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Where Is The Innovation?
"In posing this question to the slashdot community I'm sure to receive some blistering flames claiming that I'm too narrow minded in my view of what innovation is. But think carefully, can you really name something developed in the last nine years that came out of left field, shook the world by its roots, gained acceptance and you can't live without it? I consider innovations to be things such as the wheel, fire, airplanes, mechanized warfare, the radio, television, PC, and the Internet.
In looking at research being done now, I again see only a path of incremental improvement. People simply take the next step, no one jumps. Quantum computing might have a chance, but it looks like it will fall the way of hot fusion, physically possible, but not commercial viable.
If the Internet is supposed to facilitate the exchange of information, why don't we see more innovation? Is it just that the innovation has become so complex and abstract that a simple-minded person like myself is blind to it? Or for the past nine years have we just been walking along thrilled at the way things were going? (If the latter is the case, a recession might be good to stoke the fires of original thinking)
Has there been innovation (not the Microsoft defintion, but real innovation) in the past nine years? Is it too much to ask for a ground breaking idea in nine short years? Why hasn't there been more inovation with the advent of the internet?"
I think part of the problem is that people don't like to think that innovation takes time.
You talk about UNIX evolving slowly, but look at the Auto and the Airplane. All three are from the 20th Century...yes there were some earlier auto examples, but for the most part nothing really happened until 1898 on...so I'll say the 20th Century.
The Auto - Very slow development until Ford, revolutionized the entire industral system. So a good 20 years with slow evolution.
The Airplane - From 1903 until 1915 really very little was done with the airplane. Sure it could fly up to 150 miles per hour and cross the English Channel or the Alps, but it was still *very* dangerous and impractical. But between the wars airplanes started to evolve, by 1940 most of the world's airforces had mono-planes, although most still used biplanes till the end of the war (Germany, UK, USSR, Japan, US). But that's a full 37 years after the first flight. 37 years to go from Kitty Hawk to 400 miles an hour. Even during the war, US and British crews had to stop for fuel during Atlantic crossings, nearly 20 years after Lindberg flew non-stop.
Technology has always evolved slowly, look at handguns, the best designed handgun in the history of firearms was designed before the first world war and "prefected" in 1911. Not much has happened with that in 90 years.
The capitalization of Technology hasn't slown it down, it's always been slow.
...One-Click shopping!
bp
"Innovative" is only an opposite of "incremental" if one looks at advances with a pop science frame of mind. Most -- all? -- increments involve innovation.
(And implying that anything without a currently existing application is by definition not innovative seems kinda short-sighted to me.)
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
-- Charles Duell, Director of U.S. Patent Office, 1899
That sounds like a rather web-developer centric world view. As I use the web for little more than a reference tool and communications tool, let me assure you that the rest of the scientific and technical world is making leaps and bounds. Partly helped by the increase effeciency of tools like the web, partly by other advances (although I would find a web browser hard to term an advance as it is just a tool to standardize interfaces into one user "experience" :-)).
The new technology in the semiconductor field alone has made the browser a usable tool. Do you remember using Mosaic in the early 90's? It was stripped down and still slow on anything short of a high end workstation.
What you are seeing is that those improvments that require you to make a paradigm shift for greater effeciency are "breakthroughs" (the web, a car 100 years ago, etc). Really all technology is just improvments on other technology. Some require change onthe users part, others are hidden from them to make their life better. All in all, the web browser is not the biggest breakthrough in the last 9 years, it just has the biggest social footprint.
After all, think about the invention of calculus. This has made physics possible, thus making many things that we take for granted possible (computers, etc.). Now, one could say that calculus is just a logical progression from algebra. However, think about the thought processes and the jumps that had to be made just to make that logical progression possible.
Get thee to at text on the history of mathematics. There was no singular point that was "the invention of calculus." Newton did not 'invent' calculus. Many of the important theorems of calculus were already in place, 'proved' by the standards of the day. What Newton did was an incremental step forward from previous work. Granted, in his lifetime, he was able to provide LOTS of incremental steps, and analysis (the branch of mathematics which includes calculus) was much improved by his work.
Keep in mind, though, that there was for decades (centuries?) dispute over Newton's contributions vs. Leibniz's contributions. Both 'invented'/'discovered' calculus simultaneously. Furthermore, nearly everything that Newton accomplished, Archimedes already had. 2000 years earlier. Without centuries of analysis to build on. Without decent notation (don't underestimate its value - Einstein couldn't have done his work without the tensor calculus - in essence, a way to represent MANY equations with a single variable).
Newton's brilliance was in pulling everything together, improving on it, developing better notation, and applying it to widely disparate fields of inquiry. In a single lifetime.
There is no such thing as "an increment that changes everything." Each such increment is built on thousands of others, and provides a foundation for thousands more.
So, you can give eight examples of "innovation" that have occurred since the dawn of time -- and you're concerned that we haven't had one in the last decade? Boy, that's shocking!
I find it disturbing that you went from talking about sheep to talking about Viagra. If I had kids (or sheep) I'd tell you to stay away from them.
Unless your name is Einstein ("what happens as you get faster to the speed of light?") or Wright ("Hmm, if we stick static wings on this bicycle, maybe we can fly better than the guys trying to flap"), or Ford ("Hey, what if we made a machine to build a bunch of identical parts, and used humans to assemble the parts into lots of cars, instead of building carriages by hand?"), you're only likely to see incremental improvement.
Incremental improvement isn't bad. The automobile, passenger air travel, and yes, 300-baud modems through 56K modems are all examples of incremental improvement.
Some technologies which seem like breakthroughs (MP3 vs. uncompressed .WAV) are merely incremental -- I remember when you got "graphics" by downloading uncompressed memory dumps of video RAM. Then there was .GIF (lossless compression, quick to view on a '286). Then - when CPUs permitted it - .JPG (lossy compression that required a 386 or 486 to render in 2-3 seconds per image).
But yes, evolution of technology does take years.
I like games like CivII and Alpha Centauri, where the "waiting" of 10 years between breakthrough and application can be over in a night. Unfortunately, real life ain't like that - if it takes 10 years of "game time", it takes 10 years of "real time".
As for comparisons between the airplane and the rocket for space exploration... well, until there's somewhere there worth going to, or something there worth bringing back, nobody's gonna build the technology to make it worthwhile. This is (IMHO) sad, verging on the tragic, but true.
- ftp
- archie
- gopher
- lynx
- Mosaic
- Netscape
- IE
None of these in and of themselves are revolutionary or particularly "innovative". They build on previous work. That is how the human race advances; by building on previous work. Innovation just doesn't happen overnight, and innovative ideas don't always immediatly catch on.There's been enough significant enhancements in most of our lifetimes to realize this.
http://www.naildrivin5.com/davec
...I think that's spot on. The great technological achievements were not created with the idea of "Let's do this, so we can make a million bucks off of it.". In fact, the idea of applying a business model to technological ideas has done nothing but cripple the movement. Example: UNIX is born at Bell Labs. Ritchie and the crew didn't create UNIX to make money...they built it because they had the 'programmers itch'. Bell Labs took it over, seeing that they could make a wad of cash off of it, and UNIX has been evolving at a snails pace ever since.
The great things [UNIX, the Web, e-mail...hell,e ven Slashdot] were created because some geek thought it would be cool, or as a tool to get something done more effectively. All capitilization of technology has done is sloooow it down.
--Just Another Pimp A$$ Perl Hacker
El riesgo vive siempre!
First off, I'd argue with your definition of innovation a little, but I understand what you mean. Now, lets look at the timetable of the innovations you deem worthy enough to mention. Doesn't that stretch through the whole course of human history?
Lets narrow it down to the last 115 years or so. Major "innovations" according to your definition would be: the Automobile, airplanes, radio, TV, Nuclear Power, Computer, PC, Internet.... can you think of anything else? No, and neither can I. Lets assume for the sake of argument there's two other world changing "innovations" I've forgotten. That gives us 10 innovations in 115 years. Wow. That's slightly slower than 1 every 10 years.
Are you expecting these to come about overnight? The vast majority of things are just improvements and refinements of other ideas, and many of them do revolutionize the way we do things. You just can't set an alarm clock and expect a new one every other year. That's grossly optimistic at best and utterly naive at worst.
Mordred
Well, I think that you have insanely high standards for what counts as innovative, then. To suggest that the genome was just applied engineering ignores the tremendous developments in informatics that were necessary to make it possible. More importantly, the way that genomic data is used is qualitatively different from the way that genetic data was used before the concept of genomics. Furthermore, the genome is really only the leading edge of future biology; proteomics didn't even exist 10 years ago, and it depends absolutely on genomic data.
And, fundamentally, I think that this is one of two really critically important things to realize. Most of the change that takes place in the world is incremental and evolutionary, rather than earthshattering and revolutionary. The other important thing to understand is that often innovations have a long lead time. The web took the better part of a decade to turn from a curiosity to a passtime to a lynchpin of the economy- and that's fast as these things go. Most really innovative concepts take decades to really change the world, and it's only with a long historical view that we realize how critically they impact our lives. Just because the innovations of the past ten years haven't turned the world upside down yet doesn't mean that they won't, and in many cases it won't be until after that happens that we'll be able to identify them.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
To my knowledge there has never been a major scientific discovery which can not be considered an incremental advance on something else.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Innovative products rarely take the world at a storm the few years after their creation, so it is a bit recent to see any technological breakthrought made in the last 10 years (but, if I had to name one, cell phones is probably the biggest one since civil airplane)
> But think carefully, can you really name something developed in the last nine years that came out of left field, shook the world by its roots, gained acceptance and you can't live without it
Fermat theorem proof, of course.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
I wouldn't say that the web browser was the latest innovation in science and technology. I don't even know if I would even say that the web browser was so much an innovation in technology as it was a stylistic leap forward for computers. (I would probably say the same about the GUI).
I would say, that, just off the top of my head, that cloning a sheep was a pretty innovative use of science\technology. I am sure that there is plenty of other things we can think up. Take pharmacology, Viagra to the side, I am sure that their has been dozens of new medications devised in the past decade. Gabapentin comes to mind. In other areas of technology, the research on hybrid cars comes to mind. I am sure that people out there can think of dozens of innovations.
And of course, I can't forget to mention "Ginger"...
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
...if the web browser was patented? Thank you, Tim Burners-Lee.
The great technological achievements were not created with the idea of "Let's do this, so we can make a million bucks off of it.". The technological achievements cited by the original author (HTML, radio, television) were not technical achievements of any kind. They were all just a small step taken after the small step before them. The only thing made these achievements worthy of history: they were each accepted by the masses as a usable product. SGML existed years before HTML... no one made a big deal about it. Unix (as you pointed out) was invented long before it became a recognizable power. All of these types of technical achievements have happened in the past few years. Scientific advances in biology and nano technology as well as simple changes like the standardization of xml and the popularization of distributed applications and peer to peer file sharing. The only difference between these advancements and the ones the original author is looking for, is that none of the technologies I pointed out are done. They will each evolve before they are ready to be declared a landmark. It isn't until these technologies solve very large real world problems that they will be worthy of history books. Most likely it will be done for money.
Everyone's too busy downloading pr0n.
The last innovation that meets your criteria is probably the advent of a global telephone network, or maybe sattelite communication. Web browsers go into the same category of 'incremental improvement' which you say has stagnated recently. What percentage of people in the world do you think "can't live without" their copy of IE 5.5?
If you go back far enough and read the right histories, you'll find few Archimedes type incedents and more of a lifetime of anonymous research finally reaching a payoff.
If god had intended you to be naked, you would have been born that way.