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The reasons your iPhone 5 lets you get directions, communicate and make dinner reservations are the global information infrastructure and the tcp/ip protocol, b

by hooande 14y ago

The reasons your iPhone 5 lets you get directions, communicate and make dinner reservations are the global information infrastructure and the tcp/ip protocol, both products of a national innovation policy. I know that most people under 30 directly credit Steve Jobs for everything that they do on their phones. But it took a massive national investment to set up the basics of the internet, which provided the iphone with enough relevant functionality to make it to a 5th version. It sounds like you're equating the leap from "radio to tv" with the leap from "tv to 1080p". There's almost no doubt that the pace of innovation is slowing. Businesses will be more than happy to make billions of dollars by taking us to iphone9 and 2160p, because that's much easier than introducing an entirely new way to interact with the world. I'm not sure if the free markets are the best solution to this particular problem. Thiel and Kasparov kind of have a point. The internet emerged from government funded DARPA research. Our communication infrastructure was built by a government granted monopoly. The moon landing, one of our species greatest achievements, was the result of a national innovation policy pissing contest with the soviets. Maybe everything would really be amazing today if we'd focused more on innovation over the last several decades.

jerf 14y ago
"The reason your iPhone 5 lets you get directions, communicate and make dinner reservations is the global information infrastructure and the tcp/ip protocol, both products of a national innovation policy." And on you go in that vein, but that's massively reductionistic. For one thing, if that is so true, then why did the iPhone 5 not exist 30 years ago, which is still many years after those advances? The Internet and TCP, as important as they may be, are still vanishingly small components in the huge collection of things we call the iPhone 5, with all of its huge stack of software, the huge stack of hardware and work to miniaturize it, the hardware necessary to feed it wireless signals, the huge software stack that requires, and on and on it goes. The reason the iPhone 5 didn't exist 30 years ago is quite simply that the society of 1982 simply couldn't afford it, and it took decades to put together everything that was necessary so it was affordable. Dozens of iterations on dozens of technologies, consistently improved over decades by a crew of tens of thousands of people. Nobody could even conceive of what it would take to centrally manage this massive set of resources. If you could graph the amount of work put in to make things like the iPhone, if you could even define such a thing halfway sensibly, you'd have a hard time finding the sliver that represents the government work done on TCP/IP. It's an insult to the hundreds of thousands of other people who have done so much for you to pretend that that tiny little sliver was so much more important than everything they did. The government has a huge role in providing the stable environment necessary to safely do that work and the fair playing ground to compete on, but the government's direct involvement in the creation of the iPhone is negligible. And if we account for patent shenanigans, possibly negative. (One massive stupid patent lawsuit can pay for an awful lot of research, after all.)
- irishcoffee 14y ago
  It could be argued that the huge stack of software simply build on languages created in the 60's, 70's, and 80's, and the hardware movement you mention is the evidence of Moores Law in action. I do not think these are evidence of radical innovation.
- ebiester 14y ago
  Commercial use of GPS wasn't allowed until 1996, and there has been some refinement of use in the last decade. Without GPS, there are no turn by turn directions, and there is no GPS without the space program. There is no GPS without the government funding of military technology, and allowing commercial use. There is no iPhone without Silicon Valley. There is no Silicon Valley without the massive amount of defense work that was done in the area in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. (See: Steve Blank's stories as but one evidence.) Much of the work on smaller electronics was originally military funded - no one else had the R&D funding to do so. Without the government, it is likely the development of something like ARPANET would have been delayed a decade, perhaps more. I'm not saying the internet wouldn't exist, but it would have been delayed and certainly would have looked a lot more like AOL and Compuserve than the integrated system we have now. I'd say that there is a lot of government involvement that we're talking about.
  - jerf 14y ago
    There's a lot of government involvement. There's a stonking amazing overwhelmingly lot of private involvement. There's no Silicon Valley without, you know, Silicon Valley. Not the place, the people, the companies, the innovation. Government has better PR, the people have the vast, vast bulk of the actual time and wealth poured in to these innovations.
    - mc32 14y ago
      Government and PR? I'm taking that with a grain of salt. First, lots of those programs were originally 'secret' so they would not publish information about them. The only PR-sy thing is perhaps some of the outward space-race stuff. Government can do propaganda (sometimes), but they do not do good PR, IMO.
jauer 14y ago
There was a competitive communications infrastructure before the USG decided to nationalize it all and AT&T managed to lobby themselves into a weird government-mandated monopoly position. If AT&T had not been granted a monopoly competitive pressure would have forced something like NANPA to be developed and we probably would have ended up with LNP a bit faster. On the other hand AT&T’s monopoly provided funding to Bell Labs which had more to do with our modern world than DARPA. The Internet as we know it today couldn’t exist until the government in the form of the NSF and their government & research only rules were bypassed by commercial interests.
zanny 14y ago
As a 21 year old, I wanted to take offense to the Steve Jobs comment because he was a real jerk and the innovation came from the Woz's and not the Jobs, but given my limited interactions with others in my age group, the vast majority of them are pants on head dumb enough to have a shrine to honor turtlenecks.
- Yoshino 14y ago
  Why so much hate? The foundations of Apple were built by Jobs and Woz. Several days ago someone else on HN pointed out that had it not been for Jobs, Woz probably would have been just another nameless, brilliant engineer at HP. Likewise, without Woz, Jobs probably would not have had a computer to sell. Apple did not invent the graphical user interface or multitouch displays. However, you cannot deny that Jobs was a driving force behind the Lisa/Macintosh and the iPhone. Without those products, the technology innovations that supported them might still be languishing in expensive, niche markets.
jswinghammer 14y ago
You are looking at what you see and don't consider what you don't see. You are seeing how government intervention did these things but you are not considering that without this intervention society would have made other uses of the resources. I realize it's impossible but any analysis has to take into account unseen possibilities when considering government intervention. Ignoring the unseen effects of your actions leaves your analysis incomplete. I'm not under 30.

by hooande 14y ago

jerf 14y ago

"The reason your iPhone 5 lets you get directions, communicate and make dinner reservations is the global information infrastructure and the tcp/ip protocol, both products of a national innovation policy." And on you go in that vein, but that's massively reductionistic. For one thing, if that is so true, then why did the iPhone 5 not exist 30 years ago, which is still many years after those advances? The Internet and TCP, as important as they may be, are still vanishingly small components in the huge collection of things we call the iPhone 5, with all of its huge stack of software, the huge stack of hardware and work to miniaturize it, the hardware necessary to feed it wireless signals, the huge software stack that requires, and on and on it goes. The reason the iPhone 5 didn't exist 30 years ago is quite simply that the society of 1982 simply couldn't afford it, and it took decades to put together everything that was necessary so it was affordable. Dozens of iterations on dozens of technologies, consistently improved over decades by a crew of tens of thousands of people. Nobody could even conceive of what it would take to centrally manage this massive set of resources. If you could graph the amount of work put in to make things like the iPhone, if you could even define such a thing halfway sensibly, you'd have a hard time finding the sliver that represents the government work done on TCP/IP. It's an insult to the hundreds of thousands of other people who have done so much for you to pretend that that tiny little sliver was so much more important than everything they did. The government has a huge role in providing the stable environment necessary to safely do that work and the fair playing ground to compete on, but the government's direct involvement in the creation of the iPhone is negligible. And if we account for patent shenanigans, possibly negative. (One massive stupid patent lawsuit can pay for an awful lot of research, after all.)

irishcoffee 14y ago
It could be argued that the huge stack of software simply build on languages created in the 60's, 70's, and 80's, and the hardware movement you mention is the evidence of Moores Law in action. I do not think these are evidence of radical innovation.
ebiester 14y ago
Commercial use of GPS wasn't allowed until 1996, and there has been some refinement of use in the last decade. Without GPS, there are no turn by turn directions, and there is no GPS without the space program. There is no GPS without the government funding of military technology, and allowing commercial use. There is no iPhone without Silicon Valley. There is no Silicon Valley without the massive amount of defense work that was done in the area in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. (See: Steve Blank's stories as but one evidence.) Much of the work on smaller electronics was originally military funded - no one else had the R&D funding to do so. Without the government, it is likely the development of something like ARPANET would have been delayed a decade, perhaps more. I'm not saying the internet wouldn't exist, but it would have been delayed and certainly would have looked a lot more like AOL and Compuserve than the integrated system we have now. I'd say that there is a lot of government involvement that we're talking about.
- jerf 14y ago
  There's a lot of government involvement. There's a stonking amazing overwhelmingly lot of private involvement. There's no Silicon Valley without, you know, Silicon Valley. Not the place, the people, the companies, the innovation. Government has better PR, the people have the vast, vast bulk of the actual time and wealth poured in to these innovations.
  - mc32 14y ago
    Government and PR? I'm taking that with a grain of salt. First, lots of those programs were originally 'secret' so they would not publish information about them. The only PR-sy thing is perhaps some of the outward space-race stuff. Government can do propaganda (sometimes), but they do not do good PR, IMO.

jauer 14y ago

There was a competitive communications infrastructure before the USG decided to nationalize it all and AT&T managed to lobby themselves into a weird government-mandated monopoly position. If AT&T had not been granted a monopoly competitive pressure would have forced something like NANPA to be developed and we probably would have ended up with LNP a bit faster. On the other hand AT&T’s monopoly provided funding to Bell Labs which had more to do with our modern world than DARPA. The Internet as we know it today couldn’t exist until the government in the form of the NSF and their government & research only rules were bypassed by commercial interests.

zanny 14y ago

As a 21 year old, I wanted to take offense to the Steve Jobs comment because he was a real jerk and the innovation came from the Woz's and not the Jobs, but given my limited interactions with others in my age group, the vast majority of them are pants on head dumb enough to have a shrine to honor turtlenecks.

Yoshino 14y ago
Why so much hate? The foundations of Apple were built by Jobs and Woz. Several days ago someone else on HN pointed out that had it not been for Jobs, Woz probably would have been just another nameless, brilliant engineer at HP. Likewise, without Woz, Jobs probably would not have had a computer to sell. Apple did not invent the graphical user interface or multitouch displays. However, you cannot deny that Jobs was a driving force behind the Lisa/Macintosh and the iPhone. Without those products, the technology innovations that supported them might still be languishing in expensive, niche markets.

jswinghammer 14y ago

You are looking at what you see and don't consider what you don't see. You are seeing how government intervention did these things but you are not considering that without this intervention society would have made other uses of the resources. I realize it's impossible but any analysis has to take into account unseen possibilities when considering government intervention. Ignoring the unseen effects of your actions leaves your analysis incomplete. I'm not under 30.