Slashdot Mirror
Innovation's Role Is Sorely Exaggerated
Strudelkugel writes "The New Yorker has a book review describing our common misunderstanding of the value of technology and its ultimate uses. The reviewer notes that the way we think about technology tends to ignore older objects of technology. Quoting: '[W]hen we do consider technology in historical terms we customarily see it as a driving force of progress: every so often... an innovation — the steam engine, electricity, computers — brings a new age into being. In "The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900", by David Edgerton, a well-known British historian of modern military and industrial technology, offers a vigorous assault on this narrative. He thinks that traditional ways of understanding technology, technological change, and the role of technology in our lives, have been severely distorted by what he calls "the innovation-centric account" of technology.'" Money quote: "Seen in this light, my kitchen is a technological palimpsest."
I tend to think of this an American problem. An excellent analogy can be made, for instance, between American and Japanese technology. American companies concentrate on hitting "home runs". This is exciting, wins you the occasional game, and makes "superstars". Japanese companies concentrate on "singles". They concentrate on the long-term game plan, and make numerous small improvements to their technology. We see history the same way. How many people know who hit the most home runs in baseball, versus who has the highest all-time batting average? How many people know who developed the atomic bomb, versus who developed the first machine gun? We are very much a glitz and glamour, or "home run" society.
The commonest error is the failure to recognise that innovation it is an innately incremental and collaborative process. Technological progress, like almost any human endeavour, is a social activity. The greatest philosophers and innovators have always recognised that they were standing on the shoulders of giants.
The current IP-obsessed culture inhibits collaboration, and hampers the natural process of innovation in society.
Fortunately, initiatives like the Free Software movement have shown that innovation can thrive without creating artificial monopolies.
I think his point is that there's a lot of new technologies all the time that don't fulfill their hype. The V-2 is a good example in that during the war, it was thought as the magic weapon that would wipe out the enemy. It's not that there aren't technologies that do deserve the hype, but that the technologies that inevitably end up changing our lives aren't necessarily the ones that did. He also makes a point that innovation isn't necessarily unique. Basically, that had email not been invented, there might be something just as efficient that would have been made. Since this author believes that the same things get invented regardless (albeit with different parameters), attaching such importance to the innovation is therefore not as warranted.
Some examples of hyped technologies right now:
stem cells
quantum computing
nano-tech
anything fusion related
Are any of these going to change our lives the way they're hyped to be? Perhaps, but there's a good chance that something else from left field will do much better at the same things these technologies promise to do.
Of course, speculating on such things is mostly futile since we can't know a world that would have been (at least without some weird quantum technology). We only know the world that is. Thus, I don't know if saying that innovation is important is unwarranted. However, this article does point out that our placing so much importance on innovation is also unwarranted.
One thing that people note about most predictions for future technology is that they rarely come true, while the technology that actually makes a difference seems to "come out of nowhere" before it's suddenly everywhere.
The reason is that people are fixated on the new and amazing promises of technology, but the thing is that those are new and amazing simply because nobody actually does things like that in normal life. All real advances of technology are the result of changing ordinary everyday things because those are the things people do all the time, and a little improvement has a big effect.
Giant airplanes like the Boeing 747 or Airbus 380 are not world changing because they are giant flying things, they are world changing because they let people travel more effectively. People like the idea of flying as entertainment but almost nobody does routinely it for its own sake (some do in private planes or gliders), but people travel all the time. The fact that it's in the air is incidental.
But many people only see the flying, and not the travel, and think that flying is the world changing event. So they miss out when they try to predict the next world changing event. For example with computers, everyone thought the world changing event would be amazing hypercool virtual reality, but it turned out to be email. I mean, really, even if VR worked, who would have time for it beyond a few video games each week, and what would it change in your life? But how often to you communicate with someone else? Compare and contrast.
Same with robots. The world's most successful robot is a puck-shaped vacuum cleaner.
The next big technological advance will be something where you don't notice the technology. It will just spread until you wonder to yourself "I wonder what ever happened to cable television/flat tires/floppy disks?".