The responses are not encouraging. They're either incremental improvements on things invented before 1980 (often before 1970) or the poster is misinformed and t

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.