When Will This Low-Innovation Era End?

I don't think the pain point for a lot of us is that there isn't much innovation. It's that most of us don't get to take part, nor to guarantee ourselves a fair share of what innovation produces. Most people are barely at the table, without any role or say in the innovation that is going on (which is probably more than at any other time in history).

We have one tiny minority (well-connected political and economic elites) that captures most of the value generated by any change, even though they produce absolutely nothing, and often they get to call the shots, even though they fuck up every decision they make. We have another small minority that is socially inferior and gets less direct benefit out of the changes, but drives them and thereby gets to participate in the current round of innovation.

Then there are the 99-plus percent who are effectively non-players, some well-compensated and most not, but all at the mercy of forces that are not just out of our control (no one actually controls them, no single person has anywhere close to that level of power in this world) but over which we have no influence and no role in the driving.

The angriest among us are the "Cognitive 1 Percent", the ones who know we could be making these important decisions better than the people (politicians, corporate CEOs, VC kingmakers) currently able to make them, the entrenched players being above-average but not at our level.

It feels like there's no innovation. There's plenty, in comparison to any other time in history. There just isn't much of a role in it for any but the most well-situated people.

All efforts should be spent on finding ways to generate and store clean energy. Instead, VCs keep funding Facebook and Google wannabes.

“Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.”

✓

Wireless global communications for the masses is an enormous leap forward.

Cars and planes let me easily move 1500 miles away from where I grew up. And then modern communication technology and video/audio compression lets me communicate, with video, in real time with people back there, from anywhere I go with phone coverage. That's pretty damn significant.

The author of the original article is basically also assuming that none of the interesting things that are currently being researched are going to amount to anything. It's a bizarre mix of sampling problems, observational biases, and cynicism.

Edit: I thought of another pretty huge one: imaging, especially medically (look at how much less invasive many surgical procedures are now than they were 30 years ago), but also for stuff like mapping. We now have collections of images taken from airplanes and satellites of most (all?) of the world. When has that kind of information ever been available in the past? What kind of cool stuff will we be able to do in the next twenty years with all this information that has only seen widespread availability in the last ten years or so?

And then there are the medical procedures that weren't even possible thirty years ago...

We are absolutely about to see it all pay off.

Let's not discount universal access to information, first of all. I'm 28 and when I was in high school 10 years ago, it was right about the time you could now find the quadratic formula by searching the Web, but before you could Google how to write a resume, find a good doctor in your area, or read blogs about developing better study habits. I think the world must have been a little darker before the Google age.

Then there's universal distribution of software (the web, mobile devices) and the relative ease of developing niche apps today. The transformation of the world by (good) software is just beginning.