The Economy’s Hidden Problem: We’re Out of Big Ideas
wsj.com
wsj.com
There are several technologies on the horizon that can change everything (as Steve Jobs would say)
Real virtual reality - For a big chunk of the world who need to see it to understand it, that will open the doors to a learning, design, and experiencing new things.
Carbon based circuitry - the first all carbon integrated circuit will be 10x faster and 5x more efficient than the best silicon out there. This will put even more amazing compute and sensory power into everyday devices. We chuckle at wizard's wands but they make for a easy to carry universal remote.
Graphene based charge storage. So often we throw energy away in friction brakes because that is easier than reusing it. Charging gear in seconds to run for hours. Recapturing more solar energy both from visible light and latent heat.
Fusion power for unlimited base load power. Completely re-defining the economics of industry, water supplies, transport, and urban HVAC.
Genetic designs, e.coli that synthesize chemicals of our choice without risky refineries. Curing genetic diseases not just treating them, repairing organs, limbs, brains, with targeted stem cells.
Robotic automation that can assemble or disassemble thousands of different products. Reducing waste, eliminating toxic dumping, and allowing us to get ahead of the clean up curve.
Once we do have AI and robotics in the reach of programmers then I bet we haven't even began to realize all the things we don't have now. I am a contrarian in that if computers added more work then so will robots, there will be more to do because there is more you can accomplish and unseen needs will arise. People could build companies and products almost individually like software today. When you lower the groupthink and bureaucracy around ideas/innovation, let individuals run with it, then it always opens up.
We could still do electric highways (interstate system for electric cars), drones are just getting started, ai/self driving or automated function free us up to do many other things, medicine/health advancements, virtual worlds that really improve your life, pipes that don't degrade, water desalinization, solar, we still need massive jumps in broadband and new ways to send/store/archive data (always will be a problem) and many many more.
We don't even really know the bottom of the ocean or the inside of the planet we live on really, robots will help us in that as well. So much to still explore, learn and innovate on.
Another Musk or Tesla could come along and open up ideas we had no idea were possible spawning all kinds of innovation and quality of life improvements.
A real breakthrough.
Maybe something out of left field in physics. Or maybe just tossing old fashioned hydrogen bombs.
Current space travel does not scale even at maximum efficiency possible.
It's not, "hey, is that idea going to help people/planet/____"?
It's, "hey, is that idea going to make me rich?"
Most public companies only started reporting a sustainability report about 4 years ago.
http://www.ga-institute.com/nc/issue-master-system/news-deta...
The difference though, and why you see so much coming out of private companies, is that more people are motivated by money than are motivated by altruism. But there are still plenty motivated by altruism.
Regulations have raised the bar for commercializing new ideas while directing a growing share of innovative effort toward goals with benefits, such as cleaner air, that don’t translate into gross domestic product.
So cleaner air does not count as improved standard of living just because it does not show up¹ in the gross domestic product? This seems more a case of a broken metric than a broken development.
¹ On a second thought, it may actually show up in the gross domestic product via healthier people with less sick days and less medical spendings.
Keeping your lungs: Does not count.
Lung transplant after you get deathly ill: Big bucks and doctor is a hero!
(eye roll)
The people who live longer due to the regulation will probably need more care to treat things not related to the regulation.
Paul Krugman reviews it here - http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/books/review/the-powers-th...
bottom line: several key technological leaps can't really ever happen again - electrics, indoor plumbing, motor vehicles, air travel, telecom - these made huge fundamental changes in living standards - no comparably huge changes remain
i'd say: fusion power might be one - automated cars, considering our dependence on them in current suburbanism - cheap orbital access - brain augmentation - life extension - a foolproof recipe for homemade pho
Future predictors always want you to ignore the hundreds of times they've previously been wrong, and just get you to focus on this one call here.
No to mention that we actually lack the ability to grow abundant food without destructive environmental effects. Lots of research and business capital is going into new ways to grow food in smaller spaces. There is even development of meat that can be grown. These would fundamentally change society.
Contrarian Call #1 - He called bullshit on the rationale for the Iraq war very early.
Contrarian Call #2 - His models showed that the stimulus and bailouts after the financial collapse would not cause runaway inflation.
If you read his review of the book (not an endorsement) you'll see that it's Contrarian Call #3 -- that maybe the bulk of productivity improvements from the internet have already been achieved.
Let's discuss the ideas, evidence and models, not take ad hominem shortcuts.
I criticized him as having a bad history of predicting things (not his personality, position, or viewpoint), and history is the best predictor of future performance. Krugman said that the internet was similar to the fax (back in the 1990s), and was wrong; however, I will grant that Krugman may not be as bad as other NYT columnists.
Krugman, circa 1995: "By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."
I have some ideas for "huge fundamental changes in living standards": cheap (as in almost free) housing, not having to work 40 hours a week. Why are these not on a list of technological possibilities?
It seems like this article is attempting to state a problem that doesn't exist to create a stir. No meaningful advances recently? I cannot take this statement seriously when I now have the entire internet easily accessible in my pocket at all times compared to 10 years ago. I can talk face to face with my grandmother miles away from the comfort of my room. And virtual reality seems to be on its way to becoming a game changer for many industries if (or when) it catches on.
> Electric cars, for example, cost more and perform worse than equivalent gasoline cars; the batteries subtract space and add weight, and mileage is limited especially in extreme temperatures.
This statement has for too many variables to me to accept as true. There are many different ways to measure performance of a car. If the writer is talking speed performance, the Model S blows every competitor out of the water. Mileage is a different story, but maintenance from what I've seen appears to be cheaper (no oil changes, belt/chain replacements, etc). And the batteries and motor take up less space when compared to the engine and drivetrain of comparable vehicles. Maybe now electric isn't the most economical choice, but it seems like that's slowly changing.
His point about slowing growth in tech certainly may be true, but some of the statements he makes towards the affects of this lack of growth seem backwards to me.
in 0-60 time.
> And the batteries and motor take up less space when compared to the engine and drivetrain of comparable vehicles
Lots of weight though.
I still think the article is rubbish. The Model S is a pretty damn good electric car.
We are right on the brink of VR and AR being everyday life.
The past 10 years have revolutionized computing, again.
Ah yes, I should've been more specific and said acceleration instead of speed.
This is what I was talking about when I said there are a lot of variables to measure performance lol.
My five year old likes space stuff. This morning, he wanted to know what the planet Venus was made of. To find out, he spoke to my phone and was immediately given an answer along with lots of other details.
When I was growing up, the cost to find out such basic information was high - I'd need to find someone who knew, or dig out a paper encyclopedia after visiting the library, something I wasn't allowed to do by myself when I was five.
By he time I could do so, it usually didn't matter to me any more.
My son's standard of living far surpasses mine at the same age.
I hope the next era is one of craftsmanship, an apollonian counterpoint to repair some of the damage of the closing dionysian era.
The real problem is that current economy doesn't let those ideas grow.
This has always been true.
Therefore any kind of work aimed at making peak mental performance better would be the most important, to start cascade of improvement and fuel it.
I think that making people constantly scramble to meet the next deadline puts a harmful damper on innovation and Big New Ideas. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...
We also may need to spend more effort explicitly targeting our R&D industry towards finding mysteries and solving them. Basic scientific advancement, after all, comes precisely from exploring the unknown rather than from merely innovating within the bounds of the already-known.
And then there's patent reform and such to think about. Blah blah.
But you should take everything I say with a grain of salt, since I work for an R&D company.
Or take transistors. They were invented in 1948. What we call "electronics" didn't really start happening until about the 1970s. Moore's Law didn't really slow down until maybe 2005.
The problem is that we don't have a big idea that has already substantially begun taking off at the right time. But there are some candidates:
Genomics.
Low-cost solar.
Fusion.
If any of those really takes off (with genomics being very likely to do so), then will have the next idea that we'll ride for decades.
(Also: if it were possible to breed generally smarter humans using genetic technology, I have a somewhat hard time believing that there are a lot of dictators who would be like, "Subjects who are way smarter than I am? SIGN ME UP!")
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law#/media/File:Transi...
Shareholders are irrelevant. CEOs are irrelevant. And management is irrelevant. Just like employees are irrelevant. Anyone in the future can come up with an idea and be empowered to bring that idea to market through manufacturing done by robotics which is completely automated. You tell mama AI what to make and it makes it on demand for whoever wants it. Society needs complete re-engineering with completely new rules.
That's really the big idea. And yes we can not work on that within the framework of current system. Because it's transcending the system and requiring new rules.
In the end the only reason to choose Capitalism is people. People are difficult to manage. Capitalism makes them easier to manage and to motivate them. Without people, you don't need Capitalism. Machines are not lazy. Machines don't need motivation. Machines don't need the sort of human management. Machines are faithful. Machines are true. Long live the machines!
There is enough will, but said waste is also known as marketing and pandering to the human tastes.
A small group of people have all the resources they want to to play around with. They are now the bottlenecks to innovation.
With that magnitude of resources available, we should be able to do big things. But, those with the capital have pretty much everything they need, so there's little motivation.
Big ideas of each era have their own fingerprint and are unlike the big ideas of previous eras.
Much Internet innovation is stifled by two factors:
1. The current economy of the Internet is paid for by advertising, which goes to two main players; Google and Facebook. A system of micropayments never successfully took off, but bitcoin or its successors may yet.
2. Few startup companies aim to IPO anymore like they did in the 1990's. This results in them being bought out and assimilated into larger, less creative established organisations.
Generally, in the USA, startup company formation is now at its lowest level since 1977. In general we have fewer and fewer but larger and larger companies. This allows for less "creative destruction".
RnD investment is more risky than lobbying investment.
If not, perhaps I can interest you in a demo of one? If you don't see an increase in turnover, well make the trail period free!
Now what is declining productivity ? Well, it's a measure of how much you make, on average, from one unit of human labour. In other words: how much can one single average human produce, given the odds of them having a job (so automation is not really a positive factor for productivity anymore).
This is a critical figure for lots of reasons. Firstly, it's effectively an upper bound on average income (not average pay, as unemployed people should be included in the average). It's the maximum amount you can possibly spend, as a nation, on average, on a human, per year, without going in debt. So one might say, the maximum you can spend, sustainably.
Of course the current productivity figures have already been propped up majorly by unsustainable debt spending, which won't be possible in the future unless we start really growing the economy again. And let's face facts here : if Obama's Government and FED spending couldn't do it (and they didn't), nothing can.
So that means the average "value" available to a single American, or citizen of the world in general, needs to go down from this point forward. Note that I didn't say money, and in fact, Trump's fiscal spending, assuming it happens, will increase the money, but increase prices more. So everyone who isn't dirt poor or 0.001% or so will have to deal with less means available on a sustained basis from here forward. Less living space, less food, less traveling, ... unless we get productivity rising again.
The theory that is making the rounds is that we're demand-bound. And indeed, you find support for this all around. The concept is that productivity is lagging because producers are demand bound. We have to idle car factories almost 30% of the time worldwide and still have more cars than can be sold. Oil is in a price trap, and despite a 60%+ drop in price production went up by maybe 5% (of course oil is famous for it's price elasticity, but still). Chinese exports and even total production are flattening (assuming you take the real figures of what amounts pass through harbours, not the Chinese state's frankly untrustworthy figures, even those show lower growth though).
On the plus side, this does seem to be the idea behind Trump's trade sabotage. Fix the demand problem by taking non-American supply out of the picture through isolationism and/or tariffs. That may work. Of course, historically, it's also caused more than a few wars. But keep in mind, it won't be Trump that goes to war, nor will America likely be the target.
So if we are indeed demand-bound, well ... euhm ... Keynes had a solution for that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Keynesianism (an economic analysis of the situation will immediately show however that just building a military doesn't work. You have to actually blow up more than a few countries to make this work. WW2 did that for Keynes)
I certainly believe there are, but what you've said here is not a good reason to believe that.