Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation • Hacker News Board

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#71

Post by thaumaturgy » Sat, Oct 01, 2011, 6:13 PM UTC

barrkel wrote: post #62

harichinnan wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

And gunpowder was invented in China centuries ago. That's the kind of technology that put a man on the moon, in the same relation that your examples have with an iPad. If you really think that Lisp by itself embodies all the technology that is in C# 4.0, rather than merely being able to encode and implement such technologies, then I don't think you know what you're talking about. To get Lisp to do everything C# 4.0 c…

Gunpowder is not even remotely close to "the kind of technology that put a man on the moon". That's absurd.

Lisp might not have everything that C# 4.0 does, but so what? Most of the world still runs on C. Hell, for that matter, a depressing amount of the world still runs on Fortran and COBOL. C, Fortran, COBOL ... they are adequate, if not exactly fun, tools that can generally be used to get there from here. I promise you that there is nothing you can do in C# 4.0 and WTF 11.12 that I can't do in C.

But just go ahead and try to get to the moon using gunpowder.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#72

Post by Goladus » Sat, Oct 01, 2011, 6:13 PM UTC

I would say the most rapid and important technological advancements happening right now are in genetic sequencing and analysis. In his TEDxBoston talk, Richard Resnick even draws a parallel to the space race, pointing out that China is ahead the US in this area[1].

Energy is important too, and I think people are trying hard, but "energy" is an enormously difficult problem, and unfortunately the bar set by oil is very high. That is, if you want a viable alternative energy source it has to be as cheap, safe, portable, and effective as oil. Or else, government must ask everyone to begin making personal sacrifices in order to transition infrastructure away from gasoline and other oil consumption (the space race required comparatively little personal sacrifice).

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8bsCiq6hvM

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#73

Post by jwallaceparker » Sat, Oct 01, 2011, 6:25 PM UTC

tsotha wrote: post #55

barrkel wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

I doubt that.

The iPad is an amazing technical leap over consumer electronics circa 1985 (Pong, Pacman, grainy color TV).

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#74

Post by jwallaceparker » Sat, Oct 01, 2011, 6:30 PM UTC

wanorris wrote: post #67

hvs wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The internet connectivity and storage changes are utterly radical changes in terms of what they enable. That iPhone gives you Wikipedia and Britannica and Project Gutenberg and the Kindle bookstore and Spotify and the iTunes music catalog and Netflix, all right in your pocket. Most people seem not to notice, but this is one of the most radical changes in history.

Agreed.

Think about the explosion in digital artifacts we are producing for future generations (blogs, videos, music, etc.).

The entire historical record of human history is tiny compared to the historical record of the past 15 years.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#75

Post by samgro » Sat, Oct 01, 2011, 6:35 PM UTC

blackiron wrote: post #45

samgro wrote: post #17

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 hum…

I doubt that any sci-fi writer wrote about you buying shoes and finding old friends.. which is the point of the article.

True, it's a different, less sexy form of innovation. My iPhone and iPad would have seemed like science fiction 10 years ago, though.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#76

Post by amcintyre » Sat, Oct 01, 2011, 6:49 PM UTC

pnathan wrote: post #64

It's becoming frighteningly obvious in recent years that hardcore innovation is being stifled in the names of 'too risky', 'not enough ROI', 'politically incorrect', and $current_political_battleground. It's also frighteningly obvious that the status quo of new-flavor-of-entertainment-as-innovation has ardent defenders. As a society, almost nothing in the scope of the Big Ideas of the 1900s-1950 era has come to pass…

> Drop the entertainment ideas, and work on something good for the world.

That's one of the things that bugs me most about the job market, at least where I live: 95+% of the jobs are completely focused on entertainment or social media.

Sure, there are some interesting technical problems in those spaces, but once my student loans are gone and I can afford the risk (and pay cut) of going to work on something more likely to be good for the world, I plan to do so.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#77

Post by radarsat1 » Sat, Oct 01, 2011, 7:10 PM UTC

pnathan wrote: post #63

radarsat1 wrote: post #41

I agree in principle, but it seems funny to me to read an article like this after watching a video of a surgical robot peeling a grape! Maybe the space program was the "big idea" of the 60s, but there are still some pretty fantastic innovations being developed, even if they are closer to home. But i agree that energy innovation is going to be the most important subject of the next decade. I guess the reality is that…

Yes, we really need grape peelers. How about we figure out how to have a space program that can fuel on the go?

> Yes, we really need grape peelers.

Are you arguing that surgical robots are not a worthwhile innovation?

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#78

Post by mtviewdave » Sat, Oct 01, 2011, 7:32 PM UTC

jblow wrote: post #13

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 anot…

It takes much less time to build a new bridge from scratch than to replace half of a bridge in-place. From the Bay Bridge FAQ (http://baybridgeinfo.org/faq):

"One of the greatest challenges in performing any seismic safety work on the Bay Bridge is that traffic must be kept moving. This has required the construction of temporary structures, and shifting of traffic from the existing bridge to the temporary structures. Major construction and demolition work is often scheduled during nights and weekends in order to minimize disruption to commute-hour traffic. This elaborate scheduling has extended the length of time that it takes to complete the seismic safety work."

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#79

Post by SkyMarshal » Sat, Oct 01, 2011, 7:48 PM UTC

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…

It may be that all the low-hanging was picked, and progress seems slower because we're now working on the harder problems. But I think there's plenty of world-changing advancements on the way in the next decades:

- Nano-scale manufacturing, 3D printing

- Life extension

- Quantum computers

... to name a few off the top of my head.

The problem with the space program is that it's gotten about as far as it can go without propulsion and energy-generation systems an order of magnitude or two more efficient. Hopefully we'll see breakthroughs there in the coming decades as well.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#80

Post by bdunbar » Sat, Oct 01, 2011, 8:06 PM UTC

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…

I was there, in 1985.

I don't think I would have thought it magical, or invented by aliens, just a neat bit of hardware.

And it would have beat the krep that Kirk was forced to use on Star Trek.