12 ms·

What happened to innovation?

182 points by jordn 13y ago

embolism 13y ago
An often overlooked point is that "Getting rich quick" is often portrayed as a crass and shallow pursuit, whereas in reality in the US, it translates into: 1. Good healthcare. 2. Freedom to live in a peaceful safe neighborhood where you can have a family. 3. A reasonable education for one's children. 4. Ability to choose what projects to work on. Why is anyone surprised that these are the priorities of entrepreneurs, when they correlate directly with basic human needs - safety, shelter ability to reproduce and freedom of choice. Few people will focus on the self-actualization of a truly world changing project until they have obtained some security for themselves and their families. Jobs, Musk, Gates, Thiel, Google.org etc. are all good examples of this. (I.e. they got rich first, then they launched ambitious projects)
- oscargrouch 13y ago
  All of those you have cited, were innovators before they were rich.. when they lack the comfort you quoted.. on the contrary, maybe when they need those things for themselves or others, then they created their inovations through hard work??!
  - embolism 13y ago
    They were innovators, but the products that made them rich were a lot simpler and more focused on short term profit than the more ambitious projects that they are now famed for. The point is that they made their money with short term projects of limited scope, and then embarked on the more ambitious ones. (Gates came from a rich family though)
    - oscargrouch 13y ago
      I dont know Elon Musk biography very much, but Gates, Jobs and Page/Brin are/were very hard workers.. (Gates sleeping under his desk or in office couch are well known) Of course there are "fast bucks" stories like, instagram, tumblr and the likes.. but i thinks this is more of a bubble effect.. too much money around.. overvaluations, etc.. but (i think) that these stories are the exceptions, not the rule
      - embolism 13y ago
        You are completely missing the point. None of this is about hard work. They all worked extremely hard for their whole careers, and the ones who are still alive continue to do so. The point is that they all established a tidy fortune by focussing on short term projects before they took on more ambitious projects. That's why most entrepreneurs aren't focused on major world changing projects - they are trying to satisfy their needs for security first, and that is the general rule, not the exception.
- Ma8ee 13y ago
  This is why I'm moving back to Sweden. Your points 1, 2, and 3 are guaranteed for everyone no matter how much money they have.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    Well, 2 seems contraindicated for all least those residents of Stockholm who were near the rioting that took place last month.
    - Ma8ee 13y ago
      The exception that confirms the rule. :) There was no riots in the sense most people think about them. These were small groups of angry young men starting fires and throwing stones at the police. I don't know of anyone who wasn't dressed in a uniform that was hurt. I would probably have kept my kids at home those 5(?) nights while it was going on if I was living in Husby myself, but I wouldn't have feared going out myself. It is because Sweden is considered such a safe place that relatively small events like this get such a huge international coverage. Of course media pounces on anything that looks like a crack in paradise.
tarr11 13y ago
"We haven’t had a really capital-intensive war in a long time, and while that’s obviously great, I am always astonished when I read about how much real innovation has involved the military or national security—it’s hard to get effectively unlimited budgets and focus any other way." This "fact" bothers me. War causes such huge devastation, and yet the focus of this article is on innovation for its own sake. If you are going to write about the benefits of war, you should at least mention its cost.
- sama 13y ago
  I'd obviously choose no war over war, as would anyone sane. Just trying to point out a potential cause for the apparent slowdown.
  - loganfrederick 13y ago
    I don't disagree with your point, but I think it's worth adding that journalist Naomi Klein wrote "The Shock Doctrine"[1], a book which outlines numerous examples in the past 100 years where government officials worldwide have chosen military actions specifically with economic goals in mind. The book misrepresents capitalism somewhat, but the journalistic research and examples presented provide a compelling case that there are people who have a "sane" or "rational" (from their perspective) view that they (and maybe some others) could gain economically from war. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine
    - freehunter 13y ago
      What's interesting is that civilization simulators (like Civilization, Europa Universalis, etc) don't take this into account. In those games, military action almost exclusively leads to major losses that are only made up for if 1) you won and 2) you gain a huge advantage from taking the territory you fought over. Even then it takes significant time. Looking back at the technological innovations that came about at the early part of the last century simply due to the war effort, I have to wonder why it seems like no simulation games allow you to take advantage of that fact. Why couldn't declaring war with the right amount of propaganda lead to a massive spike in productivity and technical advancement?
angersock 13y ago
The biggest issue I've got with this is at the beginning many goalposts are set and our lack of performance is then paraded out without any regard to how silly they are. The author bemoans that we haven't done better than the jet engine, but honestly we're probably as far along the mechanical design of that problem domain as possible. The fact is, in very many fields, fuck, we've hit them to death. Concrete is pretty well understood, as is analog electronics. Some fields are simple innovated-out, and all that's left is making them more efficient or cheaper or simply more widely deployed. (This fact, incidentally, is why I ended up doing computer stuff instead of being a mechanical engineer.)
- sgrove 13y ago
  It's interesting that you mentioned that concrete in particular is well understood, I just came across an interesting article the other day about some breakthrough in understanding Roman concrete: http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2013/06/04/roman-concrete/ http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2013/06/04/roman-con... Seems there are still certainly innovations/iterations left to be made in concrete.
  - angersock 13y ago
    Saw that one too--it's a cool thing. There are still things being done, for example, in making greener concrete that has better water permeability and whatnot, but I don't think the author would consideration that the sort of innovation we need.
- xradionut 13y ago
  There's still a lot of interest and development in concrete and material science for building stuff, it's just there's not a lot of big, easy, sleazy, vaporous paydays like we see in the software startup community. (How many people understand the advantages of additives or basalt rebar in certain applications?)
jimbokun 13y ago
"It’s harder to raise money for software companies working on uncertain, long-term, high-reward projects (like AI)." That's because "AI" doesn't exist. Are there people working on computer vision? Yes. Are there people working on speech recognition? Yes. Are there people working on robotics? Yes. Are there people working on computers that answer questions? Yes. Plus far too many applications of "data mining", "big data", "machine learning" to mention here. Lots of people making lots of money on all of these things (or at least starting companies to try). But I guess none of those things are "AI".
- seiji 13y ago
  To abuse an old quote, "AI" doesn't exist in the same way a 747 isn't a giant mechanical eagle. All the "AI" tasks above are hyper-localizing things that interact with the world, but they aren't entirely integratable into something coherent. (Something we now have to call AGI because the fad establishment has cooped the term AI for lesser purposes.) I find it slightly intriguing that a gatekeeper into the World of Funding™ is directly observing a disconnect between quick burn fads and long term usefulness. Will there be new offshoot Long Game funds? Software-based long-term problems these days don't take gargantuan funding, but people need enough to quit their job and live off of while working towards the future. These Long Game problems are especially pernicious because sometimes your first payoff isn't for years down the line. In today's Fundapalooza Party Round Frat Bro Extravaganza® land, you need users, customers, and sales within the first two weeks or you're dead in the water. I'd rather see a pie in the sky fund where, if you can convince the gate keepers you have a chance at changing the world in the next 3-7 years, your team gets $500k per person up front to pursue your goals. That may sound like a lot for up-front nothingness, but we're living in an age of cash hoarding immortal corporations. Apple could create a $20 billion fund, get 40,000 people working on change-the-fucking-world problems, and not even feel the loss of cash under their kilometer-sized tempurpedic mattress. Are we better than buskers? Do we have to be starving artists until we make it big or should we be taken care of and coddled while we work in minimalism? The only problem stopping Them[1] from funding every person with a plausible but at-first-glance crazy idea[2] is the problem of selecting the right people, not lack of funding in the world. The only way to make those goals happen yourself these days is to first do a fast-fad application, sell it, then use that as your base of funding. That has a long and uncertain cycle time though and you can end up overcapitalized and distracted (let's all buy teslas and $1000 jeans and $20,000 road bikes!) unless you pull a Musker[3]. Let's give crazy a chance. [1]: You know, Them. Them people with money. [2]: Free energy need not apply. [3]: Pulling a Musker is very different from starting out with nothing though. You've got tons of connected, capable, and rich people in-the-know connections by then, so "losing it all" isn't as special as it seems.
rayiner 13y ago
I found this quote interesting: "There are a decent number of people working on more efficient jet engines, but not very many civilians working on replacing the jet engine with something new." It's not really the problem that there aren't very many people working on replacing jet engines. The issue is that the problem domain is full of physical limits. Ask yourself: why are we still using quicksort now, half a century after it was developed? Well, because theory tells us that any sorting algorithm based on binary comparisons is going to require at least O(n log(n)) such comparisons, and that is going to remain the case no matter how much engineering effort you throw at the problem. All you can really do when it comes to sorting algorithms is improve on the constant factors and take advantage of special cases (radix sort for small integer items, etc). Software engineers don't usually have to think in terms of theoretical limits. But when I was in engineering school, as an aerospace major, every course began with: these are the theoretical limits in this particular area--all you can do is approach them more closely. A Brayton cycle has a certain efficiency at a given pressure ratio and an airfoil has a certain maximum lift-curve slope and there is nothing you can do about it. Improvements are in "hard engineering"--new materials that can withstand higher temperatures and pressures to eke out slightly more efficiency, etc. You're already seeing this in semiconductor manufacturing. As you run into the limits of lithography with ever-smaller wavelengths of light, semiconductor fabrication plants get exponentially more expensive to build. These physical limits are what give the traditional engineering fields the shape of their "innovation curve." Much more happened in aerospace engineering from 1930 to 1960 than has (and will) happen from 1960 to 2020. The long-hanging fruit is gone, and all that's left is hard engineering. And of course, this all plays into the "get rich quick" issue the author brings up. If you had a billion dollars lying around, where would you invest that money? A jet engine that's 0.5% more efficient? If you had $100 billion, would you spend it making an alternative to jet engines entirely (in an industry where people will fly on truly shitty airlines just to save $5 on a ticket)?
- DaniFong 13y ago
  It's not widely known or understood, but there are, in my opinion, quite a few ways to make significantly superior jet engine replacements. Factors of 2 or 3 in specific power and efficiency are possible. Due to the rocket equation, this could yield vastly longer range and more efficient aircraft (1/10 the weight, 10x the range, 10x the efficiency, 2x the speed...). In particular, you point out the limitations of the Brayton cycle and material limitations. However, there are other cycles that are much closer to Carnot efficiency, or match it in the ideal case. There's a lot you can do when isothermal compression is possible. Additionally, if there is a thermal limitation, you can do isothermal combustion, such that much more heat addition is at the maximum temperature of your materials, and you can even design efficient reheating. It's not a jet -- you want to pair this with a driven fan system or at least have high bypass, but it's fundamentally more thermodynamically efficient. For supersonic applications, scramjets remain possible, but challenging. And rocketry + high altitude flight remains extremely exciting and potentially more efficient than standard jetliner transport. Just difficult. So yes, there are physical limitations. But they are not what most people think they are, and they do not mean what people think they mean.
kaa2102 13y ago
Profit. It's far easier to cut costs, reduce taxes, and expand existing products/services into new markets than it is to conduct applied research and commercialize new products.
- bjhoops1 13y ago
  I think it is important to understand the limitations of the profit motive. Too often it is held up as some sort of panacea, as if all problems are the result of gov'ment getting in the way of heroic capitalists seeking glorious profits. Fact is, unfettered capitalism will innovate to the direct extent and in ways that it is profitable to do so. Which is why you see very little "innovation" being done to benefit poorer citizens - why innovate for a market that can't buy what you're selling? Rather, let's spend millions developing "solutions" to the problems of those who have so very few of them. A sad irony, that. This is where a well-run government can improve things - by artificially creating profit motives in important areas where there was none before. A tax on short-term investing or day-trading would be a great start to discourage utterly worthless short-term speculation and HFT, and is a great example of how unobtrusive policies can create desirable incentives.
oscargrouch 13y ago
Capitalism tends to monopolies, monopolies tends to sustain its power and its dominance so innovation is a threat to their dominance and developed markets.. Also when a company or group of people innovate the dominant dinosaur buys it and shut it down.. On the other side, those companies put large sums of money to "innovate" on the markets they already dominate, or in research to make them better in what they already do.. (so it doesnt really get into a innovation cicle)
- jacoblyles 13y ago
  Capitalism tends to monopolies? This is not true at all in the common case. Have you read "The Innovator's Dilemma"? Highly regulated industries, industries with network effects, or industries that require very rare natural resources (diamond mines) are exceptions. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
  - oscargrouch 13y ago
    I did'nt read the "Innovator's Dilemma" , i just follow the history of the XX-XXI century and the news.. you may have opportunities when the market is new, or when you create the "market" yourself.. but with time monopolies will take control and no more inovations allowed.. until of course.. someone innovates aside of the system and a new cycle begins.. but the old status quo are still there trying to demolish the new wave that is a threat to its dominance.. i could quote a lot of cases here based on reality.. but anyone can find several examples of that just thinking a little bit..
    - jacoblyles 13y ago
      I'll tell that to the CEO of Sears Roebuck. He probably doesn't read "the history of the XX-XXI century and the news.."
      - oscargrouch 13y ago
        what i meant its to tell that this is crystal clear.. and you can pick a lot of examples of what im telling about.. eg. when apple opens the mobile market with iphone.. of course.. there a lot of oportunities..and a lot of big players start to compete, cause its a blue sea... But in 10/20 years.. it will have 2 or 3 players at most.. so maybe a new cycle will happen again.. in other scenarios.. that may or may not will break this monopoly down to pieces.. but its visible that it all tends to monopolies.. i was not questioning were innovation was impossible.. or small players could start a new game.. but a small player cant enter in a old game and spect to win because the big players will crush him, or in the best of the scenarios will buy him.. (waze being bought by google to nail the competition of google maps).. did'nt meant to be rude, ok?! sorry ;)
jacoblyles 13y ago
It's weird that a few people are challenging short-term thinking, and they're all friends with each other (Thiel, Musk). Also, it's weird how short-term thinking has infected the government. Nobody's forcing them to meet a quarterly P&L, you'd figure that would give them more freedom.
- cryptoz 13y ago
  > Nobody's forcing them to meet a quarterly P&L Yes they are, that's the problem. Running for re-election is equivalent to quarterly reports and it results in most politicians thinking in just as short of time scales as corporations.
- narrator 13y ago
  I don't think there's a whole lot of long-term vision out there. It seems the political conception of the future is mostly filled with tackling the challenges of global warming, unreset and other sorts of eco-doom that the zeitgeist is enthralled with. Musk, Kurzweil and a few others are the only people who look far into the future outside of the eco-doom/security paradigm any more.
  - zanny 13y ago
    Here are the things I'd like to see (and if possible, be involved in) during the 21st century: 1. Molecular printing, mainly of food, as the end-state of consumer 3d printing. Print the protein folds and amino acids and make whatever food product you want, and cure world hunger with it. 2. Generational spacecraft running on a mix of fission, fusion, and solar power. Requires a construction facility in at least low Earth orbit. 3. A floating city on Venus in one of the temperate belts near the poles rife with CO2 to enable an oxygen cycle. 4. Embedded cybernetics, including the ability to interface with the brain, by properly decoding the human electrical signaling system the nervous system uses. 5. 3d printed stem cells to regrow any damaged tissue anywhere. 6. The end-state of current computer tech is embedded cybernetics that interpret brain waves. Bionic eyes that provide huds and vision in multiple spectrums, a wireless access point in your head, etc. 7. Elimination of bacterial infection by fabricating antibodies with 3d molecular printing (there is a trend here!) 8. Not really long-term game changing, but the natural evolution of learning systems moves towards self-maintaining infrastructure and transit, so that entire cities and the transportation of people and goods is done entirely by an automated interconnected grid. 9. A space-based solar array to power the planet that has a diminished orbit to stay in direct line of sight of the sun. I'd suggest a solar ring around the Equator, but it is more efficient to keep the entire thing pointing at the sun all the time. 10. Either the commercial fusion of rare earth metals, or asteroid mining, whichever is cheaper (more likely the latter) for scarce elements.
jd 13y ago
Another reason why / short term & software / is the currently the sweet spot is because it allows for short feedback cycles. A startup is a company that searches for a viable business model -- a product-market fit. When you create web based applications you can gather data, A/B test and do a lot of stuff that allows you to make measurable progress in the right direction. When working in hardware or when working on long term software projects like AI you're in a vacuum. And even smart people are not going to do very well if they can't see the consequences of the decisions they make. So long term projects take more people, more resources, are typically much harder problems and on top of that you won't be able to collect data early on to adjust course if needed. So the risk-adjusted return on an ambitious long-term startup is going to be horrendous compared to the low-hanging fruit most web startups go for. So investors avoid the big and ambitious ideas, and I can't blame them.
TylerE 13y ago
I actually think this is a much longer term thing, and Wall Street is to blame. Back in what most would consider the heyday of American innovation (Say, roughly 19th century thru the late 1950s), most large corporations were private. Leaders with vision could undertake long term plans and actually pull them off, without the obsession over quarterly earnings. Would we ever have a company like Boeing or Douglas Aircraft or Bell Telephone (Who financed Bell Labs for years) or Xerox today, with the pressure to go public and cash in, rather than building a long-term viable business? One of the few counter-examples would be Apple under Steve Jobs, but such cases are few and far between.
j_rogers 13y ago
Regarding super-sonic flight in particular. IIRC, the main reason for Concorde service being discontinued was the lack of people willing to pay for it. Further, when door-to-door times are extended by excessive security and waiting at the airport it doesn't really matter if you've cut your in-air time in half. I'd be really excited if someone airline offered pilotless aircraft. I think this is technically feasible now. I know that we are currently capable of landing planes autonomously currently. Plus this would reduce door-to-door time as well since you'd reduce the need for long security lines. After all, if there's no cockpit to hijack what is the use of screening for potential hijackers?
- outworlder 13y ago
  > I'd be really excited if someone airline offered pilotless aircraft. I think this is technically feasible now. I know that we are currently capable of landing planes autonomously currently. Plus this would reduce door-to-door time as well since you'd reduce the need for long security lines. After all, if there's no cockpit to hijack what is the use of screening for potential hijackers? Yes, we can take-off, cruise, navigate, avoid collisions and land autonomously (landing requires a certain ILS category which not all airports have, yet) today. I don't really think the limitation is software related - it is likely to be regulations and public opinion. "Human error" is more understandable to the average person than "computer error". There are other concerns, such as safety against tampering/hacking. However, considering how robotic Airbus aircraft already are, I am not sure those concerns are warranted. Boing is somewhat less so, by design, but they are still fly-by-wire with a computer between the pilot and the actual control surfaces. Now, I don't think autonomous aircraft would do much for security. After all, all you need to protect the pilots is a door lock. You still have to protect the inside of a plane and the passengers, however. But they would do wonders for private jets - having a competent pilot immediately available 24/7 without paying additional salaries could be very appealing for some folks.
- TylerE 13y ago
  It's a lot more complex then that. Arguably, the single root cause of Concorde being retired was the Flight 4590 crash in 2000, which hurt passenger numbers quite a bit. Operations were further hamstrung by the very small fleet size. There are certain things that just have to be done to get an aircraft commercially viable (spare parts inventory for instance), and when you have a fleet of only 20, that will cost much more per aircraft than supporting something super-common like a 737. It's also worth noting that Richard Brason, at least, thought Concorde was still viable, and made offers for the BA Fleet as high as £5m/aircraft, but was refused, at least partially because Airbus was unwilling to offer continued support.
grinich 13y ago
I think many people often mistake innovation from invention. innovating: (v) Make changes in something established, esp. by introducing new methods, ideas, or products. inventing: (v) Create or design (something that has not existed before); be the originator of. Apple is probably the most innovative company, in that they take existing technology and continually refine it into product. Which is crucial because nobody wants their phone to be a lab prototype. On the other end, most invention happens in academia. You need a lot of flexibility and low expectations of commercialization in order to really try dramatically new things. The magic companies of the last century are the ones who could do both, allowing people to have side projects that don't immediately show commercial promise. Bell Labs was a lot like this. So was PARC. And Google to some degree. I think a lot of Silicon Valley startups now have the worst of both worlds. They feel pressure to monetize and sell for millions, so their creativity is limited and they just barely innovate. They're not content to play, or work on something just because they like it and find it interesting. We hold up Elon Musk as a great entrepreneur, but he started building rockets because he wanted them to exist, not because he wanted to make money. [1] It takes a different sort of thinking to come up with SpaceX than it does to build Exec or Instacart. A different level of grit and disregard for fortune. It's unfortunately rare to find that spirit matched with incredible focus and ability to execute and sell. And even more unlikely that it gets funded. (There's a reason Elon started both Tesla and SpaceX with his own cash.) I'm certainly not saying that one should disregard the economics of running a company. But you don't make radical changes in the world when your ideas start from them. [2] Incidentally, I've actually looked into building ramjet aircraft. (Or scramjet, because why wouldn't you go supersonic?) It's physically possible, [3] but requires a breakthrough in energy storage and composites on the order of the transistor. I've always thought there are two places in the world with huge market failures: developing world healthcare, and future-tech. In many ways, philanthropy such as the Gates Foundation helps mitigate the first, but I've yet to see anything other than war with a technologically-equal enemy push forward the second. Google is showing some promise which is exciting, but we probably shouldn't have all of our future hopes wrapped up in a single giant online advertising company. I think we should create a West Coast "Institue for Advanced Study" in the middle of the desert with a few million dollars and a bunch of dreamers who want to get their hands dirty and try ideas that everyone else thinks are crazy. People do amazing things when nobody is looking over their shoulder. [1] In fact, it seems he had to negotiate like hell to wrap a business model around that company, and got incredibly lucky that Shuttle was retired. You could also argue that SpaceX is still innovation but I would argue that the dramatic cost savings and reusability make it count as invention. [2] Maybe unless you're a brilliant economist or politician, but how that world works is a mystery to me. [3] Check out the WaveRider project. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WaveRider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WaveRider
gwern 13y ago
Warmed-over Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen.
squozzer 13y ago
The author has a romantic notion of technical progress. That's fine, but I'd argue that today's innovations have as much relevance as yesterday's, even though they lack the sex appeal. And as others have pointed out, in a lot of the well-known examples, we've reached certain limits that make technological progress very expensive. For example, probably the primary reason we don't have better airplane engines is because exceeding the speed of sound is a very noisy proposition. I have an excellent book on the B-70 bomber, which in my opinion is the most beautiful airplane ever designed. And among the reasons it was not adopted is that sonic booms over populated areas piss people off. And flying higher makes the problem (counter-intuitively) worse. But the main reason the B-70 was shelved was the ICBM. And that forms my next point. The internet itself has (or should have) made some reasons for travelling pointless. And it works at a much higher velocity -- a nearly the speed of light. So in a way the author seems to pine for a "faster horse" instead of a car.
dangoldin 13y ago
Great post. If you liked this I also suggest taking a look at Peter Thiel's CS183 lectures at Stanford. Blake Masters did a great job taking notes: http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup In particular, take a look at the Class 15 one - http://blakemasters.com/post/24122680868/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-15-notes-essay http://blakemasters.com/post/24122680868/peter-thiels-cs183-...
kungfooey 13y ago
I'm rather surprised this hasn't already been mentioned, but if you want to read more on this thread of thought written by an economist, check out the ebook, "The Great Stagnation" by Tyler Cowen. Alternatively, watch his Tedx talk.
beat 13y ago
The real hard part is that so many of us grew up on a: Moore's Law, and b: science fiction. We want to believe Moore's Law applies to everything, because it fits the mythos and the observed behavior of the world we grew up in. Sadly, nothing but computers are subject to Moore's Law. And even there, it'll run out sooner or later.
a_p 13y ago
> We were once great at innovating in the physical world...But recently, software (and mostly Internet software) has been the focus of innovation, and its importance is probably still underestimated—there are compounding effects to how it’s changing the world that we’re only now beginning to see...But innovation in the physical world (besides phones and computers) over the same time period has been less impressive. Actually, I would argue that the opposite is true. Software hasn't really had any important innovations (using David Wheeler's definition, which is from a CS/EE perspective, and which is linked to every couple of months on HN[1]). The software required to run a smartphone isn't significantly different than the software needed to run a similar application on a desktop. On the other hand, the hardware on a smartphone now and a desktop from the 90s is different. We take hardware advances like reliable capacitive touchscreens and maybe this storage advance linked to on HN today [2], and Moore's "Law" for granted, but "putting more transistors in a circuit" and increased hardware capabilities were the bottleneck to producing today's technology, not new software techniques. The reason that people associate software with innovation is because it has become the latest tech buzzword. When a word is overused in this manner, it is hard to have a conversation about it because the definition has been degraded to include pretty much anything. The granting of patents to trivial software ideas gives companies a claim to innovation that they do not deserve. Rayiner's comment on this thread: > The long-hanging fruit is gone, and all that's left is hard engineering. will soon be true for computer hardware, and eventually "Moore's Law" will be broken. When software does not become significantly faster each release cycle, it will be more apparent that hardware is responsible for today's advances as opposed to software. [1] http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5911347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5911347
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  When a word is overused in this manner, it is hard to have a conversation about it because the definition has been degraded to include pretty much anything. When you can picture someone using the word against itself, I'd say that's when the bell tolls. E.g., "Our greatest innovation for this product has been not worrying about innovation, and focusing on incremental improvement"
jholman 13y ago
Well, sama, I'm glad to hear that you feel this way, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you do about it. I mean, I never used Loopt, so maybe I'm missing something but it sure looks like an example of what you're criticizing (though better than anything I've done). But that's okay, Zip2 wasn't that huge of a contribution to the world either. The impressive bit is what Musk did after Zip2. So good luck! You're in a better position than most, to do more than talk!
vonskippy 13y ago
What happened to innovation? At least in the States, it's been sued out of existence.
FD3SA 13y ago
This post is missing the forest for the trees. Hard problems are hard. Easy problems are easy. In a world where autonomy can only be purchased by wealth, any rational actor will spend his/her time optimizing the acquisition of wealth by solving easy problems as quickly as possible. This will then allow him/her the necessary autonomy to tackle hard problems. This applies to all capital intensive endeavors of creation: science, film, software, hardware, etc. Even the least capital intensive endeavors such as pure mathematics require autonomy in the form of a guarantee of food, shelter, and healthcare to be viable in the long term. As such, the solution is simple: Increase autonomy. But do we increase autonomy for everyone, or pick and choose winners? The first strategy is basic income, and the second strategy is venture capital. Those involved in venture capital are now seeing the weaknesses in their own system, wherein picking and choosing winners will skew heavily towards the best signalers (i.e. marketers), rather than the most qualified/talented. If VCs want to hedge their bets, they can put their lobbying money where their mouths are, and support basic income. This allows savants who are unable to market themselves the required freedom to work on their ideas with a tiny but guaranteed degree of autonomy. It is the equivalent of buying a Vangaurd index fund instead of picking and choosing stocks for a portfolio. The winning strategy is to do both simultaneously.
- pyoung 13y ago
  I couldn't agree more. Realistically, I don't think we will ever reach a political consensus in the US that would allow for a basic income bill to pass through congress. More likely is that technology will eventually make most menial labor and jobs obsolete, resulting in a spike of unemployment which essentially forces the issue. Time will tell.
  - FD3SA 13y ago
    If history is any indication, mass unemployment is exactly what will need to happen. Arguably it is already happening in Europe, where a significant portion of the population have no competitive advantage that meets the minimum wage in a massive free market like the EU. I do hope that certain countries, such as Canada or Germany, will take a preventative approach rather than wait till the malignancy of unemployment metastasizes, causing unnecessary and irreversible harm to the fabric of society.
nostromo 13y ago
The beauty of the internet is that it was this unthinkably big project that was eventually thrown into the laps of the public. In my view this is government at its best: building infrastructure that lays the groundwork for huge wealth creation. The only opportunity I can think of right now that might be similar in its capacity to fuel wealth creation as much as the internet has is perhaps a space elevator. I'm not sure how exactly it would be used, but similarly, nobody really knew how ARPANET would end up being used either. I, like millions of engineers, would love to work in "truly innovative" industries beyond just software. However, innovation needs infrastructure to build upon. The amount of resources needed to work on the problems that Elon Musk takes on are prohibitive for the vast majority of entrepreneurs, investors, and engineers.
- jgamman 13y ago
  use of the word 'infrastructure' is telling. i've been doing a lot of thinking lately on that topic. really recommend the book Infrastructure: value of social resources by frischmann.
hooande 13y ago
Some thoughts on this: 1. Surprising to see an article on innovation that mentions Kickstarter only as a footnote. One of the reasons we lack innovation is because we've let one group of people, big name venture capital investors, to decide by themselves what's good and what isn't. It's important to note that the modern "VC" investment model had very little to do with the major innovations of the 20th century. Some of our greatest inventions came from government laboratories, people working on their own without organized investment and corporations who acted like VCs by internally funding good ideas. Modern VCs only appeared around the 80s to give us derivative works that succeeded by added branding to existing ideas. The beauty of Kickstarter et al is that we have a much larger pool of people to tell us what's good or bad, but it does no good if we keep looking down on crowdfunding as venture capital's weaker sibling. We need to focus more on "how much good do they do" than on "how much money did they raise" 2. Another reason we don't have much innovation is because "Inventor" is no longer a job title. Back in the days of (my hero) Thomas Edison you didn't need a VC firm or a trendy office to justify your intentions to make something new. You just did it, with no particular funding or social organization. People decided to dedicate their lives to the pursuit of making new and original things. Now it's so important to be a part of the "startup community", important to have social validation from big name vcs, important to never say no to any amount of money. Until people can declare themselves to be Inventors without all of the other trappings, we shouldn't expect unbounded innovation from them. 3. This line struck me "...one guy saying that they were going to do these crazy things like ship a phone with no keyboard running a real OS and require everyone to buy a data plan." Another reason we don't innovate any more is because minor changes to an existing product now count as the the most significant innovations of our time. I understand that we need heroes and Steve Jobs is one of them. And a lot of people like the iphone. But Thomas Edison invented recorded sound. Tesla harnessed electricity and energy beams. Freaking Ben Franklin invented the concept of a lending library. And the best our generation has is something about a phone OS and data plan? We can't expect the next generation to be true innovators when we direct all of our hero worship at people who make small improvements to existing ideas. Yes, this may mean one of your heroes too. But if we can't even make the sacrifice of focusing on those who actually do invent new things, how can we be expected to be so creative ourselves? Finally, innovation isn't completely dead. People are working on fusion reactors, warp drives and brain interfaces. Their efforts just don't draw as much attention of big VC investments or the work of big name entrepreneurs. The biggest things that innovation is lacking are things that our society can provide.
daemon13 13y ago
Existing model of financing long-term game-changing next-big-thing companies via equity dilution with angel/venture financing is less optimal from the founders' perspective than pursuing another feature start-up. More risk, less equity, success is uncertain, reward far away in the future - why bother with making world better? My 2 cents :-) P.S.: a better model might be if the founder pursuing next-big-thing commits to certain ROI for investors (2-3-5 times on capital), thus increasing this founder's potential upside and motivation to go the hard way. Critique and suggestions are welcome.
physcab 13y ago
I did my undergraduate in Engineering Physics then went on to do a PhD in Materials Science. After a couple years of graduate coursework and research and passing exams, it was time to pick a dissertation topic. We then had to defend it before our committee and get their approval. Well, I failed my first attempt (you were allowed 2). The reason the committee gave me for not passing was that my topic of choice was not a "significant improvement of basic science". This perplexed me. My committee was made up of members who were all 60+ years in age and had been the founding fathers of metallurgy. Collectively, they invented a completely new field called opto-electronics. When they gave me that response, I thought to myself, how the fuck do they expect me to improve basic science?! It turns out the solution was much more nuanced. In the months that followed, my advisor would have thought experiments with me. He essentially helped me brainstorm problems that needed solving, but he always started our sessions with the question, "what is something that you always wanted to exist, but doesn't? What are you most curious about?" He then gave me the keys to his shop and told me to "tinker around". Take apart his vacuum tubes. Screw around with his argon laser and sputtering machine. Innovation in the physical world comes from the same curious people that are inventing fun software programs. But we absolutely need to cultivate it, because that is what is dying. Put a workbench in every home, make it easier for people to take apart things they buy, encourage people to be creative without fear of punishment.
- sumzup 13y ago
  What did you end up going with?
  - noir_lord 13y ago
    Death Ray. Fundamental Science THIS!.
sandhus 13y ago
Charity begins at home.
sandhus 13y ago
Charity begins at home.
tsmdvv 13y ago
Yes, Mr. Loopt, good question, what happened to innovation?
thomasjames 13y ago
I think the fact that we are talking about "innovation" so much is a sign of an excessive degree of self-awareness. People used to be at peace with having a specific interest and true expertise and were not thinking "okay, I'm smart so let me 'disrupt' a market and shake things up." Many were okay with simply being a useful, necessary and perhaps not-so-widely celebrated part of a larger whole. Larger wholes like NASA, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, IBM, Bell, Digital Equipment and others that gave rise to this much lauded period of innovation (the mechanics of which the author doesn't entirely seem to understand). It also goes without saying that the larger players in academia were expanding in to engineering in a much more serious way due to Cold War competition. Sure, there were exceptions to the theory of leviathan organizations of specialists. Intel is an exception, in that it was a start up. But it was a start up founded by people with the understanding of how a larger research entity would work (two of the main founders were established engineers at Fairchild). Talking about this sort of thing in the context of modern start-up culture, to be honest, is flippant and cheeky. Maybe "idea guys", business journalists, and a lot of modern hackers in general just need to stop thinking innovation as some substance you can bottle and beating us over the heads with said bottle until the word loses all meaning. The innovators who created the sophistication of the modern transportation and energy infrastructure we now enjoy, not to mention the fundamentals of computing, were a lot humbler than the baby boomer titans of technology and probably a lot of us out there, too.

182 points by jordn 13y ago

An often overlooked point is that "Getting rich quick" is often portrayed as a crass and shallow pursuit, whereas in reality in the US, it translates into: 1. Good healthcare. 2. Freedom to live in a peaceful safe neighborhood where you can have a family. 3. A reasonable education for one's children. 4. Ability to choose what projects to work on. Why is anyone surprised that these are the priorities of entrepreneurs, when they correlate directly with basic human needs - safety, shelter ability to reproduce and freedom of choice. Few people will focus on the self-actualization of a truly world changing project until they have obtained some security for themselves and their families. Jobs, Musk, Gates, Thiel, Google.org etc. are all good examples of this. (I.e. they got rich first, then they launched ambitious projects)

oscargrouch 13y ago
All of those you have cited, were innovators before they were rich.. when they lack the comfort you quoted.. on the contrary, maybe when they need those things for themselves or others, then they created their inovations through hard work??!
- embolism 13y ago
  They were innovators, but the products that made them rich were a lot simpler and more focused on short term profit than the more ambitious projects that they are now famed for. The point is that they made their money with short term projects of limited scope, and then embarked on the more ambitious ones. (Gates came from a rich family though)
  - oscargrouch 13y ago
    I dont know Elon Musk biography very much, but Gates, Jobs and Page/Brin are/were very hard workers.. (Gates sleeping under his desk or in office couch are well known) Of course there are "fast bucks" stories like, instagram, tumblr and the likes.. but i thinks this is more of a bubble effect.. too much money around.. overvaluations, etc.. but (i think) that these stories are the exceptions, not the rule
    - embolism 13y ago
      You are completely missing the point. None of this is about hard work. They all worked extremely hard for their whole careers, and the ones who are still alive continue to do so. The point is that they all established a tidy fortune by focussing on short term projects before they took on more ambitious projects. That's why most entrepreneurs aren't focused on major world changing projects - they are trying to satisfy their needs for security first, and that is the general rule, not the exception.
Ma8ee 13y ago
This is why I'm moving back to Sweden. Your points 1, 2, and 3 are guaranteed for everyone no matter how much money they have.
- mpyne 13y ago
  Well, 2 seems contraindicated for all least those residents of Stockholm who were near the rioting that took place last month.
  - Ma8ee 13y ago
    The exception that confirms the rule. :) There was no riots in the sense most people think about them. These were small groups of angry young men starting fires and throwing stones at the police. I don't know of anyone who wasn't dressed in a uniform that was hurt. I would probably have kept my kids at home those 5(?) nights while it was going on if I was living in Husby myself, but I wouldn't have feared going out myself. It is because Sweden is considered such a safe place that relatively small events like this get such a huge international coverage. Of course media pounces on anything that looks like a crack in paradise.

tarr11 13y ago

"We haven’t had a really capital-intensive war in a long time, and while that’s obviously great, I am always astonished when I read about how much real innovation has involved the military or national security—it’s hard to get effectively unlimited budgets and focus any other way." This "fact" bothers me. War causes such huge devastation, and yet the focus of this article is on innovation for its own sake. If you are going to write about the benefits of war, you should at least mention its cost.

sama 13y ago
I'd obviously choose no war over war, as would anyone sane. Just trying to point out a potential cause for the apparent slowdown.
- loganfrederick 13y ago
  I don't disagree with your point, but I think it's worth adding that journalist Naomi Klein wrote "The Shock Doctrine"[1], a book which outlines numerous examples in the past 100 years where government officials worldwide have chosen military actions specifically with economic goals in mind. The book misrepresents capitalism somewhat, but the journalistic research and examples presented provide a compelling case that there are people who have a "sane" or "rational" (from their perspective) view that they (and maybe some others) could gain economically from war. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine
  - freehunter 13y ago
    What's interesting is that civilization simulators (like Civilization, Europa Universalis, etc) don't take this into account. In those games, military action almost exclusively leads to major losses that are only made up for if 1) you won and 2) you gain a huge advantage from taking the territory you fought over. Even then it takes significant time. Looking back at the technological innovations that came about at the early part of the last century simply due to the war effort, I have to wonder why it seems like no simulation games allow you to take advantage of that fact. Why couldn't declaring war with the right amount of propaganda lead to a massive spike in productivity and technical advancement?

angersock 13y ago

The biggest issue I've got with this is at the beginning many goalposts are set and our lack of performance is then paraded out without any regard to how silly they are. The author bemoans that we haven't done better than the jet engine, but honestly we're probably as far along the mechanical design of that problem domain as possible. The fact is, in very many fields, fuck, we've hit them to death. Concrete is pretty well understood, as is analog electronics. Some fields are simple innovated-out, and all that's left is making them more efficient or cheaper or simply more widely deployed. (This fact, incidentally, is why I ended up doing computer stuff instead of being a mechanical engineer.)

sgrove 13y ago
It's interesting that you mentioned that concrete in particular is well understood, I just came across an interesting article the other day about some breakthrough in understanding Roman concrete: http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2013/06/04/roman-concrete/ http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2013/06/04/roman-con... Seems there are still certainly innovations/iterations left to be made in concrete.
- angersock 13y ago
  Saw that one too--it's a cool thing. There are still things being done, for example, in making greener concrete that has better water permeability and whatnot, but I don't think the author would consideration that the sort of innovation we need.
xradionut 13y ago
There's still a lot of interest and development in concrete and material science for building stuff, it's just there's not a lot of big, easy, sleazy, vaporous paydays like we see in the software startup community. (How many people understand the advantages of additives or basalt rebar in certain applications?)

jimbokun 13y ago

"It’s harder to raise money for software companies working on uncertain, long-term, high-reward projects (like AI)." That's because "AI" doesn't exist. Are there people working on computer vision? Yes. Are there people working on speech recognition? Yes. Are there people working on robotics? Yes. Are there people working on computers that answer questions? Yes. Plus far too many applications of "data mining", "big data", "machine learning" to mention here. Lots of people making lots of money on all of these things (or at least starting companies to try). But I guess none of those things are "AI".

seiji 13y ago
To abuse an old quote, "AI" doesn't exist in the same way a 747 isn't a giant mechanical eagle. All the "AI" tasks above are hyper-localizing things that interact with the world, but they aren't entirely integratable into something coherent. (Something we now have to call AGI because the fad establishment has cooped the term AI for lesser purposes.) I find it slightly intriguing that a gatekeeper into the World of Funding™ is directly observing a disconnect between quick burn fads and long term usefulness. Will there be new offshoot Long Game funds? Software-based long-term problems these days don't take gargantuan funding, but people need enough to quit their job and live off of while working towards the future. These Long Game problems are especially pernicious because sometimes your first payoff isn't for years down the line. In today's Fundapalooza Party Round Frat Bro Extravaganza® land, you need users, customers, and sales within the first two weeks or you're dead in the water. I'd rather see a pie in the sky fund where, if you can convince the gate keepers you have a chance at changing the world in the next 3-7 years, your team gets $500k per person up front to pursue your goals. That may sound like a lot for up-front nothingness, but we're living in an age of cash hoarding immortal corporations. Apple could create a $20 billion fund, get 40,000 people working on change-the-fucking-world problems, and not even feel the loss of cash under their kilometer-sized tempurpedic mattress. Are we better than buskers? Do we have to be starving artists until we make it big or should we be taken care of and coddled while we work in minimalism? The only problem stopping Them[1] from funding every person with a plausible but at-first-glance crazy idea[2] is the problem of selecting the right people, not lack of funding in the world. The only way to make those goals happen yourself these days is to first do a fast-fad application, sell it, then use that as your base of funding. That has a long and uncertain cycle time though and you can end up overcapitalized and distracted (let's all buy teslas and $1000 jeans and $20,000 road bikes!) unless you pull a Musker[3]. Let's give crazy a chance. [1]: You know, Them. Them people with money. [2]: Free energy need not apply. [3]: Pulling a Musker is very different from starting out with nothing though. You've got tons of connected, capable, and rich people in-the-know connections by then, so "losing it all" isn't as special as it seems.

rayiner 13y ago

I found this quote interesting: "There are a decent number of people working on more efficient jet engines, but not very many civilians working on replacing the jet engine with something new." It's not really the problem that there aren't very many people working on replacing jet engines. The issue is that the problem domain is full of physical limits. Ask yourself: why are we still using quicksort now, half a century after it was developed? Well, because theory tells us that any sorting algorithm based on binary comparisons is going to require at least O(n log(n)) such comparisons, and that is going to remain the case no matter how much engineering effort you throw at the problem. All you can really do when it comes to sorting algorithms is improve on the constant factors and take advantage of special cases (radix sort for small integer items, etc). Software engineers don't usually have to think in terms of theoretical limits. But when I was in engineering school, as an aerospace major, every course began with: these are the theoretical limits in this particular area--all you can do is approach them more closely. A Brayton cycle has a certain efficiency at a given pressure ratio and an airfoil has a certain maximum lift-curve slope and there is nothing you can do about it. Improvements are in "hard engineering"--new materials that can withstand higher temperatures and pressures to eke out slightly more efficiency, etc. You're already seeing this in semiconductor manufacturing. As you run into the limits of lithography with ever-smaller wavelengths of light, semiconductor fabrication plants get exponentially more expensive to build. These physical limits are what give the traditional engineering fields the shape of their "innovation curve." Much more happened in aerospace engineering from 1930 to 1960 than has (and will) happen from 1960 to 2020. The long-hanging fruit is gone, and all that's left is hard engineering. And of course, this all plays into the "get rich quick" issue the author brings up. If you had a billion dollars lying around, where would you invest that money? A jet engine that's 0.5% more efficient? If you had $100 billion, would you spend it making an alternative to jet engines entirely (in an industry where people will fly on truly shitty airlines just to save $5 on a ticket)?

DaniFong 13y ago
It's not widely known or understood, but there are, in my opinion, quite a few ways to make significantly superior jet engine replacements. Factors of 2 or 3 in specific power and efficiency are possible. Due to the rocket equation, this could yield vastly longer range and more efficient aircraft (1/10 the weight, 10x the range, 10x the efficiency, 2x the speed...). In particular, you point out the limitations of the Brayton cycle and material limitations. However, there are other cycles that are much closer to Carnot efficiency, or match it in the ideal case. There's a lot you can do when isothermal compression is possible. Additionally, if there is a thermal limitation, you can do isothermal combustion, such that much more heat addition is at the maximum temperature of your materials, and you can even design efficient reheating. It's not a jet -- you want to pair this with a driven fan system or at least have high bypass, but it's fundamentally more thermodynamically efficient. For supersonic applications, scramjets remain possible, but challenging. And rocketry + high altitude flight remains extremely exciting and potentially more efficient than standard jetliner transport. Just difficult. So yes, there are physical limitations. But they are not what most people think they are, and they do not mean what people think they mean.

kaa2102 13y ago

Profit. It's far easier to cut costs, reduce taxes, and expand existing products/services into new markets than it is to conduct applied research and commercialize new products.

bjhoops1 13y ago
I think it is important to understand the limitations of the profit motive. Too often it is held up as some sort of panacea, as if all problems are the result of gov'ment getting in the way of heroic capitalists seeking glorious profits. Fact is, unfettered capitalism will innovate to the direct extent and in ways that it is profitable to do so. Which is why you see very little "innovation" being done to benefit poorer citizens - why innovate for a market that can't buy what you're selling? Rather, let's spend millions developing "solutions" to the problems of those who have so very few of them. A sad irony, that. This is where a well-run government can improve things - by artificially creating profit motives in important areas where there was none before. A tax on short-term investing or day-trading would be a great start to discourage utterly worthless short-term speculation and HFT, and is a great example of how unobtrusive policies can create desirable incentives.

oscargrouch 13y ago

Capitalism tends to monopolies, monopolies tends to sustain its power and its dominance so innovation is a threat to their dominance and developed markets.. Also when a company or group of people innovate the dominant dinosaur buys it and shut it down.. On the other side, those companies put large sums of money to "innovate" on the markets they already dominate, or in research to make them better in what they already do.. (so it doesnt really get into a innovation cicle)

jacoblyles 13y ago
Capitalism tends to monopolies? This is not true at all in the common case. Have you read "The Innovator's Dilemma"? Highly regulated industries, industries with network effects, or industries that require very rare natural resources (diamond mines) are exceptions. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
- oscargrouch 13y ago
  I did'nt read the "Innovator's Dilemma" , i just follow the history of the XX-XXI century and the news.. you may have opportunities when the market is new, or when you create the "market" yourself.. but with time monopolies will take control and no more inovations allowed.. until of course.. someone innovates aside of the system and a new cycle begins.. but the old status quo are still there trying to demolish the new wave that is a threat to its dominance.. i could quote a lot of cases here based on reality.. but anyone can find several examples of that just thinking a little bit..
  - jacoblyles 13y ago
    I'll tell that to the CEO of Sears Roebuck. He probably doesn't read "the history of the XX-XXI century and the news.."
    - oscargrouch 13y ago
      what i meant its to tell that this is crystal clear.. and you can pick a lot of examples of what im telling about.. eg. when apple opens the mobile market with iphone.. of course.. there a lot of oportunities..and a lot of big players start to compete, cause its a blue sea... But in 10/20 years.. it will have 2 or 3 players at most.. so maybe a new cycle will happen again.. in other scenarios.. that may or may not will break this monopoly down to pieces.. but its visible that it all tends to monopolies.. i was not questioning were innovation was impossible.. or small players could start a new game.. but a small player cant enter in a old game and spect to win because the big players will crush him, or in the best of the scenarios will buy him.. (waze being bought by google to nail the competition of google maps).. did'nt meant to be rude, ok?! sorry ;)

jacoblyles 13y ago

It's weird that a few people are challenging short-term thinking, and they're all friends with each other (Thiel, Musk). Also, it's weird how short-term thinking has infected the government. Nobody's forcing them to meet a quarterly P&L, you'd figure that would give them more freedom.

cryptoz 13y ago
> Nobody's forcing them to meet a quarterly P&L Yes they are, that's the problem. Running for re-election is equivalent to quarterly reports and it results in most politicians thinking in just as short of time scales as corporations.
narrator 13y ago
I don't think there's a whole lot of long-term vision out there. It seems the political conception of the future is mostly filled with tackling the challenges of global warming, unreset and other sorts of eco-doom that the zeitgeist is enthralled with. Musk, Kurzweil and a few others are the only people who look far into the future outside of the eco-doom/security paradigm any more.
- zanny 13y ago
  Here are the things I'd like to see (and if possible, be involved in) during the 21st century: 1. Molecular printing, mainly of food, as the end-state of consumer 3d printing. Print the protein folds and amino acids and make whatever food product you want, and cure world hunger with it. 2. Generational spacecraft running on a mix of fission, fusion, and solar power. Requires a construction facility in at least low Earth orbit. 3. A floating city on Venus in one of the temperate belts near the poles rife with CO2 to enable an oxygen cycle. 4. Embedded cybernetics, including the ability to interface with the brain, by properly decoding the human electrical signaling system the nervous system uses. 5. 3d printed stem cells to regrow any damaged tissue anywhere. 6. The end-state of current computer tech is embedded cybernetics that interpret brain waves. Bionic eyes that provide huds and vision in multiple spectrums, a wireless access point in your head, etc. 7. Elimination of bacterial infection by fabricating antibodies with 3d molecular printing (there is a trend here!) 8. Not really long-term game changing, but the natural evolution of learning systems moves towards self-maintaining infrastructure and transit, so that entire cities and the transportation of people and goods is done entirely by an automated interconnected grid. 9. A space-based solar array to power the planet that has a diminished orbit to stay in direct line of sight of the sun. I'd suggest a solar ring around the Equator, but it is more efficient to keep the entire thing pointing at the sun all the time. 10. Either the commercial fusion of rare earth metals, or asteroid mining, whichever is cheaper (more likely the latter) for scarce elements.

jd 13y ago

Another reason why / short term & software / is the currently the sweet spot is because it allows for short feedback cycles. A startup is a company that searches for a viable business model -- a product-market fit. When you create web based applications you can gather data, A/B test and do a lot of stuff that allows you to make measurable progress in the right direction. When working in hardware or when working on long term software projects like AI you're in a vacuum. And even smart people are not going to do very well if they can't see the consequences of the decisions they make. So long term projects take more people, more resources, are typically much harder problems and on top of that you won't be able to collect data early on to adjust course if needed. So the risk-adjusted return on an ambitious long-term startup is going to be horrendous compared to the low-hanging fruit most web startups go for. So investors avoid the big and ambitious ideas, and I can't blame them.

TylerE 13y ago

I actually think this is a much longer term thing, and Wall Street is to blame. Back in what most would consider the heyday of American innovation (Say, roughly 19th century thru the late 1950s), most large corporations were private. Leaders with vision could undertake long term plans and actually pull them off, without the obsession over quarterly earnings. Would we ever have a company like Boeing or Douglas Aircraft or Bell Telephone (Who financed Bell Labs for years) or Xerox today, with the pressure to go public and cash in, rather than building a long-term viable business? One of the few counter-examples would be Apple under Steve Jobs, but such cases are few and far between.

j_rogers 13y ago

Regarding super-sonic flight in particular. IIRC, the main reason for Concorde service being discontinued was the lack of people willing to pay for it. Further, when door-to-door times are extended by excessive security and waiting at the airport it doesn't really matter if you've cut your in-air time in half. I'd be really excited if someone airline offered pilotless aircraft. I think this is technically feasible now. I know that we are currently capable of landing planes autonomously currently. Plus this would reduce door-to-door time as well since you'd reduce the need for long security lines. After all, if there's no cockpit to hijack what is the use of screening for potential hijackers?

outworlder 13y ago
> I'd be really excited if someone airline offered pilotless aircraft. I think this is technically feasible now. I know that we are currently capable of landing planes autonomously currently. Plus this would reduce door-to-door time as well since you'd reduce the need for long security lines. After all, if there's no cockpit to hijack what is the use of screening for potential hijackers? Yes, we can take-off, cruise, navigate, avoid collisions and land autonomously (landing requires a certain ILS category which not all airports have, yet) today. I don't really think the limitation is software related - it is likely to be regulations and public opinion. "Human error" is more understandable to the average person than "computer error". There are other concerns, such as safety against tampering/hacking. However, considering how robotic Airbus aircraft already are, I am not sure those concerns are warranted. Boing is somewhat less so, by design, but they are still fly-by-wire with a computer between the pilot and the actual control surfaces. Now, I don't think autonomous aircraft would do much for security. After all, all you need to protect the pilots is a door lock. You still have to protect the inside of a plane and the passengers, however. But they would do wonders for private jets - having a competent pilot immediately available 24/7 without paying additional salaries could be very appealing for some folks.
TylerE 13y ago
It's a lot more complex then that. Arguably, the single root cause of Concorde being retired was the Flight 4590 crash in 2000, which hurt passenger numbers quite a bit. Operations were further hamstrung by the very small fleet size. There are certain things that just have to be done to get an aircraft commercially viable (spare parts inventory for instance), and when you have a fleet of only 20, that will cost much more per aircraft than supporting something super-common like a 737. It's also worth noting that Richard Brason, at least, thought Concorde was still viable, and made offers for the BA Fleet as high as £5m/aircraft, but was refused, at least partially because Airbus was unwilling to offer continued support.

grinich 13y ago

I think many people often mistake innovation from invention. innovating: (v) Make changes in something established, esp. by introducing new methods, ideas, or products. inventing: (v) Create or design (something that has not existed before); be the originator of. Apple is probably the most innovative company, in that they take existing technology and continually refine it into product. Which is crucial because nobody wants their phone to be a lab prototype. On the other end, most invention happens in academia. You need a lot of flexibility and low expectations of commercialization in order to really try dramatically new things. The magic companies of the last century are the ones who could do both, allowing people to have side projects that don't immediately show commercial promise. Bell Labs was a lot like this. So was PARC. And Google to some degree. I think a lot of Silicon Valley startups now have the worst of both worlds. They feel pressure to monetize and sell for millions, so their creativity is limited and they just barely innovate. They're not content to play, or work on something just because they like it and find it interesting. We hold up Elon Musk as a great entrepreneur, but he started building rockets because he wanted them to exist, not because he wanted to make money. [1] It takes a different sort of thinking to come up with SpaceX than it does to build Exec or Instacart. A different level of grit and disregard for fortune. It's unfortunately rare to find that spirit matched with incredible focus and ability to execute and sell. And even more unlikely that it gets funded. (There's a reason Elon started both Tesla and SpaceX with his own cash.) I'm certainly not saying that one should disregard the economics of running a company. But you don't make radical changes in the world when your ideas start from them. [2] Incidentally, I've actually looked into building ramjet aircraft. (Or scramjet, because why wouldn't you go supersonic?) It's physically possible, [3] but requires a breakthrough in energy storage and composites on the order of the transistor. I've always thought there are two places in the world with huge market failures: developing world healthcare, and future-tech. In many ways, philanthropy such as the Gates Foundation helps mitigate the first, but I've yet to see anything other than war with a technologically-equal enemy push forward the second. Google is showing some promise which is exciting, but we probably shouldn't have all of our future hopes wrapped up in a single giant online advertising company. I think we should create a West Coast "Institue for Advanced Study" in the middle of the desert with a few million dollars and a bunch of dreamers who want to get their hands dirty and try ideas that everyone else thinks are crazy. People do amazing things when nobody is looking over their shoulder. [1] In fact, it seems he had to negotiate like hell to wrap a business model around that company, and got incredibly lucky that Shuttle was retired. You could also argue that SpaceX is still innovation but I would argue that the dramatic cost savings and reusability make it count as invention. [2] Maybe unless you're a brilliant economist or politician, but how that world works is a mystery to me. [3] Check out the WaveRider project. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WaveRider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WaveRider

gwern 13y ago

Warmed-over Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen.

squozzer 13y ago

The author has a romantic notion of technical progress. That's fine, but I'd argue that today's innovations have as much relevance as yesterday's, even though they lack the sex appeal. And as others have pointed out, in a lot of the well-known examples, we've reached certain limits that make technological progress very expensive. For example, probably the primary reason we don't have better airplane engines is because exceeding the speed of sound is a very noisy proposition. I have an excellent book on the B-70 bomber, which in my opinion is the most beautiful airplane ever designed. And among the reasons it was not adopted is that sonic booms over populated areas piss people off. And flying higher makes the problem (counter-intuitively) worse. But the main reason the B-70 was shelved was the ICBM. And that forms my next point. The internet itself has (or should have) made some reasons for travelling pointless. And it works at a much higher velocity -- a nearly the speed of light. So in a way the author seems to pine for a "faster horse" instead of a car.

dangoldin 13y ago

Great post. If you liked this I also suggest taking a look at Peter Thiel's CS183 lectures at Stanford. Blake Masters did a great job taking notes: http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup In particular, take a look at the Class 15 one - http://blakemasters.com/post/24122680868/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-15-notes-essay http://blakemasters.com/post/24122680868/peter-thiels-cs183-...

kungfooey 13y ago

I'm rather surprised this hasn't already been mentioned, but if you want to read more on this thread of thought written by an economist, check out the ebook, "The Great Stagnation" by Tyler Cowen. Alternatively, watch his Tedx talk.

beat 13y ago

The real hard part is that so many of us grew up on a: Moore's Law, and b: science fiction. We want to believe Moore's Law applies to everything, because it fits the mythos and the observed behavior of the world we grew up in. Sadly, nothing but computers are subject to Moore's Law. And even there, it'll run out sooner or later.

a_p 13y ago

> We were once great at innovating in the physical world...But recently, software (and mostly Internet software) has been the focus of innovation, and its importance is probably still underestimated—there are compounding effects to how it’s changing the world that we’re only now beginning to see...But innovation in the physical world (besides phones and computers) over the same time period has been less impressive. Actually, I would argue that the opposite is true. Software hasn't really had any important innovations (using David Wheeler's definition, which is from a CS/EE perspective, and which is linked to every couple of months on HN[1]). The software required to run a smartphone isn't significantly different than the software needed to run a similar application on a desktop. On the other hand, the hardware on a smartphone now and a desktop from the 90s is different. We take hardware advances like reliable capacitive touchscreens and maybe this storage advance linked to on HN today [2], and Moore's "Law" for granted, but "putting more transistors in a circuit" and increased hardware capabilities were the bottleneck to producing today's technology, not new software techniques. The reason that people associate software with innovation is because it has become the latest tech buzzword. When a word is overused in this manner, it is hard to have a conversation about it because the definition has been degraded to include pretty much anything. The granting of patents to trivial software ideas gives companies a claim to innovation that they do not deserve. Rayiner's comment on this thread: > The long-hanging fruit is gone, and all that's left is hard engineering. will soon be true for computer hardware, and eventually "Moore's Law" will be broken. When software does not become significantly faster each release cycle, it will be more apparent that hardware is responsible for today's advances as opposed to software. [1] http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5911347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5911347

sliverstorm 13y ago
When a word is overused in this manner, it is hard to have a conversation about it because the definition has been degraded to include pretty much anything. When you can picture someone using the word against itself, I'd say that's when the bell tolls. E.g., "Our greatest innovation for this product has been not worrying about innovation, and focusing on incremental improvement"

jholman 13y ago

Well, sama, I'm glad to hear that you feel this way, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you do about it. I mean, I never used Loopt, so maybe I'm missing something but it sure looks like an example of what you're criticizing (though better than anything I've done). But that's okay, Zip2 wasn't that huge of a contribution to the world either. The impressive bit is what Musk did after Zip2. So good luck! You're in a better position than most, to do more than talk!

vonskippy 13y ago

What happened to innovation? At least in the States, it's been sued out of existence.

FD3SA 13y ago

This post is missing the forest for the trees. Hard problems are hard. Easy problems are easy. In a world where autonomy can only be purchased by wealth, any rational actor will spend his/her time optimizing the acquisition of wealth by solving easy problems as quickly as possible. This will then allow him/her the necessary autonomy to tackle hard problems. This applies to all capital intensive endeavors of creation: science, film, software, hardware, etc. Even the least capital intensive endeavors such as pure mathematics require autonomy in the form of a guarantee of food, shelter, and healthcare to be viable in the long term. As such, the solution is simple: Increase autonomy. But do we increase autonomy for everyone, or pick and choose winners? The first strategy is basic income, and the second strategy is venture capital. Those involved in venture capital are now seeing the weaknesses in their own system, wherein picking and choosing winners will skew heavily towards the best signalers (i.e. marketers), rather than the most qualified/talented. If VCs want to hedge their bets, they can put their lobbying money where their mouths are, and support basic income. This allows savants who are unable to market themselves the required freedom to work on their ideas with a tiny but guaranteed degree of autonomy. It is the equivalent of buying a Vangaurd index fund instead of picking and choosing stocks for a portfolio. The winning strategy is to do both simultaneously.

pyoung 13y ago
I couldn't agree more. Realistically, I don't think we will ever reach a political consensus in the US that would allow for a basic income bill to pass through congress. More likely is that technology will eventually make most menial labor and jobs obsolete, resulting in a spike of unemployment which essentially forces the issue. Time will tell.
- FD3SA 13y ago
  If history is any indication, mass unemployment is exactly what will need to happen. Arguably it is already happening in Europe, where a significant portion of the population have no competitive advantage that meets the minimum wage in a massive free market like the EU. I do hope that certain countries, such as Canada or Germany, will take a preventative approach rather than wait till the malignancy of unemployment metastasizes, causing unnecessary and irreversible harm to the fabric of society.

nostromo 13y ago

The beauty of the internet is that it was this unthinkably big project that was eventually thrown into the laps of the public. In my view this is government at its best: building infrastructure that lays the groundwork for huge wealth creation. The only opportunity I can think of right now that might be similar in its capacity to fuel wealth creation as much as the internet has is perhaps a space elevator. I'm not sure how exactly it would be used, but similarly, nobody really knew how ARPANET would end up being used either. I, like millions of engineers, would love to work in "truly innovative" industries beyond just software. However, innovation needs infrastructure to build upon. The amount of resources needed to work on the problems that Elon Musk takes on are prohibitive for the vast majority of entrepreneurs, investors, and engineers.

jgamman 13y ago
use of the word 'infrastructure' is telling. i've been doing a lot of thinking lately on that topic. really recommend the book Infrastructure: value of social resources by frischmann.

hooande 13y ago

Some thoughts on this: 1. Surprising to see an article on innovation that mentions Kickstarter only as a footnote. One of the reasons we lack innovation is because we've let one group of people, big name venture capital investors, to decide by themselves what's good and what isn't. It's important to note that the modern "VC" investment model had very little to do with the major innovations of the 20th century. Some of our greatest inventions came from government laboratories, people working on their own without organized investment and corporations who acted like VCs by internally funding good ideas. Modern VCs only appeared around the 80s to give us derivative works that succeeded by added branding to existing ideas. The beauty of Kickstarter et al is that we have a much larger pool of people to tell us what's good or bad, but it does no good if we keep looking down on crowdfunding as venture capital's weaker sibling. We need to focus more on "how much good do they do" than on "how much money did they raise" 2. Another reason we don't have much innovation is because "Inventor" is no longer a job title. Back in the days of (my hero) Thomas Edison you didn't need a VC firm or a trendy office to justify your intentions to make something new. You just did it, with no particular funding or social organization. People decided to dedicate their lives to the pursuit of making new and original things. Now it's so important to be a part of the "startup community", important to have social validation from big name vcs, important to never say no to any amount of money. Until people can declare themselves to be Inventors without all of the other trappings, we shouldn't expect unbounded innovation from them. 3. This line struck me "...one guy saying that they were going to do these crazy things like ship a phone with no keyboard running a real OS and require everyone to buy a data plan." Another reason we don't innovate any more is because minor changes to an existing product now count as the the most significant innovations of our time. I understand that we need heroes and Steve Jobs is one of them. And a lot of people like the iphone. But Thomas Edison invented recorded sound. Tesla harnessed electricity and energy beams. Freaking Ben Franklin invented the concept of a lending library. And the best our generation has is something about a phone OS and data plan? We can't expect the next generation to be true innovators when we direct all of our hero worship at people who make small improvements to existing ideas. Yes, this may mean one of your heroes too. But if we can't even make the sacrifice of focusing on those who actually do invent new things, how can we be expected to be so creative ourselves? Finally, innovation isn't completely dead. People are working on fusion reactors, warp drives and brain interfaces. Their efforts just don't draw as much attention of big VC investments or the work of big name entrepreneurs. The biggest things that innovation is lacking are things that our society can provide.

daemon13 13y ago

Existing model of financing long-term game-changing next-big-thing companies via equity dilution with angel/venture financing is less optimal from the founders' perspective than pursuing another feature start-up. More risk, less equity, success is uncertain, reward far away in the future - why bother with making world better? My 2 cents :-) P.S.: a better model might be if the founder pursuing next-big-thing commits to certain ROI for investors (2-3-5 times on capital), thus increasing this founder's potential upside and motivation to go the hard way. Critique and suggestions are welcome.

physcab 13y ago

I did my undergraduate in Engineering Physics then went on to do a PhD in Materials Science. After a couple years of graduate coursework and research and passing exams, it was time to pick a dissertation topic. We then had to defend it before our committee and get their approval. Well, I failed my first attempt (you were allowed 2). The reason the committee gave me for not passing was that my topic of choice was not a "significant improvement of basic science". This perplexed me. My committee was made up of members who were all 60+ years in age and had been the founding fathers of metallurgy. Collectively, they invented a completely new field called opto-electronics. When they gave me that response, I thought to myself, how the fuck do they expect me to improve basic science?! It turns out the solution was much more nuanced. In the months that followed, my advisor would have thought experiments with me. He essentially helped me brainstorm problems that needed solving, but he always started our sessions with the question, "what is something that you always wanted to exist, but doesn't? What are you most curious about?" He then gave me the keys to his shop and told me to "tinker around". Take apart his vacuum tubes. Screw around with his argon laser and sputtering machine. Innovation in the physical world comes from the same curious people that are inventing fun software programs. But we absolutely need to cultivate it, because that is what is dying. Put a workbench in every home, make it easier for people to take apart things they buy, encourage people to be creative without fear of punishment.

sumzup 13y ago
What did you end up going with?
- noir_lord 13y ago
  Death Ray. Fundamental Science THIS!.

sandhus 13y ago

Charity begins at home.

sandhus 13y ago

Charity begins at home.

tsmdvv 13y ago

Yes, Mr. Loopt, good question, what happened to innovation?

thomasjames 13y ago

I think the fact that we are talking about "innovation" so much is a sign of an excessive degree of self-awareness. People used to be at peace with having a specific interest and true expertise and were not thinking "okay, I'm smart so let me 'disrupt' a market and shake things up." Many were okay with simply being a useful, necessary and perhaps not-so-widely celebrated part of a larger whole. Larger wholes like NASA, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, IBM, Bell, Digital Equipment and others that gave rise to this much lauded period of innovation (the mechanics of which the author doesn't entirely seem to understand). It also goes without saying that the larger players in academia were expanding in to engineering in a much more serious way due to Cold War competition. Sure, there were exceptions to the theory of leviathan organizations of specialists. Intel is an exception, in that it was a start up. But it was a start up founded by people with the understanding of how a larger research entity would work (two of the main founders were established engineers at Fairchild). Talking about this sort of thing in the context of modern start-up culture, to be honest, is flippant and cheeky. Maybe "idea guys", business journalists, and a lot of modern hackers in general just need to stop thinking innovation as some substance you can bottle and beating us over the heads with said bottle until the word loses all meaning. The innovators who created the sophistication of the modern transportation and energy infrastructure we now enjoy, not to mention the fundamentals of computing, were a lot humbler than the baby boomer titans of technology and probably a lot of us out there, too.