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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?
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.
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.
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.
I agree. Money will be an important factor in this as A) not being wealthy makes it hard to innovate and B) those with wealth will use it to keep the market and legal system working to their advantage. Eventually this dam will break but it'll take a while. Decades probably.
As always, big business and big government is the enemy of innovation.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
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.
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).
You noted "A) not being wealthy makes it hard to innovate".
I hasten to dissagree.
MIT is concerned with astonishingly advanced innovation, but that is the rarest form of innovation.
Most innovation is in smaller products with more creative thought processes using existing technology, than in creating whole new technologies. Thes smaller products and projects can often easily be something a person or two do and create a 10-50 million dollar company.
Lots of examples exist, but they really don't get the headlines, as the pizzazz is not there for news orgs.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
You may become wealthy if you start off at least middle class or work for years towards that goal but meanwhile you have to struggle so that many innovations that could have been are wasted. If you're struggling to feed yourself and keep a roof over your head you're not going to have much time and money to produce wonderful new things.
;)
I'm the kind of person, ie a geek, that produces innovations with nearly every breath almost none of them are getting to people because of lack of time and money. I'm improving as I've dragged myself up to lower middle class and therefore have more time and money than I used to but I don't have nearly as many good ideas as I did when I was younger. If I'd had a sponsor back then I could have changed the world. Now I'd just be happy to make it to upper middle class, raise my family, make a couple minor contributions to the world, and die a somewhat defeated man.
Sex is bad. Before I discovered girls I was much more innovative. Before I got caught in the expense of a significant other and all that goes with that (house, kids, pets, yada yada yada) I could pour a lot more of my limited resources into innovation. I think there is a good reason great innovators aren't often family men. Save yourself and just hang out with the $20 whores in Tijuana instead.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
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
Exactly. If you don't have money your innovations aren't going to go anywhere and that kills the vast majority of innovation before it has the chance to do anything for anybody. Sure if you work 100 hours a week and get out there and really sale your idea you can get somewhere with just a good idea but most people can't do that. So great ideas die on the vine.
You either need money or need to know someone with money or just happen to get lucky to get those innovations to go somewhere. Given $50,000 to work with I could return at least $500,000 within the year just from minor innovations I have but getting that start-up capital is the hard part. Seed investments are always possible but take a lot of effort in itself which takes away from the time you can spend on your innovation. The best plan is to find a friend with some business savvy to partner with you and let them work on your investment money while you work on the tech but that means finding the right person for that role still.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
"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.
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.
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.
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())
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.
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..