10 ms·

When Will This Low-Innovation Internet Era End?

112 points by Dn_Ab 14y ago

alex_g 14y ago
These sorts of articles are pointless. If this guy has such a strong opinion, why doesn't he go innovate instead of telling other people to do it. Hypocrisy at its finest.
- wdewind 14y ago
  Disagree with the guy's opinion, but in his mind he is innovating. As a writer the way he contributes is by innovating culture and thought. He has seen an information inefficiency in the common belief that we are making huge technological gains, and his article is an attempt to fix that.
pyrhho 14y ago
It seems disingenuous that this article completely ignores Google as a source of innovation in the last 15 years. A company which (pretty successfully) organizes the entirety of human knowledge, and lets you query it in milliseconds? Sounds like some pretty serious innovation to me...
- protomyth 14y ago
  Not quite disagreeing, but from his (an end-user's) point of view, how is Google search different than Alta Vista or Lycos before it?
  - andrewflnr 14y ago
    More stuff indexed, for one thing, paper books and videos included. And hopefully, more intelligent interpretation of queries, though that's more debatable.
  - k-mcgrady 14y ago
    This is a very good point. Google is more accurate, and faster, but in the end it does the same thing. It helps the user find information on the web. It's not a great new idea, it's an improvement on an existing idea.
    - pyrhho 14y ago
      Sometimes a quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference. For example, motorcycles are just faster horses (in some ways worse, like for off-roading), but you could hardly argue they are the same thing. I would argue that google is substantially more useful than altavista, or dogpile, ever were.
      - rory096 14y ago
        And ultimately Altavista and Dogpile are irrelevant, because neither existed just a few years before Google. Web search is revolutionary; search engines before Google were just halting steps on the way. That is, the contention isn't that Google revolutionized web search, but that web search revolutionized the world.
    - kiba 14y ago
      An extreme change in accuracy and speed might as well be...a revolution.
  - retube 14y ago
    whoa! http://www.lycos.co.uk/ http://www.lycos.co.uk/
    - philipithomas 14y ago
      Are they just running Google search on there?
  - unconed 14y ago
    The thing that made Google unique is that they ranked pages according to the links between them (i.e. PageRank), as opposed to more traditional document ranking methods that are keyword based. As a result, Google found showed you content that people liked (and linked to). From the end-user's perspective, Google search was noticeably better and more relevant. As far as I know, it was the first massive application of data mining graphs, which now drives social networking, content recommendations and more.
  - philipithomas 14y ago
    The algorithm is quite fascinating (from what we can infer). Using things like a markov chain to model results in Google shows a big jump from human-compiled results in early search engines - it's a new application of theoretical knowledge that has greatly enhanced society, and frankly shows a degree of automation that could be a basis machine intelligence.
- kiba 14y ago
  Maybe the innovation is so powerful and so large that it basically become the background and ignored. We all take googling for granted and hardly remember a time when search engines literally don't work.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  A company founded...14 years ago.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - pyrhho 14y ago
    Fair point. It just seemed odd to use Procter & Gamble as an example of the most innovative companies while ignoring a < 15 year old company which now has a higher market cap than P&G (200M to 177M).
protomyth 14y ago
If the prevailing revenue source is advertising, it limits the type of startups that are viable.
kiba 14y ago
Innovation don't happen in certain industries are probably because of a dysfunctional social environment within that system. What prevent us from innovating is not so much intelligence but social configuration of our society at that particular sector.
k-mcgrady 14y ago
It's certainly an interesting perspective on things. I would argue that the internet has had an impact relative in scale to that of electricity or the car but it is true that things seem to have stalled. Instead of working on world changing technologies using the amazing tools we have at our disposal we are building hundreds of photo sharing apps, check in apps, and social networks in the hope of a big exit (I guess Twitter & Facebook have changed communication so there are some exceptions). I don't think this just applies to science/technology though. If you look at culture (music and art specifically) we are also in a bit of a slump compared to the early/mid 20th century. It could be that this is a cyclical thing and societies naturally go through periods of rapid innovation and creation, and and other periods where change is minor. Nb: It's easy to call out the author for being a hypocrite (why doesn't he do something world changing?) but that's not very productive. I have just agreed with him but I don't think I'm going to be the one who creates the next great invention. I'm sure most people want to change the world but it's easier and less risky to build a simple, high growth app or product with a high chance of making them a lot of money.
daleharvey 14y ago
I find it quite hard to understand the reasoning of people that downplay the affect the internet has had on our lives. I dont fall out of contact with the people I grew up with (at home or university / past jobs), I am flying out tomorrow to meet with good friends all of whom I would have never known if it wasnt for the internet, my career would not exist without the internet. The worlds knowledge is now categorised conveniently into a website which you can download and carry around wherever you go, that was science fiction 30 years ago. Almost the entire population of the world has access to enough knowledge and resources that they can become a leading expert in pretty much any field they want to. Sure we dont have our promised jetpacks and its easy to be dismissive because some people post inane stuff on twitter, but I find it really hard to believe the last 50 years is some form of lull in innovation, I cant imagine any other period of time being more exciting to live in.
- benihana 14y ago
  We have computers in our pockets that send a signal to space to locate us anywhere on the planet within a couple of feet, then tell us how to get where we want to go. We can communicate instantly, instantly with people on the other side of the planet. We have a network of satellites orbiting our planet giving us constant information about our world. Not many people predicted these things in popular culture/popular sci fi. These kinds of articles always seem like old people complaining that the future didn't turn out the way they expected. Instead of accepting that the biggest innovative breakthrough in the past 50 years was a global communication and information network, they complain that there hasn't been anything good happening.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 14y ago
    The only problem with that criticism is that Neil Stephenson has known more about the internet earlier than nearly anyone commenting on this story. One of the central activities of 'team hero' in Cryptonomicon is laying undersea IP links. If you've read his books, it's obvious he has thought deeply about how the expansion of the internet affects everyone's lives. You are entirely missing what he is saying.
nvk 14y ago
What a stupid article, short, vague and resentful. Most industries are getting disrupted and mainstream doesn't notice. The ripple effect takes a long time to reach incumbents – they can still get loans and legislations catered to keep them afloat for a few more years. meh.
DanielN 14y ago
The problem of "low innovation" in relation to the internet seems to be a problem of infrastructure. Building Google lead to building Google maps which is now leading to building a self driving car which is a problem that when/if it is solved will save millions of lives and billions of dollars. Not a perfect example, but it is an instance of not being albe to solve important problems without the necessary infrastructure.
- DanBC 14y ago
  That's an excellent example. Another example is lack of cash - governments are not doing things like going to space. Moving cash into the hands of private people has allowed those people to start exploring space. But where are the other examples? What other companies are doing similar things? This isn't just rhetorical. I'm sure plenty of companies are doing exciting things that don't get decent reporting. (I guess folding@home is one example.)
  - ippisl 14y ago
    Caedium is building an easy to use, cloud based Computational flow dynamics(CFD) simulation tool[0] Computer aided engineering tools in the cloud might be the missing link between the internet and real life innovation. They could extremely reduce the price of of a (simulated) first prototype , and enable entry to small or crazy ideas. But the major tool vendors don't hurry to offer affordable tools in the cloud, because their revenue models works differently[1]. There's probably a place for a few start-ups there. [0]http://www.symscape.com/blog/cfd-azure-cloud http://www.symscape.com/blog/cfd-azure-cloud [1]http://caewatch.com/cae-in-the-cloud-just-hot-air/ http://caewatch.com/cae-in-the-cloud-just-hot-air/
andyl 14y ago
Over the past 30 years we haven't seen breakthru innovation in transportation, energy, medicine, and many other fields. This point has been made by Peter Theil and others. That may be true, but look at some recent developments. Self-driving cars, synthetic biology, thorium reactors, commercial space, 3d printing - not to mention the rapid evolution of internet and mobile technologies. Further afield, people are working on quantum computing, memristors, AI algorithms, and more. All of these developments could make a big impact. Seems to me that we've got plenty of advances ahead of us.
- Silhouette 14y ago
  Over the past 30 years we haven't seen breakthru innovation in transportation, energy, medicine, and many other fields. We haven't? What proportion of the electricity supplied in your country came from renewable sources 30 years ago? How much did we know about human genetics and, for example, the potential of stem cells, 30 years ago? If I wanted to go to Paris 30 years ago, it required a flight or a boat trip, not to mention the connections to and from the airport or ferry port on either end. Today I can walk to my local railway station in a few minutes, take a train down to London, walk to the station next door, take another train that goes under a tunnel all the way under the English Channel, and get off that train in Paris. I think some people claim innovation isn't happening just because it's happening too slowly for them to notice in their everyday lives.
joelhaus 14y ago
The author begins by making the case that innovation was at a peak in the early 20th century, but has been largely stagnant at the start of the 21st century. It's a provocative question, but I believe it's a symptom of a real underlying cause. To answer him more directly: Innovation will ramp up when the influence of moneyed interests on legislative priorities begins to wane. An interesting and, I believe, a truly important thing happened for innovation at the beginning of the 20th century, the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt. He demanded transparency from food suppliers, broke up Standard Oil and worked hard to restrain the power and influence of large corporations. We need another T.R. for innovation to thrive. In just this past year, there have been numerous anti-competitive legislative initiatives that we can point to. Each one lobbied for and backed by entrenched oligopolies that are actively trying to put the clamps on innovation. This is happening at both the federal (PIPA/SOPA, CISPA, patent wars, AT&T/T-Mobile Merger) and local level (Bans on Municipal Broadband). In his book, "The Master Switch", Tim Wu tells a great story about a device invented at Bell Labs capable of recording a callers voice if the attached phone was not answered. The year was 1934, but the magnetic recording tape, used in answering machines and computer storage devices, did not become widely available until decades later. The AT&T monopoly chose to keep this new technology a secret, fearing that it would cannibalize their profitable business model. If nothing else, this story demonstrates the type of bureaucratic mindset that prevents entrenched corporate interests from making the kind of leaps that come from hungry entrepreneurs and government funded research. As a reader of HN, I would guess that this is already clearer to you than most.
blackhole 14y ago
I think this article is misguided in that there has been lots of innovation in the tech sector that has been overshadowed by silly things like "Instagram" that solve "cat picture problems" due to startup culture. The public face of innovation has not been dealing with hard problems, but people are working on them. There are several potential wide-ranging cancer treatments and someone came up with a potential cure for the common cold. Our educational system and our culture must change if we are to get into a period where there is widespread innovation in dealing with hard problems instead of cat pictures. The internet will be a crucial part of that, and in the future, we will recognize the internet as being a source of cat pictures before we figured out how to use it to unlock our own potential.
atarian 14y ago
I'm astonished that people think the Internet-era is low innovation. It's only been twenty years and we've gotten so much out of it (social networking, location-based services, real-time updates/news, vast pool of information). I don't know about you guys but I think anyone who lived in the past would kill to be in this era.
james4k 14y ago
There is simply a lower signal to noise ratio in regards to innovation. And yes, while there is a lot of noisy low-innovation internet companies, there are still more strong innovators now than there were 10 or 20 years ago. There is a low barrier to entry to the tech industry, and with that a great spectrum of the level of impact they make, and yet the opportunity and ease of access to an audience is greater than ever before. Nothing like this has ever been able to happen. Innovation is continuing at an exponential rate, and I would hope Justin Fox would realize this as he books a last minute hotel via mobile app, rekindles a long lost friendship from school, and slips his tiny 90s-grade supercomputer into his pocket. All while selling his hobby romance novelas on his web marketed e-commerce site.
Groxx 14y ago
>Even beyond the technological challenges, there are lots of other obstacles to change. Stephenson, who has “devoted a shocking amount of time” lately to learning about alternative space-launch technologies, said at MIT that “the reason none of them happen turns out to be insurance.” I submit that this (and related barriers) may be the primary reason for a lack of crazy innovation. Even though claiming a lack of innovation ignores the crazy amount of social changes the internet has brought us at every level. Innovating in software right now runs the risk of patent lawsuits because you came up with something that someone else came up with. Innovating in hardware right now runs the risk of falling afoul of a bajillion safety regulations you may not even be able to find out about. Innovating in content right now runs the risk of being squashed by the older players (RIAA, MPAA, B&N, etc) because they don't like they way you looked in their direction. Innovation is still happening, but yes, it could be faster if we'd just chuck all that and say "do whatever". The wild-west of creativity. We'd get our personal jetpacks and flying cars in a small handful of years at worst. But then again, there's another article on the front page that shows the danger of allowing this, the 'tiny, cheap, and dangerous' iphone charger: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3903705 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3903705 . (tl;dr: the $2.79 charger might kill you) Honestly, I doubt we can have both innovation and safety. Ever. There is very likely a happier middle ground than where we are now, but they're almost precisely opposed to each other.
Silhouette 14y ago
I don't think the Internet is the problem. Rather, it is an unfortunate catalyst for certain negative effects and serves to amplify others. One such effect is that many political and legal systems in the West are broken. The general population is apathetic because their voices are so readily ignored by those in power, and special interest groups call the shots. That results in things like an excessively burdensome intellectual property regime, which instead of promoting the development of new ideas and the creation of new products and services by those with meaningful contributions to make, often serves to defend the dying business models of entrenched old players against competition from new players, while in practice offering little benefit to those new players in return because they lack the resources to exploit any advantages they might theoretically have. Then you combine the resulting culture of resentment by consumers with technology to share creative works instantly, and you not only have a recipe for promoting piracy rather than providing the market with more constructive alternatives that reward the people whose hard work produces things we value (but not enough to bother paying for them, apparently), you also create an over-reaching sense of entitlement in society. Another negative effect is the kind of education system that we have in many places today where the idea seems to be that no child can be seen to fail, yet it is considered somehow elitist to single out children at the top end of the academic bell curve for any kind of special treatment that would help them to take advantage of their gifts. Here in the UK, for example, we've seen an obvious reduction in the breadth and rigour of exams for at least a generation, and there is a kind of inverse snobbery about selective schools or, worse, schools that charge fees. Of course, those private schools can also use their greater financial resources to employ better educated and trained teachers, provide teaching in smaller groups, and otherwise exploit opportunities to offer a better education to their pupils, but we're supposed to ignore that because if we can't educate all of our children to that standard then damn it we're not going to educate anyone to that standard. Naturally, instead of recognising the obvious flaws in all of this and doing something about it, successive governments and educational institutions seem more concerned with being apologists for the situation, defending this year's school leavers and graduates, and pretending they only tolerate academic high-fliers. So now we have 50% of the population going to university and, ignoring the significant but still relatively small proportion who now drop out before graduating, every other person has at least a bachelor's degree, and then when they leave university they expect that the same kinds of jobs will be waiting for all of them as were waiting for graduates a generation ago when perhaps 5-10% of the population got the same qualification. The reality is more likely to be a crash course in customer service management with practical training provided in a fast-moving environment (or flipping burgers, as we used to call it). This breeds further resentment, complaints about the high unemployment rate, and so on. Oh, and it also means that many children whose gifts are not academic but who might have made excellent tradesmen or carers or artists or any number of other socially valuable (and often quite financially lucrative, too) roles are pressured into getting certificates that will never be of any real use to them and working 9-5 (sorry, 8-5 or 9-6) in a dead-end office admin job. Did I mention the resentment problem? There's a whole load more: raising at least one generation with very little respect for anything, the rapid erosion of privacy, the paranoia of governments about anything that might even resemble a possible threat to national security like studying physics, chemistry or engineering, and the list goes on. But this is already a very long post so I won't go into any more areas in detail. We know these are problems. Our political and legal systems are broken. Our education systems and childcare are broken. Everyone knows these things are broken, and a lot of people have a very clear idea about why, but the system works to prevent those people from getting into positions where they can fix it. And so, instead of encouraging the people with the big ideas to share them, and the people with the practical talents to design better tools and build great new things, and the people with social skills to co-ordinate and encourage all of this, we are breeding new generations who have no concept that anything worth doing requires hard work and commitment, and whose total career aspirations are to climb the middle management ladder as fast as possible (or just to stay alive and out of jail, depending on the luck of the draw). The Internet didn't cause these problems. It just makes it easier than ever for us to see them, and it provides a stronger incentive than ever for vested interests to clamp down on anyone innovative enough to pose a threat to their bottom line. The one comfort I have is that the Internet is almost certainly also the way those vested interests will also be brought down eventually. The Powers That Be have all kinds of resources to throw at problems they don't like to make them go away. In contrast, we're only just learning to use grassroots activism, collective funding models, the ability to share knowledge and ideas freely with like-minded people all around the world, and the ability to share educational resources crafted by the smartest educators on the planet, on the kind of scale that the Internet allows. It will take time to understand these things, and to fix the problems that are getting in the way of progress, but there are always going to be enough smart and interested people in the world to sow the seeds of change, and while they may not rise to prominence in politics or business this year or next, in the Internet age there are other ways to get things done. We just haven't learned to get the right people to use them yet.
kirk21 14y ago
Guess one of the problems is that it takes often a decade before a technology is mature and 'domesticated' by its users. You see sth on engadget and think you'll have it in your hands the next day but it takes years before you see it again so you have the feeling it takes ages before sth changes. On a related note: it always strikes me that people devote a lot of time and money to sports and celebrities while cool tech is ignored. Imagine that all that time/money was devoted to science...
rachelbythebay 14y ago
This reminds me of a story from a few years back. In short, the greatest minds of a generation are selling advertising (or are scamming investors). Who's left after that?
zerostar07 14y ago
- Maybe the jetpack won't be needed because the internet makes it easier to do work without the need to commute (a way of work familiar to many HN readers i guess). - The mars colony would prove a point more than being a revolution nowadays (same reason why we don't return to the moon much often). - We 're not really worried about lack of energy sources either, because our sun will be bright enough for long, and the relevant science is known for almost a century - Our chores been taken care by technology enough it seems, so we 're now feeding our brains. It's not very visible externally as the industrial transformation of the earth was, but the human brain has been upgraded significantly and irreversibly by the instant access to all the world's information. I thought the article would be about why internet innovation is not that so fast paced anymore... i was wrong.
IsaacL 14y ago
I actually disagree with most of the comments here, and agree with the article. I recently had the same realisation that the article author did: that much more innovation seemed to have happened in the years 1870-2010 than the years 1972-2012. http://blog.i.saac.me/post/based-on-the-exhaustion-of-opportunities-economic-growth-in-developed-countries-will-end-sometime-after-2030/ http://blog.i.saac.me/post/based-on-the-exhaustion-of-opport... I also degree with the people saying that the current legal system is the problem; in fact I don't think there's any way to speed up innovation at all. I think we're started to reach the limit of wealth-generating opportunities. The train, the telegraph, electricity, cars, factories -- these revolutionised people's lives. I think we're now getting close to peak "innovation" -- it's getting harder and harder to find new ways to seriously improve people's lives. Smartphones and the internet have changed people's lives, too, but they're only major changes of the last few decades. Now, a fair response might be -- we still don't have a cure for cancer! We still haven't colonised space! We still haven't built an AI! Nanorobots! 3D printing! And people are working on all those problems. And technologically, yes, they're much more complex and advanced than anything built in the industrial revolution. But look at it from an economic point of view -- and I'm talking about the foundation of economics. Economics is based on value; human value. Stuff people want, as pg said. I want a box on my desk that can print useful objects, but probably not as much as my great-great-grandfather wanted to be able to heat his home without having to burn things. We want a cure for cancer, but not as much as past generations wanted a cure for cholera, typhoid or the bubonic plague. That's why processers keep getting faster but economic growth keeps slowing. Technology advances exponentially, but human wealth grows logistically. The natural limit is the limit of human happiness. Example: World economic growth is mostly driven by developing countries playing catch up to the West's living standards. Heck, even Adam Smith himself said that economic growth would only last a few centuries. I guess each new iPhone app or Facebook game does make people marginally happier, the entertainment value does have economic value. But again, this is scraping the barrel of value creation. Are there still ways to majorly improve people's lives out there? Possibly, we're definitely not in utopia yet, but I think we'll need a new definition of wealth to get there. I should really write up the above ideas into a proper blog post soon. Would be interested to hear people's opinions first.
- erichocean 14y ago
bo1024 14y ago
This is what he's really complaining about: > More prosaically, the 15 years since the internet became a major part of our lives has been marked here in the U.S. — birthplace of the internet — by mostly disappointing economic growth. It seems like an old-fashioned viewpoint to conflate innovation and creativity with economic growth. If we're seeing more innovation, we must be spending more money, right? Well ... not so fast. Consider a classic Internet innovation, the search engine. It opens up worlds upon worlds of information to the common person's fingertips. But it only rarely convinces people to buy something extra. (It does make buying things easier, which is a big reason that ad revenues are so big, but it probably doesn't grow consumption all that much[0].) For a better example, look at Wikipedia. Direct economic impact, measured in GDP growth? Hard to say. But it's tough to argue that Wikipedia isn't an awesome example of human creativity and collaboration, or that it hasn't made a big positive impact. My argument: the Internet era has just made us more efficient. We can do more with less money. Economic growth is not desirable in and of itself -- only when it is a signal of increasing quality of life. The Internet has enabled greatly increased quality of life without an increase in spending. [0] (edit) Wild guess on my part. Could be wrong.
- JumpCrisscross 14y ago
  I think this quote captures his implied response to your point: »for decades, electricity had little effect on industrial productivity as manufacturers simply swapped out older energy sources for electric power but changed nothing about how they made things. It was only as new factories were built that took advantage of the unique properties of electric motors that a productivity boom ensued. Wikipedia, Google, et al are innovations in the way the stock market or ECN were - undeniable leaps forward in the factors of production, i.e. allowing tangible innovation to happen. These innovations, the latter in capital and former in information, hold their social value in the tangible progress they enable. What is enabled has not materialised with the force that was expected. This will be an unpopular point on HackerNews, but most people live in the tangible world. That is why the iPhone and iPad have propelled Apple so far, so fast - it is a clear manifestation of tangible technological progress. The author laments that these factors of innovation are getting so much attention intrinsically at the expense of follow-on, arguably harder, tangible innovation.
lcargill99 14y ago
We have not dealt with the social effects of advertising-driven television, much less the Internet. Empirically, change DID slow down a great deal with the advent of the Internet. If you listen to the hope buried in the regret of Pink Floyd's "Division Bell" ( which specifically refers to the Usenet postings of Publius ) can you feel anything but a great sadness for what might have been? Remember Usenet? It was amazing, for a while. Then they turned away...
gdubs 14y ago
The 4th paragraph is strikingly similar to an exchange between the characters Josh and Leo on The West Wing: Leo McGarry: My generation never got the future it was promised... Thirty-five years later, cars, air travel is exactly the same. We don't even have the Concorde anymore. Technology stopped. Josh Lyman: The personal computer... Leo McGarry: A more efficient delivery system for gossip and pornography? Where's my jet pack, my colonies on the Moon?
mkr-hn 14y ago
The technology that will power the next round of innovation is under development on uninspiring projects. Think about how far browser technology has advanced in just the last few years. We're only just now starting to apply the processing and communication capacity created by the .com boom. We need a break to appreciate how far we've come at least once a century. And this break is about to end. Appreciate while you can. We're about to see a repeat of the '80s, '90s, and '00s.
paulsutter 14y ago
It's really up to each of us to aim higher, solve a large problem. Peter Thiel does a much better job characterizing the problem than this author. Peter also offers solitons. It's worthwhile to encourage everyone to aim higher. But this article comes off as a rant.
ericflo 14y ago
When Will This Low-Quality Article Era End?
SkyMarshal 14y ago
Q: When Will This Low-Innovation Internet Era End? A: Imho, when innovation and production of material goods is as democratized by 3D Printing and similar technologies [1] as knowledge innovation and production was by the Internet. I'm looking forward to the day the impedance mismatch between knowledge creation and tool/product creation is much reduced from the current state. Good summary [1] by the Economist for anyone who hasn't read it. 1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3895690 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3895690
moocow01 14y ago
I think we really need to talk about what innovation means because its liberally thrown around everywhere these days. Taking the more conservative meaning of innovation... The internet is an innovation in itself - but what is being built on it is the --application-- of the innovation of the internet, and usually these internet services are not true innovations in and of themselves. That doesn't mean internet services aren't useful or progressive - it just that I'm very bearish on seeing huge truly paradigm changing innovations on the scale of space flight, nuclear, etc pop out of the "internet sector". What the internet and the services being built on it are really good at is taking existing services and processes and streamlining them to be easier and less costly. We can communicate, distribute, and automate so many things because of the internet and whats being built. Thats the internet sector's form of innovation - I think you just need to qualify what definition of innovation that fits.
rmATinnovafy 14y ago
History takes time to be written.
andrewfelix 14y ago
I would argue that what we perceive to be a slow down of innovation is actually the stark contrast to what we witnessed during the post-war and cold war period. That was an unusually amazing period of technological achievement largely driven by an arms race and idealogical competition between two super powers.
ilaksh 14y ago
'Even beyond the technological challenges, there are lots of other obstacles to change. Stephenson, who has “devoted a shocking amount of time” lately to learning about alternative space-launch technologies, said at MIT that “the reason none of them happen turns out to be insurance.”' I think that the economic model and related institutions (and the social model) are actually antagonistic towards the application of technology. I learned that mostly from Jacque Fresco and Peter Joseph et al. I disagree with their solution in that they are talking about a centralized control system, but most of Fresco's ideas I think are correct. He just formed his theory before the research came out on how decentralized distributed systems are more robust. So I don't think you can do away with money like the ZM people suggest, BUT you do need to be aware that there are quite a few important problems with the economic model, for instance the way that automation eliminates employment and therefore the consumer base. Look up the Zeitgeist Movement/Venus Project and you can see all of the arguments. Where I differ is in my solution. I think its important to automate and move away from the consumer driven infinite growth ownership/labor model but I think that once we do that, rather than centralizing and homogenizing automated systems, we just need better information distribution, common data formats and exchange. We need to have a more unified view of the real world and to be able to easily exchange information about it holistically. But it is crucial at the same time to allow for diverse solutions to shared problems. That is necessary to make the system robust, allow it to evolve, keep people sane, etc. I think that representative government, if it was ever really supposed to be representative, has proven to be subservient to money. Also governments have a monopoly on force. I see governments as entrenching moneyed power and enabling its use of force against those with less money. Essentially money is a point system that represents power. I don't think we want to do away with the point system, at least its a way of keeping score. However, we do need to change the nature of money and correct the fundamental problems with belief systems such as the Social Darwinistic viewpoint held by most people. There is no group of truly superior individuals who deserve to have vastly more wealth and control than most people, or a large group of mostly worthless humans who don't really deserve to live. However, I really believe that most people deep down believe both of those things. Those beliefs support the current social framework, which as I said is antagonistic towards the application of technology, as well as creating massive inequality. So "economics" needs to become a real science by first accepting a more up-to-date non-eugenicist model of humanity and its place in the universe as well as integrating physical and social science. This will make it much easier to apply the scientific advances we already have to solving common human problems. Humans need hierarchy of some sort as well as a way of keeping score and satisfying primate needs etc., but you have to integrate that with physical reality and common needs.
stretchwithme 14y ago
As if you could compare the creative process for different innovations on a spreadsheet. I heard someone talking about how innovative Bell Labs was. Which actually collected a 1 or 2 percent charge on every phone bill for decades. Well, you BETTER deliver something if you're sucking up that kind of money. I'm more inclined to thin that people are mentally compressing the past and comparing it to how slowly this moment seems to be going by. Of course it feels like nothing significant is happening. The reality is that we are all learning about whats going on much faster than every before. Maybe we aren't coming up with things that are truly unique because we are not as isolated anymore, just as we probably won't be encountering any new languages from here on out.
colomon 14y ago
I hate this "low innovation" meme. Seriously? Imaginary example, but real tech: Suppose I remember the first half of an Irish reel I heard somewhere, but can't remember the name or where I heard it. In 1980, trying to track it down would involve months (maybe years) of asking every musician I met if they knew it, hunting through obscure books of music, and if I found a good solid lead, perhaps an expensive international phone call to order a recording of it from Ireland. Today? I could play the tune into an app on my phone and within seconds know its name, have multiple different sources for downloading (free) sheet music, and in another couple of minutes have purchased and downloaded multiple professional recordings of it. Two things about this: 1) It's a net negative to GDP. Before I would have spent lots of money on a phone call, a full album, and overseas shipping, now it costs me $1 to get the one track I want. My personal consumer surplus from the new arrangement is really impressive, but the money and time I save doesn't get calculated into the economic figures these people are looking at. 2) The benefit is mostly to the long tail. You've always been able to easily buy Top 40 albums pretty much wherever you were. But now buying any genre you can imagine is easier than buying Top 40 was 32 years ago.
- tatsuke95 14y ago
  >"1) It's a net negative to GDP" I agree with everything but the above. As you say in your example, that chore rarely gets done in 1980. Today, there can be multiple transactions of this type, done easily, everyday.
  - colomon 14y ago
    Hmm. Speaking personally, I don't think my music-buying has more than doubled the number of tracks I purchase in a year from 1994 (first year with a full time job, still had to buy from brick-and-mortar stores) until today. Considering how much CDs cost then versus MP3s today, I wouldn't be surprised if my absolute dollar spending has stayed about the same. (Before correcting for inflation!) Maybe the right way to say this is, I'm getting at least twice as much personal value for the same amount of GDP?
- yxhuvud 14y ago
  Net contribution to GDP is a bit more complicated because there are secondary effects from the things you spend the money and time on instead.
marshallp 14y ago
The biggest new technology breakthrough can be computer vision (so that unconstrained robots are possible). However, the type of people who can work on it are mostly working in big data (the stock market and online advertising). It is reasonable for them to do so (the money is just sitting there to be taken), so the solution to the innovation problem is to fund more people to work on computer vision.
danmaz74 14y ago
"Or, to look at it another way, until the prime example of an innovative major corporation ceases to be Procter & Gamble, we probably aren’t in a truly innovative era. (Tide to Go is awesome, but it’s not exactly the transistor.)" Please, this is such a strawman... the most valuable company in the world is now Apple. Wether you like it or not, tell me that it isn't an innovative company.
stcredzero 14y ago
Neal Stephenson is writing a story based on this proposal to enable SSTO by building 20km high steel towers. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003AIPC..654..290L http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003AIPC..654..290L Basically, this is just looking at what is possible, eschewing the hypothetical advance, then running with it. This is also where SpaceX is finding success.
lucidguppy 14y ago
The focus of technology should be sustainability now (Europe is trying to do this now). America needs to look more like central Europe with walkable cities and less cars. Also the entire world is still trying to make sense of the industrial revolution. Our machines could serve all the world for free, but what are consumers going to give back in return?

112 points by Dn_Ab 14y ago

These sorts of articles are pointless. If this guy has such a strong opinion, why doesn't he go innovate instead of telling other people to do it. Hypocrisy at its finest.

wdewind 14y ago
Disagree with the guy's opinion, but in his mind he is innovating. As a writer the way he contributes is by innovating culture and thought. He has seen an information inefficiency in the common belief that we are making huge technological gains, and his article is an attempt to fix that.

pyrhho 14y ago

It seems disingenuous that this article completely ignores Google as a source of innovation in the last 15 years. A company which (pretty successfully) organizes the entirety of human knowledge, and lets you query it in milliseconds? Sounds like some pretty serious innovation to me...

protomyth 14y ago
Not quite disagreeing, but from his (an end-user's) point of view, how is Google search different than Alta Vista or Lycos before it?
- andrewflnr 14y ago
  More stuff indexed, for one thing, paper books and videos included. And hopefully, more intelligent interpretation of queries, though that's more debatable.
- k-mcgrady 14y ago
  This is a very good point. Google is more accurate, and faster, but in the end it does the same thing. It helps the user find information on the web. It's not a great new idea, it's an improvement on an existing idea.
  - pyrhho 14y ago
    Sometimes a quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference. For example, motorcycles are just faster horses (in some ways worse, like for off-roading), but you could hardly argue they are the same thing. I would argue that google is substantially more useful than altavista, or dogpile, ever were.
    - rory096 14y ago
      And ultimately Altavista and Dogpile are irrelevant, because neither existed just a few years before Google. Web search is revolutionary; search engines before Google were just halting steps on the way. That is, the contention isn't that Google revolutionized web search, but that web search revolutionized the world.
  - kiba 14y ago
    An extreme change in accuracy and speed might as well be...a revolution.
- retube 14y ago
  whoa! http://www.lycos.co.uk/ http://www.lycos.co.uk/
  - philipithomas 14y ago
    Are they just running Google search on there?
- unconed 14y ago
  The thing that made Google unique is that they ranked pages according to the links between them (i.e. PageRank), as opposed to more traditional document ranking methods that are keyword based. As a result, Google found showed you content that people liked (and linked to). From the end-user's perspective, Google search was noticeably better and more relevant. As far as I know, it was the first massive application of data mining graphs, which now drives social networking, content recommendations and more.
- philipithomas 14y ago
  The algorithm is quite fascinating (from what we can infer). Using things like a markov chain to model results in Google shows a big jump from human-compiled results in early search engines - it's a new application of theoretical knowledge that has greatly enhanced society, and frankly shows a degree of automation that could be a basis machine intelligence.
kiba 14y ago
Maybe the innovation is so powerful and so large that it basically become the background and ignored. We all take googling for granted and hardly remember a time when search engines literally don't work.
waterlesscloud 14y ago
A company founded...14 years ago.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- pyrhho 14y ago
  Fair point. It just seemed odd to use Procter & Gamble as an example of the most innovative companies while ignoring a < 15 year old company which now has a higher market cap than P&G (200M to 177M).

protomyth 14y ago

If the prevailing revenue source is advertising, it limits the type of startups that are viable.

kiba 14y ago

Innovation don't happen in certain industries are probably because of a dysfunctional social environment within that system. What prevent us from innovating is not so much intelligence but social configuration of our society at that particular sector.

k-mcgrady 14y ago

It's certainly an interesting perspective on things. I would argue that the internet has had an impact relative in scale to that of electricity or the car but it is true that things seem to have stalled. Instead of working on world changing technologies using the amazing tools we have at our disposal we are building hundreds of photo sharing apps, check in apps, and social networks in the hope of a big exit (I guess Twitter & Facebook have changed communication so there are some exceptions). I don't think this just applies to science/technology though. If you look at culture (music and art specifically) we are also in a bit of a slump compared to the early/mid 20th century. It could be that this is a cyclical thing and societies naturally go through periods of rapid innovation and creation, and and other periods where change is minor. Nb: It's easy to call out the author for being a hypocrite (why doesn't he do something world changing?) but that's not very productive. I have just agreed with him but I don't think I'm going to be the one who creates the next great invention. I'm sure most people want to change the world but it's easier and less risky to build a simple, high growth app or product with a high chance of making them a lot of money.

daleharvey 14y ago

I find it quite hard to understand the reasoning of people that downplay the affect the internet has had on our lives. I dont fall out of contact with the people I grew up with (at home or university / past jobs), I am flying out tomorrow to meet with good friends all of whom I would have never known if it wasnt for the internet, my career would not exist without the internet. The worlds knowledge is now categorised conveniently into a website which you can download and carry around wherever you go, that was science fiction 30 years ago. Almost the entire population of the world has access to enough knowledge and resources that they can become a leading expert in pretty much any field they want to. Sure we dont have our promised jetpacks and its easy to be dismissive because some people post inane stuff on twitter, but I find it really hard to believe the last 50 years is some form of lull in innovation, I cant imagine any other period of time being more exciting to live in.

benihana 14y ago
We have computers in our pockets that send a signal to space to locate us anywhere on the planet within a couple of feet, then tell us how to get where we want to go. We can communicate instantly, instantly with people on the other side of the planet. We have a network of satellites orbiting our planet giving us constant information about our world. Not many people predicted these things in popular culture/popular sci fi. These kinds of articles always seem like old people complaining that the future didn't turn out the way they expected. Instead of accepting that the biggest innovative breakthrough in the past 50 years was a global communication and information network, they complain that there hasn't been anything good happening.
- jasonwatkinspdx 14y ago
  The only problem with that criticism is that Neil Stephenson has known more about the internet earlier than nearly anyone commenting on this story. One of the central activities of 'team hero' in Cryptonomicon is laying undersea IP links. If you've read his books, it's obvious he has thought deeply about how the expansion of the internet affects everyone's lives. You are entirely missing what he is saying.

nvk 14y ago

What a stupid article, short, vague and resentful. Most industries are getting disrupted and mainstream doesn't notice. The ripple effect takes a long time to reach incumbents – they can still get loans and legislations catered to keep them afloat for a few more years. meh.

DanielN 14y ago

The problem of "low innovation" in relation to the internet seems to be a problem of infrastructure. Building Google lead to building Google maps which is now leading to building a self driving car which is a problem that when/if it is solved will save millions of lives and billions of dollars. Not a perfect example, but it is an instance of not being albe to solve important problems without the necessary infrastructure.

DanBC 14y ago
That's an excellent example. Another example is lack of cash - governments are not doing things like going to space. Moving cash into the hands of private people has allowed those people to start exploring space. But where are the other examples? What other companies are doing similar things? This isn't just rhetorical. I'm sure plenty of companies are doing exciting things that don't get decent reporting. (I guess folding@home is one example.)
- ippisl 14y ago
  Caedium is building an easy to use, cloud based Computational flow dynamics(CFD) simulation tool[0] Computer aided engineering tools in the cloud might be the missing link between the internet and real life innovation. They could extremely reduce the price of of a (simulated) first prototype , and enable entry to small or crazy ideas. But the major tool vendors don't hurry to offer affordable tools in the cloud, because their revenue models works differently[1]. There's probably a place for a few start-ups there. [0]http://www.symscape.com/blog/cfd-azure-cloud http://www.symscape.com/blog/cfd-azure-cloud [1]http://caewatch.com/cae-in-the-cloud-just-hot-air/ http://caewatch.com/cae-in-the-cloud-just-hot-air/

andyl 14y ago

Over the past 30 years we haven't seen breakthru innovation in transportation, energy, medicine, and many other fields. This point has been made by Peter Theil and others. That may be true, but look at some recent developments. Self-driving cars, synthetic biology, thorium reactors, commercial space, 3d printing - not to mention the rapid evolution of internet and mobile technologies. Further afield, people are working on quantum computing, memristors, AI algorithms, and more. All of these developments could make a big impact. Seems to me that we've got plenty of advances ahead of us.

Silhouette 14y ago
Over the past 30 years we haven't seen breakthru innovation in transportation, energy, medicine, and many other fields. We haven't? What proportion of the electricity supplied in your country came from renewable sources 30 years ago? How much did we know about human genetics and, for example, the potential of stem cells, 30 years ago? If I wanted to go to Paris 30 years ago, it required a flight or a boat trip, not to mention the connections to and from the airport or ferry port on either end. Today I can walk to my local railway station in a few minutes, take a train down to London, walk to the station next door, take another train that goes under a tunnel all the way under the English Channel, and get off that train in Paris. I think some people claim innovation isn't happening just because it's happening too slowly for them to notice in their everyday lives.

joelhaus 14y ago

The author begins by making the case that innovation was at a peak in the early 20th century, but has been largely stagnant at the start of the 21st century. It's a provocative question, but I believe it's a symptom of a real underlying cause. To answer him more directly: Innovation will ramp up when the influence of moneyed interests on legislative priorities begins to wane. An interesting and, I believe, a truly important thing happened for innovation at the beginning of the 20th century, the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt. He demanded transparency from food suppliers, broke up Standard Oil and worked hard to restrain the power and influence of large corporations. We need another T.R. for innovation to thrive. In just this past year, there have been numerous anti-competitive legislative initiatives that we can point to. Each one lobbied for and backed by entrenched oligopolies that are actively trying to put the clamps on innovation. This is happening at both the federal (PIPA/SOPA, CISPA, patent wars, AT&T/T-Mobile Merger) and local level (Bans on Municipal Broadband). In his book, "The Master Switch", Tim Wu tells a great story about a device invented at Bell Labs capable of recording a callers voice if the attached phone was not answered. The year was 1934, but the magnetic recording tape, used in answering machines and computer storage devices, did not become widely available until decades later. The AT&T monopoly chose to keep this new technology a secret, fearing that it would cannibalize their profitable business model. If nothing else, this story demonstrates the type of bureaucratic mindset that prevents entrenched corporate interests from making the kind of leaps that come from hungry entrepreneurs and government funded research. As a reader of HN, I would guess that this is already clearer to you than most.

blackhole 14y ago

I think this article is misguided in that there has been lots of innovation in the tech sector that has been overshadowed by silly things like "Instagram" that solve "cat picture problems" due to startup culture. The public face of innovation has not been dealing with hard problems, but people are working on them. There are several potential wide-ranging cancer treatments and someone came up with a potential cure for the common cold. Our educational system and our culture must change if we are to get into a period where there is widespread innovation in dealing with hard problems instead of cat pictures. The internet will be a crucial part of that, and in the future, we will recognize the internet as being a source of cat pictures before we figured out how to use it to unlock our own potential.

atarian 14y ago

I'm astonished that people think the Internet-era is low innovation. It's only been twenty years and we've gotten so much out of it (social networking, location-based services, real-time updates/news, vast pool of information). I don't know about you guys but I think anyone who lived in the past would kill to be in this era.

james4k 14y ago

There is simply a lower signal to noise ratio in regards to innovation. And yes, while there is a lot of noisy low-innovation internet companies, there are still more strong innovators now than there were 10 or 20 years ago. There is a low barrier to entry to the tech industry, and with that a great spectrum of the level of impact they make, and yet the opportunity and ease of access to an audience is greater than ever before. Nothing like this has ever been able to happen. Innovation is continuing at an exponential rate, and I would hope Justin Fox would realize this as he books a last minute hotel via mobile app, rekindles a long lost friendship from school, and slips his tiny 90s-grade supercomputer into his pocket. All while selling his hobby romance novelas on his web marketed e-commerce site.

Groxx 14y ago

>Even beyond the technological challenges, there are lots of other obstacles to change. Stephenson, who has “devoted a shocking amount of time” lately to learning about alternative space-launch technologies, said at MIT that “the reason none of them happen turns out to be insurance.” I submit that this (and related barriers) may be the primary reason for a lack of crazy innovation. Even though claiming a lack of innovation ignores the crazy amount of social changes the internet has brought us at every level. Innovating in software right now runs the risk of patent lawsuits because you came up with something that someone else came up with. Innovating in hardware right now runs the risk of falling afoul of a bajillion safety regulations you may not even be able to find out about. Innovating in content right now runs the risk of being squashed by the older players (RIAA, MPAA, B&N, etc) because they don't like they way you looked in their direction. Innovation is still happening, but yes, it could be faster if we'd just chuck all that and say "do whatever". The wild-west of creativity. We'd get our personal jetpacks and flying cars in a small handful of years at worst. But then again, there's another article on the front page that shows the danger of allowing this, the 'tiny, cheap, and dangerous' iphone charger: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3903705 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3903705 . (tl;dr: the $2.79 charger might kill you) Honestly, I doubt we can have both innovation and safety. Ever. There is very likely a happier middle ground than where we are now, but they're almost precisely opposed to each other.

Silhouette 14y ago

I don't think the Internet is the problem. Rather, it is an unfortunate catalyst for certain negative effects and serves to amplify others. One such effect is that many political and legal systems in the West are broken. The general population is apathetic because their voices are so readily ignored by those in power, and special interest groups call the shots. That results in things like an excessively burdensome intellectual property regime, which instead of promoting the development of new ideas and the creation of new products and services by those with meaningful contributions to make, often serves to defend the dying business models of entrenched old players against competition from new players, while in practice offering little benefit to those new players in return because they lack the resources to exploit any advantages they might theoretically have. Then you combine the resulting culture of resentment by consumers with technology to share creative works instantly, and you not only have a recipe for promoting piracy rather than providing the market with more constructive alternatives that reward the people whose hard work produces things we value (but not enough to bother paying for them, apparently), you also create an over-reaching sense of entitlement in society. Another negative effect is the kind of education system that we have in many places today where the idea seems to be that no child can be seen to fail, yet it is considered somehow elitist to single out children at the top end of the academic bell curve for any kind of special treatment that would help them to take advantage of their gifts. Here in the UK, for example, we've seen an obvious reduction in the breadth and rigour of exams for at least a generation, and there is a kind of inverse snobbery about selective schools or, worse, schools that charge fees. Of course, those private schools can also use their greater financial resources to employ better educated and trained teachers, provide teaching in smaller groups, and otherwise exploit opportunities to offer a better education to their pupils, but we're supposed to ignore that because if we can't educate all of our children to that standard then damn it we're not going to educate anyone to that standard. Naturally, instead of recognising the obvious flaws in all of this and doing something about it, successive governments and educational institutions seem more concerned with being apologists for the situation, defending this year's school leavers and graduates, and pretending they only tolerate academic high-fliers. So now we have 50% of the population going to university and, ignoring the significant but still relatively small proportion who now drop out before graduating, every other person has at least a bachelor's degree, and then when they leave university they expect that the same kinds of jobs will be waiting for all of them as were waiting for graduates a generation ago when perhaps 5-10% of the population got the same qualification. The reality is more likely to be a crash course in customer service management with practical training provided in a fast-moving environment (or flipping burgers, as we used to call it). This breeds further resentment, complaints about the high unemployment rate, and so on. Oh, and it also means that many children whose gifts are not academic but who might have made excellent tradesmen or carers or artists or any number of other socially valuable (and often quite financially lucrative, too) roles are pressured into getting certificates that will never be of any real use to them and working 9-5 (sorry, 8-5 or 9-6) in a dead-end office admin job. Did I mention the resentment problem? There's a whole load more: raising at least one generation with very little respect for anything, the rapid erosion of privacy, the paranoia of governments about anything that might even resemble a possible threat to national security like studying physics, chemistry or engineering, and the list goes on. But this is already a very long post so I won't go into any more areas in detail. We know these are problems. Our political and legal systems are broken. Our education systems and childcare are broken. Everyone knows these things are broken, and a lot of people have a very clear idea about why, but the system works to prevent those people from getting into positions where they can fix it. And so, instead of encouraging the people with the big ideas to share them, and the people with the practical talents to design better tools and build great new things, and the people with social skills to co-ordinate and encourage all of this, we are breeding new generations who have no concept that anything worth doing requires hard work and commitment, and whose total career aspirations are to climb the middle management ladder as fast as possible (or just to stay alive and out of jail, depending on the luck of the draw). The Internet didn't cause these problems. It just makes it easier than ever for us to see them, and it provides a stronger incentive than ever for vested interests to clamp down on anyone innovative enough to pose a threat to their bottom line. The one comfort I have is that the Internet is almost certainly also the way those vested interests will also be brought down eventually. The Powers That Be have all kinds of resources to throw at problems they don't like to make them go away. In contrast, we're only just learning to use grassroots activism, collective funding models, the ability to share knowledge and ideas freely with like-minded people all around the world, and the ability to share educational resources crafted by the smartest educators on the planet, on the kind of scale that the Internet allows. It will take time to understand these things, and to fix the problems that are getting in the way of progress, but there are always going to be enough smart and interested people in the world to sow the seeds of change, and while they may not rise to prominence in politics or business this year or next, in the Internet age there are other ways to get things done. We just haven't learned to get the right people to use them yet.

kirk21 14y ago

Guess one of the problems is that it takes often a decade before a technology is mature and 'domesticated' by its users. You see sth on engadget and think you'll have it in your hands the next day but it takes years before you see it again so you have the feeling it takes ages before sth changes. On a related note: it always strikes me that people devote a lot of time and money to sports and celebrities while cool tech is ignored. Imagine that all that time/money was devoted to science...

rachelbythebay 14y ago

This reminds me of a story from a few years back. In short, the greatest minds of a generation are selling advertising (or are scamming investors). Who's left after that?

zerostar07 14y ago

- Maybe the jetpack won't be needed because the internet makes it easier to do work without the need to commute (a way of work familiar to many HN readers i guess). - The mars colony would prove a point more than being a revolution nowadays (same reason why we don't return to the moon much often). - We 're not really worried about lack of energy sources either, because our sun will be bright enough for long, and the relevant science is known for almost a century - Our chores been taken care by technology enough it seems, so we 're now feeding our brains. It's not very visible externally as the industrial transformation of the earth was, but the human brain has been upgraded significantly and irreversibly by the instant access to all the world's information. I thought the article would be about why internet innovation is not that so fast paced anymore... i was wrong.

IsaacL 14y ago

I actually disagree with most of the comments here, and agree with the article. I recently had the same realisation that the article author did: that much more innovation seemed to have happened in the years 1870-2010 than the years 1972-2012. http://blog.i.saac.me/post/based-on-the-exhaustion-of-opportunities-economic-growth-in-developed-countries-will-end-sometime-after-2030/ http://blog.i.saac.me/post/based-on-the-exhaustion-of-opport... I also degree with the people saying that the current legal system is the problem; in fact I don't think there's any way to speed up innovation at all. I think we're started to reach the limit of wealth-generating opportunities. The train, the telegraph, electricity, cars, factories -- these revolutionised people's lives. I think we're now getting close to peak "innovation" -- it's getting harder and harder to find new ways to seriously improve people's lives. Smartphones and the internet have changed people's lives, too, but they're only major changes of the last few decades. Now, a fair response might be -- we still don't have a cure for cancer! We still haven't colonised space! We still haven't built an AI! Nanorobots! 3D printing! And people are working on all those problems. And technologically, yes, they're much more complex and advanced than anything built in the industrial revolution. But look at it from an economic point of view -- and I'm talking about the foundation of economics. Economics is based on value; human value. Stuff people want, as pg said. I want a box on my desk that can print useful objects, but probably not as much as my great-great-grandfather wanted to be able to heat his home without having to burn things. We want a cure for cancer, but not as much as past generations wanted a cure for cholera, typhoid or the bubonic plague. That's why processers keep getting faster but economic growth keeps slowing. Technology advances exponentially, but human wealth grows logistically. The natural limit is the limit of human happiness. Example: World economic growth is mostly driven by developing countries playing catch up to the West's living standards. Heck, even Adam Smith himself said that economic growth would only last a few centuries. I guess each new iPhone app or Facebook game does make people marginally happier, the entertainment value does have economic value. But again, this is scraping the barrel of value creation. Are there still ways to majorly improve people's lives out there? Possibly, we're definitely not in utopia yet, but I think we'll need a new definition of wealth to get there. I should really write up the above ideas into a proper blog post soon. Would be interested to hear people's opinions first.

erichocean 14y ago

bo1024 14y ago

This is what he's really complaining about: > More prosaically, the 15 years since the internet became a major part of our lives has been marked here in the U.S. — birthplace of the internet — by mostly disappointing economic growth. It seems like an old-fashioned viewpoint to conflate innovation and creativity with economic growth. If we're seeing more innovation, we must be spending more money, right? Well ... not so fast. Consider a classic Internet innovation, the search engine. It opens up worlds upon worlds of information to the common person's fingertips. But it only rarely convinces people to buy something extra. (It does make buying things easier, which is a big reason that ad revenues are so big, but it probably doesn't grow consumption all that much[0].) For a better example, look at Wikipedia. Direct economic impact, measured in GDP growth? Hard to say. But it's tough to argue that Wikipedia isn't an awesome example of human creativity and collaboration, or that it hasn't made a big positive impact. My argument: the Internet era has just made us more efficient. We can do more with less money. Economic growth is not desirable in and of itself -- only when it is a signal of increasing quality of life. The Internet has enabled greatly increased quality of life without an increase in spending. [0] (edit) Wild guess on my part. Could be wrong.

JumpCrisscross 14y ago
I think this quote captures his implied response to your point: »for decades, electricity had little effect on industrial productivity as manufacturers simply swapped out older energy sources for electric power but changed nothing about how they made things. It was only as new factories were built that took advantage of the unique properties of electric motors that a productivity boom ensued. Wikipedia, Google, et al are innovations in the way the stock market or ECN were - undeniable leaps forward in the factors of production, i.e. allowing tangible innovation to happen. These innovations, the latter in capital and former in information, hold their social value in the tangible progress they enable. What is enabled has not materialised with the force that was expected. This will be an unpopular point on HackerNews, but most people live in the tangible world. That is why the iPhone and iPad have propelled Apple so far, so fast - it is a clear manifestation of tangible technological progress. The author laments that these factors of innovation are getting so much attention intrinsically at the expense of follow-on, arguably harder, tangible innovation.

lcargill99 14y ago

We have not dealt with the social effects of advertising-driven television, much less the Internet. Empirically, change DID slow down a great deal with the advent of the Internet. If you listen to the hope buried in the regret of Pink Floyd's "Division Bell" ( which specifically refers to the Usenet postings of Publius ) can you feel anything but a great sadness for what might have been? Remember Usenet? It was amazing, for a while. Then they turned away...

gdubs 14y ago

The 4th paragraph is strikingly similar to an exchange between the characters Josh and Leo on The West Wing: Leo McGarry: My generation never got the future it was promised... Thirty-five years later, cars, air travel is exactly the same. We don't even have the Concorde anymore. Technology stopped. Josh Lyman: The personal computer... Leo McGarry: A more efficient delivery system for gossip and pornography? Where's my jet pack, my colonies on the Moon?

mkr-hn 14y ago

The technology that will power the next round of innovation is under development on uninspiring projects. Think about how far browser technology has advanced in just the last few years. We're only just now starting to apply the processing and communication capacity created by the .com boom. We need a break to appreciate how far we've come at least once a century. And this break is about to end. Appreciate while you can. We're about to see a repeat of the '80s, '90s, and '00s.

paulsutter 14y ago

It's really up to each of us to aim higher, solve a large problem. Peter Thiel does a much better job characterizing the problem than this author. Peter also offers solitons. It's worthwhile to encourage everyone to aim higher. But this article comes off as a rant.

ericflo 14y ago

When Will This Low-Quality Article Era End?

SkyMarshal 14y ago

Q: When Will This Low-Innovation Internet Era End? A: Imho, when innovation and production of material goods is as democratized by 3D Printing and similar technologies [1] as knowledge innovation and production was by the Internet. I'm looking forward to the day the impedance mismatch between knowledge creation and tool/product creation is much reduced from the current state. Good summary [1] by the Economist for anyone who hasn't read it. 1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3895690 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3895690

moocow01 14y ago

I think we really need to talk about what innovation means because its liberally thrown around everywhere these days. Taking the more conservative meaning of innovation... The internet is an innovation in itself - but what is being built on it is the --application-- of the innovation of the internet, and usually these internet services are not true innovations in and of themselves. That doesn't mean internet services aren't useful or progressive - it just that I'm very bearish on seeing huge truly paradigm changing innovations on the scale of space flight, nuclear, etc pop out of the "internet sector". What the internet and the services being built on it are really good at is taking existing services and processes and streamlining them to be easier and less costly. We can communicate, distribute, and automate so many things because of the internet and whats being built. Thats the internet sector's form of innovation - I think you just need to qualify what definition of innovation that fits.

rmATinnovafy 14y ago

History takes time to be written.

andrewfelix 14y ago

I would argue that what we perceive to be a slow down of innovation is actually the stark contrast to what we witnessed during the post-war and cold war period. That was an unusually amazing period of technological achievement largely driven by an arms race and idealogical competition between two super powers.

ilaksh 14y ago

'Even beyond the technological challenges, there are lots of other obstacles to change. Stephenson, who has “devoted a shocking amount of time” lately to learning about alternative space-launch technologies, said at MIT that “the reason none of them happen turns out to be insurance.”' I think that the economic model and related institutions (and the social model) are actually antagonistic towards the application of technology. I learned that mostly from Jacque Fresco and Peter Joseph et al. I disagree with their solution in that they are talking about a centralized control system, but most of Fresco's ideas I think are correct. He just formed his theory before the research came out on how decentralized distributed systems are more robust. So I don't think you can do away with money like the ZM people suggest, BUT you do need to be aware that there are quite a few important problems with the economic model, for instance the way that automation eliminates employment and therefore the consumer base. Look up the Zeitgeist Movement/Venus Project and you can see all of the arguments. Where I differ is in my solution. I think its important to automate and move away from the consumer driven infinite growth ownership/labor model but I think that once we do that, rather than centralizing and homogenizing automated systems, we just need better information distribution, common data formats and exchange. We need to have a more unified view of the real world and to be able to easily exchange information about it holistically. But it is crucial at the same time to allow for diverse solutions to shared problems. That is necessary to make the system robust, allow it to evolve, keep people sane, etc. I think that representative government, if it was ever really supposed to be representative, has proven to be subservient to money. Also governments have a monopoly on force. I see governments as entrenching moneyed power and enabling its use of force against those with less money. Essentially money is a point system that represents power. I don't think we want to do away with the point system, at least its a way of keeping score. However, we do need to change the nature of money and correct the fundamental problems with belief systems such as the Social Darwinistic viewpoint held by most people. There is no group of truly superior individuals who deserve to have vastly more wealth and control than most people, or a large group of mostly worthless humans who don't really deserve to live. However, I really believe that most people deep down believe both of those things. Those beliefs support the current social framework, which as I said is antagonistic towards the application of technology, as well as creating massive inequality. So "economics" needs to become a real science by first accepting a more up-to-date non-eugenicist model of humanity and its place in the universe as well as integrating physical and social science. This will make it much easier to apply the scientific advances we already have to solving common human problems. Humans need hierarchy of some sort as well as a way of keeping score and satisfying primate needs etc., but you have to integrate that with physical reality and common needs.

stretchwithme 14y ago

As if you could compare the creative process for different innovations on a spreadsheet. I heard someone talking about how innovative Bell Labs was. Which actually collected a 1 or 2 percent charge on every phone bill for decades. Well, you BETTER deliver something if you're sucking up that kind of money. I'm more inclined to thin that people are mentally compressing the past and comparing it to how slowly this moment seems to be going by. Of course it feels like nothing significant is happening. The reality is that we are all learning about whats going on much faster than every before. Maybe we aren't coming up with things that are truly unique because we are not as isolated anymore, just as we probably won't be encountering any new languages from here on out.

colomon 14y ago

I hate this "low innovation" meme. Seriously? Imaginary example, but real tech: Suppose I remember the first half of an Irish reel I heard somewhere, but can't remember the name or where I heard it. In 1980, trying to track it down would involve months (maybe years) of asking every musician I met if they knew it, hunting through obscure books of music, and if I found a good solid lead, perhaps an expensive international phone call to order a recording of it from Ireland. Today? I could play the tune into an app on my phone and within seconds know its name, have multiple different sources for downloading (free) sheet music, and in another couple of minutes have purchased and downloaded multiple professional recordings of it. Two things about this: 1) It's a net negative to GDP. Before I would have spent lots of money on a phone call, a full album, and overseas shipping, now it costs me $1 to get the one track I want. My personal consumer surplus from the new arrangement is really impressive, but the money and time I save doesn't get calculated into the economic figures these people are looking at. 2) The benefit is mostly to the long tail. You've always been able to easily buy Top 40 albums pretty much wherever you were. But now buying any genre you can imagine is easier than buying Top 40 was 32 years ago.

tatsuke95 14y ago
>"1) It's a net negative to GDP" I agree with everything but the above. As you say in your example, that chore rarely gets done in 1980. Today, there can be multiple transactions of this type, done easily, everyday.
- colomon 14y ago
  Hmm. Speaking personally, I don't think my music-buying has more than doubled the number of tracks I purchase in a year from 1994 (first year with a full time job, still had to buy from brick-and-mortar stores) until today. Considering how much CDs cost then versus MP3s today, I wouldn't be surprised if my absolute dollar spending has stayed about the same. (Before correcting for inflation!) Maybe the right way to say this is, I'm getting at least twice as much personal value for the same amount of GDP?
yxhuvud 14y ago
Net contribution to GDP is a bit more complicated because there are secondary effects from the things you spend the money and time on instead.

marshallp 14y ago

The biggest new technology breakthrough can be computer vision (so that unconstrained robots are possible). However, the type of people who can work on it are mostly working in big data (the stock market and online advertising). It is reasonable for them to do so (the money is just sitting there to be taken), so the solution to the innovation problem is to fund more people to work on computer vision.

danmaz74 14y ago

"Or, to look at it another way, until the prime example of an innovative major corporation ceases to be Procter & Gamble, we probably aren’t in a truly innovative era. (Tide to Go is awesome, but it’s not exactly the transistor.)" Please, this is such a strawman... the most valuable company in the world is now Apple. Wether you like it or not, tell me that it isn't an innovative company.

stcredzero 14y ago

Neal Stephenson is writing a story based on this proposal to enable SSTO by building 20km high steel towers. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003AIPC..654..290L http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003AIPC..654..290L Basically, this is just looking at what is possible, eschewing the hypothetical advance, then running with it. This is also where SpaceX is finding success.

lucidguppy 14y ago

The focus of technology should be sustainability now (Europe is trying to do this now). America needs to look more like central Europe with walkable cities and less cars. Also the entire world is still trying to make sense of the industrial revolution. Our machines could serve all the world for free, but what are consumers going to give back in return?