5 ms·

I've had an intuitive sense for a long time that the innovation rate has fallen dramatically since the 1950s. What we're doing now really feels like small incre

• protonfish 12y ago
  The Internet and everything in it?
  • ori_b 12y ago
    Was created as ARPANET in the 1960s.
  • zenogais 12y ago
    It's important not to confuse the rapid production and reproduction of novelty with innovation.
    • pantalaimon 12y ago
      Where do you draw the line?
      • zenogais 12y ago
        I feel like this @hipsterhacker tweet sums it up nicely: https://twitter.com/hipsterhacker/status/466077431061696512 https://twitter.com/hipsterhacker/status/466077431061696512
  • api 12y ago
    All invented and in many cases first prototyped in the 60s.
• sp332 12y ago
  Alan Kay asked Stack Overflow the same question. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-inventions-in-computing-since-1980 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-i...
  • api 12y ago
    The responses are not encouraging. They're either incremental improvements on things invented before 1980 (often before 1970) or the poster is misinformed and the idea pre-dates 1980. The WWW is actually a 1960s idea. Watch Engelbart's demo. Sometimes I wonder if the problem is the massive growth of free market ideology (market fundamentalism) since 1970: Ayn Rand, the Reagan Revolution, libertarianism, etc. The free market is heavily biased toward extracting pre-existing value and things with short time horizons. It rarely spends money on very speculative R&D, and the culture that it begets is a hustler culture of quick-to-market, quick-to-exit, etc. Things like the Engelbart demo are the product of very smart people with very rough, flexible deadlines sitting around and thinking a lot. There's no way to monetize that. A related problem is that invention itself is hard to monetize except via patents... the innovator often loses in the market to fast followers. In machine learning terminology we could say that the free market is a greedy hill climbing algorithm prone to converge on local maxima and unlikely to cross fitness valleys.
    • shakethemonkey 12y ago
      Likewise, the helicopter is a "Renaissance idea" (Leonardo da Vinci). In both cases, the underlying socio-technological substrate was insufficient at the time of the lofty idea.
• darkmighty 12y ago
  1) The source, "Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery" is obviously biased towards older innovations. It's difficult to judge a priori the impact of current innovations. (and it's pretty outdated by now) 2) Breakthroughs are simply very impactful innovations -- of course earlier innovations are going to have an advantage: it's like saying "The total number of descendents per capta has been dwindling since the dawn of ages. We're doomed!". Claiming the rate of breakthroughs should remain constant is ridiculous. 3) Additionally, inventions are information. They're cumulative and knowledge instensive. We can't expect them to occur at a constant rate simply because it will get harder and harder to learn eveything required to invent some really new technology/scientific discovery. I like to think of human knowledge as a chunk of information that we compress and pass along. There's only so much we can compress, and our brain hasn't really changed significantly to accomodate and absorb more information faster. The result of course is specialization, and again specialized innovations by definition have limited scope. 4) To claim we had no specialized breakthroughs recently is even more ridiculous. Take the computing aspect of engineering alone (and math) and you probably get more small breakthroughs than there were inventions at all in the 18th century. Telecommunications also developed completely in the last few decades.