15 ms·
Ease of innovation does not necessarily correlate with value (in a long-term/social sense) of innovation. As you point out that can be worked around by taking
by yew 15y ago
Ease of innovation does not necessarily correlate with value (in a long-term/social sense) of innovation.
As you point out that can be worked around by taking profits from easy innovations and using them to fund hard-but-valuable ones, but people like Elon Musk and James Cameron are notable because of their rarity. A lot of the money just dilutes and/or vanishes back into the pot.
A certain amount of entertainment is necessary (even good!), of course, but we only have to look at the drug industry to get a picture of how bad things can get if people stop solving hard problems. The 'everything done ahead of time' nature of high-technology civilization just exacerbates things.
- eli_gottlieb 15y ago>The 'everything done ahead of time' nature of high-technology civilization just exacerbates things. Could you elaborate?
- yew 15y agoHigh-technology civilizations rely on a more-or-less constant stream of innovations (or solutions to hard problems) in order to maintain a reasonable equilibrium in all sorts of areas (economy, environment, society). That reliance increases with the degree of high-tech, but also provides the benefits of high-tech. A failure of that system can lead to much worse than just a lack of progress.