Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

It seems tautologous to say that innovation happens in innovative areas, but that seems to be the substance of the problem expressed in the premise.

Not only does disruptive innovation not happen where we expect it to, it usually refuses to happen where we will it to. Not only solar (and fusion) power, but things like making the kind of artificial intelligence we wanted. It seems like they were just not solvable with any amount of cleverness. Maybe we picked the wrong build tree, but maybe we were just hand-waving when we extrapolated to flying cars.

I think part of the problem is not seeing sustaining innovation, like nearly all of the space program, as the mostly-linear kind of innovation it is. I mean, it sure seemed like we were creating new dimensions of technology when we increased the "number of men on the frickin' moon" statistic above zero. But how much of the innovation required to get there was really Freeman Dyson level stuff? To me, the 25-year line from V-2 to Apollo (with stops at satellites and ICBMs) seems pretty straightforward given the resources involved. Am I just too jaded by retrospective?

It seems the fault lies more in our expectations than in our imaginativeness.

It's just a qualitative feeling, but the accomplishment of putting a man on the moon with 1960's technology seems much more significant than similar steps forward since.

Although the sequencing of the human genome and the persistence of Moore's law are also impressive.

I'm in good company when I say that the pace of innovation has accelerated to ludicrous speed. Last week I read about scientists who knocked out a rat cerebellum and replaced it with an artificial one - and it worked. A few weeks ago I read about gamers, over the course of a few weeks with FoldIt, discovering how to fold a protein crucial to AIDS research that had eluded scientists for years.

Like William Gibson said, he now writes novels about the present because the present has caught up in many ways with science fiction. Not that we have flying cars or heroic robots, not that we have the future they predicted, but every week in the New Scientist you can read about stuff that would have been pure sci fi fifty years ago. We are inundated with magic.

I think the space program stood out more because it was channeled through the media that way. Everyone was watching the same thing and the same scientists. Today we have as much science to admire as we have viewing options on the internet.

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 may not even realize the significance of this age for a very long time.

So, what happened? Software has not, really, improved very much in many years. Our computers and phones and other devices have mated and borne tiny little offspring. But, these still feel like iterative changes on revolutionary designs.

And, of course, there is the faltering space program.

...Except, Armadillo Aerospace and SpaceX and others are right around the corner, I hope.

I think I've noticed a pretty ubiquitous pattern in certain kinds of projects: the sorts of projects that are huge in scope, with immediate deadlines, and a clear focus, and full of talented people whose responsibility it is to figure out how to reach the project goals as quickly as possible.

They grab every available technology, and they make amazing advancements in combining it and putting it together, and in the end, if they reach their goal, they end up with something that works, but is inelegant. They build an enormous, amazing, beautiful ... hack.

After that, if the progress is to continue, it's up to an entirely different kind of approach: the fucking about with the details.

It's not enough just to put a human and some supplies in space; now the goal is to do it sustainably. Now we have to build reusable ships and things capable of lifting tremendous payloads into orbit while sipping their energy through a tiny straw and not costing anybody very much.

And that's where the development is going right now. It requires tons and myriad tiny little developments in a huge array of sciences: in energy production and management, and in materials science especially. Like Intel, our space program has had its "tock"; now it's time for a "tick".

At least, I hope that's what's happening. I'd hate to live in a world in which humans had given up on exploring and pushing against their boundaries.

His "Galapagan isolation" / "large continent" hypothesis is interesting. I've noticed similar things.

Obviously, the continuous stream of data from the internet makes it harder to concentrate on one thing, I think we can all agree on that (which is why HN implements 'noprocast' and such)

But IMO something is also happening on a deeper level. The focus on 'social' these days also means being flooded with opinions by others (whether something is feasible or useful or not, for example) which might discourage you from continuing on big, bold projects.

Somehow one gets addicted to "validation" by others, which is easier to get if you keep close to the status quo. This is similar to what he describes with the shareholders of a public corporation. The immediate feedback cycle causes a lot of people to "judge" what you're doing and of course, there will always be some that don't believe in it (as there is no immediate payoff yet) and block it.

On the other hand, the internet is great because it allows communication and working together of people with similar mindsets, which otherwise would never have found each other. So it also might unite people to work on (open source etc) and/or finance (things like Kickstarter are a beginning...) big projects. A mixed blessing :)