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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.'"
The word "breakthrough" is actually no breakthrough itself. For years companies have used keywords to attract attention in consummer aspects. It was done years ago when companies used the word "Extreme" in absolutely everything that was being released to the public. (I wonder where Billy got his inspiration for W!ndows XP). By the end of the 90s everyone was using words like "Millenium" (LOL) and numbers like 2000; Example: "PruductName 2000! Out this Fall". And so the word "breakthrough" is nothing more than a marketing decision for some companies today.
As technology helps make new technology, it is expected for progress to hasten. So major milestones are reached more often and more quickly. Using press releases as a litmus test to measure claims of "breakthroughs" is a little much to ask, IMO. I expect a press release to be biased and grandiose - there's no surprise there. So while maybe the term "breakthrough" is being used a little liberally by corporations looking for investment, I fully expect to see major milestones reached at an accelerating pace.
Would the mapping of the human genome in 2000 count? At the time, it was like, "Yay! Now cancer's a snap to fix!" But all it really revealed was that there's a lot more we need to know to make that information useful. So it definitely wasn't a waste -- that is, after all, the nature of acquiring new knowledge, but is it a breakthrough?
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Lots of words have been pounded into dust:
Hero - Used to be someone doing something they weren't expected to do at great personal risk. Now it is applied to everyone ("everyday hero", UGH) or people doing the job they are paid to do (i.e. firemen rescuing people from fires).
Genius - Used to be someone who was consistantly and spectacularly intelligent (Einstein, Fermi, etc). Now it is anyone who happens to figure something out or is relatively smart. "My 3 year old can hum the national anthem, isn't he a genius?"
Star - Anyone who is appearing on your show or in your movie. "We have a star on our show tonight, Zsa Zsa Gabor!"
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I actually do research in optical computing, but the problems aren't unique to that field. I'm always getting pressured to use words/phrases like "novel", "highly accurate", "unique", etc (basically just non quantitative positive adjectives) to make the titles of my talks or publications more sexy or provocative.
It's annoying becuase they are just noise words. If something is really unique, a breakthrough, etc, those adjectives will be applied to your product (research, idea technology, choose your noun here) by others. Your job as an engineer or scientist should be to report the facts on your (noun here) in an unbiased and neutral fashion, giving meaningful benchmark figures regarding what it allows you to do. It's okay to focus on the strengths, but provide quantitative data, not meaningless adjectives and buzzwords. Fortunately more and more journals are stating not to use such meaningless drivel in their guidelines.
In my research, whenever I see phrases like "good/excellent agreement with...", instead of "this shows a standard deviation of X%", I automatically assume someone is just putting a shine on lame results. This prejudice is pretty accurate, but of course not 100% so. I'd estimate 90% or so.
The problem of course is the overly strong influence marketing has on us. Richard Feynman had a pretty good rant about this stuff. We really need to start punishing people/institutions for insulting our intelligence with this noise. He was more concerned with advertising campaigns which insult our intelligence, but the same trend has broadened itself.
In the end, I think it's important we become more cognisant, thus more resistant, to transparent marketing techniques. When an institution is singing its own praises, be skeptical.
On a tangent, if someone tells you "this is a quantum leap in XXX!", reply "so you mean to say it's the smallest possible change you can make?"
A breakthrough is
1. An act of overcoming or penetrating an obstacle or restriction.
2. A major achievement or success that permits further progress, as in technology.
While optical computing is a neato thing and it will probably make a splash in the computer world by enabling high performance systems to basically do things faster, is it really going to change the way we do computing? I mean, over the years, we have changed the way we do computing from a hardware standpoint. Things have advanced, technologies have come and gone and we have seen great strides in manufacturing techniques that have given us very small systems that you can carry in your pocket. But have we really changed the way we do the computing or are we just advancing hardware?
Optical computing isn't really a breakthrough in the sense that it will make such a difference that we will have to rethink how we program systems to utilize this technology the best that we can. Then again, much of the things being listed as breakthroughs really aren't.
What would it take to make a breakthrough? Well, cars that drive themselves safely and reliably. That would be a breakthrough because it would defintly change habits for people. Cheap, affordable space travel would be a breakthrough because it would change how we traverse the globe and even open space. Those are just a couple of things that would make an impact that could be considered a breakthrough. They would not only change the way we do things but they would also progress technology by making it available to a general consumer. That means profit margins which bring dollars for R&D to continually improve the technology.
Optical computing is, again, a nice advancement but a breakthough, unlikely. It's not changing how we do something, it's just offering a different approach and it won't advance anything until it gets cheaper but, by then, it'll be eclipsed by the next "breakthrough". In the same line of thought, the biggest blunder of a breakthrough in recent history is the Segway. While yeah it is a neat idea, it's not going to change anything. It amounts to nothing more than a scooter with a gyroscope in it and if the idea was so great to begin with, wouldn't we be using scooters already? There are just inherent problems with the idea because there are sacrifices and concessions that need to be made just to make the statement that the Segway will change cities forever. Where is the incentive to make that change? A Segway isn't a breakthrough because it's answering a question that nobody asked.
Cure cancer, that's a breakthrough. Solve traffic congestion, big deal. It will be a temporary fix until more people get Segways and just move the congestion to a different area. Along the same lines, find a way to use a different sepectrum of light to build a laser that at least triples the density of media storage space, that's a breakthrough. It changed everything from how we watch movies to how we store pictures of little Jimmy and little Sally on thier first day of school. It also advanced technology forcing the rest of the industry to find ways to use that technology to the best of its ability. It also changed other industries because now people have the ability to store large amounts of data. That changed everything from DVD players to digital cameras and we are seeing gear that is not afraid to use large amounts of space to provide much more content because there is media out there that can handle it. Finding a way to make a computer run faster, that's not necessarily a breakthrough. All the major chip manufacturers have been doing that for decades. Using optics is just a different way, not a breakthrough.
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True breakthroughs in technology are best identified the way economists identify recessions -- that is to say after the fact.
The biggest innovations come from basic research, and one of the common characteristics of basic research is that the researchers don't know what they're looking for, they're just looking.
Just look at some of the examples you point to that we use in everyday life. The way in which most of the western world functions right now would be substantially different without all sorts of things that people barely noticed at the time researchers discovered the last piece that fell into place to make it a reality.
No, we don't have a cure for cancer yet, but there's no saying that when a cure for cancer comes around it won't turn out that the discovery depended on technologies developed over the last 25 years.
For a perfect example, look at RSA encryption. The major innovation of RSA was to pair together a couple of extremely old math tricks that had previously been thought of as cute but useless. Does that mean that the breakthrough for RSA should be credited to Fermat or Sun Tzu? It certainly took until the last few decades to recognize the value of their work...
-JMP