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Are There Any Real Inventors Left?
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC is running a story about invention and innovation, suggesting that there have been no truly new inventions in a long time. 'Consumers are presented with an "invention illusion," which is really little more than a marketing tool to give the impression of "breakthrough" products. This is a difficult cycle to break, particularly with the media's appetite for sensational stories, and it is hampering opportunities for credible companies without sexy stories. It also means that many entrepreneurs are looking for innovation in the wrong places and pursuing new product design ineffectively.' It leads to the question: what are the most recent things you can think of that have been actual, new inventions? Or has the high-tech revolution just been iterative innovation?"
/smug
Nearly all innovation is iterative. It has always been that way, so I've been told.
Yes look at semiconductor industry and you should be impressed with the innovations there. You can call them engineering or whatever you prefer. But ability to scale 5 orders of magnitude in physical dimension is no easy feet.
I think part of the problem is that a lot of inventions are really just the next logical step from current systems, and especially when you have a lot of independent groups working in similar areas, the chance of inventing something truly unique is quite low. One of the problems with the patent system, I think, is that it affords the first "inventor" an enormous advantage over everyone else who might also come up with the same idea independently.
I'm not saying there aren't often genuine inventions and patent worthy things, but a lot of stuff that is just an iteration beyond what went before isn't really an invention...
Any invention is just an addition to preexisting technologies. Bell et al. didn't invent the telephone in ancient Greece for a reason. There was all sorts of work to be done with sound, electricity, and magnetism first. The telephone was just adding voice capability to the telegraph, right?
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Clearly they invented the portable music device, the tablet computer, the cellular phone and the personal computer. No other company has done so much to enrich our lives. In about 3 years time we'll see that they will have invented the television too.
The patent trolls see to that.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
"particularly with the media's appetite for sensational stories"
What, like claiming there are no new inventions to get the digerati all a-twitter and drive traffic to your site? Like that, you mean?
I have asthma. Over the past 35 years I have witnessed the slow and steady destruction of this affliction. I started with drugs that were expensive and did little or nothing to actually steady my attacks. Today I use something called Singulair which I take once a day and essentially makes my asthma disappear. It also mutes down all of my allergies, I can pet cats without any side effects now.
According to the BBC, this is not an invention. That's because we had drugs before, and we have other ones today. Clearly this is not *really* any sort of progress, right? The fact that my life, and millions of others, have been utterly transformed is just an illusion!
A moon dust rover :)
how about using the dust on the moon as rocket fuel? imagine this... blast dust downward underneath the rover, and kick up more dust. use the dust you kick-up as more rocket fuel.
"...iPhone was not a new invention - it was just a much better telephone than any we'd seen before." And the light bulb was just a much better way to light up the room...
AFAIC there are plenty of inventions, most people aren't noticing them because these things today are much more specialised in nature. What they are really looking for and can't find is huge, gigantic breakthroughs, an antigravity device or perpetuum mobile of some sort. They can't see what is not immediately obvious, and what is not immediately obvious does not become a stand alone product in its own right.
I even disagree with the supposed lack of 'cross-sector innovation'. There is probably more cross-sector innovation today than ever before in history, that's because the Inernet allows people to read about solutions that are found and used in other sectors and apply those to themselves. What this guy, Paul Martin says, is that there is "no recognition". Well, shit, that's the only thing I agree with: there is no recognition.
Well sure there is no recognition, and he is the first to lack vision to recognise just how much 'cross sector innovation' is actually happening today compared to decades and centuries ago.
You can't handle the truth.
Yes. Quit expecting to see real inventions among heavily-marketed consumer products, though.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
While I have no real facts to back this up, I would think that the innovative process requires new materials to create new ideas. Through the ages we learned and invented as we discovered new metals and other materials. I am betting that when / if we do discover some new materials in significant quantities that are useful we'll come up with new uses for them.
So when someone comes out with transparent steel or something I'll be able to invent some cool stuff.
I also feel like science fiction movies have sort of spoiled the 'wow' factor of a good majority of innovations. "Great, so you made a cell phone. It's not a communicator I can wear on my shirt... and talk to outer space with" - That's a rough example but it is an illustration of the point I was trying to convey.
To start with the actual lightbulbs: High yield white light LED technology. Sure, the photoelectric effect has been known for about a century. It took a while for the first practical applications to be available. LEDs being one of them. But you can't compare those little signalling LEDs of a few decades ago with the current lightbulb replacing LED technology. Of course this technology is a mix of other technologies, but quite a few of them are quite recent (as in max. decades old, not centuries).
The article mentions the Telephone as a truly innovative invention. But doesn't that in its turn used microphone, speaker and signal transportation technology of that time?
If the time frame for 'recent' is 'last half century' or so, I'd say there have been true inventions in, optical disk technology, various microprocessor advancements, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence hardware, gene manipulation, solar cell technology and various other fields. Too many to mention.
If algorithms can be inventions as well, we have never been as innovative as we are now. Look at all the new search technologies, data-mining for targeted ads, again AI algorithms, mostly visible to the general public in computer games, audio and video compression codecs, speech recognition, synthesis and language translation... the list goes on and on...
Most people don't have time to be creative and invent new things. They spend 8 hours a day doing what someone else is telling them to do. All because you need money just to live.
I am not really here right now.
Some of the inventions to his name:
- the Segway
- the iBot wheelchair, capable of climbing stairs
- a home dialysis machine
- an insulin pump to help diabetics maintain a proper level
- a low-power water purifier for use in developing countries
I am officially gone from
Well, no. The story is about innovation, invention is just barely mentioned - and that in passing. The bulk of the story is about innovations, cross pollination between industries and fields, and how innovations build on previous iterations. All of this leading up to opinion (unsurprisingly, since it's an opinion piece, not a "story" per se) that industries must avoid becoming insular to avoid being left behind. (Though it appears by "industries", it appears he actually means "British corporations".)
Well, setting aside the fact that you've mistaken a supporting statement for a thesis... Why does it matter? Arguably, iterative innovation is every bit as important as invention. Progress is as much about the measured steps as it is about giant leaps.
The reason you don't "see" any inventors is because of the massive hoard of lawyers that would come after any public inventor.
People who invent tend to keep it to themselves, because they'd never turn a profit after all the lawsuits.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
People like this are the modern day inventors.
[0] - http://makerfaire.com/
[1] - http://makerspace.com/
[2] - http://www.instructables.com/index
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While flippant, I think AC here has a point. I wonder how many inventions sit because IP protection is non-existent while silliness like this gets multi-billion payouts. Yeah, I'm aware of the recent judgement, but I'm just saying...
"Real" invention: Graham Bell and the Telephone. Never mind the ~30 years of inventions that came before it, including the one where the term Telephone even comes from (Reis anyone?). Stupid.
And then they speak of Apple and the Iphone because, supposedly, everyone believes that was some sort of great invention and not merely a very well executed idea that had already existed before.
Weak and sad.
Yes.
Remember the book War of the Worlds? In it, what ultimately kept the aliens at bay were the same diseases that plague us.
It turns out that we needed predators, new adventures, challenges, struggles and discomforts to stay motivated.
Instead, we have Big Macs and Netflix, and we keep shuffling the same technologies around and trying to build an economy on selling the result to each other and then taxing it...
There is more and more patents every year, so there should be many new inventions no ?
j/k
I'm pretty sure the ability to create a real, physical object based on a series of 1s and 0s in a file is worthy of being called an invention. Sure, you could consider it an "improvement" on the printing press, but things like the MakerBot are really something unique on their own.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know.
Ambrose Bierce
"It's one thing to talk about the poetry of machines. Quite another to listen to it for yourself."
There have been some massive breakthroughs in the medical field in the last few years and most recently, a possible cure for AIDS and cancer.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
The wheel. Now that was a real invention!
50,000 BCE - Tree dies and log rolls down hill to the bewilderment of the filthy cave-people nearby.
35,000 BCE - A lunatic Neanderthal pushes a log down a hill to crush his enemies.
3500 BCE - Someone eventually figures out that you can use a bunch of rolling logs side-by-side to move boulders.
3000 BCE - A slave engineer from North Africa narrows the points of a rack of logs to attached a guide so they stay together whilst rolling.
40 BCE - Some Roman stone mason makes a log out of stone and more disc-shaped.
2 BCE - And finally, some brilliant -real- inventor pokes a hole in an old stone log and sticks a wooden log inside as an axle, probably so he can better lash someone to it for a good flogging.
We just don't have -real- inventions anymore like the wheel!
Usually when it is said "no new inventions" they are comparing against the flurry of activity from circa 1850-1950, and then I point out how the commercial worldwide Internet (early 1990's) and affordable cell phones (mid 1990's) fundamentally changed life. Before the 1990's cell phone, women did not go out alone at night. But this BBC article defines "recent" as "21st century" and focuses on everyone's favorite non-invention whipping boy, the iPhone.
Well, 2001-2010, has been called the "lost decade" for Microsoft, and in my opinion was the lost decade in general for a lot of organizations, market sectors, and technology areas. 9-11 set in an economic conservatism and then the housing bubble that followed (resulting from the low interest rates that were instituted to counter that economic conservatism) misdirected a huge percentage of time and effort away from productive endeavors. And then of course the Great Recession. We're only now waking up from that 12-year sleep, and there is now a lot of exciting stuff going on.
The BBC's article is like writing about a 17-year-old and saying, "he hasn't even gotten a diploma yet to show for all those years of schooling."
Besides those two life-changing inventions I started out with, though, there is a third and it is more recent: the end of physical media. One could say eBooks, flash drives, DVRs, broadband, and low-priced scanners (who remembers when they used to be $5,000?) are all incremental, but taken together, they have fundamentally changed life: libraries are obsolete, and homes no longer have to devote square footage to media storage.
... this argument has been with us for at least a century, as well.
In recent years white LEDs have appeared in more and more places. After early red and even earlier weak blue LEDs, in quite a short time we went from green to blue to white indicator LEDs, and now the white ones are getting ever better.
They're really a pretty miraculous technology: they're at least partially replacing everything from real candles to filament lamps to gas discharge lamps. They're about to unseat low pressure sodium lights as the most efficient streetlights, if they haven't already done so. Meanwhile they can still turn on and off faster than other lamps, and contain smaller amounts of toxic substances than most alternatives. They're a very science fictioney technology happening right here in real life.
Gone are the days when a sole inventor working in a garage could come up with a revolutionary new design that will change the world. All the low hanging fruit is gone. Now it is about slow incremental changes over time. One analogy is wikipedia. At the very beginning, you could easily come up with an article about a topic that nobody else there had written about. Nowadays, not so much... Your new article on wikipedia is likely to be a very obscure topic, or one created by a current event. You are more likely now to edit existing articles than to create new ones.
the problem is the lack of NEW fields where you can land up having your name used for the Units of that field. That and getting into a new ar3ea (even if its related to an existing one) is a good way to be sued/criminally charged/shot by somebody.
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Unless you are an anonymous employee on a fixed salary of a big corporation that takes the merit and profit for your inventions (where don't worth it), is just too risky to even try.
I'd say progress comes in waves. Someone invents something revolutionary and then others spend decades, if not centuries, improving that technology and exploiting it to its fullest extent. That said, technology is growing increasingly complex which means that it requires the involvement of multiple people. An individual might have an ambiguous vision like a flying car, but the odds of that person along inventing the technology that would make it work is slim.
I do think it's outrageously idiotic to suggest that we are not in a golden age of invention. The author seems to be arguing that there's no invention because we haven't been hit with big, flashy bits of technology. Progress is far more subtle than that. It's iterative and often has a long incubation period.
Much of it isn't even noteworthy on it's own, but enables a whole host of new technologies. Look at something as mundane as manufacturing processes. If you gave an engineer in 1980 the complete schematics to a modern smartphone they wouldn't be able to build the thing. They haven't had the advances in machining and material sciences to enable that technology.
Every few years some dolt writes an editorial complaining about how there's no real innovation because cars still require wheels or computers look kind of like typewriters. The guy who's written this particular editorial is probably being self-serving given that he represents some consultancy. But generally I think the attitude is incredibly self-centered. It's the idea that because the world hasn't met *MY* ridiculous standards there is no innovation. Because I haven't been observant enough or alive long enough to notice the fundamental impact on humanity nothing's changed.
And yes, he did innovate, a la Newton, along the way.
I come here for the love
Many would-be inventors (and software developers) sit idly by or work on dull projects for large corporations because of companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Sony. It's financially dangerous to invent something or publish software as the hard part is not the engineering, it's the 'imaginary property' problem and all of the lawyers required. It's not worth the effort, as in the end you either get purchased by a large corporation or squashed by a large corporation. Most inventors aren't looking for imaginary property protection, they just want to make and sell a product.
... http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/02/01/1427226/public-domain-prosthetic-hand Yes. The answer is yes.
AI attorneys! That would save people and businesses some money. I'll get right on it.
The stepwise refinement, collaboration, and remixing we see today is the way it has always been. Everything you ever learned about "Person X invented thing Y" is wrong. Such statements are made by history books to make a good story, and have no connection to reality. Edison was a smart and hard-working guy, but he didn't invent the light bulb or the phonograph out of thin air, nor did Bell the telephone, or Marconi the radio. They all played a role, but hardly a unique one.
--Lee Daniel Crocker : http://www.etceterology.com My life is in the public domain.
Wait, I'm sure all the human attorneys will find a reason to sue me before my AI defense attorney has passed the bar! Never mind.
Would be after CERN or Fermilab make a history altering discovery ..
Saying there are no real investors just speaks to how the BBC has become nothing more then a sensational tabloid service rather then anything to do with news. And does speak to the current state of our society in general for valuing what the BBC has to "report".
No, you are not going to see the world's next big invention on the Dragon's Den (or Shark Tank for you Americans). Someone is not going to walk up to the panel with a solution for the world's energy crisis having worked on the problem in their garage for a couple of years. Also inventions are not just stuff you get on a cellphone or tablet.
Where invention is happening is in laboratories with subject matter that would make the average BBC employee's head explode with its complexity and impact on society. Maybe rather then writing up some drivel about the lack of innovation and invention in the world, tour any post-graduate lab at a university for an hour.
I would agree with one sentiment from the BBC article, there are few innovations that are readily digestible by the average human. For instance discovering the Higgs Boson particle is barely understandable by the average person. While this was a huge win in the field of physics, most people could barely understand what actually happened and few news sites could even report properly the impact it has.
So, just because the iPhone has not introduced anything new for the last few years doesn't mean invention is dead, it just proves that news reporting is a dead art.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
There are very few, if any, human achievements that come totally by themselves, with no reliance on what came before them. Everything is iterative. Some things may be bigger leaps than others but it is all still built on earlier work, it is all derivative to an extent. I think Newton's statement to Hooke is apt "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
You hear shit like this from whiny people all the time with regards to video games ans so on. How there's nothing "new" anymore, that everything is based on something else. Of course all that really speaks of is looking at the past with rose coloured glasses, and of course ignoring the influence of other media on early video games.
We do not live or work in a vacuum, trying to come up with things with no knowledge or reference of what else has been done. We build on what we know, and try to add to it. In science, this is EVERYTHING to how it works. It is all about discovery leading to discovery, small pieces being unlocked to slowly solve large puzzles.
Also many of the really big things kind sneak up on you. They don't happen over night, little does, and you only notice the massive change in retrospect. The Internet is a good example. When I first got on it in 1995 it was a toy really. It was damn cool but there was little you could do with it of much utility. However that shifted and shifted until seemingly suddenly, without me really noticing, sometime in the mid to late 2000s it really matured.
Now the Internet isn't just useful, it is vital to many things. You can do most everything online, some things you have to do online. It has become to go to place for the world's knowledge. It is just an assumed part of computing to the point that when it is out, you forget and still try to open your browser to look something up real quick because you are so used to it.
It didn't happen overnight, but it did happen in a pretty short time really. It changed the way humans communicate, the way our data interacts. It kinda capped off the information age in a sense. It is a major change in human civilization, and most people have trouble really appreciating how different things were without it.
You are also extremely right about preexisting technologies. Convergence, some people call it. You have to have all the other stuff ready before you can do some things. Smart phones are a great example. People have long had the idea of something like it. Heck, look at Star Trek. The idea of a handheld information/communication device is nothing new. So why did it take so long?
Well you had to get all kinds of technology to the right state. Batteries had to be small enough and last long enough. Lithography had to advance to the point were a useful amount of CPU and memory could be jammed in there. Display technology needed to advance to where you could have a workable display in the small package. Oh and then there's the little matter of having a communications network to get data to it.
Once we had all that? Well guess what? We got ourselves smartphones. There again is a massive shift happening right under our noses. It is quickly going from something nobody had, to something only a few had, to something everyone is getting. Internet, and as such the store of human knowledge, is now something that follows many people around everywhere, and the number grows daily.
1) There are always diminishing returns on technology. The easy stuff gets discovered and developed first.
2) Invention always starts as an individual with an idea. Current employee contract law guarantees that benefits of a new invention go to corporate entities instead of the individual, thus short-circuiting the reward process for invention at the start.
3) Patent trolls can successfully shake down real inventors via litigation. Larger corporations can shrug this off. Individuals and small businesses can't.
You want invention? Purge the parasites and parasitic elements from the system (i.e. patent laws favoring corporations and patent trolls). At that point, talented individuals can start profitably inventing again.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
We've got car-sized rovers on Mars roaming around, taking pictures, drilling in rocks, relaying data back through a satellite in orbit around another planet and nothing new was invented to accomplish that?
Idiot.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
In 1899, U.S. Commissioner of Patents Charles H. Duell declared that everything that could be invented had been invented.
The fact is we are riding a wave of invention unparalleled in human history.
I'd say all the new tech coming out of graphene could be considered new invention. Look towards the universities.
Can you please stop asking trick questions on /.?
Author is confused because he focuses only the ideas in commercial production. How long were lasers or LEDs or transistors or any number of fundamental inventions in existence before they made large commercial entrances that popular culture recognized? He needs to go into the labs and see how many fundamentally new items have been created in the last 10 years that are now in the world of development (and yes invention ) that reduces them to practice and economic accessibility and then tell us the cupboard is bare. Some guy whining about the shallowness of popular acclaim with a shallow assessment of the world.
I live in the Canadian prairies, and it turns out that there is an interesting side effect of the higher efficiency of the LED bulbs....they don't put out *enough* heat.
Last year the weather conditions were just right and we had a kind of sticky blowing snow that stuck to a bunch of the traffic lights. With the old bulbs the heat would have been enough to "self-clear", but for the LED ones they had to send out crews to clean off the snow.
Most of the LED brake lights use PWM for brightness control, and it results in the LEDs of the car in front of me appearing to flicker whenever I move my eyes. Drives me crazy.
The solowheel does actually appear to have been invented by one guy...
Gladwell wrote an article for the New Yorker a while back opining that it is the iterative inventions rather than the "breakthroughs" that are most important. Here it is: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell
He is riffing on another article that claims that the industrial revolution started in Britain because "it had a far larger population of skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them work."
It seems that TFA is misled by the fact that nobody remembers the long history of tweaking and engineering that results in a popular product. For example, everyone thinks that Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb, but he was just one of many engineers improving on a concept.
There are a lot of post about how past "inventions" were really just minor iterations too, so the author's claim doesn't stand up. However, I think the author does have a point; try the recognition test.
If an average american from 1910 were suddenly transported to 1960, things would be unrecognizable -- there were so many truly groundbreaking changes. Home electric power, radio, television, refrigerators (and the supermarkets and foods they allowed), automobiles, antibiotics, etc. had all gone from being unknowns to being commonplace in the intervening period. (They may have existed in 1910, but they weren't developed to the point of commercialization.)
In comparison, someone suddenly transported from 1960 to 2010 would recognize almost all parts of daily life. Wake up, flip on the lights, make some breakfast using ingredients from the fridge, drive to work, listen to the radio on the drive, return home, and watch TV. Few things would be truly new. Even most of the new things wouldn't be unrecognizable. Cell phones are just two-way radios; those existed in 1960. People in 1960 knew computers were going to be a big deal, etc. Heck, if I were transported from 1960 to 2010, I'd be disappointed. Where are the flying cars and other Jetson innovations? (Yes, The Jetsons aired in 1962; just add two years to everything if you must.) The internet and the computers we access it through are the only really big change to daily life that I can think of. That's significant, but not as significant as the 1910->1960 changes.
And coincidentally, Dyson is about to launch a "top secret revolutionary product" you know like Kamen did with the Segway. So I guess this aricle is hyping up Dyson.
Optical media, remote controls, data compression algorithms (MP3, JPEG, etc.), plasma and LCD displays...just off the top of my head.
What are these guys smoking, I wonder?
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
I recall an article from the 1990's lamenting how technological progress for American consumers had stalled. It argued the life of the average American in the 1950's was fundamentally the same as life in the 1990's. People in the 1950's wrote letters and talked on the phone. They listened to the radio and watched TV and went to the movies. They had cars and drove everywhere and could also travel by bus or train or airplane.
I wish I had a copy of that article, because there's been a big change between the 1990's and today and what we expect in the near future.
Wireless remotes were available in the 1950s.
Color television was available in the 1950s.
The USDA restriced avacado imports until the mid 90s. There's no reason they couldn't have been imported sooner. Bananas were already being imported from central america to america sumpermarkets.
The first successful weather satellite launched in 1960.
NASA launched its first communication satellite in 1960.
The USSR launched its first Mars probes in 1960.
The list goes on. Thanks for proving my point; with the exception of internet related things, these were not unknowns in 1960, even if they weren't fully commercialized (or gradually refined to the point they're at today). A person from 1910 would be more out of place in 1960, than a person from 1960 would be in 2010. Period. End of story. You're simply wrong.
This article is a poor, sensationalistic rewrite of a much more thoughtful one:
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21569393-fears-innovation-slowing-are-exaggerated-governments-need-help-it-along-great
A sad day for the BBC.
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The light bulb still counts as an invention, even though it was not all invented at once by Edison. Today's inventions require years of hard work by large teams.
Several other things I have invented have gone into commercial production decades after I invented them. Here in the UK, no one wants to know about new inventions. That Includes the UK offices of Ford and General Motors. I still have plenty of inventions worth millions - no one wants them. If you know someone who does,, and is willing to pay for it let me know.
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There is all kinds of new technology. (Finfets, carbon nanotubes, meta materials, etc). And there are new devices: smart phones, dvrs, drones.
What we don't often see are new technologies suddenly making their appearance in new devices that consumers can see and buy. That's the classic (and mostly wrong) inventors tale. What happens much more often is that new technology is first applied to existing applications and new applications are cobbled together from existing technology. This model substantially reduces risk since, if we can make it work, we know there is a market for new technology. New devices can be created much more quickly and be much more likely to work if they are not based on unproven technology.
It does raise the question of what sort of breakthrough devices are we missing out on because the required technology is not useful for any current applications.
The average person today has far more lesiure time than ever before in human history. Medieval serfs had to spend every daylight hour toiling in the fields, 7 days a week, just to eke out a subsistence-level income.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Did you not see the Slashdot article/video yesterday, showing off the Solowheel? Powered gyroscopic unicycles are pretty darn inventive/innovative. As was the Segway.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
For 5 years, I worked at a DNA sequencing company in the R&D group. The biochemistry group created a breakthrough in the chemistry called (sequencing-by-synthesis) where once instrument from 2010 was equivalent to 60,000 top-of the line DNA sequencers from 2005. Instead of reading bases one at a time in a capillary-tube, it was able to capture a whole microscope sized swath at a time, where fixed segments of DNA stuck to the bottom of the flow cell like a kelp on an ocean floor, and every cycle through the machine, using clever biochemistry techniques, removed one base-pair from all the strands at once (with a density of ~700,000 clusters per mm^2) ..It ends up being about a terabase worth of data per sample. The cost drop was phenomenal, and is dropping faster than moores law.
Sequencing has enabled all sorts of medical diagnostics and research that were previously unavailable. It was quite exhilarating to to read in Journals like Nature about people that had late stage cancer being sequenced to find out that they were misdiagnosed with the wrong cancer. Just a few years ago, it was impossible to determine what type of cancer a cancer was before it spread. Once it has metastasized, it was all a guessing game. With sequencing you can know for sure, and give you the right medicine to address that cancer.
I've always considered biology to be hundreds of years behind physics and the other "hard sciences", because they never had the tools to deal with it.The CPU power, the RAM, the hard-disk space, even the cloud infrastructure are all needed to make DNA sequencer efficient. The last instrument I worked on was a low cost DNA sequencer that could yield a sequence in one day. At the end of a run, to do the basecalling and base alignment of the data, you would need significantly more horsepower than what was on the meager instrument. The cloud allows you access to a supercomputer the the short time that you need it, so the customer is not burdened by the huge computational complexity involved.
As the cost sequence drops (and continues to drop), whole new fields of research have opened up. Bioinformatics where biology and computer science meet is a pretty hot topic. We have a deluge of data, but we don't yet have all the good algorithms necessary to unlock all the secrets we wish to solve. The Rosetta stone of the 21st century. This is the biggest complaint I hear about from biochemists.. Making sense of the data. Data leads to knowledge leads to wisdom, but data is not knowledge.
I consider DNA sequencing to be an enabler, just like the steam-engine, or the electric light. It is now possible to look deeply at things we never could, like meta-genomics. Did you know that you have more bacteria in your body then all other cells in your body put together? ..And did you know that you can't grow most of them on a petri dish? We have been to mars, but we don't even know the bacteria in our own gut. Meta-genomics is a form of "shot-gun sequencing" .. In the lab you understand the biology by making millions of replicas of it in the petri dish.Not all bacteria grow on a petri-dsh . With shot-gun sequencing, you sequence enough sample so you can digitally reconstruct what organisms were there to begin with. This has enabled us to [begin to] understand the biochemical messaging between soil bacteria and the roots of plants, understand the biochemistry of food digestion to generate bio-fuels more efficiently, etc .. Interesting times...
I'd say many of these these are largely market breakthroughs, the application of an existing technology to a new market. If anything, with the exception of the Internet, these demonstrate the article's point.
7. Speech recognition. Computerized version of break audio into components, looking them up in a translation table, and report results.
8. Automatic language translation. Computerized version of looking something up in a translation table and reporting results.
Wow. Just wow. You really have no idea what actually goes into natural-language recognition and translation. For starters, we've been able to "break audio into components and look them up in a translation table" for, oh, fifty or sixty years now. Speech recognition was "ten years away" for the first thirty or forty of those years. Now, it's basically arrived, although there's still plenty to be done.
What made it possible? Partly, it was these last four or five orders of magnitude of improvement in processor speed and memory size. But there's also a colossal amount of research in signal processing, statistical analysis, and AI that you're simply sweeping under the rug.
By the same reasoning you applied to these points, the Internet is even less of a "breakthrough" -- it's a simple iterative advance stemming from more numerous and widely-used computers, better data-transmission technology, and new market demand. Except that it's anything but "simple", and the "iterations" that led to it took us over a precipice. On this side of the precipice, everything is different.
When you come right down to it, every invention is an "iterative advance" based on pre-existing technology, simply because you can't really base an invention on technology that doesn't exist yet, and because you can't take infinite steps. So, your observation may be technically valid, but I don't think it's useful.
A few years ago, the media touted Dean Kamen as a great inventor. Sure, his Segway didn't change the world a whole lot, but he was supposed to follow that up with super-efficient Stirling engines, which would power hybrid cars and purify water for third-worlders.
Whatever became of that? Nothing, as far as I can tell. I'd love it if some slashdotter could provide information to the contrary.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
If the problem is sensationalism in the media, then why did they write this article? I can 3D print a mechanical replacement for my hand, I can build an autonomous drone for under a grand, and when I walk into my apartment my lights come on automatically and some nice music starts.
If we haven't invented anything in a while I would have been doing all that stuff ten years ago.
or else!
For a long time, humans had little scientific discovery. And little technological progress. Then it seemed like a lot of previously undiscovered facets of nature were discovered. With it came technological progress.
I think the author is lamenting a perceived lack of new fundamental scientific discoveries about nature, not so much a lack of technological progress. The discovery of bacteria. Molecules. Atoms. Electromagnetism. Radio waves. And the like. New fundamental discoveries about nature. Which don't seem to happen nowadays.
Scientific discoveries versus technological progress - a dichotomy? We're making fewer new scientific discoveries about the nature of the physical reality in which we live, yet increasing our number of technological applications? In graph terms, I suspect the author believes that scientific discoveries are following a bell curve, whereas technological progress is following a line rising continuously. Y axis would represent number of new scientific discoveries as well as number of technological inventions while X is time, ever increasing.
It is an ignorant point of view that believes thinking about something, or for that matter writing it down or drawing it is invention, that is called fiction. Did Jules Vern invent the rocket because he wrote about taking a trip to the moon or did Michelangelo invented the helicopter. If that was true invention, then we wouldn't need any engineers. We all could have travelled to the moon in 1865 when Jules Vern released his book. I was born 100 years later and no one had still stepped on the moon. People point at patent law as inventions, yet that is just how lawyers and judges play in technology. Real invention doesn't happen sitting on your couch. It doesn't happen in the attorney's office. Real invention takes many disciplines, team work, time, money and desire. More things are being invented today than at any other time. True invention actually produces a working version of an idea. The wright brothers were not credited with inventing the airplane because they were the first to think about it, they were credited with inventing the airplane because they were the first to take off and land in a craft they built without killing themselves. And Curtis invented the aileron that all modern use to fly even though he lost the patent battle with the Wright brothers. Real invention is doing the work, not wining in court. I've worked at companies where someone wanted to sell us ideas, what a load of bull, usually we would tell them to get lost as we have a ton of ideas that we employees have discussed already and many times we had already written down in detail. Part of the inventive process is trowing out ideas that are not yet cost effective.
I think the TFA and all involved have gotten so used to a daily candy shop of FRICKIN' MIRACLES. That they're inured to the taste of sugar.
Every rule has more than one consequence.
It doesn't really cost that much to patent something. You could take out a loan if necessary. Why isn't there a wikipedia article on magfets, they seem cool.
I think the article is confusing invention with inventor. I do believe that inventions are continuing at a stagering rate. The difference now is that we rarely see it as coming from a single inventor. Often inventions are released on behalf of a corporation or the patents are licensed through a corporation. Inventions are also often incorporated through an existing product line because that is where there is an existing profit model. So new inventions are sometimes hidden from view and not specifically announced to the public as they are marketing benefits, not technology features. For example, just try to find out exactly what technology is inside an iphone and you will be bombarded by marketing on what you can do with it, but minimal information on the working technology that drives it.
The article is wrong. It specifically mentions that the accellerometer inside the iphone is inventive, but not a new invention. The combination of inventions is a new patentable invention as recognized by the WIPO (world patents). It may require the licensing of existing patents to combine them into a new one, but this is always the way patents work.
My argument is that we do not see these invensions as invensions because they are not marketed as such. As an example, try to locate the patent behind an accellerometer inside a cell phone. Also, try to find out exactly what chip is being used in the iphone accellerometer or how many axis it has or the degree of angle accuracy, or the speed of these calculations or the code to communicate with it. The average consumer will not be able to find this information, let alone have it marketed to them. Im not saying that it is impossible to find, but rather there is absolutely no marketing it as an invention. Instead, what is marketed is the resulting features. For example, the iphone can be tilted and the displayed page will tilt with it. Thus the consumers see this invention as a benefit improvement. Because customers do not by on technology features alone, they buy on the idea of how they will use it.
Clearly the lightbulb is an invention, and yet Edison did not invent tunksten or the vacuum or electricity in general. And he wasnt alone in his idea that a filament electrified inside a vaccum was the way to proceed. He combined many failed attempts and stumbled apon one that worked. So if combining elements of the past in novel ways to create something new is NOT an invention, then the light bulb is NOT an invention. To suggest that building on the past does not constitute inventions that can change the world, then the author of this article is defying common sense and disagreeing with patent offices around the world.
Just to make a link to another current /. story, what about what Lytro is doing with camera optics and processing? I think what they are doing is quite different thinking to anything else out there, and might (eventually) have the potential to change our very definition of a "photo"...
7. Speech recognition. Computerized version of break audio into components, looking them up in a translation table, and report results.
8. Automatic language translation. Computerized version of looking something up in a translation table and reporting results.
Most everything can be described as a look up table if you break it down. The hard part is learning, building, maintaining, storing, updating, and searching, the structure and content of these tables in real time. This is where true algorithm innovation has occurred.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
"Good" Speech Recognition has been "just a few years away" for at least three decades. Seriously, in 1985, I hacked up a voice-controlled home automation system based on the CoVox VoiceMaster recognition system for the Commodore 64 (about $700, all together). It actually worked reasonably well, especially considering the low cost of both the voice processing hardware and the base computer system. I worked *almost* as well as the $3000 Texas Instruments VoRec system we had at work (which required a $4000 PC AT to host!)
While Siri and her ilk work better than the old CoVox system (which could not handle "connected, speaker-independent speech" at all, but nailed trained words or phrases from a one or two-user training set), the odd thing is that overall, speech recognition is still not really good enough to bother with. (I use Siri about once a month, usually when driving, and with only about a 50-60% success ratio).
Here's the odd thing: In that time, the available compute power to handle speech recognition has increased by well over a million-fold (and it's really more than that, since even on a new fast A5/A6 CPU, Siri still has to fling your voice request up tot he cloud for processing), but the entire system is nowhere near a million times better at recognizing your speech. More like a hundred times, maybe. On a good day.
This is one of those problems that has shown itself to be stubbornly resistant to traditional procedural AI approaches: 30 years on, the best we can do is still not very good!
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last