Slashdot Mirror
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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
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
Okay here's a simple equation for you:
Invention = (Discovery + Innovation) Therefore to more we discover the more we can innovate and invent.
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?
No, there will be one innovation that will make everything that existed before a very distant memory--the singularity and transhumanism.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
I agree. Innovation is getting slower not because people are getting dumber but because deviation from red tape results in prosecution or censure.
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.
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.
The hard problems are not being cracked.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
America (and other countries) almost need a revolution.
Almost, you say? With all this ridiculous patent crap, intellectual property, citizens suing each other or big corps for the slightest mistake, or trying to forsake all the responsibility for bad things that happen to them (McDonalds suers? Tobbaco Co. suers?) At least people still have freedom of speech, but how long will that last? How long till they sue you because some dipshit patented the metaphor you are using, or your accent (patent number 131313: Method for expressing irony using certain combinations of words), or some other such irrelevant thing? Damnit, they are patenting clicks these days! When will the people rebel? When it is too friggin late?
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
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.
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.
"the original 17 year (right?) patent limit is just too long"
The problem is more insidious than that. As long as there is no connection between patent duration, investment cost, time to develop and time to generate ROI, patents encourage investment in low or zero-cost 'inventions'. The value of the patent becomes only the monopoly, the costs to obtain the monopoly detract from ROI, and you end up with patented inventions that would have been invented even with only time-to-market incentive, as those are the most profitable and least-risk investments, with or without patents.
"I am not anti-patent"
I have become anti-patent. Now, dont get me wrong, I'm not anti-ROI, but I consider patents to fail utterly at accomplishing their intented goal, and as such they should be entirely replaced with a completely different system that rewards actual investment in R&D and risk taking.
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.
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.
Yes and No. Watch what happens to fishing industries when there is no Govt regulation, it just becomes a free for all and unfortunatly there is more people than not that have the ability to commercially fish that couldn't give a toss what a private research firm said about overfishing.
And no, I couldn't give a shit what my karma is.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
We had the capability to bring malaria under control, if not all but eliminate it.
But then, some people decided to effectively ban DDT.
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!