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Why Innovation Won't Save Us
- nakedrobot2 14y agoThis is an ancient trolling argument against the ingenuity of humanity. Every few decades since the beginning of time, someone out there has proclaimed, "Everything has been invented, every idea has been thought, and it's only diminishing returns from here on out. The best days are past us". Except this time it happens to be a WSJ op-ed. How many WSJ op-eds have been written in the past hundred years, predicting the same thing? It so easily dismisses driverless cars and 3d printing and hypersonic transportation. OK, these are hard problems. Sure, humanity may have given up on "big ideas" for the last few decades while the internet was born (Neal Stephenson's big complaint) But to say that the best days are past, and that innovation can't bring us to a place that nobody imagined before? Come on. This is just silly. Or put it another way, we could use the oft-disparaged Donald Rumsfeld quote that actually does make a lot of sense: "We don't know what we don't know".