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Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

worldpolicy.org

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Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#51

Post by barrkel »

PakG1 wrote: post #46
barrkel wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's wrong to say that there has been little improvement in software, in both our techniques of building it and the body that is in existence. I think the advance from the disconnected dumb home microcomputer of 1985 to the globally connected iPad of today is comparable to the advance from the telegraph to television. I think it's easy to underestimate how far we've come when you've lived through the change.…

I agree for the most part. I video skyped with my mom today. It boggled her mind that we're able to do this. This is something that was only possible in cartoons in the 70s. She only just discovered Skype, whereas I've been using it for years and have seen it evolve. I imagine it's like watching your nephew grow up. Don't see him for a few years, and suddenly, it's like, whoah! You're huge! But if you see him every d…

Exactly. If you could travel back in time and bring an iPad back to 1985 (and somehow keep internet connectivity with the present) and showed it to someone, they'd probably consider it magical to the point that it must have been made by aliens. It's far too facile for someone in the present to dismiss it as an incrementally improved piece of technology that is no better, fundamentally, than what already existed in 1985.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#52

Post by harichinnan »

barrkel wrote: post #40
_delirium wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the disconnected dumb home microcomputer of 1985 to the globally connected iPad of today But the microcomputer of 1985 was globally connected too! And that did seem like quite a technological advance: here in one's own home, a machine that, via phone lines, can exchange messages worldwide! I agree that the number of people globally connected has increased, but it seems more incremental; a matter of economics and in…

Extremely few C64s and Amstrad CPC 464s were globally connected; that's the class of machine I had in mind. If you think this is just incremental, then I'd say that putting a man on the moon is just an incremental improvement in bomb-making, the culmination of the controlled release of chemical energy; a matter of slow refinement over centuries.

Think about this.

The first cell phone was developed in 1947 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mobile_phones

The Internet starts in 1950 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

Tablet computers were prototyped in 1968 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook

It's the economic improvement since that created the iPad. iPad is not in anyway comparable to the technological innovation in 1960 that put a man to the moon.

It's like someone using VS2010 and C# 4.0 seeing the SICP book for the first time, or a chance encounter with LISP. And you would know we didn't improve that much since the days we put a man on the moon.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#53

Post by mark_l_watson »

While I agree with the basic premise of the article on complacency and lack of risk taking in innovation, there is another side to this argument that is well covered in Eric Ries's new book "The Lean Startup" on making both innovation and learning what works more efficient.

We seem to live in an increasingly stratified society: much of the work force has obsolete skills and too often a lack of incentive to retrain while a smaller number of people are pushing the envelope on learning new ways of running businesses and new ways to develop tech.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#54

Post by Lagged2Death »

I enjoy Stephenson's writing, and I think he must be a really smart guy. Which is why I'm puzzled by this reasoning:

1) Science and engineering aren't chasing anything audacious and world-changing anymore.

2) The blame lies partly with the fact that we're living in a world changed by pervasive, cheap communications and networking technology that would have seemed unthinkably audacious just a generation ago.

There is an irony here that I would have expected him to see through instantly, but he seems entirely oblivious to it.

Science fiction famously anticipated some real-world 20th century innovations like atomic power, communication satellites, waldos, etc. But it's had a much worse track record with communications. There are no cell phones (or cell-phone-like devices) in Neuromancer. Stephenson's own Snow Crash features an international computer network with a virtual-reality interface that seems incredibly cumbersome and inconvenient compared compared to the actual web.

I think it must be harder to imagine how any given piece of technology will interact with the larger society than it is to make predictions about what the development of a technology will make possible. A VR type interface to the web wouldn't be much of a challenge (technically) by now, but nobody wants one. Second Life is withering on the vine. The video telephone that has been so long predicted by SF is possible now, but it turns out to be more trouble than it's worth except in exceptional circumstances. And when you make it available to just anyone, it turns into a TV show about penises.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#55

Post by tsotha »

barrkel wrote: post #51
PakG1 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree for the most part. I video skyped with my mom today. It boggled her mind that we're able to do this. This is something that was only possible in cartoons in the 70s. She only just discovered Skype, whereas I've been using it for years and have seen it evolve. I imagine it's like watching your nephew grow up. Don't see him for a few years, and suddenly, it's like, whoah! You're huge! But if you see him every d…

Exactly. If you could travel back in time and bring an iPad back to 1985 (and somehow keep internet connectivity with the present) and showed it to someone, they'd probably consider it magical to the point that it must have been made by aliens. It's far too facile for someone in the present to dismiss it as an incrementally improved piece of technology that is no better, fundamentally, than what already existed in 19…

lol, no, we would not have considered it magical. Based on television shows like Space:1999 we fully expected to have a large moon base and ray guns by 1999. My 1985 self would have looked at the iPad and said "That's all? The battery only lasts for a few hours, it's only two-dimensional, and I can't roll it. What happened, was there a nuclear war initiated dark age?"

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#56

Post by tsotha »

glimcat wrote: post #5

I can sympathize with this. But I also think it's wrong on many points. Feynman's point that "there's plenty of room at the bottom" is extremely relevant to the modern age; most of our marvels are now Small Stuff rather than the Big Stuff that Neal calls for. I'm crazy for space exploration, but unmanned exploration really is the stronger option at this point. I get excited over large trussed structures, but cheap ha…

>Feynman's point that "there's plenty of room at the bottom" is extremely relevant to the modern age; most of our marvels are now Small Stuff rather than the Big Stuff that Neal calls for.

We understand quite a bit more than we used to at that level, but there hasn't yet been a lot of tangible benefit. We haven't sped up the pace of drug development, and haven't developed nanomechanical computers (no Young Lady's Illustrated Primer). We haven't developed Drexler's universal constructors.

Of course, we do have see-through zinc oxide. So there's that.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#57

Post by hvs »

varjag wrote: post #44
doomlaser wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Female emancipation was even bigger social change, but it wasn't the article's point. If we restrict ourselves to realm of technology, smartphones are not that much of a breakthrough. I had my Nokia and my Palm back in 1990s, it wasn't really that much different.

Your Palm in the 90's had a 16 Mhz processor and 1 MB of memory. An iPhone has a 1 Ghz processor and 32 GB of memory. If that's not "much different" you have a strange understanding of scale. And that was only 15 years ago, not 50.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#58

Post by hvs »

caf wrote: post #37
1092u34iojagj wrote: post #9

Go back to the 90s with an iPad... see what they think of it. We have artificial leaves that generate fuel by floating in sunlit water. In a few short years most book stores (an industry centuries old) will have been closed and replaced with e-readers. You can get the next Harry Potter (or whatever replaces it) without leaving your couch. We have 3d printers that will create a statue of your World of Warcraft charact…

I just tried that - the 90s said "Great, they finally made the Newton useable. Good to see Moore's Law has kept up the pace."

I like how you just ignored every other argument the OP mentioned just to make your snarky comment.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#59

Post by jeffdavis »

I am only about halfway through the article, but the "failure of society to get big things done" thesis is falling flat.

What about cell phones, and the communication revolution in general? While I'm at the park in the US, I can call someone in Europe riding on a train. Or, I can take the same phone to Europe and call someone back home. That's pretty amazing, if you ask me.

What about free/open source software? Someone can start a business with almost no capital at all, and get an operating system, an office suite, a web browser, and sophisticated database management software. And they don't even need to tell anyone that they are doing it. And when they need something better, they can fix it themselves or hire someone to fix it; they don't need to deal with the original vendor. That's just the business side of things -- the educational aspects of free/open source software are just as compelling.

I guess the problem is that none of these things are as impressive to look at as a 500-ton rocket.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#60

Post by spiritomb »

sorry, i don't share his vision of technology grandeur.

- the moon and mars (let alone the other planets) are _not_ hospitable to humans. pure fantasy to consider fruitful colonization.

- the next stop outside of our solar system is lifetimes away, who would actually want to live in a moving space station? yuck

- more efficient energy and transportation systems - why? so we can cram even more people onto this planet? how many is enough (or too much)?

- more/better gadgets? games? sad - aim higher.

the big questions we need to solve are those pertaining to sustainable living (as a population). the only people giving this thought these days are crackpots.

we have significant peak-this-or-that issues staring us right in the face. if we don't stop farting around w/ 'golden age' SF fantasies, and start working on the real problems we face .. we'll be looking at another dark age rather than crying about not playing frisbee on Neptune.

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