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Too Many Smart People Chasing Too Many Dumb Ideas?
theodp writes "In The Unexotic Underclass, C.Z. Nnaemeka argues that too many smart people are chasing too many dumb ideas. 'What is shameful,' writes Nnaemeka, 'is that in a country with so many problems, with such a heaving underclass, we find the so-called 'best and brightest,' the 20-and 30-somethings who emerge from the top American graduate and undergraduate programs, abandoning their former hangout, Wall Street, to pile into anti-problem entrepreneurship.' Nnaemeka adds, 'It just looks like we've shifted the malpractice from feeding the money machine to making inane, self-centric apps. Worse, is that the power players, institutional and individual — the highflying VCs, the entrepreneurship incubators, the top-ranked MBA programs, the accelerators, the universities, the business plan competitions have been complicit in this nonsense.' And while it may not get you invited to the White House, Nnaemeka advises entrepreneurs looking for ideas to 'consider looking beyond the city-centric, navel-gazing, youth-obsessed mainstream' and instead focus on some groups that no one else is helping."
minecraft
So I guess you never saw infiniminer? Minecraft is one of the biggest ripoffs in the history of video game development.
smart phones
Radio -> mobile radio -> pager -> PDA -> smartphone (Blackberry) -> smartphone (Apple). It's just an iteration, not something truely innovative.
self driving cars
I'm pretty sure I read about them in Ralph 124C41+ (1925), but either way it's a very logical evolution of the chauffeur or cabdriver.
private space flight
So something becomes new and innovative because of its funding source? Have you considered applying for the position of patent officer?
crowd funding
Look up how the pedastal for the Statue of Liberty was funded sometime. Or if you want to go back even further, the joint stock companies which funded early (British) settlements in America.
Growing body parts from stem cells
Simply the next iteration of stem cell technology. If you want to tag stem cells as truly original you'd have to either put the date at 1908 for Alexander Maksimov, or perhaps 1963 for McCulloch and Till, and then it would be more of a discovery than an invention.
Mars exploration
We've been doing this since the 60s with Soviet missions (mars 1M).
Discovery of planets around other stars
How is this something 'new' or 'innovative'? It's hardly innovative to think 'gee, I wonder if there are other planets out there.' People have been trying to chart the skies since prehistoric times. The biggest 'true innovation' I can see in this field was the first telescope, and that was almost 500 years ago.
Yes, there is a bit of innovation in most of your examples. Certainly there must have been innovation between, say, Mars 1M and Curiosity. But the innovation, the new thing, is something like 'a better algorithm for flight trajectories' or 'a better radiation shield'. The concept of exploring Mars is hardly new.
So why didn't you say 'a better algorithm for flight trajectories' or 'a better radiation shield' in your list? Probably because you aren't intimately familiar with the science behind the various Mars missions, and therefore can't pick out exactly what the innovations have been. That's fine, neither am I. But certainly there is some field that you are intimately familiar with: your job, your field of study, etc. I studied mathematics. For examples of real innovation I give Mochizuki's work, a body of proofs and papers so dense and full of new terminology and new constructs that almost nobody besides him understands it enough to believe it. But for some reason, people don't say "Mochizuki" or anything similar, they say "Minecraft" and "tumblr" and call them 'new and wonderful.' Things that are actual innovations are ignored, while minor tweaks combined with PR are treated as new. Every one of your examples, except exoplanet discovery, has been accompanied by massive publicity. Minecraft was the subject of one of the biggest viral marketing campaigns to date, crowd funding is publicity in implementation, stem cells have been the subject of massive amounts of controversy, Apple's reality distortion field needs no introduction, etc.
That's what GP is referring to. The things we are shown, the things that have the label "new" or "innovative" slapped onto them, are almost never actually new or innovative, as your list perfectly demonstrates.