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Innovation Getting Slower?
Daniel Dvorkin writes "A New Scientist article details the claims of Jonathan Huebner, a Naval Air Warfare Center physicist, that the rate of technological innovation is actually decreasing, not increasing exponentially as some people believe. Huebner says that there are now fewer 'important technological developments per billion people' than at any time since the 17th century! I'm far from convinced, but it's an interesting and thought-provoking article." From the article: "He says the rate of technological innovation reached a peak a century ago and has been declining ever since. And like the lookout on the Titanic who spotted the fateful iceberg, Huebner sees the end of innovation looming dead ahead."
Microsoft
Personally, I blame slashdot. I could be inventing some crazy shit if I didn't have to check this site every 5 minutes.
Lack of innovation has always been their trademark.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
The death of innovation is due to apathy.
I was going to invent a solution to the problem, but who cares?
If Huebner were to imagine himself twenty years from now and reconstruct the present, do you think he'd really find innovation today to be in decline?
Innovation has been patented.
It's a good thing the world sucks or we'd all fall off.
So who says innovations per billion people is a legitimate measure of the rate? Innovations per year seems to be the only measure that matters. And maybe the rate appears to be slowing because all of the totally common sense innovations have already been done. The stuff that is left requires a huge knowledge base and a large effort on the part of hundreds to achieve. Maybe innovation rates should be correlated to complexity of the innovation. Bet it's increasing if you do it that way. Statistics can always say whatever your thesis needs em to say. Bah!
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
I wonder by how many billion the population has grown since the 17th century? Does the article account for the exponential population increase mondially?
Ok, a serious answer now. Necessity is the mother of all invention, and personally my life has gotten pretty good. I'm most impressed by a device that can reel up my hoses efficiently, or make my popcorn more buttery.
Plus, all the easy inventions have been taken.
Everything that can be invented, has already been invented!
:)
You know what this means. Judgement day. But without the robots.
But WHY is a different question. Maybe we're just dreaming about harder stuff. Nanotechnology, space elevators, quantum computing, and curing cancer through understanding of genetics might just be a *wee bit* harder than figuring out the thermodynamics of a new steam engine design.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Perhaps the commoditisation of one of the most valuable resources of the world, human ingenuity, to be renamed as something called "intellectual property" needs to be considered and changed for the better. Ingenuity and advance has always been on top of the inventions that came before. The circle became a wheel, the wheel became a cart, which became a carriage and finally a car. By stopping further developments by restricting them, hiding them and/or charging a fortune for them, of course development will slow down. If I were to build a starship to travel into the galaxy, I'd have to settle about 16,000 patent claims and divy up a fortune of funds between thousands of organisations.
Every generation thinks that everything has already been invented. Wait until true AI comes out, and it'll make all the previous bursts of invention look positively leisurely.
I was going to post something against patents but I found it had been patented by fifteen companies and some other companies might claim copyright infringement on my work because I will be using similar or identical words.
There's many more fields of technology than before. Though breakthroughs might not happens as often per person, there's pletny of innovation going on, the resources are just spread out. Our innovation in new fields such as computers can't be graphed by major breakthroughs and inventions. For every researcher, there's dozens of engineers making smaller but crucial progress. It's like looking at the last decade of computers and pointing out only the World Wide Web as an innovation. Hardly an accurate measure of technology progress.
Well, first off - invention is more difficult these days... invent a new computer chip? Oh yeah - once you got a billion dollar fab that's easy...
Second its out patent system and its ridiculous enforcement. In a system where a case like the one with SCO can go on for so long without them showing any prove who can expect you to invent stuff?
Peter.
Buzz words moved in and technology moved out. It doesn't matter if you're 100 times better then your nearest rival, it's whoever has the best advertisements that wins. It's no longer profitable to spend money on development when you can just tag along later (or patent broadly) and spend that money on marketing.
I like muppets.
I think the more we discover the more we realize we don't know yet. So I'dhave to say I disagree with your comment.
I blame patents.
Patents pretty much hobble innovation. They work when you have a relatively small population base, but not when the population is in the billions. (And not when patents keep getting extended to longer and longer periods of time.)
During the 1800s there were no improvements to the pistol for about 20 years due to patent restrictions. Patents are supposed to promote science and industry, but often have the opposite effect.
There is a large amount of huberis involved with the patent process that says "no one is as smart as me, so anyone who has a similar idea to mine must be stealing it". The problem is that when you have large numbers of people working on the same problems, you are going to encounter the same solutions over and over again.
If we continue to have a "first one to patent wins" on a global scale, we will have crippled ourselves to the fastest filers, not the fastest thinkers.
We no longer stand on the shoulers of giants because we are crippled by midgets.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
I call crap on this. There is still so much that we do not know. And as we discover new areas there will be new bursts of innovation.
Considering that there were fewer than 600 million people in the world in 1600, I'd assume fewer "developments per billion" today.
Sorry, I just don't see anything to be concerned about. The per capita rate of development may have gone down in the last 200 years, but the numbers have gone way up.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
But according to a new analysis, this view couldn't be more wrong: far from being in technological nirvana, we are fast approaching a new dark age.
If there really are fewer inventions being adopted, I think it would likely be due to the higher level of technical complexity to develop truly innovative designs these day that would catch someone's attention. Combine that with the signal to noise ratio and fewer inventions are coming to the forefront.
Today I was listening to a radio show, I think it was pre-taped on CBC Radio, but at any rate, the show delved into the differences between advertisements today and fifty years ago, with an emphasis on ads that push the limits of decency. The show's host made a comment that stuck with me about how yesterday's shocking ad is certainly mild in comparison to what's next on the horizon. To me this points at the human condition in that we are less and less impressed with the here-and-now, until someone changes the way we see things altogether and a whole new level is reached, attained, marketed, exploited and drained until it happens again and again.
More and more, he says, progress takes place "under the hood" in the form of abstract computing processes. Huebner's analysis misses this entirely.
I think the advancements that make most sense are not necessarily under the hood, but it would be important to address that aspect. To me, the most important advancements are how people use technology, not the technology itself -- and I would like to think it will always be that way. Maybe I am wrong.
You can invent webpages, but they won't really catch on until they have links in them, decentralizing and killing document hierarchy. You can invent weblogs but they won't really catch on until you have RSS and weblogs with feed readers built in. It's the little things but you need to be able to really understand how people WANT to use things before the level of invention meets demand.
Nothing is new under the Sun, except our use of the materials given.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Though it's interesting, this guy has some serious flaws in his thinking. First off, measuring innovation per billions of people isn't very reliable, as a population can rapidly increase or decrease and this doesn't take into account the education level of the population. The list of innovations he plotted is also debateable. I consider the development of Javascript a major innovation, but is that on the list? Think about the thousands and thousands software and hardware innovation that have been made. I don't think it's because they're "insignificant". If it may appear as though there are fewer innovations, that may be because you're looking in the wrong place. Many, many innovations are taking place as we speak, it's just highly specialized. This guy is saying that we'll pretty soon invent everything and be done. This reminds me of a quote by the head of the USPO back in the turn of the century (wish I could find a link). He said that everything that could possibly be invented has been invented. This is obviously way, way off target. Huebner is on the same train of thought.
And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be bannana-shaped.
If you look at the movies for summer (just about every one of them is a remake of some kind), innovation is definitely standing still.
The further into the future we go the more possibilities and oppurtunities we will find. The simple ones have all been taken so the layman may not have as much to discover. There's plenty for the taking!
That's a silly way of measuring innovation. By that logic, if we killed off half of the world, this would be the most innovative year ever. I like to call that Bush logic.
Eh... no.
How about this: the ratio of revolutionary innovation to evolutionary innovation is decreasing.
Stopping a discussion halfway through and saying, "now, let's define our terms" is annoying as all hell. Still, I'm sure everyone has different ideas of what "innovation" is. If you just mean that it's something new, it seems like there's a lot of innovation. But a lot of it is relatively arbitrary, and certainly not "life-altering" or "revolutionary". The article uses the phrase "important technological developments"; what the hell does that mean, and who decides?!
My feeling is that much of what now passes for "innovation" in the developed world is really refinement. Faster ways of searching for information, endless new ways of distributing capital, methods of communication. Humans face two major hurdles to existence: scarce resources and disease. A true major innovation -- vaccines, mechanized agriculture -- will make one of those problems less of a burden. While it does seem like we're making good progress with modern medicine, I don't think we've made much progress with our energy, food and water supplies in recent years.
No, that's not true ... it just takes more effort to make new discoveries and inventions because the easy ones have already been made, just like it takes more resources to access mineral wealth nowadays because all the convenient deposits have been used up. There's still plenty of both to go around, but it just takes more work. I wouldn't go closing down the patent office just yet (well, actually I would but not because we've run out of things to invent.)
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Yeah, but you also have to admit that the more we discover, the harder it is to discover more. Remember, a couple centuries ago, Franklin was inventing hundreds of things. Well, yeah, because it was easy to invent - say - water flippers or a snorkel back then. I mean, how hard is it to say "hey, if I had a straw in my mouth pointing up, I could breathe underwater"?
But today, the easy inventions are over with. The majority of the things some general jack-of-all-trades in his garage could invent have been invented. Even the personal computer, invented in a garage, has already been invented.
If you want to make some great discovery today, you're not going ot be doing it in your garage or while going about your business. You're going to be doing it in relation to funded research, government grants, a decade in college and many degrees into it. So, yes, of course innovation is "slowing down". Because you spend so much of your life just "catching up" to the knowledge that is now needed that you're a geezer by the time you've got enough behind you to start "inventing" or "discovering". Discoveries aren't cheap. You can't just stare at the sky a few minutes every night to sketch solar flares in your log book to document the behavior of the sun. You're going to need a billion dollar facility with computers, staff, and a big ass telescope.
So yes, perhaps innovation seems to be stagnating in general - but that's largely because the entry-point for great discoveries and innovation is so high now.
I dunno, I feel thermodynamics was equally as hard to formaulate. The steps required from the base platform of knowledge were just as steep as those required for the stuff you mentioned.
The breakthroughs in the mathematical methods required to solve the problems are just as various, just as thought provoking, and the solutions will prove to be just as ingenious.
If you look at the economics of invention, we now have created an inverse relationship compared to the 17th century. Invention in the 17th century required vision, capital and persistance concentrated on the invention itself and some or no legal restrictions. Today invention requires more legal capital and effort than anything else. So, how inventive would you feel if 1) the financing to handle the legal mumbo-jumbo vs the capital required for the actual invention was 10 to 1? 2) to get the financing you had to sign your invention over to a corporation? 3) you knew that your invention wouldn't be used to spur further invention for the common good (a common concept in the 17th and 18th centuries)?
It astonishes me that we have something like a Spaceship One given all the constraints. It won't astonish me when innovation in the US software industry comes to a screaming halt.
Unfortunately the modern beauracracy and political structure just doesn't value innovation. Patents, grants and research facilities are becoming harder and harder to access. On top of that, multinational corporations are pushing the little guy and his innovative ideas out of the market, so that the only innovation that remains is profit-driven and commercial, which more often than not locks us into the age old cycle of repainting the tiger's stripes and selling him as a new animal because anything too radically new 'wouldn't grab the market'. And government institutions are consistently failing to innovate because their focus is not development, but rather generation of jobs = votes, and any new innovations might risk public sector jobs (NASA, anyone??)
All the great innovations of the past took enormous risks, and sometimes they failed. It's great to see some private companies with the financial backing there taking those risks (Armadillo Aerospace, Scaled Composites...etc) but it's a pity that government makes it so difficult.
Who knows how many brilliant innovations have gone unnoticed because the inventor didn't have the money to run R&D privately and couldn't be bothered with the government red tape...I think that we should be encouraging private innovation because you never know where the Next Big Thing is going to come from!
Not in a position to innovate. How many people live in China?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
As far as the number of patents declining I'd have to say that this isn't the greatest metric for measuring technological innovation. From the number of crap patents out there (Amazon One-Click, NTPs patents, etc, etc, etc) I'd have to say that just because lots of patents are being generated doesn't mean that innovation is thriving or perishing (In fact I'd fear that too many patents would stifle innovation by preventing people from experimenting with new technologies).
The reason I have such a problem with Huebner's analysis can be summed up by this one quote from TFA:
Huebner disagrees. "It doesn't matter if it is humans or machines that are the source of innovation. If it isn't noticeable to the people who chronicle technological history then it is probably a minor event."
So, if something passes under the radar of those stalwarts who have charged themselves with chronicling technological history then it really doesn't matter. By this logic a technological historian of the early 1970s would probably have been writing volumes about the space program and nuclear research while ignoring things such as the nascent revolution in semi-conductors that was being created by the folks at Intel and other engineers in Silicon Valley, which by any measure has affected our daily lives as much, if not more than the space program or nuclear research. By admitting this Huebner is, at least to me, showing that his analyses are totally arbitrary and therefore valueless.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
We have acheived a level of comfort that people are happy with, and more convienience is now seen as extravagance.
The big innovations, the ones that change our culture fundamentally are going to come at a cost that most people are afraid to pay. Namely religous beliefs.
Stem Cells, Cloning, Space Exploration, Quantam Computing, all these courses of study have the ability to alter views on creation itself.
And most people are not willing to pay that price.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
I like this guy! From a larger viewpoint, I have always thought that we are not progressing faster than prior generations. Electricity, Lightbulb, Radio, Car, Plane, (the list goes on)...These are MAJOR innovations compared with the relatively minor ones of a P4 processor, the iPod, etc...Think of things in categories. Everything that is new these days is are minor extensions of the old (the computer, or the transmission of data over some kind of wire...) I vote that things are stale and getting staler. However, this view need not carry negative connotations (except maybe for a /. crowd)...After all, don't we have enough already?
Three words: George. Foreman. Grill.
'nuff said.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
There's less to discover and invent the further into the future we go.
Yeah... someone said something like this about physics around the end of XIX century, if I recall correctly. This time we must be correct.
The fields of molecular biology and nanotechnology are two examples of new information opening up and being engineered. New fields of information, and, its implementation, can open up further fields and so on.
Perhaps one of the most immediate problems we face is a deluge of information that must be investigated and peer reviewed. Recently, a post grad, posted on /. that, in his opinion, there are too many Phds. I think there aren't enough Phds, and, further, we don't have the systems in place to gardner the results of the Phds now doing research.
P h d... is that pronounced fud?
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
We can't innovate! It would be against God/nature/Gaia/Jehovah/Allah/etc.!!!
I partly blame the resurgence of mysticism and silly dogma for the slowing of innovation... and yes, I agree that innovation is slowing.
And I call crap on your logical capabilities
Quite clearly if we invent something, there is one less thing to invent.
You cannot call crap on a truism.
Lyric software that searches automatically while mp3's are playing and include 10's of thousands of Karoke files that when paired with Vocal Removing Software allows me to have improvised karoke nights in my living room with any song that I can get lyrics to.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
we had invented everything that was possible. I don't see it as any different now to have the prognostication that innovation is slowing to the point of stasis being proven wrong (again) at the end of the century. The author of the article may well keep in mind that a staggeringly useful enabling tool was created in the last 100 years - the computer - and that it is opening up whole new areas of research and innovation.
-- The problem with troubleshooting is that sometimes trouble shoots back.
The clever have made it easier for the stupid to live.
Stupid will now reward the clever by driving them into oblivion.
Who cares what the rate of innovation per unit of population is? That peculiar measure of progress would only matter if benefits of innovation somehow didn't scale with the population size. The world population is still increasing - so the absolute rate of innovation as seen by consumers of those innovations is surely far better than linear.
But even if you are concerned about rate per unit of population, averaging over the entire planet is a stupid idea. The population increases are in the underdeveloped countries - who (pretty much by definition) aren't innovating much.
If you counted the rate of innovation per unit of population in DEVELOPED countries (whose populations are actually DECREASING) - then you'd see that the rate of innovation amongst those who are actually doing the innovating is still on a steep curve.
www.sjbaker.org
The thing is that society has hit its sweet operative spot and we're just basically improving and tweaking the successful recipe. I can't see how my super duper cell phone with holographic display and surround sound with voice command and freaking metal welding laser (for cutting your hairs and nails of course) will change the basic functioning of society as we know it.
Innovation getting slower is a loaded concept and doesn't take into account the incredible leverage we make of technology. Well, I assume they talk about technological innovations. Changes in society are usually more profound and more durable. Take as an example the Great Darkness where Europe stayed commatose for centuries. Sure technology is important in the scheme of things, but maybe the question should be: If innovation is really slowing, maybe it's because it is being slowed down by our current organization of society.
Okay here's a simple equation for you:
Invention = (Discovery + Innovation) Therefore to more we discover the more we can innovate and invent.
If GWB only could bring up the number of deaths in Iraq 100 000 times, he would double the innovation power of today! Lets give him more money and our soles...
If I had cancer I would rather be living today than 1902 wondering if heavier than air flight was possible. Face it, the easy shit got out of the way first. When it comes to what is really important, health and aging when push comes to shove is where it's at.
But I'm tired of
A: the apologists who say "innovations per capita don't matter, total number matters!". Give it up. People just don't think anymore. American Idol is probably on somewhere, stealing those innovative minds away.
B: people saying "all the easy things have been invented" The only easy day was yesterday, and they only seem easy because they were simple. Just wait, more "easy" things will be invented, and people will slap their foreheads and say "Why didn't I think of that!"
The previous has been a secret message to my comrades.
Did Alexander Graham Bell get a broadcasting licence from the CRTC?
Did Mme Currie have a permit to work with radionuclides
Did Captian Cook put up with this crap when he commissioned his vessels?
Our current world doesn't like risk, the era of mad investigation seems over, or in the freezer for some years at least. I guess it was a hint when from "R&D" (when I was kid) it went to "R&D and innovation" (last years), and reading in my notes from class that innovation was taking something already done and applying it so it could be sold. In my mind, that was like new boxes for old cereals, and forgetting about discovering new products at all. Someday, you run out of stock of discovered things to be introduced into market, and have to look for more (research) and make sure they can be built without problems, etc (development).
No, there will be one innovation that will make everything that existed before a very distant memory--the singularity and transhumanism.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
innovation stopped with the first apple.
So population has been increasing at a faster rate than technology. So what?
I think there is a variety of plausable reasons for a tech slowdown. Some are:
1) Why invent? Whatever job you have, if you're the sort that can invent, has a clause in your hiring contract ceding ownership to your company. Why bust your buns to make your employer richer?
2) If you don't have a clause in your employment contract allowing your employer to glom onto your widget, then it is pretty darn expensive and pretty time-consuming to get a patent. There's lotsa hoops to jump thru and lotsa $$$ to be sent to the patent office.
3) According to some, the patent system is broken to the point that it _only_ serves large corporations. See http://tinaja.com/patnt01.asp
I myself have what I believe to be a patentable mechanism to switch railway cars at speed, individually, to allow rails to be used in the manner of highways by individuals, but under computer control so it can be automated and therefore run at very high speed. Am I gonna patent it? Not for $3000 - $8000 and patent attorney fees and patent maintenance fees with extremely little chance for success unless I want to spend the rest of my life promoting it, which I don't.
I have often thought of what world power I would have been if I had lived in the correct time period, all of us have missed out on several world changing innovations where one person could have 'seized' the moment and been on the bleeding edge of technology quite easily as compared to todays standards. For example the steam engine, IC engine, movies, and airplanes to name a few.
The only front I see changing the world in our lifetimes which you can still be a part of is biotechnology, nanotechnology, or some form of genetic engineering, and perhaps robotics. Even then you will be a miniscule peice of history, as any technology or invention today takes 10s if not 100s or 1000s of people to be of anything substantial, which I think is the real difference in our time.
Back when things were simpler 1 person could actually make a difference and change the world. In our time your lucky to get all of your phone/email/sms/pager/voicemail messages checked before lunch lol. Not to mention everyone has instant access to free porn now, I mean really, what else do we need as human race?
RoR is the greatest and most innovative! It should count for, like, 5000 points on the innovation scale. With Ruby On Rails we're, you know, like in Star Trek, dude.
This reminded me of the story about how supposedly somebody recommended that the Patent Office be closed in the 19th century because there was "nothing left to invent". I smell a UL, because while I was googling around some people said it was the US patent office and others said it was the Brittish counterpart. Snopes search came up dry.
Anyway, UL or not, this story reminds me of that.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I think that- any innovation that works inside a computer, he'll just call it a "minor innovation."
So, if we write code that can quickly automatically reconstruct 3D models from video footage, and put it into every computer, it'll be "just another computer program."
If we write really smart translation systems, and hook it up to speech-to-text and text-to-speech, it'll be "just another computer program."
Make any machine, but make it run inside a computer, and it'll be "just another computer program."
Just a minor innovation.
But I don't think we can afford to think of things that way.
These are really big innovations. Just taking an existing innovation, and just putting it into everybody's hands: should count for something.
But I think people are fooled, because they just see a geek and a computer. "Oh, nothing new. He's still sitting in his chair at his computer."
Seriously, when I was in college an eternity ago, we kids wanted to do a whole range of things. Then five years later (late 1980s) everyone who had heard of it wanted to become an analyst on Wall Street. Wall Street also hired many of the best quants, and some very good physicists, meterologists, statisticians, and other sorts of people with hard science backgrounds. Our society has become plutocratic, and it values making money a lot more than being inventive. And as we all know, the respect accorded to Bill Gates is proof.
than technology can keep up.
Technology depends on ecomonimcs. When the next greatest thing is in sight before the previous greatest thing is out of R&D, it forces technology to try to pre-empt or co-opt science. And still technology can't afford to herd up and pay off all the scientists.
"What we need is a Manhattan Project for dumping flash memory data directly to DVD in one flash." Figure the odds.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Pick up a textbook about digital signal processing or communication theory. The concepts are straightforward to understand because they involve linear systems. When systems are not linear, we try to linearize them because linear systems are more easily grasped by the human mind than non-linear systems.
We have already picked off all the fruits of linear systems. The next step, nonlinear systems, is a tad more difficult. So, innovation will slow.
I presume that other endeavors outside of signal processing face a similar situation.
As a last example, consider physics. Newtonian physics was the low-hanging fruit. We can see its application in almost everything from cars to buildings to aeroplanes. Beyond Newtonian physics is a very difficult, non-intuitive step: quantum physics.
As integrated circuits become so small that quantum effects appear, humankind will face a brick wall, and innovation will slow to a crawl. Of course, there will be bright ideas. Science-fiction writers also have brilliant ideas, but implementing them will not be feasible.
In order for technology to be developed efficiently, it must be framed in a way that is intuitive to the mind. This intuition gives brilliant people a way to reason about a problem and to find a neat solution. Linear systems and newtonian physics are intuitive and fit well within the mental framework of the human mind. Nonlinear systems and quantum physics are quite the opposite.
So yes, perhaps innovation seems to be stagnating in general - but that's largely because the entry-point for great discoveries and innovation is so high now.
[prediction]
Copyright strangleholds and patent/license ransoms will play a larger role in stifling invention than any other factor in the future.
[/prediction]
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
For one living in the present, innovation may seem very fast, or very slow, depending on your outlook, yet, hindsight tends to be in 20/20.
I discount this view, but we will see in 50-100 years.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
In Soviet Russia
Poems write you!
Interesting, you are either saying that you believe that there is no limit on the amount of discoveries mankind can make because there the secrets of the universe are infinite.
Or you have misinterperated what the grandparent was saying.
If it is the former, and it were true, I would be mildly depressed as nature would be far messier than it should be.
It sounds like he's trying to quantify the amount of paradigm shifts per billion people. That statistic means absolutely nothing. Who cares how many 'innovations' there are per population. Of course we havent had many paradigm shifts recently because we've got the majority of new technology invented. Most of research is into evolutionary, rather than revolutionary study.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." - C.S. Lewis
Also from my perspective a lot of innovation happens when a new method, technology, or understanding of nature opens up and broadens possibilities to do things better, easier or differently. Some good cases in point are the microcomputer, the internet, Linux and other FOSS tools (which opened the internet to development to us mere mortals), and micro-sized lasers.
Once someone makes a new meta-discovery such as battery life improvement (size/capacity) by a factor, attainable fusion power, better storage methods, data throughput, construction methods, etc. you will then see a lot of innovation follow to accomany that void.
I think it is harder to get these meta innovations going because people are more afraid of the potential liabilities that they may incurr (stem cells, nanotech, dna manipulation, etc)
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I doubt the US is spending even close to that on alternative energy research. Not to diminish the problems of those with erectile dysfunction but a cure for cancer or free energy would probably do a lot more people a lot more good for the money.
The problem is a large proportion of research energy is focused on what will return the most in the marketplace instead of what will return the most to mankind. People lose sight of the big picture in their sprint to make the most money they can and people suffer because of it.
There has to be a balance between altruism and greed and we aren't anywhere close to the middle right now.
That is the single stupidest thing I have seen all day.
To Show Why...
Golden Plaques = (Gold + Wood) Therefore the more wood we find, the more gold we can find and plaques can be made!
So I guess we can all give up on our collective dream of having a garagable flying car eh?
He's right. Science in those days worked in broad strokes. They got right to the point. Nowadays, it's all just molecule, molecule, molecule. Nothing ever happens big!
I don't know why the article referred "nanotech" as nanomachines or molecular assembly. To quote: "Drexler says nanotechnology alone will smash the barriers Huebner foresees, never mind other branches of technology. It's only a matter of time, he says, before nanoengineers will surpass what cells do, making possible atom-by-atom desktop manufacturing."
Pfft... talk about uninformed people. Better go to http://news.nanoapex.com/ and get REAL information. (Yeah I know, Drexler is the father of nanotech - but Drexler's nanotech is NOT the nanotech that countries are investing billions in R&D. Too bad for him, tho)
Nanotechnology isn't just about molecular-level manufacturing. It's about nanoelectronics, nanomaterials for energy storage, new diagnostic machines with nanoscopic precision, analysis of biology in the nanoscale (a completely UNEXPLORED field so far), new materials for permanent artificial bones, filters which will separate the salt (and microorganisms) from seawater at the molecular level... and of course, your 6-million-dollars bionic eyes. Yes. All of this is possible.
Now, Want a real-world example of technology innovation?
Vehicle with the highest fuel efficiency sets new world record . "PAC-Car has now achieved its goal: it finished the course at the Shell Eco-Marathon taking place on the Michelin test track at Ladoux, France, using only 1.07 grams of hydrogen."
Hey, if that's not innovation, I don't know what it is.
Now think of the advancements in say, molecular engineering (chemistry) that will be possible by the time we start comparing home computers by their teraflops.
So, innovation getting slower? Yeah, right.
I think innovation will take off again when we get into space with a significant population. Nothing like have to live in a hostile environment get your creative juices flowing.
An independent back-of-the-envelope calculation of technical progress based on how many new elements are added to the periodic table each year more than confirms Huebner's findings.
From the f*ing article....
"In an effort to find out, he plotted major innovations and scientific advances over time compared to world population, using the 7200 key innovations listed in a recently published book, The History of Science and Technology (Houghton Mifflin, 2004). The results surprised him."
Um..... let me just interject my interpretation: That book won't likely have the key innovation for the last, say decade or so, because they aren't widely known yet until they impact us. For instance, Einstein's first theories weren't widely considered important/innovative until years AFTER he developed them and us dumblings could finally tune into his wavelength and say "AHA! They are useful."
Or like Arpanet might have been viewed as a cute military playtoy in the 70's...... until it evolved into the internet.
"Rather than growing exponentially, or even keeping pace with population growth, they peaked in 1873 and have been declining ever since (see Graphs). Next, he examined the number of patents granted in the US from 1790 to the present. When he plotted the number of US patents granted per decade divided by the country's population, he found the graph peaked in 1915.
The period between 1873 and 1915 was certainly an innovative one. For instance, it included the major patent-producing years of America's greatest inventor, Thomas Edison (1847-1931). Edison patented more than 1000 inventions, including the incandescent bulb, electricity generation and distribution grids, movie cameras and the phonograph."
Do we really have to get into a discussion of why Patents are not the best measurement of progress?
Actually, I don't think it matters.
Look at physics at the end of the ninteenth century. They thought they pretty much had everything cased. Well there was this one niggling problem about why electrons didn't lose their energy slowly and spiral into the center of their atoms. Then all hell broke loose. Quantum physics. Relativity.
Things don't follow a simple mathematical curve. You get a lot of jumps and plateaux. Anyway, people think the middle ages were a time of stagnation. Actually, there was a lot of growth which suddenly manifested itself in the Renaissance. ie. Even when it doesn't look like anything is happening, things are happening, they just aren't always obvious.
A more thoughtful take on the problem is "The Ingenuity Gap" by Thomas Homer Dixon. The problem he presents is not that we aren't innovating but that we're not innovating fast enough. It is a very serious problem. On the other hand, google on 'innovation' and see how many people and organizations are working on the problem. I suspect that Huebner opened his mouth before he researched the problem properly (just my wild assed guess though).
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
Charles H. Duell, U.S. Commissioner of Patents, in 1899.
I think there is some truth to that.
There is no guaranteed money from innovation. Sure, if you're lucky, you might strike it rich with your findings. But it is a huge gamble. It's much easier to make a comfortable living doing the same old thing.
Quite clearly if we invent something, there is one less thing to invent.
What do you get when you subtract one from infinity?
It's not that there arent innovations being made, or work toward innovations being done. It's that the "easy stuff" is behind us. X-ray lithography is harder to do than photo lithography. Making things an order of magnitude more efficient and smaller is harder than just reapplying mass production methods to the latest new thing. Mars is a lot farther away than the Moon, and so on.
It's more likely that Jonathan Huebner's mind's capacity to process innovation is decreasing exponentially.
"As the island of our knowledge increases, so does the shoreline of our ignorance." -anonymous cow herd
Government regulation is a necessary evil but over-regulating via regulations, sin taxes, hidden taxes, and all out bureracry will slow down or prevent innovation and kill a country's economy.
Simplifying, you are either in the cart or pulling it, when there are too many people in the cart, the cart stops.
Cart riders:
1. Government workers
2. Government contractors
3. Government handout recipients (welfare, food stamps, EIC, free medical care, PBS, NPR, farm subsidies, etc.)
4. Government industry protection handout recipients (radio stations, tv stations, and other industries with multi-million dollar liceising process/fees paid to the government)
I agree. Innovation is getting slower not because people are getting dumber but because deviation from red tape results in prosecution or censure.
Innovation is probably decreasing. You can't hardly be innovative about anything without involving someone else's patent attorney for possible infringement.
1. Greed
2. IP Lawyers (actually, all lawyers)
3. Software Patents
4. Patents on Business Methods
5. Patents on Math
Who wants to innovate when all of the above could get you, your children, and your children's children sued, or worse, jailed.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
"Everything that can be invented has been invented." Charles H. Duell, commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office, 1899
It just seems that way because our tecnological progress has outstripped our society's capacity to deal with it. Once we get rid of the sociopolitical bottlenecks, we can restart innovation and maybe in another hundred years, the next in the Duell/Huebner chain can make the same observation.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Let's not forget this. Most every vehicle's width still relies on the width of a horse's ass.
If technological progress starts to slow, it means we're going to advance through other means. Just as culture was a replacement of evolutionary progress as a means of inter-group competitiveness, and technology advancement became a replacement of cultural competition.
At least according to Kurzweil's law. (Which isn't really a cast in stone law, but more a theory that all progress follows an s-curve, and that when the curve of a mode of progress nears an end, it gets replaced by another mode. Just like when transistors started taking off when vacuum tubes started becoming a hard to improve technology.)
Well, I certainly sympathize with your sentiments but I'm afraid the only solution is a benevolent dictatorship. After all, who is going to decide not only what's best for mankind but also the optimal allocation of resources to achieve that goal? I think we'll eventually get there; it'll just take a little longer in the absence of some force that is not only benevolent but also enjoys a privileged perspective.
There is the story that a US Patent Office official said in 1843, "The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." Well, it's a story.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Have you hugged your penguin today?
I feel that we are in a period of refinement before another age of massive innovation. The rest of us are refining while a few are working on a big ideas.
Devise, Repair, Solve, Build
I keep on hearing the same old rehashed arguments about how Communism is here and destroying society. Its like the Red Scare and McCarthy all over again, only that we aren't having virtual lynch mobs for people who dissent against the popular political tone of the day.
r y2.htm). The "dumbing down" of public schools simply reflects the fact that these are the values that our culture and our marketplace embrace.
It seems that there exists a group of neo conservatives who associate any form of dissent against their socio-political views to be a form of communism. One only needs to look at history to see the sheer stupidity and irrationality of this overhyped fear of communists to see just what they are all about. The book "1984" was once put on a banned books list in the United States becuase it was alleged that it was covertly supporting communism. In reality, the book was only slamming the excesses of the very type of authoritarian regimes that existed both in many hardline communist nations. 1984 offended many of these hardline anti-communists becuase the book dared to challenge and criticize authoritative excesses in government.
I dont know if the people who keep preaching about how communism is creeping into society really believe what they say or not, but they are using the theme as a tool to smear political dissent and rally people with fear against an enemy that really doesn't pose the threat they claim it does.
The continual dumbing-down of our educational system and the increasing banality of popular culture are just two clear trends, now becoming so clear we can look through them to their source.
I disagree.
Firstly, pop culture is being perpetuated by the heavily capitalist market.
Does the government pick and choose which CDs make it into Wal Mart? Does Atty. General Gonzales have a comittee to decide which shows MTV puts on the air? I'm sorry but popular culture icons are defined by the marketplace, not some silly communist influence. Pop culture icons are telling everyone to buy and spend the latest trendy fashions and other goods. Your argument is silly.
As far as the schools are concerned, I don't know how you can blame communism for that either.
The modern incarnation of the public school is a result of capitalist influences (http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/historytour/histo
Communism, you see, is not "dead." It is not even napping! In fact, it is right out in the open
Okay, show me.
Our nation's newspapers are edited by socialists.
I'll give you credit for liberals in the media. Don't really see an abundance of hardline communists though.
The TV networks spew endless hours of mind-numbing groupthink.
Again, this is a result of the market place. TV networks put on what generates viewership (which, ultimately, drives commercial ad sales).
Society has become so left-of-center that most people do not recognize Communism when they step in it. Even Republicans get down in that wallow, like porky squealing pigs.
Left of center meaning what? That some of us dare question the reasons for going to war in Iraq?
Of course the Democrats have been totally up front about their support of Communism since the FMLN/Contra War. Give 'em a point for honesty, at least.
Who?
If Soviet Russia were still around, we'd have some REAL innovation. Micro Television Camera on CCCP1 here I come!
Consider such transforming technologies as the world wide web, the cell phone, quantum computing, genome sequencing etc. Remember also that many technologies are in their infancy today, and their full impact won't be felt for decades (e.g. nanotechnology).
Finally, I put it to you that if you're focussed on consumer items such as iPods and personal computers and are of the opinion that we "have enough", perhaps you should broaden your view a little. Over a fifth of the world's population does not "have enough" by any metric.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
"Everything that can be invented has been invented." --Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, US Office of Patents, 1899
New things happen now at a pace dictated by how quickly society can adapt to them, not how quickly new ideas can be considered.
I sit in my HOME OFFICE (something I couldn't have had 20 years ago) surrounded by technology based things which didn't exist 10 or 20 years ago. Some are new enough that the underpinnings that make them possible didn't exist 30 years ago.
I'm typing on wireless keyboard, viewing a 19" plasma flat screen. My phone is VoIP, running on a software PBX. Its wireless. I'm watching a movie on HDTV from my DVR while blogging.
A shame there's no innovation.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
No the stupidist thing is comparing abstract concepts such as discovery and innovation to finite physical resources.
This seems to be more of a reflection of third world population growth than on innovation.
A similar statement could read: "the percentage of educated people in the world is decreasing". (or more directly: the percentage of people *capable* of making innovations is decreasing).
Population growth in poor and developing nations (and the word "developing" is unfortunately only used out of political correctness) is out of control and is at a dangerous tipping point where we could conceivably see mass famines (as in 'millions dead') any year where drought, blight or oppression get ugly.
Innovation is alive and well within the population that can innovate.
Poverty and illiteracy (as a percentage of population) are growing at a furious pace.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Patents you say? Is every country in the world hobbled by a patent system similar to the US? If there is demand for a product, patent or not it will be filled. Whether homegrown (in my case US) or imported from some country where the patent law does not care as much. Patents do have their problems, but stifling innovation IMO is not one of them. In fact by reading the patent you know what the other person did. Now you can even work with the patented info and make your own enhancements.
It seems fairly obvious to me: inventions of the past were largely more simplistic than inventions of present day. Present day inventions require a greater base of knowledge.
Often times, one person cannot reasonably acquire in one lifetime all of the knowledge required to invent some new piece of complex technology. This piece of complex technology must logically then be the work of several people.
If several people are working on the same invention, they are not working on separate inventions. Therefore there are fewer man-hours being logged into individual inventions than in the past, when the technological and scientific learning curve was less steep.
If you're talking about man-hours though, it might be useful to include world population, and the state of world education.
Clearly this is a complex issue involving many different factors, and boiling the issue down to a simple statement of "the rate of inventions per year has been dropping for the last 50 years!! The sky is falling!! At this rate, inventions will stop in 2088!!".
Let's get serious and realize that issues that have such overarching societal effects and a wide base of influential factors cannot be boiled down into a simple linear trend.
FUD.
The hard problems are not being cracked.
You mean not anymore, right ? Or have we already forgotten about Concorde ? Sure, she was economically not viable, but there she was.. elegant and cruising at supersonic speeds.
And guess what ? France and Japan are pondering a suitable replacement.
The other items were pipedreams back then. The fusion thing *may* happen in a test run in France in a couple of years or whatever.
But flying cars ? People can't drive on a boundaried 2D grid properly, and we expect them to do a good job in a 3D grid (air corridors), let alone freeform ? I think not.
Colony on the moon ? What -for- ? I can think of scientific research, maybe, but most of that can be done in an orbital station (assuming 'we' ever finish ISS up proper).
I think it's also important to note that although there's many things envisioned in the 50's/60's that we don't have, there's a staggering amount of things we take for granted now that they couldn't have even dreamed up back then.
Not buying that. ;-)
Did anyone before have this unprecedented access to people and information we call Internet today?
Red tape is something to live with and work thru - like savages and deceases for capt. Cook
As soon as you figure out that photoelectric effect thingie, all of modern physics will be done.
Just take care of that, will you?!?!?!!!
668: Neighbour of the Beast
I agree somewhat. I mean, if you didn't have plastic, it might be a bit more difficult to come up with a viable snorkel. Certain inventions make others possible; whether due to changed surroundings, or maybe even changed thinking. For instance, maybe it won't be so hard for today's kids to innovate and create things that would be completely incomprehensible to us right now, due to the fact that we didn't grow up on the internet and satellite radio.
On the other hand.. we are getting so much more advanced that it is taking EXTRAVAGENT measures to come up with the best. When you're trying to disappate heat from your tower by making a special fan, you really can't compete with people who are creating nano-tunnels that super efficient at moving heat. It makes you not want to even try inventing things because someone out there will have some incredibly expensive and amazing technology that will blow anything you come up with out of the water.
Not to mention all the red tape you've gotta wander thru - legal fees for one. If you invent something and try to make it available to everyone, you better damn well make sure you're not going to be stepping on anyone else's toes. After you've spent all that money innovating and creating, you can't hardly afford to pay someone to make sure you're not going to get sued into bankrupcy by an honest mistake, but you'd have no choice.
You're nothing; like me.
Exponential advancement was always as unfounded an assumption as the assumption of linear advancement that it replaced. While the death of science has been proclaimed many times before, always extremely prematurely in retrospect, I believe that there is only so much nature is prepared to give us, and as we approach this natural limit we're making fewer and fewer revolutionary discoveries and doing more and more refinement, and as the refinement progresses, as with any refinement process, apparent progress slows as you near an ideal state.
Simple example: there is a really, really good chance that space travel will always be slower than light with no cheats like wormholes ever found, no matter how much we advance, even if we became infinitely advanced, because the laws of physics probably do not permit FTL travel and apparent loopholes may prove completely unusable for anything above the subatomic particle scale.
I am deeply, deeply skeptical of the promise of nanotech. Our capacity to engineer de novo really interesting and effective enzymes (i.e., examples of real nanomachines) is dismal, we're still working on understanding how natural ones work and making our first crude protein designs, and "nanotech" as we usually think of it, little molecule scale versions of machines we're more familiar with, is IMO somewhat chemically ludicrous. Although some enzymes like ATPase actually look and act soemthing like those kinds of ideas and are super nifty. Still, when we get good at real nanotech, I think the reality is going to cut our fantasies down to scale despite being wicked cool.
I recall from reading Analog magazines in the 80s :) that it once seemed very fashionable to assume an exponential rate of growth in human technological enlightenment. Authors and commentators self-conciously talked about the previous assumption of linear progress (which you can see in older science fiction in which centuries are posited for what in hindsight are laughably modest achievements). This led to some predictions for our own time which have not been borne out - where is my flying car, godammit? :)
I thought about it a bit and came up with the hypothesis of an S-shaped curve as the function of human progress, and I believe observation has borne and will bear it out. I was inspired by titrations, which I think progress most resembles. At early stages of the curve, of course, advance is very slow because you need technological advances to make technological advances, it's self-promoting. At some point as you come close to an equivalence point, advance is extremely rapid. But at that point you start to rapidly reach the limits imposed by nature and progress levels off into more and more trivial refinement, but never entirely disappears. It's not exactly analogous but I think the resemblance will prove striking.
Progress looked linear from the point of view of the first plateau, just like the increase in pH before the equivalence point might seem linear in a base titration. Progress of course looks exponential when you are closely approaching the equivalence point. This is still an illusion.
Certain technologies, if they are truly available and do not turn out to be beyond the realm of technical possibility, like uploading ourselves into computers (I think this is easier said than done, because I think the human self only possesses the illusion of cohesiveness to itself, but is not actually unitary or cohesive - I wonder if a human mind is really readable to anything but itself), or immortality, could radically transform our very nature and hence change everything. But barring that, I think the highest goal of our species should be to get through the equivalence point to the new plateau alive and basically ourselves, and we need to hope to hell that that plateau includes, for example, truly sustainable sources of energy.
So, um, summary of long winded spiel, exponential progress = bullshit. No doubt in my mind that there is a limit to what technolog
A number that fills the space between infinity and nothing.
You're nothing; like me.
The Foreman grill sucks ass. Have you ever tried hamburger cooked on that thing? It tastes like it was made at Burgerking and left in the heating-steam-bin for six hours. Total crap!
Plus, you don't want your burgers to be compressed from the top. You should never squish your burgers when they're cooking. That dries them out and ruins the flavor.
Well, this seems obvious as the number of people increases exponentially but the probability of innovating has always been skewed between the different peoples of the earth. As you then measure innovation/billions ofcourse you will find that it decreases.
This is an impopular idea these days but sooner or later everyone will have to face the facts.
The researcher is flat out wrong. His criterion of "major innovations" is actually equivalent to "easily understood innovations" because significance is in the eyes of the beholder, and his beholders (technology historians) aren't specialists. Viewed in that light, the article's claims rocket up in the "duh" factor. Innovation isn't slowing down, the ability of the laymen to understand what innovation is occurring is no longer sufficient.
Even granting that innovation per capita is dropping, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were, the researcher misattributes the root cause. He talks about what innovations are "economical" without considering what factors would go in to determining that limitation. Long story short - the limitations of the human brain play an important role: how fast it can learn, how much memory it can retain, how fast it can communicate with the outside world, etc. If innovation is slowing it is likely because we're running in to limitations inherent to the human brain as it exists today. Just look at how long it takes before a person can learn enough to make a meaningful contribution to a chosen field today as it compares to yesteryear. Hell, the fact that we have to specialize to the degree we do today compared to the days of Galilei, Newton, Franklin, and the like speaks volumes about how far we've come. Without any changes to the system (education, research, etc) it is obvious that the time will eventually come when a human being simply cannot live long enough to learn what's necessary to make any contribution whatsoever no matter how early they specialize. Fortunately, there's hope. Whether the advances in the human brain come from genetic engineering, cybernetic implants, developmental modifications (think something along the lines of mentats from Dune), or just better teaching methods, they will come. Once we have achieved enough of an understanding of the brain to improve our ability to augment it in a widespread fashion (that is, cheaply), innovation per capita would pick up again.
And I see no reason why perfecting some technology along those lines isn't economically feasible with our present limitations. In fact, I'll be astounded if something significant doesn't happen in this avenue within the next century.
BlackGriffen
If you used RSS, you wouldn't have to check every 5 minutes! Instead, you could simply read it every hour, leaving you plenty of in-between moments for your fabulous inventions!
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
eom
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
But... isn't that the definition of an innovation? Taking something that already exists and combining it with a slightly different approach to result in a new something that didn't exist before?
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
If it is, it's because of changing social attitudes.
There are many causes, but here are some.
1.) There is a rush of quasi-technical people. They are not really good at it, but get there degree's and get into it technical fields just for the money. They are making is harder for natural born technical people to succeed.
2.) Investors tend put money in to these quasi-technical people, and not the Tesla's and Edison's. True innovation doens't come from Academics, that system screens out non-conformists.
3.) Many Investors can't tell the scam artist from the real people anymore. (see dot.com boom)
4.) Society goes in Cycles.
a.) War bring innovation, peace bring stagnation.
b.) But also change too quickly tends to bring on a strong backlash, where all the new is rejected. Just look as Christian fundamentalist, Taliban or any extreme religious groups these days.
5.) The torch may be moving again. By this I mean the eternal flame of innovation keeps moving. During the change things slow.
It was in China thousands of years ago, Greece, The Roman Empire, England during the Industrial Revolution, and now in the US. But already some is going to India, and Taiwan.
Where will it move to next, once the US society/government chases it off?
I mean it's getting too expensive here, also there is a constant ridicule of new things these days, a resistance to really new ideas and innovation beyond the next generation of cars, or mp3 players. Hell, Ma Bell held the Internet back for 20+ years (It couldn't blossom till the AT&T breakup). Now stem cell research and cloning is being blocked here. And chips manufacturing is all overseas because of chemical and pollution concerns. Even general medicine has ground to a halt here in the US from lawsuits, fat profits from the government protected drug companies and insurance companies.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Population rates include babies, toddlers, pubescents, and so on.
Measuring by current population is nonsense - a better measure to normalize against would be the size of the working population, particularly those between their mid-20s and mid-40s.
Since the world population leads the number of people in the "innovating" population, of course the ratio is going to appear to fall whenever the rate of the leading number grows, as population growth has increased over the last century, thanks to advances in medicine and agriculture.
This contention is just an artifact of sloppy math.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
"That dries them out and ruins the flavor."
Ruins? Or makes better!
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
> There is no guaranteed money from innovation.
Truer words have never been spoken.
Just ask Nikola Tesla.
Charles Murray, co-author of the Bell Curve, wrote a book describing this a year or two back. The title is Human Accomplishment.
The article's premise of per capita innovation is not very useful. Consider if we were to just look at a portion of the technology tree, health care. Would innovations per capita over all history be a useful measure of the continued rate of health care innovations today? I think not.
The absolute rate of innovation is more relevant for a few reasons.
Here's one.
Dissemination of innovation begets innovation. The rate of change influence the rate of change.
Any innovation today can potentially benefit everyone in a relatively short time frame. In the period he touts as the peak an innovation often would take 50 years or more to reach relative universality. Today a useful innovation will reach universality in a tenth the time.
Around 1999 I saw an LCD monitor prototype, about 200mmX200MM in a glass encased cabinet at a technology meeting. It was guarded by a security guard as well. Today, if I have the means, I can go out and buy an 19" LCD monitor for about $400.00.
How long was it for everyone to be able to buy a generally useful camera from the invention of photography?
A more complex benchmark would be more appropriate. Something like the rate of innovation per years of education per per capita would seem to me more relevant.
I know I'll get modded down, but the mod squad should give the nod and mod up the mod up request above.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Ruins.
Doesn't anyone watch Good Eats anymore?
a vehicle for cockroaches. Who would have thought such innovation would occur just a few years ago?
In any given group there is something of a maximum nuumber of people that are productively engaged in a project. If you exceed this number the productivity doesn't go up; indeed it will go down with further addition to the group.
You could draw this to a national or global scale saying that greater numbers of people being born isn't helping anymore and we're spending more resources on keeping things going that developing new things. Certainly the development of newer technology is still occurring, but the per capita measurement shows that more and more resources are going towards status quo.
http://www.andashdesigns.com/
One thing:
Erectile dysfunction was a very important problem for mankind for tens of thousands of years. A tremendous amount of cumulative effort was spent with hundreds of different folk-remedies over the centuries -- several of them no-doubt fatal.
Then some drug company cured it a couple of years ago. The problem was more-or-less gone from that day forward.
And you're complaining about it and belittling the accomplishment.
We now live in a world where 2/3 people live in a comfort-zone, where we wait for other inventions to come along to make things even easier for us.
Think about why technology spurred over the past few hundred years. It was all necessity. What's necessary now...?
Not necessarily. This kind of thinking assumes that there is a fixed pool of things just waiting to be discovered, and it is getting closer to being exhausted. I believe quite the contrary; there's a nice quote by someone I forgot, that "the greater the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder". For example, the invention of the transistor opened up possibilities for a whole industry of new inventions.
As a scientist, I believe there will always be new discoveries in science, that the supposed pool of knowledge is infinite. Therefore there's an infinity of possibilities for practical inventions as well, especially when we consider that the science in a certain field usually precedes engineering.
In fact, I think the rate of innovation is getting higher, but there's so much of it going on that it's impossible to pinpoint single, major inventions like it was a hundred years ago. Also, many significant inventions are results of many people with many smaller inventions working together, such as the Internet. In those cases it's hard to pin down even what the invention actually is.
Inventions and discoveries are becoming an increasingly important part of our lives, since we are past the struggles of basic survival. Thus it's naturally less noticeable.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Oh no! The global innovation curve will reach the dark ages point in 2024!
That doesn't sound like bullshit at all!
This isn't a real time strategy game. This is real life. Real life doesn't come with a big poster detailing all possible upgrades on the tech tree. You can't possibly know whether we as a civilization have almost invented everthing that we're ever going to invent. No one -- not you, not anybody -- has an exhaustive knowledge of every possible human innovation.
I remember Einstein saying that war had never proved itself creative. But in our society, it seems like the inventors of millitary weapons, the NSA etc. are some of the most creative folks out there. They have the funding to be so.
As long as America lives in dread of the millitary strength of its rivals, there will be millitary innovation.
I really don't buy the 'innovation is slowing' argument to begin with. Back in the early 1900s you could make a discovery in physics with a cloud chamber and a few research assistants. Now? You need a team of several dozen physicists at the least and a few million dollars worth of equipment. So if discoveries require more people and more money to make, of course you'll have fewer (per person) but as has been mentioned elsewhere, you have more total innovations for the whole population.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Your position is a cop out. Saying that all the easy stuff has already been invented is just ignorant because nothing is easy to invent. You say, oh, that couldn't have been too hard to invent. But why did it take humanity so long to think up all these 'easy' things? I bet you that somebody argued your exact same point in the 1500s with the limited know we had then. And somebody will argue the same thing in the year 2500 with all the advanced things that we have cooked up then. The fact of the mater is that thinking up any non-trivial new idea is incredibly difficult. And it is incredibly amazing. You can't look down on the old inventors. Just because in hindsight what they created seems simple doesn't mean that they were.
There are billions of ideas out there just like "if I had a straw in my mouth pointing up, I could breathe underwater" that in retrospect will seem completely obvious, but that nobody today will come up with. Just because you, or me or anybody else for that matter, isn't creative enough to think them up doesn't mean that they don't exist. And It doesn't mean that they are harder then anything already created to think up. It will require the same amount of brilliance that it did to first come up with the light bulb, or any other great invention. And we must never loose sight of the amazing challenged in think up new ideas.
I don't think that innovations per person is the proper thing to measure. When we come up with a new technologies, they aren't divided up so that only a a few people get each innovation. Instead they are available to all people. Thus the only number that matters is the absolute number of inovations, which is currently higher than ever.
what sig?
... the fact that most of the "obvious" stuff, electricity, the earth goes round the sun, gravity, the EM spectrum and so on has already been discovered and investigated... we are now onto questions such as WHY we have gravity, WHY is electricity the way it is and even harder stuff like WHY is the earth going round the sun a by-product of gravity, WHY (and how) are EM radiation and gravity tied together... WHY does Quantum Theory work but not make sense... WHY do we keep seeing smaller and smaller "universal building blocks"...
These are bigger questions and once they have been answered it will usher in a new wave of "advancement", this is just the natural ebb and flow of scientific innovation... Of course once the "harder" stuff has been answered there'll just be harder questions... Like WHY is God not in the phone book... WHY do all terrorists think that God is on their side... WHY is there no easy way to eat spaghetti...
1899 "Everything that can be invented has already been invented.", Charles H. Duell, director of the U.S. Patent Office
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Couldn't agree more. Innovations in any given branch, especially science, generally follow a recurring sequence of:
...till the next big one.
1) a quantum breakthrough -- a novel discovery of / insight into / use of a hitherto unknown or little understood phenomenon.
2) frenetic exploration and/or development of the nascent field; usually follows a near-exponential curve
3) a plateau of incremental refinements till the field reaches relative maturity
It seems plausible, given that there is a finite set of distinct essential phenomena in our world, that each iteration of the cycle gets progressively longer and harder, as our knowledge-base of a specific domain increases in depth and complexity.
This would probably explain the apparent slowing down of innovation, if one merely goes by the rather crude metric of the rate of tangible and immediately useful contraptions being spawned.
At that point, non-linear fruit might be just as low, or lower, than the linear fruit was.
Perhaps we'll see the benefits of picking chaotic fruit, or unified theory fruit, or string theory fruit, or fusion fruit... you get the idea.
Progress isn't smooth, and frankly, why would one expect it to be?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
and it's not as if I am not trying ...
I am.
Honest.
If my generation hadn't 'invented sex', we'd have time to do more inventing. Of course now that we've got teledildonics, we're done!
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
As was already pointed out, innovation per person is not a very useful measure, it takes only one invented cell phone to start making cell phones for everyone.
Furthermore, I would argue that Huebner's statistics are wrong: he counts innovations made by a tiny fraction of the world's population, but divides it by the entire population. The innovations he counts can only take place in the most advanced countries, because he counts innovations which move humanity forward. You have to be at the forefront of humanity's achievments to move it forward. Right now there are almost a billion chineese and indian farmers who may be very innovative in their own way, figuring out how to feed their families with the primitive tools they have, but it does not count because their innovations were already made, probably centuries ago. I doubt Huebner's innovation count includes some farmer's clever way to improve his oxen-pulled plow, but that's the kind of innovation the absolute majority of the world population does every day.
The population which has at least a chance of making an innovation which Huebner would count does not grow fast, if at all. You have to exclude most "3rd world" countried (not because their people are not innovative, but because Huebner's study does not count their innovations). That leaves you with population which is hardly growing at all, fertility rates in most "1st world" countries are around or below 2.
So Huebner's methodology excludes the majority of world's population when he counts the numerator, but includes everyone in denominator. If this ratio was not shrinking I'd say that bad statistics was compounded by bad arithmetics.
I don't mean that it becomes more difficult to discover new things because there is a fixed number of things to find and more are being found in that limited pool each day.
I mean that, yesterday, you could take a shit and think "I should invent something that cleans your ass. Some sort of... paper product, perhaps". And sure, plumbing could come along and then you could think "I should invent something that cleans your ass". And it would be two different inventions doing somewhat the same thing. One of them would be new tech and the other would be based on existing tech (plumbing).
But most of the big "common man with a creative mind" discoveries that occured up until the Personal Computer... well... have been discovered. Today, the discovery process is more like "I want to invent some sort of hype-directional precise speaker that emits audio in a very finite space in a small device". Of course, the guy who invented those very directional speakers is a billionaire and was before he started inventing them (I think he's the same guy that has been trying to push the hover-car he made for the last decade).
Or, alternately, someone with many years of college and a tuition debt higher than most California residential homes following up on his thesis to seek government or private funding in the millions to pursue his intent to discover some sort of nano-tech-gene-splicing technology that will help cancer patients or something...
I mean, back in the day, you couldn't piss without coming up with a new invention. "Hey, put a candle in a lamp and have portable light!".
Today, any kind of real invention of any value or worth costs money. Lots of money. For design, prototyping, testing (not to mention liability insurance in some case!) - then if you want it to become anything, lawyers, patents, marketing... The rest of the "inventions" are just silly things on the web (I'm sorry, but del.icio.us, though interesting, is not a world-changing invention. Or even a significant "invention") -- or stupid things that some house-wife invents.. like a bag of sand with pockets to latch onto your beach umbrella so it doesn't blow away. Whooptie-fucking-doo.
I blame large corporations. Large corporations look for incremental improvements. They worry about the next quarter, not about the next decade. Innovation is risky and they avoid risks.
Imagine if Thomas Edison were alive today. He would have joined a company like IBM, and his innovations would have been lost in the maze of bureaucracy.
Large companies do a great service. They take innovations and make them into reality. The problem today is there are too few innovations to be turned into reality.
What we need are more small groups of people willing to look beyond the next quarter. Google has a great example of innovation. However, I doubt Google will still be so innovative after that grow to the size of companies like Cisco.
Corporations are constantly gettings more influence over the government and legislation, the patriot act, the digital millenium copyright act, the new laws in sweden recently banning fair use of copyrighted material because of pressure from US corporations!
How can one not feel that hopelessness to all this when the people of the world have no power over their lives and are being led like sheep by evil clever corporite laywers around by their noses.
What little power we had has been snatched away because people don't care enough and feel that it is quite all right to let the government and corporations tell them what is right (more copyright, patants, less freedom for you, bigger class destintion, etc.) and what is wrong (caring of your neibhor is evil, you must NOT share with others you evil foul pirate (aparently the coast guard aren't doing their job or something).
I used to fight. Be active and try my best. It just doesn't matter, not matter how hard you try these bastards STILL get their obviosly bad laws through no matter how many protests there are.
Thats it, this post will be my last ever time I will care before I join the brainless zombies who's freedom matter less to them then about missing oprah! ARRGH!
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver.
Yes, innovation will stop. This is the most ridiculous leap of logic I've ever read.
"Just ask Nikola Tesla."
I can't: he's dead! Take that you stupid Croats!
Shakespear wrote, "There are more things in heaven and earth...", and information theory gave his intuition a rigourous proof. So why do people still write (let alone publish) this kind of crap? Do they know nothing of art and science or is it a combination of a little knowlage and a lot of arrogance?
Whenever I hear someone talking about the death or decay of technological advancement, "evidence" is presented that the really important stuff happened X yrs ago (where X >= 50). A trully revolutionary discovery is rarely seen for what it is until years later when people have had time to investigate and digest the implications. Even when it is immediately acknowlaged, (eg: Watson & Crick), it takes decades/centuries, to work out the full implications and utility of such a discovery. Maxwell's equations were not particularly "useful" until ~80yrs later when Edison created his Electiric light company and begrudgingly hired a mathemetitian or two. My generation (baby boomer's) were the first to really feel the importance of Darwin on our society and it may yet take another 150yrs to be fully absorbed into our collective phyche.
There are also alot of people in this thread complaining that IP laws are killing innovation. IP laws are killing the profit to be made by a "small shop" creating innovative gadgets. IP laws cannot stop people such as Eienstien, Maxwell, Turing, etc, finding fundemental insights that in turn drive the technological innovations that corporations so desperately want to profit from. There is however a good argument that when IP laws adversely affect communication between individuals and groups then technological progress will naturally slow down.
Einstien's equations have been tested to death but yet there is still something "wrong" with our understanding of gravity (on a large scale, "it just don't add up!"). I don't have a crystal ball but I assume in another 50-100 yrs, something like string theory, (at the moment only "useful" as a head scratching excersice), will be seen as having a profound influence. It will be used as evidence by unimaginitive writters to show that physics is dead, they will be sure to point to Godel, Turing and [insert your favorite genius here] as proof that most of the really important stuff has already been discovered.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Communism, you see, is not "dead." It is not even napping! In fact, it is right out in the open
Okay, show me.
What the parent post meant by communism is it's ideaology, which indeed is perpetuated by almost every cultural outlet and school in the western world.
In short, the fundamental idea of this ideaology is that all people are equal, and therefore every manifestation of talent must be a symptom of "unfairness", and every recognition of individuality must be a "social construction". ("individuality" is not meant in the betraying bubble-gum-pop-tart style á britney or coke commercials)
Capitalism does not have much to do with this. Communism and capitalism is compatible, as China ably demonstrates.
Yes, the stupidist.
and other similar nonsense.
Lawsuits, patent madness, etc..
"Invention" means the creation of a NEW thing (pretty much so)
Invention of NEW things are not easy to come up with anymore, just about everything that can be thought of has been thought of.
What is more important is IMPROVEMENT..
People take an existing idea, concept, product, etc. and with a different perspective than the original creator, improve upon the original design so as to make life better for everyone.
But greedy mega-corporations believe that this is taboo, that only THEY should be the innovators and not the little people. God forbid the little man that has to use the product daily should ever consider improving the efficiency or performance of the product.
They live in absolute terror that anyone should ever make ANY money other than themselves.
What will we see in the future?
I suspect that in the not too distant future, all the greedy globalists and the neo-con governments will merger into a singularity, to be known as "The Company"..
This single entity will be THE world government body and the single producer and distributor of all consumer goods, from vehicles to vegetables and everything else.
People will be bred on company baby farms and raised to be consumers. Your sole purpose in life will be to consume. You will work for The Company and you will consume the products The Company produces.
Anyone caught bartering will be dealt the death penalty. The terrible crime of denying The Company any income is the worst crime that one could ever commit, it is called "Profit Denial" and is the highest form of treason.
Like Taco Bell in the "Demolition Man", The Company is everything, The Company is GOD..
Shhhhh.... What was that I heard? Was it a shell being chambered? Did someone utter the words "Lock and load!"???
Think it can't happen? Better think again, it's under way right now folks...
http://www.uh.edu/engines/qualitytechnology.pdf
read up.. numerical evidence proving this
"genetics might just be a *wee bit* harder than figuring out the thermodynamics of a new steam engine design."
/sacrasm.
I agree, thermodynamics is pretty simple, in the sense that a decent engineer could work it out. I wonder why it took humanity so long to find those three obvious rules and turn them into a near optimal steam engine.
Now I come to think of it those cave-men must have been as dumb as dog shit, I mean 1.5 million years and all they invented was fire and some crudely shaped rocks! What about the way people rave on and on about the ancient greeks, as if takes a fucking genius to notice the bath water rises when you get in it!
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Wouldn't you agree that it would be MUCH better to compare Innovation per Innovator / Scientists.
Because...
1) A lot of people are old (baby-boomers). I don't think my 50-year-old dad will be inventing anything anytime soon.
2) I believe that the number of scientists and innovators per population is probably decreasing.
3) Whoever wrote this is an idiot.
Comparing Innovations to population is just stupid.
While I'm a professional programmer by heart and salesman by profession - I nonetheless see incredible innovation in life sciences and behavioral sciences which tend to get overlooked or drowned out in the noise of the next Pentium. There are some exciting developments in treating PD - Parkinson's disease with innovative techniques of gene therapy that just blow me away
Today, one is often 30 years old by the time you earn a PhD and do interesting research. There is so much to learn, it takes many years to reach the "cutting edge".
I suggest you read Slashdot
It's all more intense now, the entrenched power of special interests make it difficult for anything revolutionary to happen whether driven by technology or otherwise. A powerful buggy whip lobby would have prevented or delayed the introduction of the car and etc.
How is that possible? We've all (by now) seen the next article after this one: "Vehicle for Cockroaches." Who saw /that/ one coming? I think "we"'ve still got a few ideas left. ;)
Vernor Vinge gave a talk once in which he suggested that the Singularity might not happen. What if technological growth follows the usual biological S-shaped growth curve instead of staying exponential?
Then we'd end up at a high plateau of material sufficiency and human well-being.
Vinge pointed out a book called "The Coming of the Golden Age -- A View of the End of Progress" which argues that we're in exactly that situation. Fundamental physical laws are known, technology is retreading known phenomena, and even art is reduced to making sequels.
The book makes a pretty convincing argument until you notice that it was written in 1968. By a molecular biologist.
No, that's not innovation, that's evolution.
This sounds like an excuse for someone who doesn't meet the yearly quota with publications :] Hey prof, look, it's not my fault, it's the scientific world that's on a way down to hell.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Innovations comes because ppl/society has something to look forward to. Apathy is ppl/society no longer caring. Quite honestly, America (and other countries) almost need a revolution.
As I wrote about earlier, Illegal aliens (and possibly legal aliens) are actually hurting America long-term. Basically, they will make us complacent.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Today's evolution is tomorrow's revolution?
For example, perhaps the printing press took 50 years or more to develop? As the time since invention increases, we tend to regard the development time as negligible compared the large time period since invention. Consequently, we regard most 'old' inventions as having happened instantaneously and being 'revolutionary'. Hence we regard the printing press as something that happened in a short, revolutionary, burst of inventiveness.
Compare that with the fifty year 'evolution' of the computer. Maybe in 500 years time computers will be regarded as a revolution that exploded on the scene?
Somebody who knows more about history will have to give it a stab at the "why". My 0.02 drachmas: Leisure, not work, was considered the most valuable time (think of all those MBAs turning themselves into corporate droids working twelve hours a day, their brains wasted while they figure out a better marketing strategy for toothpaste), and intellectual pursuits were valued higher than passive consumption. You could also say "less distractions" -- would Plato have ever formulated his stuff if he could have watched Baywatch reruns instead?
If you're only regurgitating the information you have access to on the Internet, you're hardly innovating anyway.
From the article:
He has long been struck by the fact that promised advances were not appearing as quickly as predicted. "I wondered if there was a reason for this," he says. "Perhaps there is a limit to what technology can achieve."
In an effort to find out, he plotted major innovations and scientific advances over time compared to world population, using the 7200 key innovations listed in a recently published book, The History of Science and Technology (Houghton Mifflin, 2004).
Is anyone else confused by this? Did he do anything other than show that a particular history book lists more past innovations than current ones?
Maybe not the best examples.
o yage_.281776-1779.29
Bell - Created a telephone monopoly
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T
MMe Currie - Exposed to radiation and died of Leukemia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madam_Curie
Captain Cook - Killed by natives
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_cook#Third_v
No one has really accounted for what happened in 1973 but a whole lot more than just productivity slowdown happened right around and just before that time.
Seastead this.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
HOWEVER, on the other hand the rate of technological increase has accelerated exponentially so that in this day and age, the original 17 year (right?) patent limit is just too long, ESPECIALLY for the oft-disputed software patents.
The original limit, while probably a good idea at the time, is now just too damn long. Look at technology now, and think about where it was 17 years ago (hint, digital watches were still a pretty neat idea). Now, think about the patents being granted, especially in bio-tech and software, and imagine these methods being essentially locked up for the next 17 years. Developers, inventors, et al are starting to fear inventing, or rather innovating on a previous design because of the threat of legal action. This is certainly stifling innovation.
Now, don't get me wrong. I am not anti-patent, and I do firmly believe that they can help the little guy survive the corporations (though obviously, these days patents really only seem to be benefitting the lawyers, the litigous, and the corporations). However, I do think that with the current speed at which technology increases, patent law should be looked at and perhaps be revised to have shorter terms.
Say 2 years for software (zero would be better), 5 years for bio-tech, and maybe at most 7 years for actual physical inventions.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
No, those are perfect examples. Pushing boundaries implies and *requires* risk that unpleasant things might happen as a result. If you try to make everything completely safe and prevent any mistakes nothing innovative will ever happen. Bureaucracies don't innovate. Committees don't innovate.
In each of those examples the good far outweighed the bad. It's a shame that Curie and Cook had to make those sacrifices. But just like many other explorers and boundary-pushers they contributed huge amounts to humanity. And at the time, Bell's monopoly probably did far more good for the communications infrastructure in this country than it did harm.
Patents hobble revision. If an idea is truly novel, then it will not be hindered by the patent system.
But all science and technology is incremental -- even the most radically "novel" idea rides entirely on the previously built foundation of scientific work, a pyramid without which that allegedly novel concept would not exist and in fact would not even be intelligible. So to claim unique ownership of the idea is totally disingenuous at best, and in actuality quite fraudulent as well as utterly unfair to those who went before and upon whose work it inevitably stands.
The real problem with patents is that they have become synonymous with idea ownership, when in reality they were intended purely as a short-term boost to assist manufacturing. A patent should become void if, after 5 years of protection, the holder has not actually started building something that uses it, verifiably.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
"Red tape is something to live with and work thru"
I think you mistyped "avoid and work around".
need I say more? /me wrings hands.
I have several ideas that I will not even attemp to pursue, as I do not have the time or resources to sift through hundreds of thousands of copyrights and patents.
I have, however, put my ideas on paper, and had them notarized and witnessed.
Ya never know, there may not be any patents on my ideas, so I can still claim ownership and sue.
Microdick is coming awfully close to it.
There are two problems with attempting to relate population to innovation:
1) There are over 6 billion people on earth right now. In fact, most of the people who have EVER lived are alive right now.
2) Most of these people live in 3rd world ratholes where "innovation" is limited to finding ways of keeping a roof over your head and food in your belly. In some cases you can add finding ways of avoiding the local warlord's henchmen.
Measuring how much innovation there is per billion population is nonsensical because most of those people never have the opportunity to contribute anything. As far as innovation is concerned they don't even exist.
If he wants to attempt to model the relationship between population and innovation, he needs to limit the population in his model to that of developed nations with strong educational systems. If he ever gets around to doing this, I already know what his reaction is going to be:
"Doh!!!"
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
It has nothing to do with regulators. Investors want a return withing three months. Everything has to be short term, nobody wants to do fundamental research because there's no money in it, anything that hasn't got an immediate and obvious market value goes straight down the drain.
Technology has gotten so complex that launching a new product (let alone a new field) on your own is getting next to impossible, so investors are a necessary evil. But investors aren't interested in helping you, they are interested in making money, both goals aren't necessarily compatible.
Unless public funds are used for research, there is a fair chance that innovation will indeed slow to a crawl (just see what's happening with pharmaceutical labs). There are too few corps that see long term.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
A good part of the reason is that psuedo innovation is becomming the focal point.
... and this from a distraction from genuine science. The carrot of money which is given only when it can distract genuine science.
Disallow software patents and the total number drops significantly.
Stop the funding of abstract psuedo science and it will drop more.
The RTFA doesn't work here as this article isn't the real article of the research results.
Those who disagree with him that others might listen to, seem to think innovation can continue but only for those with tons of money for R&D.
Notable innovation has slowed due to the distraction of psuedo R&D
Nano technology has a long way to go and Artificial intelligence is - nothing is naturally that stupid... an illusion of intelligence, but in reality nothing more than almost doing what it is programmed to do.
I'd like to see a comparison of innovation to the change from the roman numeral system to the decimal system. As I suspect there is a need to change some fundamental idealoligies of our calculations today. Changes that will revitalize innovation.
With the roman numeral system advanced math was extreamly hard if not impossible to do. That base thinking tool set had such limitations that today we would not have much, certainly not computers, had we not moved past the limitations of calculation with roman numerals.
Today the limitations are being cause by a failure or genuine computer science to establish the base line of abstraction physics. In simple terms, seeing past the abstraction of numbers (regardless fo the numbering system being use) and to extend calculation abilities to include other anbstractions as well. This is possible through the establishment of abstraction physics.
However, it took three hundred years for the decimal system with its (how can nothing have value?) zero place holder to overcome the limited roman numeral system.... BECAUSE of the vested interest in the roman numeral system accountants and supporters.
Bring abstraction physics into teh picture and it becomes clear that Software is NOT patentable, but calculation advances then allow for revitalized innovation...just as the decimal system allowed us to advance past the limoitations of teh roman numeral system.
It seems like a lot of people here are blaming patents for the slowing of innovation. To me that sounds rather silly. Patents have been around for a very long time. And it can certainly be argued that they encourage innovation through incentive, which is what they were ment for in the first place. Research and development is much more institutionalized now adays, beyond Universities. Corporations like IBM pump tons of money into R&D to create new inventions and the government conducts a lot of research also. If anything we should see more innovation today, but if we're not, here's like the likely reason why, IMO...
Pretty much all technological inventions of the past 150 or so years have revolved around the manipulation of electromagnetic fields. Quite simply, use of electricity is what was the behind all the inventions of the past. Now we're running out of things to do it with it. We're just tweaking existing designs, making them better and more reliable but it's going to take a major scientific discovery to spur the creation of new inventions once again. After all, how many times can you reinvent an electric motor?
To regulate is to retard. What is needed are private research firms which advise the public of risks , dangers etc. in any industry. This way the whole industry and its research auxiliaries get a growth impetus.
Governmental control is useless and without a resonable justification because the only function of the government is to protect the freedom of all individuals.
Huh. Well, that'll teach me to draw on any information research tool. After all, if you're only regurgitating the information you have access to in the library, you're hardly innovating anyway.
fewer 'important technological developments per billion people'
many of you have attacked on the per billion people remark, but what i'd like to attack on is the word 'important'. how do you define important? by the amount of people using it? by the percentage of people using it? by categorizing it as necessity vs luxury?
i mean the importance of the invention of the automobile vs the importance of small portable storage media are 2 different scales. just because not many people use the space shuttle, does it make it a less important invention than a car?
what do you guys think importance is measured in?
HD Trailers
I haven't studied too much economics, but I remember from my classes something along the lines that with the Solow growth model one can pretty accurately find out the rate of innovations growth in a country and per capita because innovations are the main force behind productivity growth.
Also, there was this thing called Schumpeterian trilogy which talks about the relation between invention, innovation and diffusion. Basically, there will be no productivity gains from inventions if nobody gets to use them.
Ideas for Google searches from here:
http://www.nber.org/reporter/summer99/eaton.html
We have things like the first attempted Nuclear fision reactor that is going to be built in France and will take 10 years to build.
In order to build something like this, you can't have earthquakes, so the west coast is out. The east coast has a high population, so you don't want something like that, as a "just in case" type thing.
That leaves the midwest if you are talking about the USA. There isn't a high population density there, no earthquakes, and if you go underground, no problem with tornados or severe weather. That means the only people who would object are all the people who protest any new technology.
There was a time when the government would push to stay ahead of the rest of the world when it came to technology and science. Putting a man on the moon for example was done to stay ahead of the world, not because of any financial advantage it might give.
George W. Bush needs to wake up and start supporting innovation and advancement in this country again. There is NO reason why this country couldn't have the first fusion reactor if the government supported the idea of providing the electrical power we need and getting away from oil.
Remember that it was Meucci, not Bell, that invented the telephone.
The problem with today's innovation marketplace is that due to the way these developments have been funded in the last 25 years; they must be firstly safe, and secondly make money quickly. Think about it this way, 25 years ago the fastest jet airliner in service was Concorde; today there isn't anything that fast in service. Also nobody in 25 years has bothered to go to the moon.
During this period the amount of money invested into pure research into technology has been significantly reduced as GDP of most Western states, as a result the experience in the fields is being lost as scientists and engineers move on with no replacements being trained. NASA have even lost the blueprints for the Saturn V rocket, so to go to the moon, they either have to reverse engineer what 40 year hardware they have left or design a complete new platform at a very great expense.
When you consider that Brunel made a hudge loss on the Great Western Railway for its shareholders, and that his SS Great Eastern (which held the record for the largest ship ever built for 50 years) was a commercial failure, you being to understand that innovation does not necessarily make money quickly.
In the past 10 years, great performance increases have been made in computer performance with reducing costs. The way this has happened is due to the electronics industry ditching the high tech Military and Aerospace markets, and cutting corners to produce very fast electronics that suit only consumer devices that only need to operate for the lifetime of the warranty. In addition the goods have been manufactured in low cost countries, which has meant that the cost of these good has dropped. But I can clearly tell you one thing now, like the crazy situation with the dot com bust, low cost electronics are not going to last much longer, as the electronic devices currently being developed meet their physical limits and the costs of going further get very much higher. Nanotechnology may be the answer, but unless a lot of money is thrown at it, don't expect to see anything seriously useful for about 15 to 20 years.
Believe it or not, we will have to think about the technology and how it may help us.
Indeed. What some of the libertarian-leaning folks posting here should remember is that corporations are notoriously risk-averse. The majority of basic research is publically funded. Unless it's one of those infuriating deals where a company funds some research at a school, then develops it into a proprietary product---essentially using public funds to subsidize their project. Yecch.
Midas Mulligan ain't gonna swoop y'all off to Galt's Gulch. Ain't gonna happen.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Millenia ago men often didn't live long enough to suffer from erectile dysfunction...
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T
Ummmm...no. Again, you are confusing free market vs. government intervention. From the very article you cite:
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
instead, ill make do with my current tech for as long as it takes. thanks
Pshaw. You don't need nanotunnels or anything like that to build a better fan. [1] [2]. Check it out. It has a neat "man, I wish I'd thought of that" feel to it.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Frankly, I don't think it matters if the rate of technological advance per person is diminishing. The rate of technological advance of the species as a whole is accelerating, and that's what counts. Because only one person may invent something, but the whole race benefits from that invention.
Huh. That sounds kinda nifty, actually. The invention, that is. I doubt you could---I doubt you should---be able to market and promote an invention without significant effort and outlay on your part, if you want to keep control of it.
Still, $3000 seems excessive, especially since the USPTO has demonstrated how bad it is at its job. (Researching prior art and the like.) And you'd likely not have the money to sue someone who infringed on you, in any case. Damn shame.
Anyone have an idea of how to make it so that inventions like this don't get lost in the mists of time?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I truly see only one way to rectify the situation, and that's to get enough people who see the problem to move to one place, where they have a good chance of changing things.
And that's why I moved to New Hampshire last week!
Part of the Second American Revolution!
did curie die from radiation poising (many early workers did)
did cook spread invasive plants and animals around the world, destroying native habitats
Yeah yeah whatever. Only captain I care about goes by the name of Morgan.
The idea of a patent is that the inventor gets a monopoly that he can exploit to repay the investors who backed his research.
But what happens when a product is covered by more than one patent? Every patent holder gets a veto on exploiting every-one elses' inventions!
If you propose a program of research, hoping to create a patentable invention, your bankers will want to know how many existing patents they will have to license before they can exploit your hoped for invention. Lots of patents means no funding for your research.
The patent system can only work in the way its boosters claim if there is a one patent per product rule. Let the patent office pick a single ruling patent for each product and grant the monopoly only to the inventor of the ruling patent. Then investors can back expensive research aimed at major break throughs, enticed by the prospect of having the ruling patent, and not having to buy off patent leaches.
Energy Production: I recall reading some news about experimental fusion reactors being build/developed in France and China.
Space Travel: I don't see any problem here either. Combined with horizontal launch techniques, ion-engines will propably do. Nuclear power is doable, but has been neglected due to environmental hazards.
Artificial Intelligence: Ever heard of the term 'embodied cognition' - it's still in its infancy, but i'm sure that's the way to head on, in combination with neural networks.
that'a fair argument. the cost of innovation now vs. the "sweet spot" period in the article.
Edison innovated in his shed out back. The cost might have been significant in his day, but not prohibitive.
Some might argue that the cost of innovation now is prohibitive. The fair assessment of this article might be that all the "easy" innovations, or all the "cheap" innovations have already been discovered.
The other thing is this. There are a lot of books circulating about criticality. A big idea in criticality is complexity arising from very simple origins (Gutenberg-Richter Law). So there is the idea that the TREES of our major technologies going forward have already been discovered. The branches are being fleshed out now, but the trunks are all there in plain view. If that is the case, then innovation isn't slowing because of societal reasons, but is slowing because there's less new shit to discover, lending credence to a simple universe.
un burrito me trampeó.
I've argued that telepresence will displace business air travel.
It is unreasonable to fund supersonic transport research when competition from telepresence is looming.
It is still possible to do it in your garage. The man who invented the blue laser did it that way. But I will agree this is not the norm, and you have a valid point about thigns being harder to discover.
Viagra was actually meant as a drug for hypertension, then angina, before you know what. http://pubs.acs.org/hotartcl/mdd/98/novdec/viagra. html
Many of the anti-psychotics were originally for epilepsy. Unfortunately innovation doesn't usually come from highly focussed research. The discovery of new drugs and technologies is more haphazard than that, and those that fund research are aware of this problem.
Communism and Capitalism are compatible? How?
In order for Communism to work, the idea of private property must eventually disappear. China claims to be a Communist nation, but in its rush to modernize, it has been slowly mixing capitalistic techniques into its economy. Profit motive, participation in open markets, etc.
China demonstrates that totalitarianism and Capitalism are perfectly compatible. Which brings up the question of why the Bush administration continually conflates "promoting free trade" with "promoting democracy".
Nor is there a Communist maxim that everyone is equal in talent or ability. What you're failing to grasp is the distinction between "Everyone is equal" and "Everyone deserves to be treated equally". The former is only claimed by a few untalented academians who don't dare subject their theories to the real world. The latter is a principle of Communism, but also of many branches of Enlightenment thinking. For example, it guided the creation of the Constitution of the United States.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
You, sir, are full of it.
::rolls eyes:: "Don't you want me to get into college?"
Compare, over the course of centuries, the number of people who have died of malaria to the number of people who have died of botched erectile dysfunction remedies. More to the point, compare that to the number of people who died of erectile dysfunction itself.
Then tell me how--in the great scheme of things--erectile dysfunction was the more pressing problem.
Then consider that there is currently a great deal of ongoing research in the field. Even if the problem is--how did you put it?--"solved", the companies that have products are hard at work on new refinements to the solution, and other companies are looking hard for an unpatented solution so they can cash in on the market for these drugs.
The grandparent wasn't complaining that the problem had been solved, but that it was receiving greater focus than more pressing problems.
To illustrate, imagine the following conversation between a father and his teenage daughter:
Father: "What the hell are you doing?"
Daughter: "Filling out my application to Harvard. It's a very useful and productive thing to be doing."
Father: "While your little brother was on fire?"
Daughter:
Compared to some of the real problems out there (AIDS, malaria, etc.), erectile dysfunction is a recreational problem. As with everything else in life, you play when the work is done.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
What happened to standing on the shoulders of giants?
Are we really so arrogant as to believe that our society today is reaching the peak of human achievement?
I truly hope not.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I would suggest a solution: A much more equal distribution of wealth.
Why is a recreational problem like erectile dysfunction receiving about as much attention as AIDS, and way more attention than malaria? Because in Africa, where these two problems are wreaking havoc and killing millions every year, the potential customers for these drugs are too poor to pay for them. If they had the money to buy them, our drug companies would make these two diseases their single biggest priority.
As it is, if Grandpa Bud in the U.S.A. is willing to shell out a few hundred dollars a year to please the missus, his money is worth as much to the drug companies as an African farmer who would give everything he has to buy a cure for AIDS.
I'm not saying that it would be right or useful to simply take from the rich and give to the poor until everyone was equal. What I am saying is that, within a purely capitalist society, economic resources aren't going to be directed towards the problems of those who cannot afford to pay for a solution.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
You had me right up until "molecular factory". I'm so gullible...
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
It's because the populations keep rising methinks. People are shagging more than inventing.
There's a huge flaw in the logic of the statistics used for this article!
Let's consider what would you would see in that "book of inventions" even if inventions really do grow exponentially. If the book always documented, say, 1% of the inventions, then much of the book of inventions in 1700-2000 that he studied would be devoted to recent years. However, I'm sure that the people who wrote that book factored this out, and (conciously or unconciously) tried to even this effect out, and to choose, say, the 100 most important inventions of this century. When you divide this constant by the number of people (why??), you end up with the number of "innovations" in the book per person going down. And it doesn't mean anything.
If you don't do what I described above (pick a constant number of most important innovations per century), it's almost impossible to decide what's more important. What is more important - the invention of a new and more efficient steam engine, or the invention of a new and more efficient programming languge? Does the fact that every year computer chips get faster mean that they are a series of important inventions, or does it count as just one invention?
I think the author of this article isn't really interested in inventions, but rather in paradigm shifts. The move from sword to pistol is one. The move from carriage to automobile is one. The invention of the Internet is one. BUT, when you already have paradigms that work, why shift them? We are using "cars" for 100 years, because they work pretty well - does this mean that there was no more innovation in this century, any more than the fact that we still use Euclid's geometry means that there has been no innovation for two millenia?
"This seems to be more of a reflection of third world population growth than on innovation."
Sort of..
It's a reflection of the dropping value of human labor. Nearly all inventions are driven by the cost/benefit ratio between the old and new methods. The devaluation of human labor (globalization) reduces the cost of the older manual methods. I.E. Your time, my time, is worth less and less as globalization progresses, therefore the cost/benefit ratio of a new invention must cross a higher threshold to become successful.
The second aspect of innovation is the amount of resources and free time one needs to innovate. As value of human labor drops in respect to living standards, one must devote more and more time towards providing for subsistence. This leaves less time and resources for inventing.
A third aspect is government tampering the various markets.
Visa programs which flood a market with foreign tech workers, automatically devalues the skill set of domestic tech workers. In so doing damages innovation in both aspects listed above.
Likewise the issuing millions of patents(17 year monopolies) each year for non-inventions also damages the market by reducing the value and ability to market true innovations.
It could be done by changing the way short and long term investments are taxed. Right now there's not enough downside to speculation (i.e., demanding a significant return this quarter) or upside to true investing.
Also to blame for the short-sightendness of corporations are the executives who want to come in, raise the stock price (often by gutting R&D and laying off the most experienced employees) to pander to the speculators, and then bailing out.
Perhaps corporations should tie this year's compensation for an executive to how the company performs one or two (or three) years into the future, regardless of whether that executive is still there (unless he was fired for malfeasance). Or you could hand out bonuses today based on how the company did this year to those who were there two or three years ago laying the foundations for this year's performance.
Such compensation given with an eye to long-term performance could be taxed at a lower rate adding to the incentive.
In other words, use taxes and compensation plans to force people to look ahead by up to three years (I don't know if there is a benefit to a more distant horizon but there may be). If taxes were structured so that investors really were owners then they would have more interest in enforcing an ownership mentality on the executives.
This sort of compensation structure would change the way people think about the long term viability of the company and would prevent a lot of the damage I've personally witnessed at NCR, ICL, and IBM.
I agree that part of it is that the USPTO is making it harder, but I think it's also that as technological innovations have become so complex that people need more education to make them, and a lot of people never get that. Sure, Faraday never even went to college when he discovered EMF, he just liked to diddle around with electrical equipment - but he needed Maxwell to make mathamatical sense of it for him so that others in the scientific community would really take notice. Now imagine how much you have to know ahead of time to invent a new signal processor or algorithm - standing on the shoulders of the old innovators is a lot harder than it use to be.
"there are now fewer 'important technological developments per billion people'"
... ...
... ...
... ... ...
Should we blame over-population
and the capitalistic-tyranny
that has created a generation of have-nots ??
note:
I didn't say republican-tyranny
nor did I say conservative-tyranny.
By and large
I wouldn't associate either of these 100% w/ capitalism.
note:
Capitalism is what makes someone total a car w/ a small amount of body dammage. (wasteful)
A conservative would fix the car themselves,
possibly put it up on blocks in the backyard 'till they need to use it for spare parts.
note:
Republicans
I couldn't even tell you what these people are about these days.
So I won't even guess at what their adjenda is.
I used to think they wanted government out of our lives.
As of late,
I'm beginning to think that they want government in everyone else's life.
Perhaps this is to win the, so called, culture war.
If that's the case
Isn't that same adjenda as the Liberal-Democrat?
So the Republicans
They're just confused.
Erectile dysfunction was a very important problem for mankind for tens of thousands of years.
No it wasn't. Erectile dysfunction might be a problem for a particular individual, but it's not a very important problem for mankind. HIV is a very important problem. Smallpox is a very important problem. Nuclear war is a very important problem. These are things that can radically damage society. Erectile dysfunction can't radically damage society.
And you're complaining about it and belittling the accomplishment.
No, he has the right perspective. You are the one that has things out of perspective.
One of the reasons for the difference in spending between, say, erectile dysfunction and alternative energy research is that erectile dysfunction is an immediately obvious problem, and burning oil is less immediately obvious. In a capitalist society with people who don't like to plan ahead, the immediately obvious problems get far more attention.
Compared to some of the real problems out there (AIDS, malaria, etc.), erectile dysfunction is a recreational problem. As with everything else in life, you play when the work is done.
Then what are you doing spending your time posting on Slashdot? Did you cure AIDS and malaria early yesterday afternoon?
"If that is the case, then innovation isn't slowing because of societal reasons, but is slowing because there's less new shit to discover, lending credence to a simple universe."
You haven't studied physics have you?
What we have now is a very full set of speculation from which the reasoned mind might be able to pull some insights. But there are many many things whose explanation is merely superficial. It has always followed that with better explanations, greater innovation can follow. We still have some explaining to do.
The printing press wasn't revolutionary! All Gutenberg did was stick block printing on a rack. Evolution, not revolution, obviously.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
How much you earn is a direct measure of how much society values your contribution to the world.
Most people's time is only immediately valued by a small group of people and what most people can accomplish is pretty much the same (on average one person is much the same as another). Hence, there's not much value put on the average individual's personal time and he isn't paid a lot.
On the other hand (to use a common example), a sports star has an unusual talent (not many people can do what he does) and many people put some value on it. Hence, the sports star makes a lot of money.
In all cases (short of theft), what a person is paid is a reflection of the value society puts on that person's contribution to the world. Drug lords make a lot of money because many people put a high value on the product they supply to at great personal risk. School teachers are not paid a lot because only the parents of the students really care and teachers are easily replaced (comparatively speaking).
Sometimes someone produces something of high value to the world but the world doesn't find out about it so that person doesn't make much money (or any). Van Gogh would be an example.
Suppose a person invented clean free energy. That process/machine would have incredible value to the world but only if the world finds out about it. If that invention is constrained to a community the inventor may be rich in his community but he will not be rich in the world.
At the end of the day, no matter how much we not like to admit it, the people who earn more than we do (including successful stock speculators who are effectively lending money at high interest rates paid by unsuccessful speculators) are more highly valued by society than we are.
To make more, do something society as a whole values highly, that few other people could have done, and make sure society find out about you.
In early America, hundred year investments were very common. Why? Because it was not *yet* common practice for the government to tax to oblivion people's property/ investments. Now, one would be foolish to make such a long term investment, because its only a matter of time before the government finds that they can make lots of promises to other people in order to procure their votes. Subsequently, those promises are funded with tax money from wherever there is money ... in this case investments.
So dont blame investors please. They are simply a symptom of a much bigger and much more burdensome system. One in which I suspect the parent poster fully endorses.
I don't agree with this finding, mainly due to my knowledge of history. There was a time around the turn of the century (1900, not 2000) at which people actually thought everything had been invented and the patent office could be closed down. The science community thought that physics had been completely wrapped up. I think its a general trend of humanity that we set artificial barriers for our knowledge (i.e. the world is flat, nothing can go faster than sound, no one can go to the moon) and just when we think we are there and no more can be done, along comes Einstein, or Aristotle, or a Bell Airplanes engineer, to disagree just a little. I think that we should be happy we think things are slowing down. I think it means there is something just around the corner, even bigger and better (hey I'll take the speed of light). Of course I could be wrong.
the people who earn more than we do (including successful stock speculators who are effectively lending money at high interest rates paid by unsuccessful speculators) are more highly valued by society than we are.
Actually, sports stars are typically of lower value. Say you have a team of 20 players, and I pay $20 to see a game that lasts two hours. That's a value of $0.50 per player per hour!
If I wanted to hire you, I'd be paying you at least minimum wage, perhaps all the way up into hundreds of dollars.
Luckily for the athletes have economics of scale on their side.
is demographic in nature. The appearence of immortal (or nearly immortal) humans in numbers large enough that some of them will become scientists. Simply put, there is so much knowledge that needs to be absorbed by a single person today before this person is a specialist in a field and can come up with new 'inventions' that a human life is not enough anymore.
Scientists that will live at least 250 years, and at least 220 of those years they should feel young - both physically and mentally to be useful and able to invent new things.....
--
OR we must create AI at least as powerful as human's intelligence and teach it and work with it on new inventions. But I think this is less likely to happen than my first suggestion.
You can't handle the truth.
The problem is a large proportion of research energy is focused on what will return the most in the marketplace instead of what will return the most to mankind. People lose sight of the big picture in their sprint to make the most money they can and people suffer because of it.
And, amazingly to you, that little greedy process called capitalis was able to generate the most powerful country and economy the planet has ever seen in the shortest amount of time (from scratch in 230 years!). If you wonder why innovation is slowing, look at all the things that are eating away at the true capitalism that spawned most of the world's best innovations - social-ism/-ist policies, etc.
Our great-grandkids will grow up asking us what 'car keys' are, and why we just couldn't have them signal us when we lost them.
And they will be walking around with nanites in their hair they use to change the color of it randomly, and we'll mutter about kids and their fancy hair, and no one will realize that nanotech is going to give us new inventions for another 100 years...
Or something else besides nanotech. Genetic engineering? Quantum computers? Honest-to-goodness midair holograms? Antigravity? Who knows?
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
why does everything end up with some form of personal attack?
I've actually studied a lot of physics. How this is relevant is uncertain. My argument is that the branches of physics in which we stand to make these discoveries ALREADY exist. We've already discovered those branches. If each discrete branch of physics is a tree, one argument might be that we've discovered all the trees and are now determining the branches and leaves. The details.
String theory? Not new. Dark Matter? That was Einstein's cosmological constant a hundred years ago. Shit, we can already theorize about how to manipulate gravitational wells to bend time. I can sit down and think of fifteen different things I can apply a hypothetical gravitational lens to. My nine year old nephew understands what a Bose-einstein condensate is, which was actually predicted in the 20s.
That's precisely my point. This is what nanotech seeks to solve. Despite what seems like our limited knowledge, our knowledge is far more vast that our ability to engineer. So if innovation is described as when the possibility of something new comes within our conceptual grasp, then innovation proceeds faster than ever. But if innovation is defined as our ability to make something tangible that is new, then we are moving at a snail's pace.
Cell phones are still telephones. We still sit humans on top of controlled explosions to send them into space.
un burrito me trampeó.
I think that the standards for what is an "innovation" are being raised. Consider software... any program contains thousands of operations that are each potentially an "innovation" as profound as the bridle, but with billions of people making these "innovations" only a tiny fraction stand out and get noticed. The innovations that have become an everyday fact of life are masking themselves, "oh, another world-changing idea, no big deal, it's time for the new episode of Galatica".
Consider the heroic story of Edison trying out hundreds of fibers in lightbulbs. That was brilliance and dedication a century ago, and at the end one innovation resulted from it. Today that whole process has become an assembly line and then turned into something you turn a computer loose on and wait a few seconds for a billion moron-level synthetic Edisons to come up with an answer. And you don't call that answer an innovation, you call it the result of a Monte-Carlo simulation and go on to the next routine miracle. That doesn't make the answer less of a miracle than it was a century ago, it just means that innovations are coming so fast we can't even see them any more.
He's trying to compare the ripples in a millpond with the waves that are similarly outstanding in a typhoon, and saying "on the average, the typhoon is calmer".
So really, he's saying if we have a die-off in population, our rate of innovation will plummet. But as our population keeps growing, we have more innovation.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
Aren't you saying we need patents on software? :)
Big deal. I'm sure it's not that hard to get a Visa to Ecuador. I need a visa to visit the US, and I can only stay 3 months. Most people in Ecuador who apply for visas to the US cannot pass the interview. It's just not possible (hence, all the illegal immigration.) There's a reason why the US appears in the short list of countries for which a Visa is required. Strangely, Colombian citizens are just let in.
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This reminds me of a quote by the head of the USPO back in the turn of the century (wish I could find a link). He said that everything that could possibly be invented has been invented.
I know what quote you're refering to. It's attributed to Charles H. Duell, who was once the commissoner of the US Patent Office, and is normally given a date of 1899. However, the quote appears to be, at best, apocryphal.
To start with, no one has ever been able to find a definative source that he was the one who said it. The earliest source I can spot is from a 1915 Scientific American article, who attribute it to a nameless 1833 patent office clerk. The quote can also be found (those less frequently, thanks to the wonders of everyone just copying and pasting pages of quotes without checking them) to an anonymous 1875 Patent Office director (which implies Charles Duell's father), and to an anonymous British patent office employee (which is how I first heard it). These alone should be enough to set your spidey-sense tingling.
The truth of the matter is that the quote is completely out of character for Duell, whose 1899 report to President McKinley notes that the number of patents increased over the following year, and suggests that "aid and effectual encouragement" could help in inventors by "improving the American patent system". No mention of shutting it down, no mention of everything having been invented.
The article from which I drew most of this info from: Skeptical Inquirer: A Patently False Patent Myth Still! (May-June, 2003)
(As an interesting side-note, posts on various mailing lists which I found while searching for that article suggest that the quote was first identified as apocryphal by 60 years ago. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the NY Times for Oct. 15, 1995, where this tidbit was mentioned, so I can't check their source on that.)
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
we may be getting fewer innovations, but the quality of them is clearly on the rise
I don't think the argument is that people are getting dumber. It's like trying to make processors faster. There are always limits, physical limits -- until a new breakthrough is made. Nowadays it's also very difficult for a single individual to come up with new things when there are corporations with a lot of resources driving technological change. So motivation for the individual could be a factor, combined with the need for huge resources in order to develop something new.
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As with all things, it's a matter of power. In this case, that power takes the form of wealth.
Generally, the wealthy don't suffer from the worst of the diseases out there - generally they can shield themselves from them and get excellent health care. Plus, when oil gets so expensive that it is ten times as expensive as it currently is in real dollars, the rich will be able to afford it.
But all people succumb to the rigors of old age eventually.
So of course the wealthy will spend the most on what affects them personally. And with increasing wealth dispairity (www.lcurve.org) you'll see less and less money spent on humanitarian concerns.
I disagree. There are always more problems to solve. And, the more solutions that are created, the more problems will be generated that need to be solved. That's what continues to spur innovation.
The misconception presented here that innovation is slowing is just an illusion caused by the population explosion. When a population more than quadruples, you're bound to see less innovation per XX billions of people than before.
But that doesn't mean innovation just comes to a standstill.
Mod parent funny!!! That is fucking histerical.
Sports stars are of higher value to society precisely because of the "economics of scale on their side" you mentioned.
That is exactly what I meant by making certain a lot of people are aware of you. Most of the wealthy have figured out it is better to get $1 from each of a million people than to get $10,000 from one person.
Products like MicroSoft BASIC, VisiCalc, Napster, BitTorrent, etc. were made by one or two clever guys. I dont see that slowing down. It take imagination and sweat to invent the next great thing.
Companies sue each other far more frequently than people sue companies. Inter-corporate lawsuits are more likely to be dismissed as 'frivolous'.
In the infamous McDonald's case, the size of the jury award The victim was found partially liable, which reduced her judgement. Later, the judgemnet was reduced much further on appeal.
Corporations are trying to forsake responsibility and shift it to the public - privatizing profits, socializing risk. Do you know who pays for cleanup after a nuclear accident? Who paid to clean up the S&L mess? Not the people who can afford to hire lobbyists.
Whiny individuals aren't responsible for the extension of patents and copyrights - it's big business, and the Mouse. I think you're on the right track, just looking in the wrong direction.
And with the offshoring of research to the ancient (and some might say backward and dictatorial) cultures of China, Russia, India, etc., don't look for any more innovation from non-innovative cultures like these. (And no - this isn't an egocentric comment - newer cultures inspire innovation for obvious reasons.)
We had the capability to bring malaria under control, if not all but eliminate it.
But then, some people decided to effectively ban DDT.
The hard problems aren't really being tried.
Energy production Fission is less dangerous than people claim, there's a lot of really good ideas that haven't been really been followed through on, though what the Chinese are doing with pebble-bed reactors is encouraging.
Space travel Most of the really useful mechanisms for getting out of the gravity well haven't even been tried, and once we're out of the well chemical energy and solar sails are more than enough to get around. After they've built a linear induction motor up the side of Kilimanjaro and THAT hasn't worked out, THEN come back and tell me we need nuclear engines.
Artificial Intelligence There's more things going on in the brain than we understand, and there's all kinds of interesting things coming out of the efforts to understand it. Be hopeful.
Individual technical innovation comes from individualism, demand, and investment. All three of those things are less per person than they were before. Regulation, Patents, Copyrights, MPAA, RIAA, and others did not exist in the way they do now. To create something without thinking about the government is a sentence to life in prison now days. Before it was the path to freedom now its the path to jail or world domination. One of which will eventually occur to those that seek innovation.
Half Life 2 probably contains more genuine innovations than the Wright brothers, Edison, and Franklin came up with in their lifetime.
We don't see them because innovation is so much a part of the environment that we no longer have a word for the equivalents of things like the light bulb, or bifocals. We have assembly line labs using fresh-hired grad students to find solutions like those for us. It's like we're standing on the beach at Bondi complaining that there's only a couple of big waves a minute... and back on the beach at Brighton they were coming in much more often at that. Because the waves the size of the ones you get in the Channel are too common to notice between the breakers.
To find something that stands out that it looks like universal gravitation in the storm of innovation around us we need to find something like the innovation equivalent of a Tsunami.
This is probably the best way to make sure that your innovation gets 'heard.' More than an IEEE paper. People pay attention to money (strange, isn't it?).
Society will reward you if you succeed. It is likely that you will fail, with the most likely reasons being bad timing, and a few bad apples in the recruiting barrel.
And, amazingly to you, that little greedy process called capitalis was able to generate the most powerful country and economy the planet has ever seen in the shortest amount of time (from scratch in 230 years!).
Mexico has had Capitalism. So why aren't they a powerful country and economy? According to your 'theory' they should be totally kicking ass, because they're far less socialistic than the US is.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
What more does it take to determine this is the theory of an individual misguided in the belfry department than the declaration of a precise date that will mark the end of innovation?
Or more precisely, 2024 as was stated in the article.
It is worse than the author states. Not only are the relative number of patents decreasing, but the patents that are granted are completely stupid. (At least the software patents are, since that is my field of expertise. Perhaps there are still some decent patents in other fields.) Oh for the days when you had to have a working prototype to file a patent.
The social mismanagement of the internet by companies is a massive factor. The net is an environment which has its social nature corrupted by the big corporations.
I'm not a gun nut, but I reckon the laser sight is pretty damn innovative. Likewise this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_bullet
Other things too, like the machine pistol.
The most basic principle hasn't changed, like the wheel hasn't changed. But tires change, and many of the details of handguns and how we use them have changed.
What time period are we talking here? And since when has Mexico become less socialist than the US?
You'd be wrong especially when you adjust for inflation. Please remember that the US has a century of alterative energy research under it's belt, including a vast amount of work on hydroelectric, fission, and fusion.
Not to diminish the problems of those with erectile dysfunction but a cure for cancer or free energy would probably do a lot more people a lot more good for the money.
Erectile dysfunction is an important problem and we have gotten a lot of value for that $16 billion. Plus I suspect that we've spent vastly more on curing cancer than on erectile dysfunction. It bugs me that we're not supposed to work on lesser problems until the big problems get fixed. IMHO the market seems to better able to prioritize stuff than you.
There has to be a balance between altruism and greed and we aren't anywhere close to the middle right now.
That's your opinion. I don't see your point.
Yes, and that was a mistake. We were using too much of it, then we recognized that it was having very serious effects on the ecosystem, and we overreacted.
At this point, we can use satellite imaging/GPS, etc. to target the areas where it would be most effective. Using DDT was highly questionable back when it was first banned, but now it seems irresponsible to not use it in measured doses.
That's my position. Following the thread, it appears that your position is simple: We had a solution, which we gave up for no good reason, and rather than looking for a better way to save the millions who die each year from malaria, we should go back to perfecting the technology to turn Grandpa Bud into a sexual dynamo.
That's the impression you're leaving in my mind, anyways. Feel free to correct me if your position is more reasonable than you're letting on.
Then again, it's your first post. I really don't expect to hear from you again.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
In the infamous McDonald's case, the size of the jury award The victim was found partially liable, which reduced her judgement. Later, the judgemnet was reduced much further on appeal.
More than that, it wasn't just a case of "waah, I spilled hot coffee in my lap and it hurts! I'm suing!" The coffee from that particular McDonald's wasn't just hot -- it was dangerously hot, far above normal coffee temperature. Furthermore, they had received several complaints from other customers and had done nothing about it. When the plaintiff spilled the coffee in her lap, it gave her serious burns that required immediate medical attention.
I can't say that giving someone tens of millions of dollars because they were scalded by coffee makes much sense, but OTOH, that McD's fucked up in a big way and a customer suffered because of their incompetence. They deserved to be punished for it. I think that this is something that is often overlooked in the furor over "frivolous" lawsuit awards -- it's not just an award, it's a punishment for the defendant. And a few thousand dollars (or even a few hundred thousand) in "punishment" is not enough for a large corporation to even notice. That's pocket change to them.
Only a complete stupid may think that the knowledge he may get is "unlimited". Farther from Sun - less light. And funny to see a kid that goes around, finds a rock and calls it "new". Then it sees how an apple rolls down, calls it a "wheel" and calls it "invention". And some say that some kids invented the laws of physics. How did the world keep turning before them? ;-) Interesting, will be ever a time that will be no increse in registered patents per year ;-) The kids definitly want to reinvent the whole Universe ;-)
I doubt the US is spending even close to that on alternative energy research. Not to diminish the problems of those with erectile dysfunction but a cure for cancer or free energy would probably do a lot more people a lot more good for the money.
Actually, I think you are diminishing the problems of those with ED. And engaging in the common fallacy that no enterprise is worth undertaking if there is a better undertaking. If we were actually to focus 100% of our efforts on the key problems chances are we would shoot ourselves in the foot because innovation in those areas will ulitimately depend on innovation in others and because scientific discoveries often occur when you are looking for something else.
There are about 3 billion men in the world with a life expectancy of around 70 years. As a rough rule of thumb, the probability of erectile disfunction is a mans age with a percent sign tacked on the end. So, about 2.1 billion people will suffer from ED. Not to mention their partners. So, $16billion in research is about $8 per person who would be helped. Not even counting future generations. Global income is around $5500 per person. That means that $8 represents about 0.004% of a mans lifetime income but it makes a substantial difference in quality of life. However, existing treatments are less than 100% effective and cost more than $8 per DOSE not per lifetime.
Why divert money from one benificial activity to another when you could be diverting money from a detrimental activity?
It is much more productive to make the comparison between spending money on alternative energy and the cost of the war on Iraq. We have spent $180 billion on the war so far. Not to mention the human cost. If you spent that money on Negawatts, thermal depolymerization and other biomass projects, hybrid cars, etc. we would go a long way to eliminating our dependency on middle eastern oil and reduce greenhouse emissions considerably. Negawatts includes replacing all incandescent lightbulbs with compact flourescent, installing decent reflectors in all light fixtures, and installing more efficient motors. Just the lighting improvements are enough to make the US go from a net energy importer to a net energy export. And, we would actually get all the money spent back many times over in future cost savings.
And all its kin around the world. I Thomas Edison had to do all the current paperwork and pay the current fees (even adjusted for inflation) he'd not have a tenth the patents he had. I can just imagine the 4 month delay when the Patent Office asks Mr. Edision to clarify the difference between his claim of a wire support for a filiment made of carbonized cotten from the previous claims of a wire inserted through the glass for the "florescent" light previously patented. And having to pay the continuing support fees to protect his patents would have bankrupted (more than it was / faster) Menlo Park. Also he is looking at innovation per billion people. More people mean more people will do simultaneous inventions like Fulton's steamboat and whathisnames and Newton's Calculus and whatshisnames (well I do know the names but you get the point).
:)
Maybe the rate of innovation has exceeded the rate that is easily understood by one man.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Remember that time in the 1900s when we considered closing the patent office because "everything had been invented" ?
In actuality, that's about the ONLY THING that can't be attributed to research from the NASA space program. An EXTRAORDINARY amount of advances and devices, from digital electronics, computer science, materials science, biomedical engineering, polymer chemistry, etc., etc., ad infinitum, stem from there. See any massive government-supported research programs on the horizon?????? See the present administration kill scientific research!!!!! 'Nuff said.
Rule No. 10
"The specification applying to the hardware must be agreed to in advance of contracting. The Skunk Works practice of having a specification section stating clearly which important military specification items will not knowingly be complied with and reasons therefore is highly recommended." (Standard specifications inhibit new technology and innovation, and are frequently obsolete.)
When things slow down, you think outside the box.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
I think his reference to aliens refers to ppl not born here .
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In reference to lower innovation, the visa workers sign Intellectual
Property statements that they lose all right to any good ideas
they come up with . So basically unless they are just feeling
giving they are better off sending encrypted e-mails of company
information back home via anonymous remailers with web-mail
The funny thing on this is, the dumb local corporations don't
understand how their product was "instantly" reverse engineered in a foreign country with no R&D path , ROFL . Essentially their VAST greed just cut their own throats
Visa workers are having a impact on innovation, because they
know they have no right to the idea, and can only hope for a
token raise for such work . Some ppl love their work and will
innovate anyways , but most ppl work so they can make a living
In other words, we have alot of corporations that setup Visas, H1-B and L1 are just two common types
To avoid the laws permitting only certain numbers new ones have
been made as well, though the L1 visa is unlimited anyways
I used to work for a few major corporations during and after the
DOT COM boom, and the number of non-citizens is up EXTREMELY in the onshore work force
When its more beneficial to ship it overseas they take that route
Which should also should be banned, and yes it is protectionism, and yes other countries have protectionistic laws too
The corporations decry that they have to hire Visa workers because
they cannot find ppl locally, but the real truth is that a Visa
worker often can be had for ALOT less salary wise, and fear
can be used to scare the visa worker to work HUGE amounts of unpaid overtime
All the places I worked for during the DOT COM boom used these tactics to line their pockets with more cash
A professor in California at UC berkley wrote a paper concerning
the Visa fraud, and how some of his citizen students who had good
grades, and good projects could not get jobs, but they students
with Visas with even LOWER performance had no trouble getting jobs
The professor asked his citizen students if they had declined jobs due to pay and 90%+ said they could not even get an interview.
This is the degree of the situation, and it is discrimination . If you need more proof of the farce, I can provide
The professor at UC berkley is Norman Mattloff, here are some of his sites
http://www.mnforsustain.org/matloff_testimony_myt
http://www.vdare.com/pb/matloff_h1b.htm
Keep in mind, even after the DOT COM bust that congress passed
to double the # of H1-B's allowed per year into the country
Basically for the purpose of greed , several 100,000 ppl are
laid off every year "effectively" to bring in cheap labor that
can be pressured with deportation back to a place they were eager
to leave in the first place
Then citizens have their taxes raised so that we can "bribe" the foreign nations with foreign aid dollars instead of spending the money here
This environment of fear and exploitation was OK'd by congress
98-1 back in 2000, so don't play partisan politics, both sides
SUCK on the issue because both sides are bought and paid for
with corporate cash
Soft money from corporations now has more say in the way our government is run than the ppl . The constitution's quote of "For the ppl, by the ppl" is a farce
The political parties pick their puppets, and the corporations dance their marionettes
We just get to vote for one puppet or the other, with a facade of concern for the plight of the working man . They should all win oscars
Peace, Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Change the last line: When there were already 20 firefighters who could do the job better than me on scene? Better for me to stay out of their way.
Though if it happened exactly as the above I'd question the sanity of someone who could fill out a college application knowing a near relative is on fire. Assuming we ignore that part though, my line fits better.
There are many things to do, but that doesn't mean I can do a good job on them all.
Inventions are the product of society as a whole, and not really the inspiration of the attributed inventor. For an invention to occur it must fit into its place in technical and social history, then at exactly the right moment two or more people will come along and do the "inventing." (Sometimes they get to share the Nobel prize; sometimes they get to argue with each other about it.) Talking about invention in terms of gross population is not really meaningful, and is a symptom of the "cult of personality" that we have created in the last hundered years or so.
If you believe that individual genius is what leads to innovation this thesis is significant and dismaying. Where did all the genii (per capita) go? If you do not think that individual genius is significant this thesis is totally irrelevant. Since I ascribe to the latter theory, I will use the thesis as further evidence that individuals just do not really matter that much. We really can just stop giving Nobel prizes and Brownie Points already.
This reminds me of some speculation on the rate of innovation in reaction to the attention Neil Gershenfeld's Fab Labs have been getting.
Fab Labs are USD$20,000 boxes of equipment that can be used, with an afternoon of training, to cook up many inventions, including basic electronics. This is the beginning of something that eventually might resemble a desktop nanofactory like this one proposed by Chris Phoenix of The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology.
In short, the premise (open for debate, at present) is that personal fabricators ("PFs") in every home could do for patents what personal computers (PCs) in every home have done for copyright, when combined with the Internet. If the tools to innovate material things were distributed to non-commerical users, the amount of non-commercial innovation increases, whether we're talking about software or gizmos. For twenty years, incumbent comemrcial patents might dominate, but once they expire, openly-licensed patents could dominate through sheer numbers.
The popularity of open source licensing has largely solved the copyright problem; there are plentiful alternatives for those who insist on software freedom, and more are arriving daily. PFs could extend this to physical inventions, as well.
Huebner's choice of "major innovations" and patents as his measures of innovation just prove his bias is slanted toward the fact that innovation is decreasing because it's concentrating along with the wealth that results from it.
The thesis is almost trivially true.
Consider someone of my grandmother's generation, who was born in 1886 and died in 1980. By the time she was my age, shortly before 1930, she had seen the creation of:
1) Heavier-than-air flight
2) The application of heavier-than-air flight to warfare
3) Commerical heavier-than-air flight
4) The airship industry
5) The mass-produced automobile
6) Radio (she was 10 when Marconi demonstrated his device in England)
7) Electrification of every-day life (Stanley's AC system for Great Barrington, MA, was installed the year she was born)
8) Commercial moving pictures
9) Audio recording technology (1887)
The laser was patented around the time I was born. The silicon transistor a decade before that. The sound barrier was broken a decade before that, more-or-less. In my lifetime we've gone to the Moon with mostly WW II technology, developed a range of really powerful applications of silicon transistors and a few applications of lasers, but relative to the masssive changes my grandmother saw in the same time-span things are pretty much the same now as when I was born.
Today, we drive cars powered by internal combustion engines, just the same as when I was born. We fly in sub-sonic jets, the same as when I was born. We watch TV and movies and listen to the radio, the same as when I was born. We power our homes using electricity mostly generated by burning fossil fuels, the same as when I was born.
Vinyl is pretty much dead, but other than that not a lot of tech has gone away in the past forty years. Mostly the technological advances have been refinements of pre-existing tech. Other than computers and software, including the internet, there have been no major technologies introduced in the past 40 years that have had more than a tiny fraction of the impact that heavier-than-air flight, the mass-produced automobile, and radio, TV and movies had on everyday life in the first 40 years of my grandmother's life.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
- "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America"
/ 104-5327902-9960761
- Mercury ion complexes added into your drinking water decreases your I.Q. instantly. : http://crashrecovery.org/Lor2_QTS_700kb_QD.mov
- Computerized T-valves were added in 2004 into the Los Angeles water supply system to remotely facilitate customized additives into the drinking water.
Public Extermination Project
http://la.indymedia.org/news/2004/08/115676.php
by Janet C. Phelan
Roberthttp://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0966707109
The more I learn the more I know there is to learn.
Not to be too far out there, but ...
... etc.
The number of seminal thinkers on planet earth at any one time has been constant in number for a while.
There are perhaps a greater number of minor innovators who build on the work of major paradigm-shifting innovators, but trailblazers have always been few.
Does mankind progress by the majority pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, or do a few avatars make a trail for others to follow and build upon?
I think the latter.
The author does seem to show that there is a growing number of people who may be considered "dead weight". This is on several levels. In addition to the major one the article points out, let me add a few others:
- Fewer companies, percentage-wise, are thinking long term. The majority just want to please Wall Street.
- Fewer are working to pay taxes, social security
- Fewer are conversant in our non-technological heritage.
I can't say I agree with you 100 percent, but regardless, that was a really good post. Mod parent up!
Think of someone with average intelligence. Now think 1/2 the world is dumber than that guy.
Are we really so arrogant as to believe that our society today is reaching the peak of human achievement?
Depends if said arrogance will obstruct research into (now) unknown fields of knowledge.
You make a good point. If someone thinks curing malaria has greater utility than, say, building online stores, she might nevertheless have the capacity and interest to do the latter, but not the former. If everyone only worked on "important things", we'd very quickly find out that we'd underestimated the importance of the rest of it.
But my analogy wasn't supposed to be about individual choices, it was supposed to be about the priorities of society as a whole. I was certainly not trying to chastize any one person for not working on malarial research.
Allow me to extend your extension to my analogy. We've got one harried firefighter rushing to put out poor little Timmy, while a whole legion of them show up to get the mayor's cat out of a tree. This situation exists because the people running the local emergency response have found it more profitable to tend to the needs of rich, well-connected individuals than to the needs of a poor millworker's kid.
I've been working under the assumption that there is nothing particularly fascinating about erectile dysfunction from a medical standpoint, that--paycheck for paycheck--most "grunt researchers" would be just as happy researching malaria, and that the skill sets needed to perform research in both areas overlap pretty well. Therefore, it is my belief that the decision to put so much research into erectile dysfunction and so little into malaria stems from the relative profitability in the eyes of bean-counters in big pharmaceutical companies.
Sorry if I caused confusion. I hope I've clarified myself.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
The closer we get to the Finish Line the harder the steps get. Any slowing is a natural result. No cause for alarm. Even tho we may -possibly- have fewer innovations, I believe the ones we do have will eclipse the early stuff because there are so many more people living today who will benefit... & the numbers benefited by every invention will be astronomically larger in use than at the start. We're constructing a scientific pyramid. A few at the top -the "icing"- will stand on the shoulders of many. This isn't cause for alarm. What we need for now is more respect for each other. We have not outgrown the need for another Edison. http://www.newpath4.com/friction_kinetic_inertia_p ower+on+the+fly_constants+of+motion.gif . By today's standards Edison seems a simpleton. By today's standards I am become a throwing star dummy. New ideas don't always come from the one you choose... perhaps because the choice wasn't yours to begin with. The spark of invention and inspiration falls wherever it decides to fall. http://free.seekon.com/CarSizeSteamEngine/. Damning the messenger is a cop out. The article referenced made mention of how fast our computers are becoming. An Anti-Gravity engine will use that speed to recover faster than Gravity. By that I mean this, that a tiny amount of produced energy ever so slightly above that of Gravity -aimed away from the Earth- if refreshed fast enough... will give us wingless levitated flight. The tiny increments of power produce an overabundance of upward force when applied as a cumulative cloud of power, the upward force overcoming the downward. Tiny hammers hit hard when applied as a continuous serial hammer. http://www.newpath4.com/newpath4%20news%20for%20yo u%20a%20new%20engine%20capable%20of%20interplaneta ry%20travel%20to%20the%20stars%20and%20beyond.htm . NASA knows of my work and webpages but they want to choose their champion. Red tape isn't as destructive as a red mind. Too bad we aren't on the same team; we would be awesome. At any rate, once there's enough flying cars blocking the extra sun radiation we will stop global warming.
my point is that while there is much to learn about superconductivity, it has been discovered. We have easily-replicated experiments that we can consistently perform; we can predict results with some accuracy. In other words, superconductivity has already been discovered (the tree); the details you mention (the branches) merely add to the precision to which we can fine tune its mechanism and commercially exploit its science.
An analogy is learning to ride a bike. Once I've learned to ride a bike, the major aspect of discovery is gone. There are minutiae (wheelies, tricks, racing, etc) - there are details, but I can now ride a bike. My point is that it might just be possible that we've discovered a good number of innovations. Our ability to fully exploit them is hindered by our engineering, which in my opinion has seriously lagged behind our ability to collect and analyze data.
un burrito me trampeó.
Darwin didn't get a business visa, he didn't even have a job. But, he was a spoiled rich kid with a lot of free time on his hands, and no playstation to interefere with his studies. Any radio frequency noise that Bell accidentally broadcast never interfered with anyone's reception. Marie Curie didn't get a permit, but she did die of luekemia almost certainly caused by her naive handling of radioactive materials. Maybe if Cook had respected the native environment, including the people, he wouldn't have been speared to death in Hawaii.
It is those very "minutia" that lead to new discoveries. For example,"total internal reflection" was discovered quite some time ago. If scientists had not then turned their attention to the minutia, they would not have then discovered "frustrated total internal reflection" and the resulting ability to mass produce sensors for biological and small particulates.
In reality there are tons of areas where even a garage setup could add to the body of scientific knowlege. Noone has exhausted the empirical study of even the most simple and well-known devices. You could spend your entire life finding new things out about transformer/inductor design, for example, if you have the creativity to conjur up some interesting configurations. It's nice to think that "oh we can just model that now" but the truth is that when you actually build a real, physical device, you end up with a bunch of interference from the effects of other physical properties. A normal engineering mindset is that these are "problems" to be "overcome" in order to distill the intrinsic effect and isolate it from the others... but it is the very interaction of the effects, for example, that make thermoacoustics work.
I attribute the lack of innovation directly to the unwillingness of the modern scientist/engineer/hacker to engage in the kind of methodical, near-brute-force searches for interesting phenomina that are neccessary. There is a focus on deciding what you want to "invent" and then engineering it. A more free-form, go-with-the-flow approach of creating something unique, studying it, and then figuring out "well, what might that be good for?" would IMHO yeild more innovation. In the end, innovation is the result of discovery, not "invention."
Of course, if you just spend a few minutes here and there of spare time on it as a fun hobby, you'll probably only end up with some silly little toys like mine, but hey, at least I have fun doing it. Most people do not have the luxury of being able to engage in "leisure science" which is a root cause of the lack of empirical study.
Someone had to do it.
First there's revolution, then, evolution, until the next revolution.
-Palal
Not meant as a personal attack, just meant to attack your point of view.
Right now we have a lot of competing theories that conform to experimental results but all describe fundamentally different universes. I believe that far from being minor details the very foundations of physics are going to be rewritten as a result of what we might learn as we are able to experiment at higher and higher energies and look further into space. The theory that is right, might be a current theory or it might not be.
From a more perfect understanding of the way the universe works will certainly come greater innovation and refinement of our technologies.
But what is left is much much more than just detail.
These are really big innovations. Just taking an existing innovation, and just putting it into everybody's hands: should count for something.
Bravo. That's why I still love Google. The established money-making infrastructure is unprepared.
This is a pretty good basic overview of how 3D scanning works. You can do laser scanning or photogrammetry, or both.
That's right. Innovation means making something completely new. A lot of people forget that. It's supposed to involve revolution, not evolution.
Americans aren't going to expend money and resources to find a "better way" to solve a problem that we solved over 50 years ago, nor should we.
If Africa were to abandon war and socialism, they could eradicate malaria in much the same way the US eradicated malaria. Then they could be wealthy enough to turn their attention toward male dysfunctions.