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Mass Innovation and Disruptive Change
bart_scriv writes "The new head of MIT's Media lab argues that societal advances, previously the domain of a small group of individuals, will now become the product of millions of people due to changes in education and technology. He also offers advice to would be start-ups and entrepreneurs, including an argument against instrumentalism: 'The successful will look for fundamental disruptive change.'" There sure do seem to be a lot of creative people doing projects on the web today. What do you folks think of this?
100% affirmative. yuppers. how could I argue the change the internet has and will make. really, how could one argue?
As much as I hate the term, blogs seem to be an opening manifestation of this. Just like there are a whole lot of people out there who can write but, up til now have had no method of publishing, there are a lot of really amazing ideas out there that just plain never get heard or implemented. Open source has changed that a bit, but I expect it to start snowballing sooner rather than later.
A blog about stuff.
but it will be the corporations who will lock it away with patents, and create laws designed to suppress the advances, even the US gov has passed over 1000! laws since 2001 restricting you from getting goverment information, you think the corps will stand by while you innovate them out of business ?
there is a revolution coming, its just not a technical one
Seems to me they're far outnumbered by the un-creative people.
Concepts like "good design" and "good programming" are skills that take training, practice and work. Woodworking tools are cheap, ubiquitous and far more capable than what was available 20, 40 or 60 years ago. Where are all the people building beautiful, elegant and functional furniture?
The new head of MIT's Media lab argues that societal advances, previously the domain of a small group of individuals, will now become the product of millions of people due to changes in education and technology.
That's funny... because it seems to me that in the last 20 years education has only gotten worse and worse.
The head of MIT's Media lab is himself specifically in that small group of individuals that is traditionally associated with societal change. And moreover he's buried far enough inside that group that I don't think he can see that America's educational infrastructure outside MIT is just plain crumbling to the point where the group of individuals equipped to change the world (or at least America) is if anything shrinking...
Right now we are going through another bubble I think with venture capital. Too many stupid ideas are getting funded. It pains me to see these new Ajax sites launched every day and to spend five seconds looking at them and know they have no chance of ever succeeding. At least they fail cheaply.
I think the bottleneck right now is much more on the creativity and business side than it is on the hardware/software side. If you want to be a tech entrepreneur than learn business skills, you can always find someone to help you with hardware and software. Of course you need to understand what is possible, be able to tell the difference between a good and bad programmer, etc.
is that really your ph # or is it aunt Sally?
Isn't this coming from the director of the laboratory whose only successful prodcut is a glowing green ball that changes colors with the stock market?
Seriously, what kind of disruptive innovation has ever come from the MIT Media Lab? Companies have put money in there for years and gotten nothing in return.
By the way, looking for disruptive vs. incremental technology changes is complete and utter nonsense. Entrepreneurs look for where they can make money. There's plenty of money to be made in all kinds of places in our economy, ranging from mom and pop restaurants all the way up to the latest and greatest gizmo. Game changing technology might be interesting or it might not. The road is littered with companies who changed the game and then were crushed by other players.
Money is made with smart market analysis that asks what do people want and how much are they willing to pay. Throw in a way to keep competitors out, and you have the beginnings (but not everything) of a good startup whether you make new fangled ball bearings or web pages. MIT Media Lab not required.
There sure do seem to be a lot of creative people doing projects on the web today. What do you folks think of this?
I think that looking where everyone else is looking is the surest way not to find disruptive change. If you want to invent a disruptive technology, the last place to look is where everyone else is.
I don't buy his argument. Very few people actually create change in the world. The rest just ride their coat-tails. Smart people are internally motivated - they would succeed in any environment - internet or not. Look at most source projects. Only 1 or 2 people do 99% of the work. All the web brings is a lot of slack-jawed wanna-be gawkers and mediocrity.
That's exactly what the terrorists are striving for. This guy needs to have the NSA perform a few anal probes on him in Guantanamo. He is obviously aligned with the Axis of evil.
There have always been a lot of creative people doing projects on the Web. Ideally, the Web is the province of Creative People, delivering their creative goodness directly to the consumer and bypassing the middlemen, and the tech stuff is transparent, in the background. Nobody goes to a show to see the stage crew, although we know they are there -- somewhere -- and respect their contribution.
Of course, the geeks built the Web, and were the first to know it was there and what it was capable of. As a result, the content of the early Web tended to be content of interest to geeks. That changed, happily, until the geeks developed streamlined means to manage and post new content, giving birth to 'blogs,' which are again dominated by geek topics. This too, is leveling.
Now, an awful lot of creative people like to call themselves "geeks" cuz it's (still) trendy, and an awful lot of geeks like to call themselves "creative" cuz they believe it will get them laid. But the hardcore shakers and shamen in each camp know enough not to dilute their efforts by dabbling; they just count on each other to work their respective money-attracting mojo.
is this dumb enough?
http://www.theexplodingwhale.com/
It may be easier for the average guy to write his own song, blog, or whatever, but that doesn't mean that he is contributing to societal advance. Just because it is easier to distribute ideas doesn't mean that it is easier to come up with *good* ideas. If anything I'm worried about all the smart, dedicated, creative people in the world being drowned out by all the morons and hacks, who vastly outnumber them, but in the past were kept quiet to some degree...
What you have to remember is that good ideas are not distributed evenly. Some people are vastly smarter than others. Vastly more creative than others. Vastly *better* than others by any way you mean to quantify better. You may have access to the modern equivalent of the printing press, but that doesn't mean you can publish the modern equivalent of the Principia Mathematica (either one).
Blogs are an excellent example of this. Blogs are horrible. They allow people who are too lazy or too ignorant even to build their own website the ability to spread their tawdry and mindless blatherings to the rest of the world. People talk about blogs supplanting traditional news media in some ways, but this is true only because traditionally news media has become so watered down and useless that just about any form of media that doesn't talk to you like a child could supplant it. Blogs are *not* an improvement over a good newspaper... it is just that good newspapers are hard to find these days (the seattle times in pretty good though).
Excuse my ignorance, but how is this an argument against instrumentalism? I mean, from a scientific POV at least, that means ideas needn't be true so much as useful at explaining things, right? Does "anti-instrumentalism" require objective truth? Or does it demand that ideas not explain anything?
.nosig
You are almost guaranteed to *become* wealthy in our society if you are genuinely smart and hardworking, and of course, if they care about such things. When I say something like this, people often get a little pissy and say something like, "how come *I'm* not wealthy then." Heh... well... funny story behind that.
Now if it were only easier for smart people to get laid... Since smart people can get money fairly easily, and a lot of people would trade just about anything for enough money... perhaps some mechanism for trading money for sex could be developed? Then *everyone* would be happy. This is all just speculation.
Bog business and big government fund a lot of the innovation in our society... I would direct your attention to the glowing block sitting in front of your face, and the internet it is connected to.
That's not to say that individuals aren't the *most* important factors in innovation. You need smart people. It is just my experience that smart people either get government funding, or start their own business.
Disruptive change never comes about via the masses. Large groups of people thinking collectively (at best) move slowly; their ideas evolve and change over time. They have to be convinced over large spans of time to accept ideas. The masses do not innovate; they smash ideas down and then accept them.
What the head of MIT's Media lab should have been saying is that there are a lot more people on the planet than there were before. With increased numbers over the whole and a constant percentage of "smart people," it would appear that smart people are on the rise.
In the overpopulation of our planet, we are witnessing a lot of smart people being born. We are also witnessing a lot of stupid people being born. Although there may be millions of intelligent humans out there now, there are still billions of stupid ones.
The group of individuals making the change is as small as ever..in terms of how much of the population they take up. And with more stupid people running around, change will happen just as slowly as before (try convincing billions that you are right!)
One last thought - Those making the changes have always wanted disruptive change, but look at the results of their desires. Communism would have been a massively disruptive change (on paper), but once it was implemented, people were able to smash it back down into the monarchy they were accustomed to.
I think the article referrer (Zonk) and Dr. Moss are speaking about different things (and perhaps this is why so many /.ers disagree).
I believe Dr. Moss is referring to researchers (primarily in academia) and is encouraging them to do more groundbreaking research (you may waste years on what end up being a dead end) instead of incremental research (which is an easy paper mill).
Most of what passes for 'creative' on the Web is actually just re-inventing the wheel, poorly. Taking desktop applications and putting an AJAX interface on them and running them on a web server. They're slower, take control away from the user, and have worse user interfaces and features. But hey, it's on the Web!!! Web based word processing! Web based calendars! Oooh!
All disruptive change will lead to, is a reversal of those changes. Instead of trying to change, we should take a more conservative approach. Most people are not looking forward to change.
I tried reading the article looking for the relevance of mere numbers in changing the optimal size of a disruptive team. I also tried looking up "instrumentalism". Making sense isn't real high on the list of priorities here is it?
Seastead this.
The goal should NOT be disruptive technology. Disruptive technology will only lead to blowback, as many people will blame the internet, and science for change, and as a result the internet and science will face new laws to control them.
Ultimately, disruptive technologies does harm to the technology and to science itself. If you want to promote science, do so in the right way, promote science in a culturally sensitive way which respects conservative values. If you promote science in an overly disruptive way, all that will be accomplished by this is, well, you'll make technology into the enemy.
Honestly, I like technology, but I don't think you should focus on "disruption" as the goal with technology. Technology can be used to promote order and structure. Technology can be used to enhance security. Technology can be used to promote conservative values. Technology can be used in a non partisan way. The one mistake you don't want to make, if any of you read Linus's last posting, is you don't want to turn science and technology into activism. I think it is a huge mistake to do this. Innovation is good, but innovate in ways which society can accept and not in a way in which you'll make yourself into a tech-activist. If technology and science becomes activism, then how exactly is this good for us internet users? I like technology, but I agree with Linus, activism is not a good idea. Technology must be non partisan.
As the poster says: "There sure do seem to be a lot of creative people doing projects on the web today."
But, dammit, I'm tired of all this "creativity". I would appreciate someone yoking some intelligence to it as well.
Case in point, BoingBoing. An amusing "blog", yes. But if one of the admins says their friends (or vice versa) are "geniuses" (or any variant thereof) again, I'm going to....
I don't know. But you get my point: Creativity without more than a smidge of intelligence == 4th grade fingerpainting.
The guru on disruptive technology seems to be Clayton M. Christensen. He is Harvard prof. who has written several books including "The Innovator's Dilemma". His version of disruptive technology is that established companies have a hard time taking advantage of it. It creeps in at the edges of the market and by the time the established companies view it as a threat, it's too late.
The other thing about change is that it is usually driven from the top or from the bottom. It usually doesn't come from the mushy middle. For example, the things kids wear have been influenced by what is being worn in the poor neighborhoods of the inner city.
So, is there change happening on the web. Of course. There are two ingredients necessary. You need an innovator and you need followers. The one is as necessary as the other. So, to those who think the majority of people on the web aren't creative, I say phooey. The creative process is happening and it is being driven by a huge number of people.
And yes, some organizations are going to have a hard time dealing with it.
The more disruption you do with this technology, the more laws will be created to reverse the disruption. You can have any technology you want, and it's not going to change that fact that unless the internet promotes conservative values, and respects the fact that people don't want disruption, then the result will be a less free internet.
If your goal is to have more freedom, you'll want to govern the internet properly yourself, otherwise the internet will be governed the way everything else is governed. There was once a time when television and radio was open like this too, there was a time when technology was like this in many industries, but when a technology is free and people abuse this freedom to "disrupt" and act as activists, the result is that the technology itself becomes the enemy.
I think this is a mistake. I don't think MIT has the ability to create laws which govern the internet, and honestly I don't think any of these will matter. All of this disruptive technology will be worthless, and it will simply piss people off.
As part of a team engaged in a disruptive Open Source hardware project (http://reprap.org/ I have to say that the guy is almost right. Yes, advances come from large teams, but they need a small, dense and enthusiastic core to start the ball rolling.
:v)
What is essential for a project to spread, other than being useful to the users, it the ability to replicate it on demand. With software, this is pretty easy. With hardware it is currently more difficult, but we're fixing that.
What astounds me is the inability of the commercial world and economists in particular to recognise that there are ways of creating disruptive technologies without being limited by the need to make a profit. I can see a two-teir world developing before my eyes, with the commercial sector deriding anything that is not profitable on the grounds that it'll never spread. Software is so far the only exception to this pseudo-rule, but within 2 years the same will start to apply to hardware as multi-material 3D printers become available for under $1,000.
Vik
Wealth has little to do with intelligence and hard work. Yes it takes intelligence and hard work to be successful at anything, but being wealth takes instinct, the abiltiy to organize yourself and others, the ability to plan and have a strategy, and the social skills to have the friendships and connections you require to actually put plans into action.
Wealth is anything but guarenteed, and if wealth were guarenteed then we'd have a lot more wealthy people than we have. Wealth is not guarenteed, nor is it supposed to be. Wealth is something which we compete for, on every level, and this does not just mean on the level of academics. Going to MIT does not guarentee you'll become as rich as Bill Gates. Many models and movie stars become wealthy with no intelligence at all. Many people win the lottery. Many people become wealth on instinct, they just know how to make money. Many people become wealthy because they know how to take what they want and ask for what they don't really need. Then you have the rare few, who actually study their way to wealthy, impressing their boss, and asking for raises until slowly they get given wealth.
If you have learned anything outside the classroom, it's that wealth is not something you get by just asking for it. Everyone wants wealth, and only a few people get it. Millions of intelligent people never become billionaires, and chances are you won't either.
I innovate, you innovate, we all innovate. Most of us here at Slashdot are intelligent. That is not the point. The point is, innovation and intelligence is useless if you don't give your ideas to the right people, and have access to people who have the money to fund your ideas. You could have the greatest most profitable idea in the last 100 years, and it will be useless because you don't have anyone to give the idea to, while someone else who happens to have a rich cousin, who who happens to know the CEO of IBM, might be able to take their idea to the right people and be given access to the kinds of capital required to start a business.
Ideas and capital are not always one in the same. Businesses are started on capital, not on ideas. I don't know if anyone here has taken an economics course, but ideas can be purshased, while capital has to be found.
There must be a dozen people here posting half-considered arguments about how the internet just enables mediocre people to blather, and doesn't do anything for the gods who walk among us. I'm hoping these are very cleverly ironic, rather than self-defeating.
The trends say otherwise. Glenn Reynold's new book, "An Army of Davids", is a good treatment of the subject. Here's my take:
The Industrial Revolution was characterized by economies of scale. Large steam engines, huge factories, massive capital expenditures, etc. But this is the Information Age, which doesn't need economies of scale. Small is better, and the individual is rising in importance. The two centuries that gave us collectivism, groupthink and the centralization, are giving way to a time of individualism and decentralization.
Software is an example. The old industrialist model of software development is to have rows and rows of programmers sitting in cubicles, each working on one small part of the whole. The model promotes outsourcing to the cheapest possible programmer with the required skillset. But that model is rapidly fading away, to be replaced with small teams and distributed collaboration. In contrast to the article's premise, innovation in software is routinely performed by individuals.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Resist the current temptation to make incremental changes to attract funding. It might get you off the ground,
Is this just another version if the new economy of the 90's? When we all threw out the basic laws of conservation, and thought that money could be grown from nothing. That we could totally recreate the economy in a new image, one in which customers would magically appear, and profits would be generated by the invisible elf hand, as the customers themselves got everything for less than cost? Incremental changes have always been very profitable, and major changes are seldom so.
Companies are now paying attention to some of the major socioeconomic problems in the First and the Third World.
In as much as companies must work in those places, and customers do not seem to want the worker in those places to be excessively abused. However, it still appears that the oil companies in Nigeria facilitate oppression, and it does not seem we mind so much as not to use oil, Google has no problem censoring material for the chinese people. Just like imperialism, the current engagement is more a matter of cheap material and labor than solving socioeconomic problems.
We will undergo another revolution when we give 100 million kids a smart cell phone or a low-cost laptop
I will tell you what happens when 100 million kids have a smart phone. They surf porn in class and chat with their friends rather than learning. But this is no different form pencil and paper. A kid can take notes or draw naked pictures. Their choice. Unless the smart phone or laptop meets a stated and funded objective, it is a distraction.
We think of games as a way to kill time, but in the future I think it will be a major vehicle for learning.
This is just scary. Only the most undereducated or unsophisticated person thinks of a game as a way to kill time. Games are, and always has been, the primary form of socialization. The game teaches the kid, in a safe environment, the rules and expectations of society. Think of the games that small children play and the rules and expectations of those games. Follow rules. Wait your turn. Effort produces reward. As people gets older the games can help them release the animal desires though simulation of socially unacceptable behaviors. Games are our primary form of education, and, often, are our primary form of testing new technologies.
The overall thrust might be correct. Technology often allows more people to participate in the development of new technology. The cheap book helped people educate themselves. The cheap computer allows more of us to create models that help other work more efficiently. The technology of standard measures helps us do research. But in the end, it is still a few small groups of people that refines the technology that the larger society creates, and often a single group that wins in the marketplace.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Why do you assume innovation is good and big business is bad?
Innovation can be bad and big business can be good, it certainly depends on the businesses and innovations we are talking about here.
Innovation is good or bad, big business is good or bad. What matters is profits, if your innovation is profitable, it will create big businesses, and it will make many people rich, this is good. If your business and innovation sucks then it will be small, and this is bad.
IBM is a big business, and because of IBM you have the open source movement. Google is a big business, and because of Google, Firefox is being funded. Microsoft is a big business, and because of Microsoft we have the Xbox and PC gaming. What is more important is how profitable these big businesses are, and how many jobs they provide. If they provide you with a job, or with stock, then big businesses is good. If they won't hire you and they arent selling stock, then we have something to debate. I suggest you just buy stock in the big businesses. Buy stock in Microsoft and Google, buy stock in IBM, buy stock in all the big businesses that profit.
...the cost of entrance into that club is less and less having anything to do with possessing a degree from MIT or Stanford.
This is not going to happen. Many people believe that the world is way over populated, and you go on to say that because we have 6 billion people that we can afford, energywise, to put them all online? Be realitic.
While I don't know what will happen in the future, it looks like we don't have 6 billion jobs, and with computers coming, I don't think we will ever have 6 billion jobs. Computers and AI, thise reduces jobs, the machines replace people and replace jobs. So what is your point? What do we need these 6 billion people for? When you can figure this out then post.
It may be easier for the average guy to write his own song, blog, or whatever, but that doesn't mean that he is contributing to societal advance.
Actually, I think it does in fact, help society. By being a basic content creation machine. Maybe you, or even 99% of the people out there hate my music, but that still leaves one percent, which could potentially be, with the numbers we are talking about, could be over a hundred thousand, and that's at a 1% share. Please take my "facts" witha grain of salt, just trying to make a point.
I'm not even including content creators out there who might not like the music themselves, but will use other's content to create interpretations of their own music.
"Just because it is easier to distribute ideas doesn't mean that it is easier to come up with *good* ideas."
No it is easier... just much harder to come up with an original idea.
"If anything I'm worried about all the smart, dedicated, creative people in the world being drowned out by all the morons and hacks, who vastly outnumber them, but in the past were kept quiet to some degree..."
Define "moron" or "hack" with out being objective.
You mention blogs in your post. I am a "blogger" but I do so for my own reasons, to be honest, I could give a dog's drool what you think. I think what you were trying to say is that you're scared that the "noise" will drowned out the "signal". I have a piece of advice for you, which IMHO should be the first "Web Commandment(TM)".
Treat the internet like a library. When you goto a library, what do you do when you want to find out information about a subject you have never studied before. You goto a librarian. Even if the librarian has no prior knowledge they can point you to books that are popular or to reference manuals.
In above just use this for the web.
Your argument holds no weight as it's filled with:
Quit spreading FUD -jijin
This is like art without talent. Their needs to a fundamental skill behind development or else their isn't much chance for it catching on.
Who wants to follow a badly conceived amateur? Learn the basics before trying to play expert. It is like consulting without experience.
I find it hard to believe that blogs have influenced the signal-to-noise ratio in a positive way, and I wouldn't be surprised if they have influenced negatively. Blogs simply provide more information to sift through; you do find gems, but you can do an awful lot of work to find them.
I'm going to make up numbers here, but the idea holds: 90% of people think they're good at something when in reality, only 10% are. (I believe there is a statistic in Code Complete about how many programmers think they can get away with flowcharts when few actually can.) Therefore, when I'm searching the web, I get results of the 90% when I only want the 10%. I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers are closer to 99% and 1%...
The bottom line is that blogs aren't going to help a whole lot until it's quite easy to sift the pearls from the sand, and current "popularity search engines" don't cut it. More information isn't very useful unless you can actually find it!
"Meme theory shows that the more information we all know, the more progress will occur. ...
We can think of the human brain as a computer: a meme processing unit (MPU). Most of what everyone thinks everyday has already been thought of, but, occasionally, a few memes come together in a way that has not yet been processed and progress occurs. Progress never comes in huge chunks, only tiny advancements at a time. Like coral, humanity's knowledge continually grows off the existing base.
Now, if you think of humanity as a distributed meme processing machine - a supercomputer of interconnected MPUs spanning the globe - then the more we know as a species, the higher the probability of new discoveries being found. The more discoveries we find, most often, the better off we all are."
-excerpt from u4Ya.ca
1 voice in a sea of voices
A century ago people basically lived in one place their entire lives. Anyone could vouch for you so you didn't need a degree to get a job. Then with the rise of transportation, our new mobility outstripped our identity technology. Thus colleges stepped up as the new middleman to vouch for people. Basically, we regressed from networks back to hierarchies (networks are the most advanced form of social organization).
But now with the Internet we are basically all connected, so it's basically like living in the same little village for your entire life. Especially since a record of what you say and do is kept on your home page, so you don't really need a third party to vouch for you. I can send off an email to the CEO of almost any company I'd ever want to talk to or work for.
Also, the fact that as credentialism replaced learning as the reason why most kids go to college, the quality of education greatly suffered. Now it's way more efficient to just sit in a library and read books than it is to go to lectures. I learn more reading a book or two that I did from most of my classes at Cornell, especially since colleges use extremely low quality textbooks most of the time. Some of the textbooks they used at Cornell had advertising in them! Which wouldn't have pissed me off nearly as much if they weren't not only completely useless, but also filled with scores of blatant errors.
Like first off, from what I've seen out there most VC's wouldn't recognize a free market if it ripped them a new one. How about skipping the VC's.
... good ole fasioned Gold is disruptive!
Second off, copyrights are dead. Anything that approaches that cause will be a worthy endeavor.
Third off, government backed moneys are going to die over the next few years (and all the programs, bonds, and promises that go along with it). Position yourselves to deal with that, and especially position yourselves in those old "barbaric" precious metals. How Ironic
Fourth off, "ownership" of the spectrum is also going to die. Anything that approaches that will also be a good endeavour.
Fith off, university and public education is going to die (probably arround the time the government money systems die). Get ready to deal with it.
Sixth off, while patents won't die as soon as copyrights, and their death will likely be much more violent, anything that moves assembly, invention, and manufacturing out of the corporate world and into the home will be a good thing in that direction.
Once connected to the internet, people are only a growth medium for the reproduction of ideas.
Once the ideas were spread by word of mouth, very slowly. Methods for transferring ideas faster came out, but they were largely one-way. The result is that certain ideas were able to dominate others simply because they were the sorts of ideas that appealed to publishers or television producers.
Now everyone can pass their ideas back and forth very quickly. You put your idea about people being useless up, I respond by saying that people are raw intellectual material. Millions of these interactions a day allow us to transform culture at a lightning pace. A list of 80s fads and a list of the fads of the past two years would probably be about the same length.
It's hard to say for sure that this increase in thinking and the universality of this communication will have any concrete benefit, but in the past every step in this direction has been significant.
As for jobs, once the computers fully replace people for the purposes of work, we won't have to work anymore at all. This seems obvious, but many people miss it. The major issue is the painful transition when some people still have jobs and others have been replaced.
Frankly, I think the most significant thing undergraduate degrees teach people in preparing to enter nearly any field is how to deal with a hostile, overbearing, inefficient bureaucracy infested with sadistically egotistical ladder-climbing prats and their gaggles of sniveling sycophants.
In that sense, there is some worth to going to one of the cushier schools, since they are usually the worst cases and you're likely to come out with a nearly superhuman ability to navigate mountains of b.s. that would suffocate a mere mortal.
And you touched on why this is so. As technology increases, demand for raw materials and the energy needed to work those into products then to power them then increases.
It just plain isn't there right now. All the increased demand will do is drive up the prices and make it so the already well off can continue that way. You can go right down the list of raw materials and it is getting harder and harder to extract them. I'll cite two of them , both critical for modern tech advances. Look at the battle right now over silicon chips or silicon to make solar panels. Solar panels were a better deal two years ago then they are now, and efficiency increases are not keeping pace. Too much demand, not near enough supply is the problem. And energy is in even worse shape. We aren't hitting oil gushers anymore, they have to inject water or CO2 to get them to flow. Mexico is just reached peak, north sea has hit peak, US is well past peak. And demand is set to just explode during the next decade, like 3 or 4 times current demand, yet we just are not finidng the "superfields" that we need, that we relied on during the 70s,80s and 90s. they just aren't being found.. Look at world wide demand for oil right now, are prices dropping because "increased demand and market forces" just makes more oil happen? Nope, prices are a lot higher than they were a decade ago, and most refinery and pipeline and tanker capacity is already maxed out. All the oil rigs are out there working, all the drilling rigs are working, and they aren't making enough to drop oil prices back down, because it doesn't exist in the forms and quantities we used during the big growth phase of the 20th century. It's just...gone.
There are going to be a lot of tech and food hungry people but only enough to sustain maybe 1/2 of them at the rate things are going. This is coming very soon to a planet near you. We could double the efficiency of everything already made and the things to come, and there still won't be enough. Yes, technically the planet is "supporting" 6 billion people right now, and how many of them are not even close to being what would be considered poverty level in western nations? This isn't a case of the planet "supporting" 6 billion, this is around 3 billion barely managing to survive with the specter of drought/famine/disease/war etc always right in their face. Let alone getting them all cars and iPods and nintendos and houses with air conditioning and big screen TVs and various et cetera that a lot of us take for granted.
Of the other three billion, only one billion can be considered to be living in relative middle class status, the other two are still pretty bad off.
There's really only a shade over a billion people on the planet living more or less cool now, call it a billion and half to be overly generous, all the others are *wanting to* of course, but where are the resources for that? We're as close to being maxed out as you can get for most things.
I am afraid that what the world might get to enjoy in the way of universal high tech in the next generation will be dwindling resources put to advanced weaponry to fight over shrinking resource reserves. We needed a global manhattan project 30 years ago to develop alternative resources, for just about everything, and we should have been using the cheap raw materials and cheap energy that still existed then to accomplish that goal, and it just plain didn't happen. We wasted that time and opportunity because there wasn't any immediate bottom line payback, nothing for politicians and nothing for big business. So it didn't happen. We got academic "studies" and political committees mostly out of it.
The planet has been eating what seed corn there is ever since then, that's why a lot of these areas of the world that still have the resources all seem to be "contentious". This is only going to get worse as demand goes up, not better.
I don't wish it so, far from it, but this is just observable data. The "market" is not a panacea, in fact, the "mar
How about altering the prevailing paradigm?
Did this guy step off the shuttle bus from 1998?
tone
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I see it as strictly a big company game. Sony could pull it off. Perhaps Toyota. Who else?
Notice that I've picked a difficult point to argue. I'm trying to say that some disruptive changes need big companies to see the development through to completion. I've tried to give an example, but disruptive changes are always controversial before they happen, so you might not believe in the example I've given. If the next disruptive change is not the replacement of business airtravel by telepresence what will it be? I don't see any reason to write off big companies and their corporate development labs.
I wonder if we went to the same school? I had almost the exact same experience/impression from my undergrad program.
I agree that the 4 year technical degree is starting to become a bit vocational, and that's why I went to graduate school. Getting in to a top graduate program was the reward for all of the research and extra classes.
However, when looking for a job after graduate school (where my GPA sucked because I took what I was interested in, rather than what would get me a good GPA) the school discouraged putting a GPA on a resume. It was a great litmus test for me when an employer asked for a GPA anyway, and didn't ask any technical questions - I immediately knew that HR was lazy, and that leads to all sorts of other problems (B players hire C players and so on...).
I finally find an innovative idea that no one's done before, and some guy at MIT just blurts it out to millions of people one day. Great.
I think it"s a good concept and that the philisophy is right because there are alot of talented people out there who are just now showing off there abilities. Much of the talent is forced to work on company projects and not wha tthey have in there heart to want to design.
Britney Simpson
Rosalind W. Picard, one of Media Lab's prominent research scientists, is regularly cited as a supporter of intelligent design. The New York Times writes about the Anti-Evolution Petition that "advocates who have pushed to dilute its teaching have regularly pointed to a petition signed by 514 scientists and engineers", including " Rosalind W. Picard , director of the affective computing research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology".
Can Rosalind Picard please explain how teaching Intelligent Design is good for the educational system? Is she hoping to secure a big fat grant for her Affective Computing Research Group from the Discovery Institute?
Wikipedia's Discovery Institute says:
The MIT Media Lab is often criticised for being more interested in securing corporate funding than having any scientific rigor and or intellectual seriousness. If Rosalind Picard is such a rigorous scientist who supports Intelligent Design, then why doesn't she submit a proposal to the Discovery Institute to do some actual research to prove her irrational beliefs?
Knock Knock.
Who's there?
Intelligent Designer.
Intelligent Designer who?
God.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
"Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, the theory goes, and they will eventually produce prose the likes of Shakespeare."
Yes, but it may take a little time...
...omphaloskepsis often...
School is no longer a place of learning. It is a business. Church is no longer a place of spiritual revival. It is a business. Anyone whose idea of merging these two entities the same way two businesses combine in a corporate merger, is leading that school and church are the same thing and therefore violate church and state.
For some reason both of these "businesses" no longer support a need for math, science, English, history, or liberal arts.
They only want to tell you everything about math that allows you to make money...for someone else.
They only want to tell you everything about science that does not involve the idea of evolution, chemistry, or physics. ("Christains don't believe in gravity.") They want you to follow the ideas and the believes that were instilled during a time when their was no sciene because sciene involves individual thinking, which just about every fundie xian believes that the idea fo individiual thought leads to "delinquency" and "sin". If you've played the Religion Game, reguardless if you are Christian, Muslim, or Jew, you've no doubted have been told everything that you do is a sin and an even greater sin if you do not "donate [money] to the church" or "Read [books other than] the Bible"
Then there is that emphasis on English. Rather than encouraging kids to read the classics and mondern literature, they want you to read artzy crap that does not generate ideas based on these novels unless it is a book that is marketable enought to be made into a movie. (See the last paragraph and refer to Harry Potter for example.) Then they teach grammar in such a way that you have the Grammar Nazis who troll forums correcting and scoulding people for making typos.
Here is the real kicker: HISTORY. I must have been forced this Anne Frank crap in the seventh grade, eighth grade, nineth grade, tenth grade, eleventh grade, twelfth grade, and freshman year of college. I do not deny that the holocaust existed however, I've I have to read the freaking diary of Anne Franke one more time I will go postal! What about people who WEREN'T Jewish or atleast Jewish Scientists (i.e. Einstien). Why can't we study about relevant history, like this New World Order and New American Century that these half-assed history teachers are trying to force down our throats? I've come to the realization that history is bias. If anything it is not history at all, especially when they pull this "Israel should be a country." I don't think so, Rabbi! If I want to be taught history, I want it to NOT be kosher! I want to hear stories about how America f***ed up more than it succeeded. We are NOT the greatest country on this planet nor are we going to be here forever. Look at Rome for example. Look at howmany dynasties China went throught.
If I want to know something I want to learn about it! Not the soft happy stories, but the cold aweful truth!
I'm tired of been treated like a ewe in a flock of sheep or some drone that obeys a queen in a hive. I am a human being damnit!
If you want to be creative, you have to self educate yourself. Know the truth and know yourself!
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
Yes, I agree, I hate that line of thinking. Latent within this is the self-congratulation on being a member of the truly talented .001 percent.
First off, crappy, mediocre productions are of worth because they take a certain role in a chain of conversations. The end of those chains of conversations are those amazing results from the few, the proud, the caffeinated, and the lucky.
Secondly, these crappy little products represent tiny triumphs of the human spirit. If you don't think the human condition is illuminated by such little sparks, and probably *mostly* illuminated by such sparks, you are at best an elitist creep; at worst a nazi.
And yes, I'm being an anonymous coward today; I don't like debating when I'm really mad.
AC
Frankly, I haven't seen too much useful, or incredible stuff come out of The Media Lab. I read the book by Stewert Brand, and he totally missed the Internet. Here is an institution concentrating on computers and people and media and they completely missed the Internet revolution.
Yeah, I need more electronic ink.
Ummm, you're an undergrad in college, aren't you?
(hint: you'll grow out of it. just try to keep alive in the meantime)
The ability for one person to more is good for the whole (especially if it does not cause physical harm). For this ability to be spread amoungst everyone is good for the whole. As for the mediocre comments, no one put it better than einstein: "The majority of the stupid is invincible and guaranteed for all time. The terror of their tyranny, however, is alleviated by their lack of consistency." -- Albert Einstein
...it's not the first time in history that it's happened. Massive disruption in the way knowledge is constructed occurred in Ancient Greece with the transition from primary orality in the face of the phonetic alphabet, and again in the 15th century with the transition from the manuscript culture to the print culture. Western society is again in the midst of a massively disruptive transition that began with the introduction of the telegraph (marking the transition from print to electric communication) and will end roughly 150 years from now. By that time, our society will quite likely be regarded as quaint, and somewhat primitive.
A much more detailed examination of this is blogged here, with the full text of the lecture available for download.
I'm basing that on the commodities markets, published reserve numbers,then the 8revised* numbers, several of the sisters have had to go back and drop what they were claiming previously, industry analysts opinions, and other such assorted data I've socked away in the biodrive over many years now. It's my best futurist extrapolation.
I think we screwed the pooch and waited too long to get things sorted out and fixed, by roughly 3 decades.
Like I said previously, I don't *want* to have that opinion, but every time I look at it, that's what comes up. The numbers won't jive. I don't think drunk arthur andersen accountants could make the numbers jive.
There ain't enough "stuff".
I'm not saying we can't produce some amazing tech, we obviously do, just we are running out of the stuff we need to produce amazing tech, *enough for everyone*, and now the secret is out, and all the 6 billion want a big chunk.
We are still far away from universal replicators on the atom or molecule scale, which is what it would take to pull this off. And we don't have backyard Mr.Fusion yet, either. We need both those things to do this task.
And, more or less, it DID start heavily going downhill a hundred years ago when serious mass production and assembly lines began. Amazing new business practices, lead to huge tech advances and short term wealth production and enjoyment all over, and equally amazing resource depletion. All of that is true facts. The 20th century was built on amazing cheap resources, amazing cheap energy costs, and zero environmental awareness almost. All of that has now come to bite us, soon hard, the first nibbles we are feeling now from that beast.
Hubert's peak is *real*, it happened exactly around when he said it would with the US, and chances are very good it will happen internationally as well. It's just..numbers. It isn't rocket surgery.
I am a BIG alternative technology/energy proponent, I am one of only maybe at best a few dozen slashdotters who actually own solar PV and use it. I encourage others to use the alternatives, but I tell you, it is worse than getting linux on the desktop when it comes to adoption rates. It's much easier for "the market" to sell big screen plasma TVs to most people, because they just will not, can not, or aren't able to see coming serious resource depletion, because most of them aren't looking and won't want to deal with it..it's frightening to contemplate, so they "don't believe it". NO ONE asks "what is the energy payback scheme" for their big screen plasma Tvs, or new gaming rigs, etc. but, they use resources to build, finite ones for the most part, and resources to run, finite sources for the most part. That's what most people care about, the "right now this second" deal. Ten twenty thirty years down the road is equal to infinity, it's *guaranteed* procrastination.
I just use data, clunky old plain jane science, boring numbers, simple graphs, etc. I mean, EEK! The other is more a cult belief system, near as I can see.
I look around and see the resources going into anything *but* for 99% of the population. Most everyone is cruising on "business as usual" when the resource peaks or near peaks are right at hand, and YEP, I think it's damn **&^%%$ scary because all the warning sirens are going off, the data is there to see, some big names even try to say it out loud, but they get drowned out by "business as usual"--for now anyway..
I remember putting gas in my first car at twelve cents and tax a gallon. I also remember ten dollars a gallon during the OPEC embargo. I remember just last year watching prices jump a buck in one week after katrina.
Shift happens
I am now reminded of these things called "big wars" and places like the middle east where an area as large as Indiana holds 1/2 the remaining light sweet crude that is not that bad energy wise to get extracted.
Shift happens sometimes. Planetary
Sorry. Didn't read the entire article, but c'mon...
(On the positive side, and FWIW, the only time I saw a working NeXT box was at the Media Lab...aound '93.)
The successful will look for fundamental disruptive change. So, would melting the polar ice caps be considered sucessful? I'll start a company to do just that, and if you want to join, I can also give you a great deal on a bridge...
How to enable garbage collection on a system without protected memory: #define malloc() ((void *) rand())
Aha!
..."
"Arise, you prisoners of starvation!
Arise, you wretched of the earth!
As time goes on, it gets harder and harder for a single person, or a small closed group to invent anything.
The number of patents being applied for over the last few decades indicates this trend...we are simply running out of things its possible to invent in isolation.
However...as humans, we have something big and powerfull that not only reverse's the trend, but can send humanity flying forward at an expotentialy increaseing speed.
The internet links people from accross the world, exchangeing ideas at a rate of minutes, when just a hundred years ago, the ideas wouldnt have been exchanged at all.
For every problem in the world, there is a good chance someone has a solution.
The internet can help bring those together.
Billions of people contributing to an overall hive-mind, collective knowledge and inteligence being used for the common good.
The internet in its current form does this quite inefficiantly though.
Its a random, unorganised mess.
To truely speed up "mass innovation" we need a semantic database of knowledge, and a semantic database of ideas (or "memes").
These things would have to be made as easy as google is, in order to get the max number of people to contribute to them. (I am thinking of a friendly flow chart of meme dependances)
Wikipedia should that, on average, people supply accurate information.
As long as its weighted right, with correct voteing, a semantic network can have the same level of success.
Every idea, every proposal, every thing scribbled on the back of a coaster...they all could be usefull to somebody somewhere.
~Darkflame (at) Gmail.com
That would rule out invading Iraq then?
It's not a case that everyone needs to be rich, or wants to be rich, but you certainly want to be rich, and the majority of this 6 billion wants to be rich. If you think the world still works the way it did the last century you are wrong. We are in a globalized world now, where everyone wants to live just like you do. They want to have medicine when they get sick, they want good food, they want clean water, and this requires money.
If you want to make people more useful, create more jobs, it's all about the economy. If you sit around saying we know what to do with 6 billion people and you don't create the jobs, then obviously we don't know what to do with 6 billion people until we have at least 6 billion jobs. We won't have 10 billion jobs for a long time.
We could have 6 billion programming jobs, if computers do not learn to automate themselves. We could have 6 billion high tech jobs, or 6 billion jobs in medicine, or 6 billion jobs in new industries not yet invented, but we absolutely will not have 6 billion service jobs. There's only so many personal chefs and maids we can hire. Theres only so many people who we can hire to cut our grass. Theres only so many who we can hire to fix our computers. Theres only so many we can hire to cut our hair. Service jobs cannot make up the rest of the 6 billion jobs because honestly, robots can do some of these jobs.
If you want to bring jobs, figure out the economics first, figure out how to create billions of valueable jobs.
... hmmm, http://soren.org/gov/silent.html ...
:wq
Blogs enable the masses to be able to publish fast and without thought. Case in point, your highly though-provoking subject line. In a rush to publish (first post syndrome), people produce crap.
Sorry, but its true.
Disruptive change never comes about via the masses.
What masses. Masses are composed of people, individual units. Le Bon's contagion theory of mass psychology has been fairly comprehensively disproven, to my satisfaction at least. There is no group mind. Just because they are not assembled in a mob at this exact moment in time does not make them any more or less susceptible to crowd psychology (Turner and Killian's diffuse crowds), as in this case, the internet. Even marketing, the art of influencing the masses and crowd psychology, is ultimately targeted at the lowest common denominator; a scattershot approach designed to attract individuals, as many as possible.
it would appear that smart people are on the rise.
Smart, stupid. Such a vast amount depends on the environment that one's genetic makeup rarely has anything but a passing influence on comparitive intelligence. Sorry for that, eugenics, back to the drawing board, I'm afraid.
In the overpopulation of our planet
The planet is so far from overpopulated its not even funny. You could quite comfortably fit the entire population of the planet in the state of Texas, and I don't mean three high, I mean a house and land each. The perception of overpopulation is a misconception.
try convincing billions that you are right!
If you are right, you are right. The opinion of billions does not make you less so. Sooner or later they will have to come to accept your point of view. Draw your conclusions, base your future actions on that, and move on.
Communism would have been a massively disruptive change (on paper), but once it was implemented, people were able to smash it back down into the monarchy they were accustomed to
People didn't smash it anywhere. A few individuals did, taking advantage of a poorly educated, impoverished, and frankly terrified population. I have tremendous faith in humanity and its ability to ultimately rectify its own shortcomings. Denigrating the teeming masses really isn't helping anything. Anyway communism was a fundamentally flawed social theory. Marx sadly did not think it through to its logical conclusion. What he did manage to do was sully the waters sufficiently that any even vaguely similar system can immediately be branded "communism" by those with a lot to lose in such a system. Indeed, any system outside the current one.
Do you really envision slavering mobs of semi intelligent buffons marauding up and down the countryside, crushing new ideas anywhere they go?
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Look at the last coloumn in these DOE stats.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I thought I would add a link for fairness. Just coincidently a recent article. The last sentence from an oil analyst.
u siness/09opec.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/business/worldb
There's a lot more out there on this "capacity" deal. And the figures for 'superfields are well known, there just aren't finding them anymore..
The bottom line is they can cut production, or production can get cut due to outside unplanned for forces, but as to adding to production, very few places can do that now,the article claims only saudi arabia has any spare capacity at all. If we are taking the whole supply chain into account, it's even more iffy, given recent geopolitical events and natural disaster events..
As a set of rules
1. There is a limited amount of essential jobs, therefore as the population/amount of people on the planet goes up, the value of life and work goes down. It's not complicated.
2. There is a limit to the amount of natural resources, therefore as the population/amount of people on the planet goes up, the energy requirements also rise. It's not complicated.
The more people we have, the more essential jobs must be discovered or created. We are no longer in an era where jobs are guarenteed. If we have 10 billion people, or 6 billion people, maybe at best 1-2 billion will have essential jobs. Essential jobs are jobs which actually maintain the system itself, or maintain the people. Lawyer, Economist, Doctor, and then you have all the business related jobs which come and go. Service jobs like Mc Donalds and Walmart, are on borrowed time because these jobs can and will eventually be replaced by bots. You essentially have to create jobs which are irreplaceable, and which only you, or few others can do. This means you must be highly specialized, either through increased education, skill, experience, or esoteric knowledge. The nature of work is going to change, as knowledge, at least in the professional world, will be far more secret and esoteric than things are today. You'll be able to go to school to learn just enough to be useless, and if you want to learn anything more, you'll have to find a mentor and become an apprentice. Jobs will be passed from person to person once again, just read in the history books and all the knowledge you need to know about how the economy works is right there. Find your niche, and don't share it. Let the public share the public knowledge, and keep your business ideas to yourself, or at least learn to sell it.
This is not some sort of special insight. It goes back at least to the book The Innovator's Dilemma - and probably much farther back than that.
You fools!
Your creations will be the end of us all!
from the site: A universal constructor is a machine that can replicate itself and - in addition - make other industrial products. Such a machine would have a number of interesting characteristics, such as being subject to Darwinian evolution, increasing in number exponentially, and being extremely low-cost.
No. 99.5 million kids wiill be pr0nsurfing and IMing. 500,000 kids will do something interesting with them, assuming the boxes aren't locked down to prevent this.
Put tools in the hands of enough people, and somebody will do something interesting with them. There wouldn't be an Open Source scene if the price of computing hadn't dropped to the point to make them almost ubiquitous in the industrialized world, even if the average computer user never does anything but e-mail / websurfing / Office documents.
We might actually get that revolution.
Tech Public Policy stuff
2) At least they fail cheaply.
Doesn't anyone notice the contradiction here?
What are the high-profile web2.0 sites/businesses that have succeeded? Flickr, del.icio.us, writely, basecamp/ta-da lists, Upcoming, ...
What are the high-profile web2.0 sites that have failed? Where is web2.0's pets.com?
Sure ajax and web2.0 are dumb monikers, but the biggest and, arguably, smartest web companies are snapping up these new Ajax sites.
Ie, they're build-to-flip operations. Yahoo! and Google are simply acquiring some programming talent and a few eyeballs the expensive way.
So your definition of "business success" is ... "get bought"?
Keep smokin' the crack, dude!