worthwhile or economically feasible way is actually really hard. From the outside, it might look like making personal jetpacks for everyone is easier than transcribing youtube videos. After all there are videos of people using jetpack-like things going back many decades! Surely if it almost worked then, it must work now. That's how technology progresses, right? I'm convinced that most people making points like this think tech is like a video game, and all you have to do is put resource points into it. And don't even get started on all the innovations that they probably just aren't paying attention to. As if it's a total coincidence that more and more cancers are getting survivable over time.

nescioquid 5y ago

I think the latent idea in this article (though I'm not sure the author thinks this) is that innovation happens within a cultural and economic context which simultaneously enables and inhibits certain kinds of innovations. The industrial revolution could probably have happened in republican Rome -- they had factories, after all (peopled with artisans and slaves) -- but cultural and economic forces inhibited this. Today technology is focused on ad-tech and rent-seeking patterns -- these are our Roman factories. A better question might have been what sorts of technologies are blocked by our current cultural and economic regime?

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
> The industrial revolution could probably have happened in republican Rome Before the printing press and modern steel processing? Before newton and other fundamental physics and chemistry innovations?
- nescioquid 5y ago
  Yes, my point is that cultural and economic forces inhibited further development along these lines. They had the engineering sophistication to create things like odometers (to accurately place mile markers), basic steam engines, concrete, etc. It may not have looked like an 18th-century industrial revolution, but something along those lines could have happened but for the cultural and economic forces at play.

jdrc 5y ago

Ask yourselves "how can one make money from their innovation"? It used to be that ads was the default option, at least in the beginning, not anymore. Nowadays most money goes to marketing and naturally the companies that get richest are the marketing companies. Innovation in payments must be a key here, but it is missing

theknocker 5y ago

groby_b 5y ago

I mean, sure, the world had just built a new vaccine in 20% of the usual time, using an entirely new platform, but other than that... And sure, understanding of the immune system has exploded by leaps and bounds in the last two years, but other than that... And fine, we now have a reusable launch platform giving us relatively cheap access to space, but other than that... OK, and carbon capture/terraforming are rapidly improving, but really, other than that... And quantum computing has progressed by leaps and bounds, but other than that... Sometimes, when this argument comes up, I feel like I'm in a Monty Python skit. I'm terribly sorry that CS applications in a work context aren't moving as fast as the author would like to. I would like to see progress there, too. But I really think that the extrapolation from that tiny domain to "nobody is inventing anything" is maybe failing because it's lacking a whole number of steps.

bokohut 5y ago

My personal stance is "no" as an entrepreneurial doer. While the masses consume the topic du jour served up in an all you can eat fashion by the very systems mentioned from the article there are those that still press on. Even before today's most recent topic du jour there still existed countless issues to which solutions are needed, some being extreme in both time and financing. As the world continues to move forward in time, do note that I did not say progress, over that passage of time will come new ideas and techniques from those who challenge themselves to solve their own problems first. The world is certain to be confronted with more and more challenges set by the diversity and growth of the world's population however even in the midst of the disagreements every single one of the world's inhabitants will still require the same exact resources to survive. Thus significant opportunities are everywhere, one just needs to focus their time.

throwoutway 5y ago

I’m reminded of an event 150 years ago where someone said “everything that can be invented, HAS been invented!” Claiming that is short-sided