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America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

greaterseas.com

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Re: America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

#11

Post by narrator »

jff wrote: post #4

I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation selling ads, making social media startups – slaves with white collars. Internet hype has us chasing VCs and tweets, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no AI Winter. No Project MAC. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our…

I think the projects Elon Musk is working on, especially SpaceX, are probably the most meaningful grand vision kind of innovation we have.

Re: America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

#12

Post by jshen »

nlawalker wrote: post #8
awt wrote: post #2

"The people that are using digital innovations to solve real world problems like energy, health care, agriculture, and transportation are ahead of the curve." Those are all capital intensive. Most 20 year olds don't have that much capital. It would be great to see more investment in this space, though. I'm sure someone straight out of school could write software to improve healthcare records management, but the cost…

Maybe that's the real lament then - that so many people fresh out of school have such a strong desire to be independent that they don't contribute to efforts to solve the problems you listed in your quote. I'm not saying people aren't justified in wanting to not "work for the man". I'm just saying that maybe the fact that working for the man is perceived as such a bad thing (or is such a bad thing) is a bit closer to…

true, but why is working for the man perceived as a bad thing? Could it be "the man's" fault?

I happen to work for the man and here are some issues. I can't release code as open source, I get paid the same regardless of whether I work my ass off or just do enough to be ahead of the curve, I have virtually no say in our products because I'm just an engineer (we have product people for product design), I have to get an act of congress passed to setup a server in a non company standard configuration, etc, etc, etc.

There are some up sides, one is that I get to focus and think deeply about my specific problem space which at one time was search relevance, and is now data mining. I don't have to do sys admin work, even though sometimes I'd rather do it, I have access to a very large hadoop grid that non startup would have built prior to success, there are a lot of really smart people with diverse backgrounds to bounce ideas off of, etc, etc.

Oh, but this man I work on is focused on ad clicks :)

Re: America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

#13

Post by dxbydt »

If you want "fundamental" innovation, you simply aren't going to get it in a jiffy.

Imagine if a person dead over a 100 years ago woke up today. What present day technologies would he have no trouble recognizing ? 1.Movie Projector. 2.Bulb. 3.Car.

That's about it. We use pretty much the same 35mm format and film projector that was originally invented some 110 years ago( George Lucas's constant lament ). We drive around in cars powered by the internal combustion engine invented a 100 years back. We come home to a dark house and turn on the bulb invented a 100 years ago.

If you allow some leeway for time, you can add a few more "genuine" innovations - Air Conditioning, Transistor/IntegratedCircuit, Antennas/SW/MW/AM/FM, ...

The rest is just fluff. That's always going to be the case, unless you have some major genetic mutation that'll cause all of us to wake up tomorrow & fly away in our flying cars or jetpacks we rig up in the basement toolshed.

Re: America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

#14

Post by aantix »

But isn't this just the natural flow of innovation? We solve trivial cases first and then once the all of the idiosyncrasies of the technology have been fleshed out, we proceed to more advanced use cases?

We had Geocities with animated butterflies and horribly designed Guestbooks for others to exchange comments. Now we have Facebook that keeps people connected in realtime regardless of geographic boundaries with a fairly compelling user experience (relative to Geocities and that of 15 years ago).

I have faith in the current generation; trivial problems always become boring so hopefully this pushes into a more meaningful considerations in our software development.

Re: America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

#15

Post by c0riander »

tybris wrote: post #7
jff wrote: post #4

I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation selling ads, making social media startups – slaves with white collars. Internet hype has us chasing VCs and tweets, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no AI Winter. No Project MAC. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our…

Really?

Reference: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137523/quotes?qt0479105

Re: America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

#16

Post by TravisLS »

narrator wrote: post #11
jff wrote: post #4

I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation selling ads, making social media startups – slaves with white collars. Internet hype has us chasing VCs and tweets, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no AI Winter. No Project MAC. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our…

I think the projects Elon Musk is working on, especially SpaceX, are probably the most meaningful grand vision kind of innovation we have.

Precisely. Just because all the 25-year-olds are proving themselves by working on ad clicks today doesn't mean tomorrow's Elon Musk isn't among them.

A generation of kids cutting their teeth on smaller, more approachable products is going to grow up into a generation of seasoned entrepreneurs who can meaningfully allocate capital to solve bigger problems.

Re: America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

#17

Post by msutherl »

Wake up. "Web" is not the largest nor the most innovative startup scene. Bio-tech, medical tech, and energy are all much larger. That's where the the innovation happens. It just doesn't seem that way because they happen not to be industries based on _diffusion of information_. Think about it.

Re: America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

#18

Post by JDulin »

awt wrote: post #2

"The people that are using digital innovations to solve real world problems like energy, health care, agriculture, and transportation are ahead of the curve." Those are all capital intensive. Most 20 year olds don't have that much capital. It would be great to see more investment in this space, though. I'm sure someone straight out of school could write software to improve healthcare records management, but the cost…

"My point is that people fresh out of school who want to be independent are tackling the biggest problems they can on a budget of $1-2000/month."

As a teenager, I agree here. I know that I can build a trendy little web app for relatively nothing if it has the possibility of making me rich. However, any ideas I have for robotics, healthcare, and energy are going to require me working in a job at a large company (which I wouldn't like) or getting an unusually large amount of VC investment (which would be unlikely.)

I think the problem could be experience. For a recent graduate, it's hard to acquire the amount of VC funding you need for a hardware-based, regulated field when you can't say you have any entrepreneurial experience. For conservative VCs, there's a big difference between giving $20,000 to a college-age kid and giving $100,000 to a college-age kid.

Re: America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

#19

Post by forgottenpaswrd »

nlawalker wrote: post #8
awt wrote: post #2

"The people that are using digital innovations to solve real world problems like energy, health care, agriculture, and transportation are ahead of the curve." Those are all capital intensive. Most 20 year olds don't have that much capital. It would be great to see more investment in this space, though. I'm sure someone straight out of school could write software to improve healthcare records management, but the cost…

Maybe that's the real lament then - that so many people fresh out of school have such a strong desire to be independent that they don't contribute to efforts to solve the problems you listed in your quote. I'm not saying people aren't justified in wanting to not "work for the man". I'm just saying that maybe the fact that working for the man is perceived as such a bad thing (or is such a bad thing) is a bit closer to…

"working for the man"(in his 60s) is the fastest way to stop innovating fast. They are earth grounded not "pie in the sky" reasonable people.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard Shaw

Get a traditional job on your youth and wait to have a family to sustain and not being able to take risks. That is the definition of killing innovation and creativity. Kids are creative, middle age people are not. Kids can think out of the box, adults are "inside the box".

Re: America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

#20

Post by ippisl »

forgottenpaswrd wrote: post #19
nlawalker wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that's the real lament then - that so many people fresh out of school have such a strong desire to be independent that they don't contribute to efforts to solve the problems you listed in your quote. I'm not saying people aren't justified in wanting to not "work for the man". I'm just saying that maybe the fact that working for the man is perceived as such a bad thing (or is such a bad thing) is a bit closer to…

"working for the man"(in his 60s) is the fastest way to stop innovating fast. They are earth grounded not "pie in the sky" reasonable people. “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard Shaw Get a traditional job on your youth and wait to have a family to sustain and no…

|Kids are creative, middle age people are not.

In most fields(except the web) , most serious entrepreneurs are around 40.

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