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Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

worldpolicy.org

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Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#11

Post by doomlaser »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #8

The fuckery is in the details. I, too, wonder why so much of technological progress seems to have stalled. In a single century we went from the mass production of the automobile all the way to space; from telegraph to television; from typewriters to microcomputers. What an amazing period of technological development! There had been nothing like it in our history. Like the perhaps somewhat apocryphal Renaissance, we m…

The proliferation of cell phones is huge, and the smart phone revolution is another gigantic social change.

Conquering space in a meaningful way is a much larger problem than any of the leaps we've made technologically in the past 100 years.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#12

Post by wolfparade »

I didn't read the whole article but all I saw was anecdotal evidence that there isn't as much innovation. Maybe it's hard to measure innovation, but at least try instead of saying "from my viewpoint as a 50 year old white man we aren't innovating." And then try to come up with theories why there isn't innovation when you haven't even come close to proving that there isn't.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#13

Post by jblow »

I have been having similar lamentations recently.

One obvious example: the San Francisco Bay Bridge. The original bridge was built in 1933; it took them less than 3.5 years to build it.

Now, they are just trying to replace the eastern span (the bigger one, but hey, less than the full bridge), with technology from nearly a century later. They have been "working on it" for 9 years. It is currently scheduled to run another 2 years from now (if it somehow gets done on time) and is 6 times more expensive than originally projected.

For a bridge. That doesn't have any more traffic capacity than the bridge it is replacing.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#14

Post by sgentle »

Grr! I like Stephenson a lot but I find this argument highly disingenuous. In fact, I find most of the reactions I've seen to "the end of US spaceflight capability" sickeningly short-sighted and hyperbolic.

Read the goddamn budget announcement: "Orszag said that in addition to research and development, NASA’s proposal invests in 'advance robotics and other steps that will help to inspire Americans and not just return a man or a woman to the Moon but undertake the longer range research that could succeed in human spaceflight to Mars.'" [1]

Yes, the US has gotten unambitious in spaceflight. Yes, there's been nothing more inspirational than repeating what happened in the 60s. Yes, yes yes. That's the whole point!

The shuttle was canceled because it's stupid to turn NASA into the federal "send shit into Low Earth Orbit" department. We've done that, we've been doing that for half a century now, it's no longer innovative. What NASA should be doing is what no private enterprise can do: highly unprofitable risky space pioneering that inspires the human race. Let's take away money from boring and put it into interesting! How can anybody be against this?

Honestly, this is the reason we have politicians. Can you imagine how long we'd be running expensive useless shuttle missions if it was decided by popular opinion?

[1] http://www.spacenews.com/civil/100201-white-house-confirms-c...

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#15

Post by jblow »

sgentle wrote: post #14

Grr! I like Stephenson a lot but I find this argument highly disingenuous. In fact, I find most of the reactions I've seen to "the end of US spaceflight capability" sickeningly short-sighted and hyperbolic. Read the goddamn budget announcement: "Orszag said that in addition to research and development, NASA’s proposal invests in 'advance robotics and other steps that will help to inspire Americans and not just return…

I think part of the point is that NASA was pretty much flailing even just in the "send shit into Low Earth Orbit" department.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#16

Post by AngryParsley »

Neal makes some good points about western nations, but some of the more authoritarian governments aren't restricted by citizen initiatives or environmental laws. China is a poster-boy for this sort of growth. If they continue to increase prosperity faster than democratic western nations, their style of government might become the template for the future.

From http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/12/china-ascendant.html :

The world has emulated Western policies mainly because those nations were high status, not because their style of law or government was obviously more efficient. Chinese styles are likely similarly efficient, and if China becomes higher status, the world will emulate it instead.

A generation ago, people in China were starving. Now they're the second-largest economy in the world. Last week they launched a space station. Of course China has problems, but their government seems to know how to grow quickly, and that increases their citizens' quality of life.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#17

Post by samgro »

I'm from a different generation than Neal Stephenson. I grew up inspired by my parents' old IBM XT. The Apple II at school. My TI-83 programmable graphing calculator. Not space flight. I continue to be inspired every year by the innovations in tech startups, and that's just the field I happen to live and work in - the biomedical field in the last 10 years has made orders of magnitude of progress understanding the human genome in ways that I can barely understand (despite having a college degree in Quantitative and Computational Biology).

Without Facebook I wouldn't have seen or spoken to lots of old friends until our 25th high school or college reunion.

Without Twitter I wouldn't have learned from and made connections with influential people in the tech world.

Without Google or Wikipedia or StackOverflow I would have to go to a library to learn anything new.

Without GitHub I would have to write my own software from scratch and spend a lot of time managing collaboration workflows.

Without AWS, Heroku, Ruby, Rails et al. I wouldn't have been able to launch my own startup without outside funding.

Without Zappos I wouldn't be able to buy size 15 shoes in whatever style or fit I want. I ordered shoes last week at 7pm and they arrived at 9:30am the next day. Seriously.

Without Kindle and my iPad I wouldn't be able to get any book in the world in 5 seconds for $10.

AirBNB, ZipCar, Apple, Dropbox, the list goes on, and this is in my (our) industry alone.

Neal Stephenson might not be able to fly to Mars in his lifetime, but I'm pretty excited about the innovations that will happen in the next 10 years; if they're half as good as the last 10, us geeks will be pretty satisfied.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#18

Post by gavanwoolery »

jblow wrote: post #15
sgentle wrote: post #14

Grr! I like Stephenson a lot but I find this argument highly disingenuous. In fact, I find most of the reactions I've seen to "the end of US spaceflight capability" sickeningly short-sighted and hyperbolic. Read the goddamn budget announcement: "Orszag said that in addition to research and development, NASA’s proposal invests in 'advance robotics and other steps that will help to inspire Americans and not just return…

I think part of the point is that NASA was pretty much flailing even just in the "send shit into Low Earth Orbit" department.

Well, at least we have Braid, that's a step forward in the gaming department. ;) (Or maybe this comment is lost on the wrong J. Blow)

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#19

Post by seabee »

AngryParsley wrote: post #16

Neal makes some good points about western nations, but some of the more authoritarian governments aren't restricted by citizen initiatives or environmental laws. China is a poster-boy for this sort of growth. If they continue to increase prosperity faster than democratic western nations, their style of government might become the template for the future. From http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/12/china-ascendant.html…

China is starting from a different point to much of the West. What remains to be seen is whether their style of government will peak or surpass Western ones as it approaches the same quality of life, and it will be very informative whichever one it is.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#20

Post by gavanwoolery »

The problem is competition (or lack thereof).

The space race was not fueled by just wanting to set foot on the moon. Keep in mind the Soviets were trying to advance their space program as well, and prior to all of the space treaties this was a war for claiming new ground. Old Soviet schematics actually show some crazy designs, like satellites with (freakin') laser beams mounted on them.

Now, it does not really matter who gets to Mars first - its certainly not a competition any one person or company wants to risk billions of dollars on.

Even if you grouped together some of the most prolific VCs, their cumulative budget would be fairly small for taking on large scale problems.

The problem is that money has to come from somewhere to take on big problems, and no one wants to shell out.

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