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Technological Genius Is Timeliness, Not Inspiration
Hugh Pickens writes "Ezra Klein has an interesting essay in the Washington Post about 'simultaneous invention,' where technology advances to the point that the next step is obvious to multiple people at once, and so they all push forward with the same or similar inventions. While the natural capabilities of human beings don't change much from year to year, their environments do, and so does the technology and store of knowledge they can access. 'The idea of the lone genius who has the eureka moment where they suddenly get a great idea that changes the world is not just the exception,' says Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, 'but almost nonexistent.' Consider Adam Goldberg's CU Community, created in 2003 at Columbia University, a social network that launched first and had cooler features than Facebook, with options for pictures and integrated blogging software. Klein writes, 'Zuckerberg's dominance can be attributed partly to the clean interface of his site, partly to the cachet of the Harvard name and partly to luck. But the difference between Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Goldberg was very small, while the difference between what Mark Zuckerberg could do and what the smartest college kid in 1999 could do was huge. It was the commons supporting them both that really mattered.'"
This is one of the reasons software patents are stupid, why patent trolls exist, and why the patent system in general needs cutting down.
The network effect has more to do with being in the right place at the right time than on the technical merits of the application. A much better solution that occurred 1 year earlier or 1 year later would have failed in the market. Facebook was "good enough" and that is all that was needed.
But let's not confuse this with innovation.
So in other words it's not timeliness so much as execution and a bit of luck?
If it were timeliness, all of the kids would be using socializing through MySpace on their early style Windows Slates/Tablets/Whatever-they-were-called on an AOL internet connection.
Seems as though the first mover isn't always the winner in terms of market share and/or mindshare.
Anyone else read the description and instantly remember that Calculus was invented by Newton/Leibniz around the same time? Replace "technology" with "math" or "any scientific discipline" and it pretty much can hold true in a fair handful of instances throughout history.
"There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come." (Victor Hugo)
The internet just mad that stronger.
Predicting inventions alone won't save you from the Mule!
And yet our society and our legal systems enshrine individual innovations and creations as sacred property, while suffering the very existence of a commons or a public domain barely with tolerance, denouncing it as communism.
A useful invention will happen when its time comes. The patent system will not make it happen faster. The only thing patents do is prevent further inventions. This seems to be especially true for software 'inventions'.
There was an electronics writer, Don Landcaster, who spent many column inches demonstrating that patents were absolute poison to the small inventor ( www.tinaja.com/glib/casagpat.pdf ). Patents work for companies that can pay big bucks for lawyers to keep down the small inventor.
The classic case of an inventor being screwed was Armstrong, the inventor of FM radio. RCA stole his invention and kept him in court until the day he died. He would have been much better off if he didn't think his invention was protected by a patent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_of_Chartres
"We are like dwarfs standing [or sitting] upon the shoulders of giants, and so able to see more and see farther than the ancients."
Gee, I think that sounds strangely familiar ;^)
If Facebook is now an example of "genius", what word shall we now use to describe actual genius?
And yes, I'm aware that Zuckerberg gets more ass than I ever will, and probably has more than 100 lifetimes of my wealth. My dick doesn't work that well anyway. Question still stands, IMHO.
Anyone else remember these social networking sites? I was using them at least a year before Facebook existed, or was at least available to the general public. When Facebook rolled around my thought was "So what? Another social networking site." I only joined when the network effect kicked in and it was obvious the others were falling by the wayside.
Neither Mark Zuckerberg nor Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs could program a fucking VCR.
If several have the same idea at roughly the same time by their own means, it makes the patent system to look even more unfair.
0-click ordering
That's your best example?
Calculus, dude. It's the calculus. The Newton-Leibniz rivalry is the go-to example of simultaneous invention. What you've got instead is a shaggy dog story set up to let you imply that Zuckerberg is in some way a genius.
Computers weren't invented because of the Space Race. They were invented piece by piece as technology and science progressed because people are smart. Computers already existed in all spheres of human acitivity by the time they were needed to control a few rockets.
Please take this occasion to learn some history and stop spreading lies about technology. I'm looking at you, tomhudson, you liar.
According to him, we should all share in the success of others, even if we took no part in the hard work necessary ourselves.
It's really hard to take this swill seriously, but I see a lot of people here already do.
Dog is my co-pilot.
But the patent office would have to require a WORKING prototype of whatever you're trying to patent.
The biggest problem is that the patent office will now accept patent applications for items that do not exist. This allows companies to block other inventors by having a patent filed prior to the inventor inventing the invention.
Don't forget the "Just saying" after a remark like this.
Have gnu, will travel.
It was this silly feature that I truly think made all the difference
www.RacquetUp.org - Helping Detroit Youth
The Steam Engine of Alexandria
Archimedes celestial clock device
Concrete
All discovered, then subsequently lost and even as technology advanced beyond the point where each was originally invented no one at the time came up with them until centuries after the point this hypothesis would postulate.
What's "Facebook?" And how does it relate to MyFaceSpace?
It's arguments like this that trouble me.
That's what happened with Alexander Graham Bell, who in all likelihood invented the telephone after Elisha Gray - and both of them came after Antonio Meucci, who couldn't afford the fee to keep his patent current.
Elisha Gray was the audience while Bell demonstrated his telephone at the Centennial World's Fair in Philadelphia in July 1876.
Gray was no stranger to self promotion.
He was an electrical engineer with a national reputation and a lucrative portfolio of some seventy patents. This is guy who co-founded Western Electric. The guy who would later go on to invent an early and commercially successful "fax machine," the Telautograph.
The first Bell telephone exchange opened in Hartford, Connecticut in January, 1878. By 1882 this single exchange had gone through two stages of expansion to become Southern New England telephone.
If Gray had a working telephone in 1876, what the hell was he doing with it?
The answer to this riddle is that - like all the others who had grown up with Western Union - he probably thought all he had in his hand was a plaything.
Bell was the outsider. Bell was disruptive.
An investigating committee established by the British Parliament found Edison's work on the electric light "unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men." Edison himself thought his phonograph "not of any commercial value."
The renowned British physicist Lord Kelvin announced in 1897 that "radio has no future." A decade later a business executive told radio pioneer Lee De Forest that he could put in a single room "all the radiotelephone apparatus that the country will ever need." De Forest himself announced in 1926 that, "while theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming."
So it goes: Year after year, decade after decade, century after century, our ancestors have made fools of themselves. We always laugh at the electrical toy; van Gogh never sells his paintings; Melville always dies unrecognized. The only safe prediction is that people will go on making dumb predictions.
Hindsight, Foresight, and No Sight
Funny yes, but not completely true...
There is no doubt that Bill was a very good programmer, and could be again if was doing it everyday...
For the rest, cant see it...
In business today, there are two types of people:
Those with ambition exceeds their ability.
And those with an understand the nature of responsibility, and are technically competent...
x ...But I can't work out why MZ is mentioned, in this discussion, not only did he NOT invent the concept, there where hundreds of social networking sites, at the time, he himself even worked on one of them before reworking the concept/code as FB...
Perhaps the title should be:
Those who are cut throat enough to get to the top, inevitably re-write history, and all want to be see as geniuses....
You remember those hot babes who were Florida Gators fans who ended up in Maxim? THEY made Facebook take off.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Thank you Captain Obvious
I just today had this discussion with a friend. He said, "Peking Man was the first to master fire." My thinking went like this: someone noticed that fire (from lightening or whatever) was hot; for a while, embers were carried from one fire to start another; someone working with flint (to sharpen tools) noticed that they had accidentally started a fire; the myth of the fire bringer and the fire starter were born.
It's unlikely that there was a single person or single culture that would have discovered fire, or the means to start a fire. It was inevitable.
aliens, tesla had communication, so do Harvard graduates. not much has been mentioned about that, excuse me I have a hat to put on...
Ezra Klein is not a genius.
The book "Outliers", by Malcolm Gladwell, makes much the same argument, and gives a couple very persuasive examples of how pure luck is an absolute requirement for outsized success. One example I particularly like is how professional Canadian hockey players tend to be born early in the year, the reason being that those born earlier will be more physically mature than their younger teammates born later in the year, and the "tracking" that occurs at an early age ensures that those differences are magnified as players get older. Thus, if you had two kids with the equal potential to be hockey superstars, it's much more likely that the one born in January would make it while the one born in December would not.
Yet, for some reason, so often (especially in the US) we complete discount the factor that luck has in making people successful - we laud the uber-successful as "geniuses" and think that raising the rate on the highest tax bracket is somehow unfair because we think individuals are solely responsible for their own success.
Multiple people may get the same idea at once, but those who succeed are also those who also have to skills to pull it off. I guess that's obvious. But it may go into explaining why Facebook succeeded where others did not. Zuckerberg managed to develop a UI that people preferred, even if the number of features was smaller. Here, his skill was greater intuition or better training in how to build a usable and attractive system.
'Zuckerberg's dominance can be attributed partly to the clean interface of his site...
...what kind of hell-spawned interface did the other guy make if Facebook is clean by comparison?
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
Zuckerberg and genius in the same thought? Clearly the author and I have differing views on what is considered "genius".
There's a 68.71% chance you're right.
Hardly a new idea.... Mark Twain noticed the same thing. " It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing - and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest."
When it's steam engine time someone will invent the steam engine...
OK, first let's look at the source. Here's the author's bio at the Washington Post: "Ezra Klein writes an opinionated blog on economic policy, collapsing banks, cap and trade, health care reform and pretty much anything else you can attach a chart to. Before coming to The Post, he was an associate editor at the American Prospect. Klein has appeared as a guest on CNN, MSNBC, NPR and C-SPAN and lots of online radio shows you've never heard of. Klein, who makes a mean kung pao, will also be a regular contributor to The Post's Food section. He contributes to the group food blog the Internet Food Association." This guy isn't a historian of science, or even a real reporter.
Many major inventions were quite unexpected. The phonograph, the traveling wave tube, the maser, and to some extent the transistor were not anticipated. Some were very hard to make work - xerography, the image orthicon, MRI scanning. Those are all from electronics. In chemistry, there are far more unexpected inventions, from nylon to modern adhesives.
Klein has no clue.
See it, because it predates this article by a LONG shot, and it states that very same premise... quoting Seth the main character/protagonist:
"When a science is ready, it can't help but make the next discovery. Lots of people will come up with the same idea at nearly the same time."
APK
P.S.=> Great Sci-Fi by all means and excellently done tale as well, entertaining! Link to more about it, for those of you that like good science-fiction, as I do -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Exam_(The_Outer_Limits)... apk
"If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." - Isaac Newton. The corollary is there is no such thing as a self-made man.
I've had lots of ideas I couldn't implement become multimillion or multibillion dollar companies under someone else's hand. And for Facebook, wasn't Classmates.com trying to do the same thing before them, only Classmates.com was trying to charge a subscription fee right?
God spoke to me.
I think you've missed the point. With the exception of Concrete, these inventions were massively predated as you say, but they didn't prevail. There wasn't much application for such advanced technology, given that less-advanced alternatives were good enough and easier to produce - horse-before-the-cart and all that. To put it simply: Their Time Had Not Come.
Concrete is an interesting counter-example though. As a building material it's remarkable, and there were some things the Romans could (apparently) do with it that we still can't reproduce - real Wisdom-of-the-ancients stuff. The best explanation I can offer is that concrete requires a society to have not only some empirical knowledge of chemistry, but also a decent infrastructure and therefore a decent size and advancement of other technologies in order for the required components to be sufficiently available. The Romans had it for a while, but it was a long time after their civilization fell before the opportunity to rediscover concrete arose again. I suppose it's another example of "Steam Engine Time" in effect, but with the other examples it's due to the lack of pressing need while with concrete it's due to lack of supporting factors.
Necessity is the mother of invention, but its father is the Tech Tree.
Meta will eat itself
I have to wonder if Mr. Klein just got done watching the following series from the late 1970's: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
Perhaps he thinks the time is finally right to repackage James Burke's work with him reaping the rewards. If not, at least he might make enough from the lecture circuit to afford more than one polyester leisure suit; Burke apparently didn't.
[Sarcasm Disclaimer: Yes, I know who Ezra Klein is and I don't believe he's planning on profiting from his rehashing of the history of technological innovation. If anything, he might have a future in the majordomo space.]
The reason Facebook dominated was because of innovation. If timing was so important howcome Myspace and Friendster didn't dominate? And don't try say its because they came to early. Myspace already had millions of users and was "unstoppable". The reason they failed is because they were slow shitty, difficult to use, cluttered etc. The market rewarded innovation in the space. Simple. Here is the kicker: Timing is only important if the product cannot be *significantly* improved on. If I was given $100m tomorrow to build a competitor to Facebook I doubt I could do a better job on merit. The whole Facebook situation is EXACTLY as Google was to Yahoo and Altavista in the 90's. Google will remain on top until they drop the ball and stop innovating.
The only thing "special" about facebook is that they decided it was OK to "steal" data from other organisations, such as when they ask for your gmail/hotmail details, go in there, collect all your contacts, and let you spam them. This is something the competition (and prior artists) could have easily done, but (if they're anything like me) quickly ruled out on ethical grounds.
Several times in "The Door Into Summer" (1957) Heinlein used variations of the statement "Engineering is the art of the practical and depends more on the total state of the art than it does on the individual engineer. When railroading time comes you can railroad - but not before." He attributed it to Charles Fort, who apparently phrased it as "If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time." (1931)
:)
So people were thinking the same thing almost 80 years ago, and i would not be at all surprised if others had stated the same idea in different ways even earlier. (Victor Hugo coined the phrase "One cannot resist an idea whose time has come" in 1851, even if it wasn't specifically about technology.) In terms of the idea of people coming up with the same ideas simultaneously, this guy is a little slow out the gate
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Personally I always felt that Edison's work on the "Edison Affect" that helped drive the invention of the vacuum tube was far more exciting driving the rise of modern electronics.
I think the light bulb was inevitable and just needed perspiration to get it done. Edison and the many others who made leaps in insight are more interesting with respect to invention and innovation: Guthrie, Flemming, Edison, Lieben, De Forrest.
It is interesting that many of the innovations led to patents that didn't appear to really hamper this new area. Perhaps someone more versed in the area could point out there were many others who where locked out of the market and they would have been more advances prior to the invention of the solid state transistor.
I love the sound of distortion in the morning -- webcommando
when you can't get any ass, all you want to do is get ass
when you can get ass any time you want, you lose interest in trying to get it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
reward for innovation should go to individuals, not corporations
corporations have gamed the system of innovation and turned the patent system into a luaghingstock. music distributors embed themselves in the system that should rightfully only reward the guy who wrote/ performed the song
yes, some innovation requires teams of people. then that team should be rewarded only, even if embedded in a corporation or a university
the problem is corporations. they should not get to spend on elections (but they do), they should be rewarded for individual human merit (but they do), they deserve nothing more than to be a legal entity that binds a profit/ loss statement
corporations need to have their "rights" constantly in check. but we live in a system where their rights constantly expand (because they have all the money). this is the source of much of the problems in our world
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm sure it'd be great. It could document the rise of great civilisations based on the advancements they make.
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Vanished. The art of making it was lost. In fact the ores they mined contained vanadium and when those were exhausted, the "art" was lost. Roman concrete, the same. You need the raw material to make the stuff. Not everyone has a volcano in their back yard and when trade collapsed with the empire, there wouldn't be any of the stuff around.
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