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No More Next Big Thing?
CthuluOverlord writes "CNET News.com is reporting that Nicholas Donofrio, Big Blue's executive vice president of innovation and technology, made a declaration on Tuesday in an interview with ZDNet Asia. 'The fact is that innovation was a little different in the 20th century. It's not easy (now) to come up with greater and different things. If you're looking for the next big thing, stop looking. There's no such thing as the next big thing.'" Donofrio goes on to explain that he sees innovation as being services or social changes nowadays, rather than simply a better moustrap. What's the verdict? Is tech innovation dead?
The idea that tech innovation is dead implies that we will now recycle the same tech in slightly modified form, because we have discovered every useful thing. I THINK NOT. What is more likely is that Mr. Donofrio suffers from failure of the imagination. Usually, when someone make a claim this outsized and this ludicrous, the next big thing is literally right around the corner. Mr. Donofrio can't see it - maybe none of us can. But it will come, and its implications may be good or may be bad - tech is like that, but it won't stop until we can control matter directly with our minds :-D
I have nothing to hide. So, why are you spying on me?
Sounds like the "Everything that can be invented has already been invented" myth.
Let just wait till macworld 2007 shall we? ;p
Jonathanjk.com
::cough::
BIOTECH!?!?!
What about the up and coming functional genomics?!?
E = m * c^(Hammer)
Innovation may be stifled but it's not for lack of ideas. The coporate influence in copyright and patent laws are the choke point.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
As one of my college instructor told me, the next the big thing has already been around for at least ten years before anyone bother to take notice. The Internet been around since the 1970s but no one noticed until the web browser and general access became available in 1995. The concepts for a lot of late 20th century technology (i.e., TV, radio, radar and microwave ovens) that we take for granted today was developed in the 1900s through 1940s. The next big thing may already exist right now, we just don't know about it until it appears on Slashdot. ;)
And I'll even go so far as to say the reason why there will be no next big thing - it's our broken-ass patent system.
Someone, somewhere out there has part of your brilliant idea buried in a vaguely worded submarine patent. Soon as you hit the big time - wham. Some greedy patent grubbing jerk will sue you for daring to make use of "his idea" that he's been sitting on not using for the last half a dozen years or so.
Only big business has enough lawyers these days to explore uncharted waters. Which means that business will be in charge of innovation. Which means that no product/idea/whatever will get the green light without a financial analysis conducted by a committee of people who will 99.9% of the time tend to be conservative, or maybe even just plain clueless as to the new idea's implications.
The days of the solo guy in the garage coming up with the thing that changes the world are over.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
and not ONE proclaiming that they have the "next big thing".... in their PANTS!
C'mon people, you can do better than this.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
I would like to throw my weight out there and call Donofrio an idiot, at least in relation to this statement. There are still many Next Big Things that we have yet to achieve (though the ability to achieve such may or may not exist, but we won't know till we try.)
A short list:
- Hovering vehicles
- Anti gravity (which is probably related to the above)
- hand held energy weapons
- teleportation
- economical space travel (think "to mars", or, at the least, consumer viability for going to the moon)
- curing cancer
- controlling computers with our brains
- mechanical prostetics that respond either to brain waves or nerves (we're right on the edge of this one- I believe someone had a really basic, bulky unit working, it just has to become available for the common man)
- growing of artificial organs for transplants (goodbye organ donors!)
- interactive holographic interfaces
- solar energy that's +60% effecient
Okay, maybe that list isn't so short. Sure, many of those fields are being worked on, but nothing concrete and ready for mass use has been created (to my knowledge.) All of those items will help to advance the human race in terms of how we live and effect our environment, as well as populating into space.
Also, I'm still waiting for my damned hoverboard. Back to the Future Part II is full of lies, I tell you, lies! (I realize that the events in BttF2 don't occur to 2015, but we should be seeing regular hover technology by now if we are to meet the deadline of mass production for hoverboards that can be used by everyday kids.)
Speak for yourself. Puny Human.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Um, you might be interested in this: urban legend
Here's the important excerpt from that page:
Rumor has it... that a Patent Office official resigned and recommended that the Patent Office be closed because he thought that everything that could possibly be invented had already been invented!
While that statement makes good fun of predictions that do not come to pass, it is none the less just a myth. Researchers have found no evidence that any official or employee of the U.S. Patent Office had ever resigned because there was nothing left to invent. A clue to the origin of the myth may be found in Patent Office Commissioner Henry Ellsworth's 1843 report to Congress. In it he states, "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." But Commissioner Ellsworth was simply using a bit of rhetorical flourish to emphasize the growing number of patents as presented in the rest of the report. He even outlined specific areas in which he expected patent activity to increase in the future.
Taken out of context, such remarks take on a life of their own and are perpetuated in publication after publication whose authors, rather than check facts, copy and quote each other. For example, recent publications have attributed the "everything that has been invented..." quote to a later commissioner, Charles H. Duell, who held that office in 1899. Unlike Ellsworth, who may have been merely misquoted, there is absolutely no basis to support Duell's alleged statement. Just the opposite is true. Duell's 1899 report documents an increase of about 3,000 patents over the previous year, and nearly 60 times the number granted in 1837. Further, Duell quotes President McKinley's annual message saying, "Our future progress and prosperity depend upon our ability to equal, if not surpass, other nations in the enlargement and advance of science, industry and commerce. To invention we must turn as one of the most powerful aids to the accomplishment of such a result." Duell adds, "May not our inventors hopefully look to the Fifty-sixth Congress for aid and effectual encouragement in improving the American patent system?" These are unlikely words of someone who thinks that everything has been invented.
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
I thought the Michelson quote had another sentence: "now, if we can only figure out why these salts fog our photographic plates..." Or was that an ad-lib by my Physics Professor? (Dr. Thomas Eck, CWRU)
The thinking was that to the room of physics knowledge in 1896, the radioactivity door led only to a small closet of additional knowledge, rather than opening out into the wide, wide world.
In 1896, noone knew what made the sun shine. Now we do.
IMHO, precision chemistry (e.g. nanotechnology) will lead to some amazing things, but not at all the ones that people expect. K. Erich Drexler's universal manipulator will not happen, and a space elevator is a lot more likely. Precision fibers and laminates will do surprising things. MEMS and biotechnology will shake things up.
As fossil fuels dwindle and become more expensive, energy conservation will become more important, as will turning plant material into liquid fuels. There will be much innovation in how to do things using less energy, or less fuel. The accelleration in processor power will slow down, as thermal and quantum effects become more and more important and harder to overcome. But storage technologies, hard disk and flash will continue improving.
All of the changing ratios of relative costs will keep innovators busy finding better solutions to the changing problems.
Maybe he does lack imagination as some have said but he's got a point.
Consider the field of electronics. Most of the engineering work during the past 50 years has been refining the fabrication of the transistor and it's application. Regardless of whether you're talking about TV, audio equipment, computers, defense systems, industrial controls or any other product made of electronics.
It's all been about the transistor. The nobel prize in physics was awarded to 3 engineers in 1947. It took more than a decade to get the transistor into a form that could be used in prodcution. Since then, there have been many refinements including printed circuit boards, integrated circuits and lots of miniaturization of systems. We've gotten lots of mileage out of the transistor because of it's versatility as a controlled source. It can be used as a switch or as an amplifier. The mother of it's invention was the need for a better way of performing these switching and amplification functions than vacuum tubes could provide.
Transistor technology is mature. Discrete transistor circuitry is already considered as quaint as tube circuitry. Soon, we'll regard standard ICs the same way.
But where are the glass or plastic light based circuits on Star Trek and 2001 Space Oddessy? The answer is that awaits a breakthrough in physics of the same magnitude as the transistor was.
Since most of the people reading Slashdot are programmers rather than EEs, I will point out that much of the software we develop runs on machines made of this 50 year old transistor technology. Having machines based on light or water or living tissue or whatever form they'll eventually take is bound to change this.
But this breakthrough in physics hasn't happened yet. It might be next year or it might be 30 years from now. Look at the time it took us to progress from vacuum tubes to transistors. It's hard to predict. But there will be a certain transition period between transistor technology and whatever replaces it. Only then will we have some idea what the next big thing might be. Whatever it will be, it ain't in sight yet.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor