When a Tech 'Breakthrough' Isn't Really

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "'More than 8,600 press releases have been issued over the years with "breakthrough" in the headline, a majority of them by computer and electronics companies,' Lee Gomes writes in the Wall Street Journal. He examines whether hyperbole and hype has robbed the term of much of its meaning, focusing on a recently announced 'breakthrough' by Intel involving optical computing. From the article: 'Having been inside Intel's laser labs, I need no persuading that the company is doing important work here, and an Intel spokesman says the development is indeed a "breakthrough" because it shows how real-world optical products can be made with silicon. I wonder, though, how many more breakthroughs we will be reading about before optical computing becomes ubiquitous.'"

Comments

Past Tense & Specificity

[eldavojohn]

The word 'breakthrough' is definitely used too much.

I'm always skeptical when it's used in a present tense. For example, "The Segway is a breakthrough in transportation technology."

When the Segway first premiered, I heard this. Yet, it has been anything but a 'breakthrough' nor has it changed my life in anyway (with the exception of some humor at the Segway's expense).

My point is that you can only really use the term in the past tense when something really did signal a breakthrough. Like the invention of solid state transistors. At the time, did they really realize how big it was? Maybe, but that's not always the case.

Breakthroughs are also sometimes relative, for instance Srgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band might have been a musical breakthrough for rock but mean little to computer scientists. Likewise, proving Fermat's last theorem might have been a breakthrough for mathematics but meant little or nothing to a musician.

So, in the end, I think 'breakthrough' is used prematurely but it also is used relative to fields a lot. I don't think the author bothered to look at the thousands of uses of the word to see if it was followed by "for physicists" or "for medicine" in which case they might have been genuine breakthroughs in that sense. The difficult breakthroughs are the ones that do affect everyone (like the transistor or radio) but they are becoming harder to pinpoint as many inventions these days aren't actual inventions but instead integration of already existing inventions to form a new utility for those devices.

Re:Past Tense & Specificity

[aadvancedGIR]

On the other hand, when your team works hard for monthes to solve a technical problem and finally finds a working solution before your competition does, no one could make you admit it is not a breakthrough.

And concerning the Segway, I can't say yet that it won't change my life, I just need to actually see at least one of them before I have an opinion :)

Re:Past Tense & Specificity

[TapeCutter]

Your right, it's easy to pinpoint "major breakthroughs" after several decades, quite another to recognise them when they happen. When I was a kid a "transistor" was the "thing" that made portable radios work, mine had nine of them. The first calculator I saw was worth a months wages (my dad was an engineer). I couldn't see them catching on except maybe for engineers, same with the first CD burner I saw. I even thought the simpsons was a "bad flintstones ripoff" until my kids got me to sit down and watch it.

How many "breakthroughs" did it take to create the internet or is it a single "breakthrough" in it's own right? - I find these kind of sematic questions make for a boring article, I would rather read about peoples discoveries, breakthrough or otherwise.

Re:Past Tense & Specificity

[Morphine007]

Think of any technological advancement as being analagous to peeling through the layers of an onion. The really useful/ubiquitous advancement doesn't occur until after you've gotten through all the layers. Piercing one of the layers, however, is worthy of being called a breakthrough. I would posit that the term shouldn't be used if someone else has already determined how to pierce the layer in question. After all, Quantum Mechanics was not invented and refined with the explicit goal of creating lasers and semiconductor-based computers... but here we are...

Another example would be Galois Fields. They were a breakthrough in their time (over a hundred years ago), but never really had any use until recently. (Not that AES is the only use for GFs, but you get the tech reference....)

Basically, what laymen consider a "breakthrough" is a result of tens, hundreds or thousands of smaller highly-localized "breakthroughs" combined. To say that the creation of Quantum Mechanics or Galois Fields were not breakthroughs, but that the physical consumer products created as a result of those innovations are, is basically an insult to the scientists who perform those innovations.

Not that the term isn't overused and that many of the people using it aren't basically peddling snake oil though...

Re:Past Tense & Specificity

[houghi]

If he were a fireman not on duty, he would do something that was not expected of him and that would qualify him as a hero. And nobody is talking about payment. There are plenty of firemen who do it on a volontary basis.

I would say that a hero is somebody who does something out of the ordenary what is normaly not expected of him or her. A fireman is expected to go into a building and save people.

And let's face it, the fireman that went into the two towers did nothing out of the ordanary. They went up to put out a fire. That does not mean I don't respect what they do and feel the loss of friends and family. It does not make them heroes.

Also when you listen to the 'heroes' they all thought it pretty normal what they were doing. The fact that others don't does not make them heroes, it makes the others cowards.

Hewlett and Packard would be puking their guts out

[Anonymous Coward]

True visionaries and engineers like Dave Packard and Will Hewlett would be puking their guts out after seeing the sort of MBA bullshit that some of the most respectable high technology companies have resorted to (including their own) as of late. And with their open-door policy, everyone would have been able to see their partially digested lunch all over the place.

"Controversial"

[snowgirl]

Not just the word "Breakthrough", but "Controversial", I hear that EVERY STPID EPISODE OF BONES THAT FOX MAKES. "Next week, on a controversial new Bones."

It's like, what? Did you run out of otherwise reasonably descriptive words to describe this episode, because you use it so much, I can't hardly imagine that "Bones" would be watched by anyone unless immediately after they feel an intense need to call their best friend and discuss at length the moral issues involved with creating a 3D CG representation of a dead person based on the bones. I mean, clay worked fine, but when you have to solve crimes on a deadline, I suppose CG would let you get it done faster.

This reminds me actually of in College, I had a friend, and we talked about how there are certain words that only advertisers use. Like "Hearty", when was the last time you heard anything but soup in a commercial described as "Hearty"?

"MMm... this Captain Crunch is really hearty today, Mom!"

No, it doesn't happen. Advertising people just learned some derived language of English I think. (My apologies to anyone on Slashdot who might be an advertising person, but... come on, hopefully you aren't coming up with this stupid stuff.)

Breakthrough is broken

[diodeus]

Can we also add "Revolutionary" to the list?

Re:It's not just the word "breakthrough"

[ConceptJunkie]

There's a simple test for this. Take a book written from a hundred years ago. Most of the time you will see far more complex use of language, with extensive use of appositives and panrentheticals, that actually can take much effort to parse, leave alone comprehend. Now being hard to read doesn't necessarily make something better, and maybe we are just better at communicating clearly, but I have found the these older texts often are really that much better. Compare "The Wind in the Willows" or even "Winnie the Pooh" to anything written for kids in the last 50 years... I think our use of language is deteriorating significantly. Compare the speeches of Presidents Bush or Clinton to those of, say, Churchill or Lincoln. You will find that even when modern speeches are succinct and inspiring, as some of Bush's have been, or long and detailed, as most of Clinton's were, that the eloquence and beauty of orations from past generations simply do not exist any more.

The very existence of widespread grammar and spelling errors (e.g., loose/lose, would of/would have, pluralizing with apostrophes) demonstrates to me that most people don't read very much if at all. Now good spelling is not always correlated with being well-read (one of the smartest and most well-read people, more well-read than I, that I know is a horrible speller), but when I see people claiming that they get all the useful information they need from sites like Digg or /., I can only conclude that those kinds of people are doomed to communicate at a highly illiterate level in perpetuity. Even if you were to read extensively from common magazines and newspapers, you will not be exposed to anything more than a very fundamental (read: 6th grade) level of proficiency with the language.

I've been recently reading a book of lectures given by Max Planck in the early 1900's. While the scientific content the first couple lectures isn't above anything a typical high-schooler could (or should) be able to understand, I found the level of sophistication of his language to be surprisingly high, and yet I get the feeling that this was typical in that context for 100 years ago. Maybe we are just better at speaking succinctly... I think that is in some part true... but mostly I think we are simply losing our ability to express ourselves as well as our forefathers, that we lack much of their skill to communicate nuance and abstraction.

A good recent example is the Pope's speech that caused such a stir. Now plenty of folks use any excuse imaginable to attack the Pope, and I doubt few if any of the people reacting with anger or violence even read (or even _could_ read) His Holiness' speech in its context and entirety. However, I cannot imagine that anyone with the capacity and will to actually understand what was said would respond with any criticism the like of which we've heard over the past few weeks. I found myself wishing for a thorough grounding in philosophy because I knew I was missing many of the implications of the Holy Father's words. My degree in Computer Science has done almost nothing to prepare me to consider the significance of Hellenistic thought and its relation and importance to modern faith.

Does it matter? It should, but public perception, as ignorant as it may be, ends up having a much stronger effect regardless of whether it is based on fact or not, and those people, civic, religious leaders or anyone with an opinion, who have something nontrivial to say will suffer, as do we all, from a society that is indifferent, or even hostile, to in-depth communication or a use of language beyond that of a small child.

You may have noticed that His Holiness expressed his sorrow for how his speech was received, not what he said. Far from being the usual weaselly apology of a politician who is only sorry he was caught, Pope Benedict correctly expressed the fact that the people who were angry did not, in fact, understand what he was trying to say. Could he have prevented this misunderstanding? Probably, but

I disagree

[TheLink]

Actually in my opinion we haven't really made much progress in the recent decade at all.

1942 manhattan project
1945 first a-bomb, + hiroshima & nagasaki
1947 transistor invented
1949 Comet (passenger jet) Unveiled
1951 electricity from nuclear power plant
1952 US Airforce orders B52
1955 U2 Tested
1956 first O/S
1957 silicon wafer, FORTRAN, sputnik
1958-59 first IC, ALGOL, LISP
1961 VTOL, first man in space, CTSS
1962 spacewar computer game
1964 computer mouse & windows
1968 Douglas Engelbart demos the above, hypertext, collaborative computing and more
1969 feb Jumbo jet (747) first flight
1969 apr concorde first Mach 2 passenger jet first flight
1969 apr QE 2 ship first voyage
1969 Jul first man on moon
1969 Multics
1971 intel 4004
1972 C
1973 skylab, ethernet, UNIX, work on TCP/IP started
1974 Altair and Scelbi
1975 apollo & soyuz dock
1976 viking landings on Mars, Apple I, ethernet launched
1977 voyager 2 launched, Apple II, commodore
1978 visicalc, vi
1979 wordstar
1980 TCP/IP RFCs
1981 space shuttle, IBM PC
1982 BSD gets TCP/IP
1983 Apple Lisa
1983 "Unix Review compares six Unix-compatibles for IBM PCs"
1983 GNU project
1984 Apple Mac, X Windows
1985 Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, Microsoft Windows
#Stagnation starts
1986 chernobyl, challenger blow up
1988 stealth fighter
1989 stealth bomber
1990 WWW (hypertext revisited)
1991 Linux started (UNIX rehash)
1992 Windows NT, NetBSD, FreeBSD
1993 Mosaic
1994 webcrawler
1995 Windows 95, Altavista
1996 pathfinder mars rover/lander (viking rehash)
1997 google (good but not really a great leap )
2003 spirit+opportunity mars rovers

Looking at the past 10-20 years I can say there really hasn't been as many leaps. Most are just rehashes of the same thing done before. Some not actually done better just more popular. Linux is just UNIX revisited. Just go look at the video of Douglas Engelbart's demo in 1968 and you'll see we haven't really made that many advances in the computing fields.

As for aerospace:

All NASA can do is try to stop the space shuttles from blowing up.

They're talking about going to the Moon again (so 1960s). Then there was all that fuss about sending probes to mars. Oh wow, like wasn't that done in 1976?

Then there's the supersonic jetliner and big passenger jet... Heck the 747 design is still being used to this day (and it works pretty well too).

Only thing new so far is the space tourism innovation by the Russians. Where on a regular schedule anyone reasonably fit and healthy with USD20 million bucks can go to space.

Automobile tech? No breakthroughs. Now if there's practical gasoline/hydrocarbon fuel cell+filter that'll be a breakthrough.

Nuclear fusion/fission? No significant progress at all.

They've already spent billions and decades on hot fusion with not much to show for it, maybe they should just spend a bit more time and money investigating the cold fusion stuff - even if it isn't fusion, there's evidence that it could be an interesting phenomena. Or just spend some billions to make fission better.

AI has been a field for bullshit artists.

But medical tech has had some advances. You can now actually implement brain augmentation, telepathy and telekinesis with current communications/computing and medical technology. But the DMCA, RIAA and MPAA etc may hold the progress back in that field (they'll want a penny for your^H^H^H^H_their_ thoughts or more). And then there's the threat of lawsuits of course.

Still TB and many other diseases seem to be threatening to make a comeback, so it's not been that great either.

Lifespans are up mainly because infant mortality is down, and ER treatment is much better.

Now, tell me of something really innovative in the past 10 years. No hypersonic jetliner to be seen. When the Concorde came out it was definitely not a rehash. The first man on the moon in 1969 was not

Re:I disagree

[PCM2]

It's always easy to be a naysayer. If you draw up a totally arbitrary list of achievements, then obviously you can decide that the list stops where you want it to stop, and includes only what you want it to include.

You seem to like aerospace. What about the International Space Station? The Hubble Telescope? And most scientists would probably disagree with you that the recent Mars missions were about doing a "Viking rehash."

Similarly, why dismiss what's been done in the computing fields? Is incremental research bad? Is it indicative of "no progress"?

What about data storage? The demand for storage for digital media of all kinds have skyrocketed beyond all imaginable proportion since 1986, and yet we've pretty much managed to meet that demand. SAN networks, Fibre channel, the DVD, cheap flash memory -- all new.

There were no LCD televisions in 1986. I don't even remember seeing a color LCD screen of any kind. A 32 inch one would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Much of the innovation in recent years has been in the life sciences. What about sequencing the human genome? What about stem cell research?

For that matter, what about the ongoing search for a cure for AIDS? Sure, we still don't have one. But in 1986, when you say "stagnation starts," contracting HIV meant a rapid decline into ill health and an unpleasant death. Today, HIV positive people can live more-or-less normal lives, if they receive ongoing treatment. That treatment might allow them to live long enough to see a true cure.

I could go on and on. Read some science magazines from time to time, instead of only paying attention to what hits the nightly news.