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Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

worldpolicy.org

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Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#91

Post by tsotha »

tsotha wrote: post #85
jwallaceparker wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nonsense. In the previous decade we had gone from the introduction of LED watches to personal computers - by 1985 we had the Apple IIE, which is a bigger leap from what was available in 1975 than the IIE to the iPad. Kubrick included iPad-like devices in 2001 because he thought we would have them. I would have been surprised to see them earlier than 1995, but 2010? Late. Stephenson is right, but he doesn't go far eno…

When my grandfather was born cars were so brand new they weren't mass produced - they were only toys for rich people. By the time he was my age he saw the introduction of flight, jet flight, and space flight. He saw the introduction of radio and television. He saw the first effective treatments for bacterial infections.

There hasn't been any period of time like that recently. Progress hasn't been accelerating. The reason we thought we'd have fusion power and moon bases and a cure for cancer is that's the trajectory we were on. So no, progress isn't accelerating at all. It's slowing down, and more perceptibly every day.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#92

Post by sausagefeet »

mkramlich wrote: post #87
jerf wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What NASA should be doing is what no private enterprise can do: highly unprofitable risky space pioneering that inspires the human race." http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1112392431/spacex-sets-it... I do not know if SpaceX will make it; I'd personally bet against that timeframe, though I wouldn't bet against the goal in general. But I will guarantee this: Barring a major political turnaround in the US, SpaceX wil…

Agreed. If there's a place where I can place a cash bet that SpaceX will be the first entity to put a man on Mars, I'd do it tonight. They have the people, the vision, leadership, philosophy, and just enough of a successful track record so far to put meat into it, and de-risk it. They have momentum.

http://longbets.org/

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#93

Post by jlees »

nicpottier wrote: post #23

Nice essay. Funny thing about the SF writers being inspiration. I'm actually reading his latest book right now, "REAMDE", and although it is well written and entertaining, it certainly doesn't provide anywhere near the fun 'mind stretching' that some of his previous books have. (Snow Crash being the obvious one there) Really, REAMDE is a bit boring from a SciFi point of view, more akin to any number of suspense / thr…

I totally agree with your comment on REAMDE and am glad I'm not the only one with this line of thought. It's the first novel of his that was stifled by its own realism. OK, maybe some of the handwavy spy technology was a little fanciful, but the entire concept of T'Rain was lifted from Azeroth and its many siblings, and none of the amazing imagination of his previous books.

Today we innovate in software, not hardware, and soon the balances will tip again - to bio-interfaces, entirely passive computing, and the crazy stuff various think tanks around the world are cooking up (mostly so they can be featured in WIRED, but surely one of them will have a hit someday).

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#94

Post by ericd »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #69
barrkel wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are innumerable things that are technically possible today that were not technically possible in 1985. What I'm really objecting to is this veneration of explosively moving a certain weight of flesh over a certain distance as a thing, an achievement, which we are lacking now. Clearly, sending a man to the moon captured the imagination of a certain generation, a generation that is growing older. But it didn't ca…

Unfortunately, this is one of those points where the two opposing camps are generally not able to come to any sort of agreement. I grew up reading Cosmos and straining my eyes through a bad telescope and looking up and wanting to be there instead of stuck here . And, unfortunately, it's all too common on HN that we can't have a discussion about value that doesn't involve a concrete measurement of actual dollars, and…

I tend to think of it like this: keeping all humans on one planet and expecting long term survival is like keeping all of one's servers in one data center and expecting 100% uptime. And that data center has a tendency to be hit by extremely large rocks going very fast every now and then.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#95

Post by ericd »

samgro wrote: post #75
blackiron wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nah, it's not really that big a stretch of the imagination between the Titanium Powerbook and an iPad/iPhone.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#96

Post by zeemonkee »

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…

There is very little cultural innovation either - popular entertainment nowadays consists of reboots, prequels, sequels, and karaoke hits (American Idol and the like). It's part of the same symptom I think of stagnant, litigious, bottom-line driven, risk-averse management Stephenson talks about - and it's strangling not only our technological innovation but all forms of creativity.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#97

Post by thaumaturgy »

ericd wrote: post #94
thaumaturgy wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, this is one of those points where the two opposing camps are generally not able to come to any sort of agreement. I grew up reading Cosmos and straining my eyes through a bad telescope and looking up and wanting to be there instead of stuck here . And, unfortunately, it's all too common on HN that we can't have a discussion about value that doesn't involve a concrete measurement of actual dollars, and…

I tend to think of it like this: keeping all humans on one planet and expecting long term survival is like keeping all of one's servers in one data center and expecting 100% uptime. And that data center has a tendency to be hit by extremely large rocks going very fast every now and then.

Yep, but just FYI, the common counter-argument on HN is that the survival of the species doesn't matter to the individual, so they still don't think it's worth spending money on.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#98

Post by thaumaturgy »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #79
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…

> 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.

Exactly! And, materials science. There's this huge problem of radiation in space that hasn't been solved yet without the use of a lot of thick, heavy ("costly") materials. From the little bit that I follow the field, this seems to be an even more challenging problem than propulsion.

> - Life extension

My money for the next great advancement in science is on biotechnology. All the signs are there -- the computing power has recently become available to crack some very difficult problems, imaging systems are better than ever, and we are rapidly developing new understandings of biology, including human biology. Scientists can print organs now! If I can survive long enough to become an old man, I think there's a good chance -- if I have enough money, sadly -- that I'll live to be a very very old man.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#99

Post by ericd »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #97
ericd wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to think of it like this: keeping all humans on one planet and expecting long term survival is like keeping all of one's servers in one data center and expecting 100% uptime. And that data center has a tendency to be hit by extremely large rocks going very fast every now and then.

Yep, but just FYI, the common counter-argument on HN is that the survival of the species doesn't matter to the individual, so they still don't think it's worth spending money on.

Yeah, I never really figured out how to argue against that... it's kind of a built in urge for me, and it's not strictly logical except from a "I'm partly driven by my genes, which have been optimized to protect my tribe" standpoint. I figure most people have that, but if someone doesn't, you probably can't really make them care.

Re: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

#100

Post by vilya »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #70
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…

Video skyping is a victory of hardware development, not software. The software methodologies are not fundamentally different from the 1970s -- they are faster, and (arguably) easier in certain ways, but code is still written one line at a time, building logical constructs that have been around for decades. What has changed is the amount of code that a device is capable of executing per second, and that is what has en…

I think you're overlooking the many algorithmic advances in video & audio codecs in that time period too. It certainly has NOT been case of the software guys sitting around since the 70s waiting for the hardware guys to catch up.
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