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Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?
21–30 of 55 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?
#22I agree completely- I don't know why so many people insist that technological progress is improving at an exponential rate when the empirical evidence seems to contradict this so clearly.
... and what empirical evidence would that be exactly? Surely, if it is empirical, you can cite it! Could you at least define what you mean by technological progress ?
Cheaper food, better cars, faster computers, improved life expectancy, cheaper energy, better education, enhancements to human intelligence, better public transportation, more efficient manufacturing, better understanding of biology, better understanding of physics.
Empirically, it seems to me all of the above have seen noticeable, but merely linear improvements in the last decade. (admittedly, computers are much faster for parallelizable algorithms, such as 3D graphics, but not for the majority of software which is serial in nature)
"access to information", "density of storage" and "communications tools" are three that I think could be argued to have improved by an order of magnitude in the last decade. I would guess though that out of those, only "communications tools" will see similar dramatic changes in the next decade (cell phones and other communication links are still pretty crappy right now) I think the amount of information on the web in the next decade will increase, but at a surprisingly modes rate.
(BTW- I hope I'm wrong and we have more exponential improvements to look forward to)
Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?
#23Well we have wikipedia now. I think that's a huge leap forward.
Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?
#24Any increases in privacy, civil rights, human rights, intolerance?
These are ancient problems... don't expect a quick fix, especially via technology.
http://www.ted.com/talks/billy_graham_on_technology_faith_an...
Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
... and what empirical evidence would that be exactly? Surely, if it is empirical, you can cite it! Could you at least define what you mean by technological progress ?
Cheaper food, better cars, faster computers, improved life expectancy, cheaper energy, better education, enhancements to human intelligence, better public transportation, more efficient manufacturing, better understanding of biology, better understanding of physics. Empirically, it seems to me all of the above have seen noticeable, but merely linear improvements in the last decade. (admittedly, computers are much fas…
Exponential doesn't mean "growing really fast".
Exponential means "growth by a fixed percentage per year".
The economy grows exponentially at around 2-3% per year.
What evidence do you have that things are improving linearly rather than exponentially?
Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cheaper food, better cars, faster computers, improved life expectancy, cheaper energy, better education, enhancements to human intelligence, better public transportation, more efficient manufacturing, better understanding of biology, better understanding of physics. Empirically, it seems to me all of the above have seen noticeable, but merely linear improvements in the last decade. (admittedly, computers are much fas…
Exponential doesn't mean "growing really fast". Exponential means "growth by a fixed percentage per year". The economy grows exponentially at around 2-3% per year. What evidence do you have that things are improving linearly rather than exponentially?
Well, exponential could mean "growing really fast" since that's a vague concept that doesn't really mean anything.
I will concede though that I'm referring to growth at a fast pace, since that is the topic of the OP. No doubt some of the items I listed could be improving at a very low magnitude exponential rate and it is a more complicated task to provide evidence that this isn't the case.
Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?
#27I think it may be that you simply have enough bandwidth to do whatever it is that you want to do, would you be willing to pay a premium to get more ? I have 20Mbps here and 90% of the time I'm under 10% usage. And I consider myself a pretty heavy internet user. Innovation is probably not measured very well by looking at your DSL upload speed. A decade ago your pc would have been running at 3 to 400 MHz tops (single c…
It's an imbalance. I've never really needed more than 5mbps down, but I NEED 20mbps up or greater for my daily interest in the internet, mainly video and photography. Broadband is just another case where status quo has been maintained by lobbying and corporate bulling at the cost of losing our competitive edge and restricting our ability to grow.
Cheaper isn't terribly exciting, it's just .. well, cheaper. As to more storage, memory and processing power, so what? My desktop still feels as sluggish and kludgy as it did a decade ago. The use case changed. Browsers are still awful, maybe not in direct feature for feature comparison, but how we use them now (flash, ajax, multiple tabs) they're just as slow and unreliable.
Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?
#28I think it may be that you simply have enough bandwidth to do whatever it is that you want to do, would you be willing to pay a premium to get more ? I have 20Mbps here and 90% of the time I'm under 10% usage. And I consider myself a pretty heavy internet user. Innovation is probably not measured very well by looking at your DSL upload speed. A decade ago your pc would have been running at 3 to 400 MHz tops (single c…
It's an imbalance. I've never really needed more than 5mbps down, but I NEED 20mbps up or greater for my daily interest in the internet, mainly video and photography. Broadband is just another case where status quo has been maintained by lobbying and corporate bulling at the cost of losing our competitive edge and restricting our ability to grow. Cheaper isn't terribly exciting, it's just .. well, cheaper. As to more…
Ask around, when I was living in Toronto I found out that a neighbouring company had pulled in fiber, they let me piggyback on to theirs for a relatively low fee.
If you need it then I assume it's work related so you probably have some budget available.
You'd be surprised how much fiber has been pulled in metropolitan areas.
If you're in the sticks or some small town then it's a different matter, but you could conceivably do something with channel bonding, or ask your ISP how many dineros they want for a symmetrical arrangement.
Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?
#29I, for one, agree that the pace of technological innovation has somewhat slowed down of recently. Compared to nuclear energy, television, the space race, the complete eradication of small pox, personal computers, test tube babies, and the internet, the last 10 years seem a little disappointing. Modern miracles like the iphone and even-faster broadband and faster JavaScript engines seems like incremental improvements rather than major breakthroughs like quantum computing or true AI or whatever. On the other hand, a lot of people are trying and succeeding and changing people's everyday lives with the technology we have, so maybe it's good that we've had a little breather for industry to catch up to science, as it were.
Technological development in the United States between WWII and the last decade was propelled by a couple of conditions that don't exist currently, most notably the Cold War spurring billions of federal dollars into technological research and a few big-ass monopolies dumping billions of dollars into long-term research.
The Space Race raised the profile of science and math education in the US, and quite a lot of modern technology has roots in the space program or military programs, including a lot of CS-related technologies. The internet was a military project, and the US has had AI run their logistics since 1991. A lot of industrial-type innovations, including manufacturing and deployment operations, nuclear technology, and the first digital computers even trace back to WWII. The US government was also a huge early adopter of computing technologies like mainframes, spurring private development.
Meanwhile a few large monopolies had major research labs, most infamously Bell and IBM. I'll be the first to admit that monopolies have drawbacks and usually aren't a good thing, but because they didn't have to worry so much about quarterly earnings they dumped massive amounts of revenue into long-term strategies. Such research investments are arguably important primary causes of desktop computers and our national communications infrastructure. Google and Microsoft seem to have assumed these mantles. Microsoft, for its part, is putting a lot of work into more fundamental research, although we haven't seen a big payoff yet. Google seems to spend a lot of time on pet projects like Wave. That's probably an unfair assessment, but their long-term horizons are more on the order of 18-month product cycles than 10-year research projects.
So that's my take on it. The military-industrial complex and industrial monopolies allowed for massive projects to create big-ass breakthroughs. Without those drivers, academic research has delved into political infighting for funding and companies have become myopic so our view of 'innovation' becomes faster paced, but incremental rather than revolutionary. There's been more focus on use and users, but at the cost of fundamental developments. Whether this is "better" is anyone's guess. Faster incremental improvements get to market faster and therefore affect day-to-day life more, but my personal opinion is that the pendulum ought to swing back towards the breakthroughs, at least temporarily, to give the rabid markets something big and juicy to improve upon some time soon.
Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an imbalance. I've never really needed more than 5mbps down, but I NEED 20mbps up or greater for my daily interest in the internet, mainly video and photography. Broadband is just another case where status quo has been maintained by lobbying and corporate bulling at the cost of losing our competitive edge and restricting our ability to grow. Cheaper isn't terribly exciting, it's just .. well, cheaper. As to more…
Ask around, when I was living in Toronto I found out that a neighbouring company had pulled in fiber, they let me piggyback on to theirs for a relatively low fee. If you need it then I assume it's work related so you probably have some budget available. You'd be surprised how much fiber has been pulled in metropolitan areas. If you're in the sticks or some small town then it's a different matter, but you could concei…
I live in SOMA. Downtown San Francisco. Twitter is across the street from me, literally. My best option is 6-30mbps down, and 1mbps up, or comcast which gives 10mbps up. I'd gladly pay $250/month to get 20mbps up. Unfortunately Comcast is allowed to force apartment building to sign exclusive contracts. Nobody is allowed to put fiber or coaxial into the building but comcast, and DSL just doesn't cut the mustard. After Microsoft made a mockery of the anti-trust system in the US, the fed has seemingly lost all interest in protecting the rights of the American people against monopolies.
Innovation loses. Comcast wins.