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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.
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.
"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!
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.
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.
ability to scale 5 orders of magnitude in physical dimension is no smelly feet
There, fixed that for you
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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.
Easy question:
The iphone is fundamentally still a wireless telephone, and outgrowth of both telephone and radio technology, and it could be argued electronics as well. Perhaps the pinnacle of such tech, but still a derivation.
The light bulb however was not still a candle, but fundamentally different using a completely different basis in science/engineering, different from anything that had come before it.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
'smelly feet' doesn't make sense.
It seems it's no small feat for you to understand that pun.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
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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"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.
A light bulb is just a glowing piece of metal in a ball of glass.
There is more and more patents every year, so there should be many new inventions no ?
j/k
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!
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.
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.
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.
Would be after CERN or Fermilab make a history altering discovery ..
I am pretty sure that people were aware that hot things glow long before Edison came along (we had been working with iron for a few millenia by then). And I am pretty sure that people working with electricity were aware that a current produces heat. And I am pretty sure that putting a glass globe around hot things was pretty much standard practice. So what did Edison really do? He found, through experimentation, the right material that could sustain the heat without being destroyed in the process.
So how is that process of experimenting and finding the right material a 'major invention', but experimenting and finding the right material to make a very thin but powerful battery 'nothing major'? Why are the thousands of 'minor' inventions that make up a cell phone 'not invention', but a lamp filament is?
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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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.