Garry Kasparov: The Last Revolutionary Technology Was The Apple II

Your comment is interesting, in that I don't see how it can possibly be true. From my POV, aerospace is the quintessential example of an industry that showed great promise and was revolutionizing our world, and then ... just stopped. The planes I fly on today are basically indistinguishable from the ones my father flew on back in the 1960s -- except for the TVs, but that's not really aerospace. Meanwhile, no one has been beyond LEO since 1972. NASA has produced lots of nifty unmanned spacecraft with cameras, true, but the only thing they've done recently that I would call revolutionary is the Mars rovers, but that's more robotics than aerospace.

So, could you explain? (Or were you perhaps being sarcastic, and I missed it?)

I think that it is wrong to say we aren't trying to innovate. I rather think we are at a point where incremental improvements are yielding better results in shorter time than revolutionary changes.

Examples: How many revolutionary replacements for DRAM have been proposed since the 1103 was introduced? Yet what do we use today? DRAM, because it could incrementally improve to be better and/or cheaper before competing technologies could be introduced

How many revolutionary replacements for the ICE have been proposed? Various jet engines have largely replaced it for aircraft, but the ICE is used just about everywhere else.

How about von neumann computers? There have been many other architectures proposed, but for general purpose computing it still wins out.

The fact that I am writing on this with something that is merely the sum of many incremental improvements to the Apple II just demonstrates the huge amount of untapped potential in the design when it was introduced, not that innovation has stopped.

The next revolution is happening right now- it's consumer level 3d printers (cupcake, reprap etc) and they're going to change everything, more than computers and cell phones combined did.

Kasparov complains that there aren't enough revolutionary technologies that push the world forward, as opposed to incremental improvements driven by wanting to please consumers. And then he says the last genuine technological revolution was ... the Apple II? Huh?

The Apple II was a fine product. But it was an incremental advance on its predecessors like the Commodore PET and, er, the Apple I (whose existence Kasparov might perhaps have been able to guess from the Apple II's name).

And: Mobile phones (as already pointed out by simonsarris). GPS. Affordable laser printers. The internet. Functional magnetic resonance imaging. Compact discs. Digital cameras. Etc., etc., etc. There's no shortage of things at least as revolutionary as the Apple II since 1977. (Some of them are based on fundamental developments a few years earlier, but none of them as much so as the Apple II.)

The how is of course the tricky part, but as to the why - well, to quote George Mallory,

    "Because it's there"

That's good enough for me, but there are plenty of other reasons why. Species survival would be one of them.

There are plenty of possibilities for extinction events right here. Super-volcano eruptions, radical climate change, polar shifting, airborne super-bugs (hello zombie apocalypse!), nuclear mayhem, etc.

Our local environment also has plenty of hazards. Asteroid impact, engulfment in a large solar flare, orbital shifts are the ones that spring to mind.

Our little niche in the galaxy might also have to deal with wandering black holes, gamma-ray bursts from a supernova that is just near enough, the long-term problem of the collision with Andromeda, etc. We won't overcome any of those by colonizing Mars, but still some things to keep in mind.

On a more practical note, extreme endeavors like colonizing space require some radical thinking (and re-thinking of existing concepts). Colonizing means establishing a foothold outside Earth that is self-sustaining (i.e. can do without a lifeline to Earth). We can't actually do that right now. If we set that as a goal we're going to come up with some very interesting stuff, a lot of which is bound to be useful down here.

Life expands or dies, that's the way it works over here. What the universe really seems to abhor (apart from vacuum), is an equilibrium.