Slashdot Mirror
Neal Stephenson On 'Innovation Starvation'
Geoffrey.landis writes "In an essay discussing the space program, author Neal Stephenson suggests that the decline of the space program 'might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done.' He suggests that we may be suffering from innovation starvation: 'Innovation can't happen without accepting the risk that it might fail. The vast and radical innovations of the mid-20th century took place in a world that, in retrospect, looks insanely dangerous and unstable.'" Though the context is different, this reminds me of economist Tyler Cowen's premise that the U.S. has for decades been in a Great Stagnation.
Actually I'd conclude that patents are a main cause that innovation has stagnated in the last 20 years. Innovation depends on sharing knowledge.
What I really wonder is whether the strangulation of research will put our survival at risk at a time in history when we need to be smarter than ever about how we use energy, land, water, and raw materials? Why patents are evil.
My blog
Sounds a lot like today.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The period that Stephenson identifies with a decline in the ability to get 'big' things done coincidence near perfectly with the rise of neoliberalism in the west. The more markets are deregulated, the less ability we have to actually get things done, because corporations will break up anything large scale for profit - with the full cooperation of sleazy, dishonest politicians who are in their pockets.
But a whole bunch of us are ingrained with a kind of market fundamentalism, that the 'invisible hand' will make things right if you just deregulate some more, that you simply cannot see any way to stave off this decline.
It isn't just technology. This deregulated, global market lets 25,000 people starve to death each year, despite global agriculture producing enough food for each person get 3000 calories per day.
Now cue the stream of /.ers defending their dead ideology because they can't face up to the fact that something they support, both with their ideas and their everyday activities, is so corrosive and destructive to our prospects for survival, happiness, and development.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
But if you check their lives you will see they got that way by taking a lot of risks
You obviously haven't. There are a few poster examples but most of them were born rich.
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck."
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
If you read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers you'll find that the rich got rich by being at the right place at the right time and having important friends to help them.
I appreciate the second link's take on things, with the "Low-Hanging Fruit" metaphor, but I think the author misses some key elements in how it applies to modern society. Fifty years ago, discovery and innovation was much easier and the things invented were just lying around (like oil) to be simply picked up and applied. Just as the Enlightenment 200 years ago resulted in an explosion of discoveries about the natural world because the realm of scientific knowledge was so small at the time... You couldn't investigate any natural phenomena without discovering a new element or species.
It's getting harder and harder to push the frontiers of knowledge, and nearly impossible for and individual acting alone to do. In America we have this mythos of the "Great Man" a single inventor like Zuckerberg, Jobs, or Edison, but in reality these people are the exception while the rule is that it takes large teams and incredible financial investment to innovate today, but our mythos of innovation downplays the collaborative side of invention.
Space Exploration is an important example of this. We emphasize Capitalism as the best engine for innovation, but it was Socialism that took man to the Moon. Capitalism is only just now reaching space, 40 years later. Teamwork accomplishes great things, but in America we emphasize individualism and personal profit, which are great motivators, but create silos of productivity that are disadvantaged for lacking the cross-pollination of ideas that comes with collaboration.
Queue the "Marxist" ad hominem attack in 3... 2... 1...
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
To be fair to damburger, the OP's baseless rant is repeated so many time by brain dead people who can't be bothered with facts that it is easy to become testy after refuting it a few thousand times. It starts with creating a fantasy enemy that bears no relation to anything in reality and applying a label used by people who disagree with you, in this case 'liberals'. Then you claim the fantasy enemy did some horrible thing that never happened, in this case "taking over" the education system.
So damburger's response may be blunt, but it is totally correct to ask for even a tiny shred of evidence to support the outlandish claims.
ICBMs contributed to launch vehicle technology which contributed to satellite technology which contributed to a lot of things.
Yes there were a lot of money spent on things that are now obsolete due to the end of the cold war. There were also a lot of things that may never have been built without it. GPS is an excellent example of this. It was originally a Defence Department project because the military needed a way to target munitions accurately and to track it's assets. Private companies have tried and failed to put up satellite constellations, think Uridium, but the Government paid for GPS and ensured that it worked. Another major project that was advanced by the military was the US Interstate system. There was a lot of opposition to paying for the system but the defence department chipped in quite a bit because one of the considerations in the placement of these highways was the movement of troops and materials during time of war.
Look at all the things that come out of DARPA. Many DARPA technologies are now in civilian use.
Yes, there has been a lot of money spent on the military in the 20th century. It is also debatable whether or not it was a waste. Is it a waste for a bank to spend millions of dollars on a safe that will never be attacked by thieves because the thieves know they can never get in? I have a saying; any state not sufficiently protected by military assets will soon become the property of another state. Were the Trident submarines a waste? Maybe. Did Trident submarines ever fire a nuke in anger? No. Did they deter the USSR from attacking the US and the countries it protects? Maybe.
OK, I understand the difference between American and European usage of the word "liberal" (in Europe "liberal" is center-right, in the US "liberal" is "center-left" [which is "extreme left" to many USians and still pretty right-wing in European eyes]; from the context it is clear that you're talking about American liberals), but what is the difference between "liberal" and "Liberal"?
The OP's intended meaning of liberal is anyone who disagrees with him, and the usage generally follows other terms that describe an intentionally undefined enemy like "them" and "illuminati". What caused these problems? Them.
I don’t think it is as much an issue of innovation as resource outlay. We live in a world where profit is the prime motive, and thus the prime value. This is fine for markets, but this mindset has overreached markets themselves and become the default value system for societies as a whole.
In the past societies invested in large scale visions for reasons that aren’t always easy to articulate, but that were certainly not limited to economic gain. Whether it’s space exploration or building cathedrals and monuments, large scale projects require massive resources and corporate (as in group) commitment. Our epoch is dominated by self-interest (some might argue enlightened self-interest), market forces and market mentalities. Obviously, there is no incentive for corporations to outlay massive resources for projects that are either risky and/or that offer limited or negative ROI. But that’s not really the issue; I wouldn’t expect them to do so. The problem is that the market mentality has so thoroughly usurped dominance across all facets of society, the common opinion is that everything should be run like a business.
If you run government like a business, or put differently if you govern your society as though it was a giant company, society has no place for grand vision. We are constantly told that only markets know what society needs and are best equipped to efficiently provide those needs. Of course it isn’t profitable to engage in these kind of projects (or not obviously profitable), so markets will not engage in them. Moreover, if government engages in them, it will require resources, i.e. taxes revenues, and we are constantly told that taxes destroy markets (though the actual data doesn’t bear this out). Anyway, I could follow this tangent into a political debate, but salient point for this thread is that we have become a market society and a market only values grand vision if it leads to obvious monetary profit. If the same resources can be spent toward a greater profit elsewhere it would ‘be foolish’ not to spent to spend it elsewhere.