US innovation?
Okay, Intel is now at, what, 14, 10, 7 nm?
Intel can put how many thousand cores in
a single processor?
There was the Human Genome Project and
Craig Venter.
The US did TCP/IP, IP and BGP routers,
and the Internet.
James Simons did a lot, he won't talk about,
but that resulted in a lot of money.
Can look at what is going on in
fusion at Princeton,
Argonne, Fermi, and LLNL.
Can see what L. Breiman did in
classification and regression trees
and, then, random forests.
Of course the USAF did GPS, which
is accurate to one inch, and now
farm tractors can plow very accurately
due to GPS.
The US has done well with carbon
fiber materials.
But, IMHO, relatively well informed,
is that the US has powerful, valuable
innovation coming like drips of a
leaky faucet when it should be
raging like a massive, wild river.
Why the difference? The people managing
the money don't have even as much
as a weak little hollow hint of a tiny
clue about how to do innovative
projects successfully. As soon as
they see something beyond what they
knew in middle school, they roll their
eyes, throw up their arms, scream about
blue sky, intellectual fun, games,
and self-abuse, etc. That's grotesque
incompetence.
The main exception is the innovation
for US national security. A second
exception
is medical innovation, especially
funded by the NIH and the research
hospitals.
Silicon Valley? It has history majors
with LLBs and/or MBAs who are 99 44/100%
non technical looking for routine
software for yet another
social, mobile, sharing, membership,
consumer thingy,
throwing their line into their
backyard above ground pool hoping
to hook another Facebook.
We're talking
totally clueless. Hopeless. Their
ability to identify, formulate,
evaluate, and pursue powerful, valuable
technical innovation? Zip, zilch, or
zero. Their technical competence?
Even worse. Did I mention hopeless?
Instead, just got to have people
running projects and allocating
funds who actually understand
how to innovate. E.g., need an
Andrew Viterbi, Gordon Moore,
Craig Venter, James Simons.
For Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg,
go back to Harvard, complete
a good education, and then try
to allocate some funds effectively.
Page/Brin -- back to Stanford, guys.
I've seen a lot in innovation,
and what I've seen in the
decision makers in Silicon Valley
is the lowest, lower than I would
ever have suspected could exist.
And their ROI? Actually, on average,
poor.
Blunt fact: Could hold a
convention in a commercial airplane
wash room of all the Silicon Valley
venture partners and CEOs qualified
for a problem sponsor position
at NSF. Sorry 'bout that.
We're talking business development
people? Marketing guys?
Hold on while I go for a big
swig of the pink stuff, Pepto Bismol.
Darn, too late -- upchucked, on the
sheared 100% wool carpet. Those
people believe that the crucial
core of the innovation they
are looking for is some C++ code
on Linux done by self-taught
hackers.
At least when the US DoE and NSF
fund fusion research, they don't
look for really big breakthroughs
from 10 year old naughty boys
out back playing with matches.
In the past there has been innovation,
also, when there was money enough
involved and people ready to do
something: E.g., clocks. Why?
Well, in 1800 a wooden ship
good for open ocean sailing was
big time expensive. But on a
successful voyage, such a ship
could make
a lot of money. But, the ship
needed to know its longitude --
latitude was much easier.
For longitude, ..., right,
need a really accurate clock.
Newton knew that, too. So,
at whatever effort, ships got
some quite accurate clocks.
Else the ships too often ended
up on the rocks.
Innovation can be done;
it has been done;
here in the US now we should
have a raging, wild river
of innovation;
instead, we have a drip, drip.
Net, the people running and funding
the projects are technically incompetent.
E.g., they just didn't study the
right stuff, long enough, hard
enough in school, and, gotta tell you,
now, away from graduate school,
no way will they reinvent that material.