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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.
"There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come." (Victor Hugo)
The internet just mad that stronger.
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.
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.
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.
Timing is wrapped up in the luck. An idea before its time is still a failure.
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.
Neither Mark Zuckerberg nor Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs could program a fucking VCR.
But Ballmer can throw one quite a distance.
This is known as "big man's disease" where the belief that physical size, the ability to bellow and pound on a desk has some economic value in the management of a modern business. Back when I worked for a power company, there was some value to this. The foreman on a line crew had proven himself in a largely physical profession and was therefore accorded some level of respect.
They can't program a program either their skill is in finding someone who can and telling them to "get it done" then having the resources to write their paycheck.
Which raises the question of why the generic talents like managing an office, raising capital, keeping the stationary cabinet full, etc. commands higher wages than the people who actually build the systems.
Have gnu, will travel.
Obvious, really. Nothing makes people happier, in my experience, than letting them annoy others.
0-click ordering
Its called Government.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
I am a clod, you insensitive dwarf!
When the hard work in question is of an intellectual nature and takes no resources to reproduce, of course we should. I guess we should all have to start our lives with no technology at all, and only the lucky few of us who manage to independently discover such novel concepts as fire and agriculture should be allowed to make use of them? Or to use a more recent example, schoolchildren should only be taught algebra and left to do the hard work necessary to discover calculus themselves?
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
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.
ever tried building a system without an office, stationary(or the digital equivalent), or capital? Exactly.
Yes. On my kitchen table (more or less).
Ever try to build a system with an office, capital and a nice mahogany board of directors' table but no talent. Exactly.
The problem arises when you get something up and running and need capital to expand. The cost of that is to put the VC's idiot nephew on the board, hire MBAs from his Alma Mater's frat house and give them the checkbook.
Have gnu, will travel.
"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 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
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