Why New Technology Is a Hard Sell

Almost every technology was adopted at a rate commensurate with its cost/benefit. The car was widely adopted virtually overnight once it became cheap enough (~1914). The airplane was in common military use less than a decade after it was able to carry the first passenger. Useful technology is rarely delayed by adoption; rather, adoption is often delayed by a technology's maturity and cost. In fact, technology is so usually adopted so quickly, that if your technology isn't, it is almost always a sure sign that either it isn't as helpful as you think or its cost is too high. The statement, "It usually takes more time to convince people that your technology has changed the world than it does to invent a world-changing technology" is just not true. What is true is that it sometimes takes a while to make your technology cheap/safe/easy enough for it to actually be worth it.

One I think they're missing (though perhaps implicit in a couple of the others) is "People are skeptical of new things that promise a lot." Many new technologies have been oversold by the media and... salespeople, leading people over time to generally be skeptical that a really new technology can actually do all the things it promises. As a result, it takes time to convince people that, for example, the dish washer really is better than washing dishes yourself and not just a gimmick to take more money out of your wallet.

In many cases, this skepticism is healthy because (as the article mentions in the beginning), a lot of new tech is not actually ready for primetime for quite some time after it is invented.

Personally, I think this article is full of a kind of techno-utopianism. For example with the smart phone revolution the technology has been deployed extremely rapidly to billions (!) of people. In less than a generation we've gone from nearly zero to people and in particular children (hey I pretty commonly see infants with iPads positioned in front of their faces on the bus) spending the majority of their waking life in front of these devices. And because of this extreme speed of deployment we have no data on any long term developmental effects of this. The little slivers of research on some of these effects that we have do not look particularly great.

As such, I think we have the opposite problem from what the article suggests. We happily approve and deploy many technologies and find out about the environmental, health, mental and other hazards the hard way many years later.

The article seems a bit condescending towards "regular people", when in reality the hardest, and most expensive, effort marketing wise is education.

To educate an audience is so expensive that one is better to place that responsibility on governments, most of the times through the education system, or other public services that make it mandatory/enforced.

A good example is the goddamn seat belt - a technological wonder that saved millions, yet people have them right next to their shoulders and still today a lot refuse/forget to use it, while being enforced by law in many countries.

That's why I think the article can be resumed to - educate people to change their behavior is hard, expensive and can take a long time.

The most seamless tech adoption is the one unnoticed, where people don't realize neither have opinions on it's usage. Or enforced, where people/manufactureres are forced to adopt new technology.

Well for one.. It might be cool to have speaker in the kitchen to answer queries but I don't want every conversation to be recorded.

There are other factors not mentioned in this article.

First, most technologies are challenging to use and expensive at first. There are often related technologies that are required to make the first technology actually be useful. For example indoor toilets are not really useful without plungers.

The second problem is survivorship bias. People are rightly skeptical of new technology, because most new technology turns out to be rather limited in its uses, at least initially. It's easy to comment on the slow adoption of some past technologies, because we can see their wide use later, yet we ignore all the garbage that they were also trying to ignore. See https://xkcd.com/1827/

It is hard to tell fads from the real deal these days. There's rarely a Grand New Idea with no downsides or tradeoffs, and those promoting such ideas usually have an agenda. It's rational to let somebody else be the proverbial guinea pig. As our systems become more complex, the tradeoffs are also more complex such that the low-hanging-fruit of obvious benefits are mostly all picked.

A folding (two-screened) phone sounds like a good idea in theory, but whether they can be made reliable and if there is or will be enough useful software for them is still unknown. I'll wait it out...

I waited out the 3D TV fad and am glad I did. My grumpy geezerism paid off there.

Innovation is easy if you can do it for yourself, by yourself, using stuff you have.

That's a paraphrase of something in somebody's book. but it is really true. If costs and benefits don't accrue to the same organization or individual, if cooperation of multiple players is needed, and if some unobtainable component or technical breakthrough is needed, then innovation is really hard.

We're in the middle of a few different technological revolutions right now, and the kind of conservatism / lock-in that this article talks about is very much in evidence. It can be surreal to observe.

One revolution which I follow quite closely is in spaceflight. Since the beginning, it had been done one way and one way only, and its way of doing things had become a goal in itself. Its exorbitant cost was lauded for its ability to create jobs and -- for more ambitious initiatives -- to foster international collaboration, since surely it was too expensive for any one nation to undertake on its own. Its resulting rarity and exclusivity created a kind of mystique around rocket scientists and astronauts. This mystique and these justifications became fundamental to the narrative of what spaceflight was about.

Then SpaceX came along and screwed it all up, and practically nobody noticed. "Bad example," you might say: "Elon Musk is fetishized by millions, and is hardly out of the news cycle for more than a few minutes". Which is true, but Musk's status as a celebrity is entirely orthogonal to actually comprehending what he's doing, and adjusting one's model of the world accordingly.

What SpaceX has done/is doing, is this:

1. Changed traditional aerospace engineering, management, and procurement practices, so that they were more focused on efficiently building/operating rockets than distributing work sites around a critical mass of congressional districts. Nothing at all heroic or sexy about this, but it reduced launch costs by a factor of 3 relative to the industry norm.

2. Developed 1-stage reusability, which is quite sexy, and reduced launch costs by a factor of 6.

3. Developed the Falcon Heavy, which reduced launch costs by a factor of 8 (for large enough payloads, of which there currently aren't any).

What I find remarkable about this is that although the sight of boosters landing themselves has become common place enough to no longer grab headlines, the industrial / political community is still very much at the "Do Not Think Aeroplanes Will Ever Compete With Railroads" stage of comprehension. The fact that it's made Musk into a celebrity is, frankly, totally meaningless and facile. What's slightly more meaningful is that this has enabled a startup to capture the majority of commercial launch services in the world, and make a profit doing it. But ultimately, what a 8x reduction in the cost of spaceflight should do is change the the entire nature of the spaceflight business: enable many new types of business cases and missions. This is a fait accompli, but it's taking a long time for the world to catch onto this fact.

If you browse through an archive of traditional industry magazines and forums and such, you'll find almost no mention of SpaceX's innovations apart from dismissal and derision. Typical themes are:

1. Private companies can't afford to develop launch vehicles. (Still being claimed for a couple of years after they first reached orbit).

2. SpaceX is losing money. (They're not.)

3. SpaceX is only making money because they're subsidized by the government. (They're not.)

4. Recovering a booster is impossible.

5. Reusing a booster is impossible. (This argument was still being made long after SpaceX had started flying reused booster.)

6. Rocket reusability will never be economically meaningful because [insert painfully tortured and ridiculous argument here]. (Said after SpaceX had captured the bulk of the world's launch services).

7. Private companies can't develop heavy-lift launch vehicles. (Said as recently as a congressional hearing last week, after the Falcon Heavy has been successfully flying for almost two years)

8. Look, astronauts should be the very best of the best of the best. We shouldn't just allow anyone into space. (Said ever since the very first space tourist booked a flight to the ISS in 2001).

The myopia here is really striking to me. But one thing I've noticed is that -- contrary to the article -- it mostly doesn't really come from a too-conservative Joe Public. Rather, it comes from well-regarded experts with a vested interest in their world not being upended. When SpaceX first successfully recovered a booster in late 2015, I found that my friends with no particular interest in space were able to comprehend the significance of that milestone far more accurately than executives from the old guard space contractors. And I genuinely think that the old guard didn't comprehend. They weren't publicly ignoring/rubbishing SpaceX, while privately doing intensive R&D in an effort to catch up. Privately, they were doing nothing differently. So they really didn't understand what they were seeing.

4 years later, they're vaguely beginning to understand what has happened, and starting to think about how they might catch up. The European Space Agency is funding paper studies of reusable rockets which look almost exactly like the Falcon 9. SpaceX's main US competitor, United Launch Alliance, is aiming to start doing trials of partial reusability in 5 years. China is ahead of both of them, already doing booster-recovery experiments very similar to the early Falcon 9 recovery trials in 2013.

But this a terribly muted reaction to what has already been a significant revolution in spaceflight. And anyhow, it is all going to be much too little, much too late -- because actually the revolution was just getting started, and matching the capabilities of the Falcon 9 is about to be the least of any competitor's worries.

SpaceX is now developing the Starship, which will be fully reusable and plausibly stands to reduce launch costs by a factor of 50-100 vs. the prior industry baselines. This will be a mind-bogglingly huge development: at those prices, asteroid mining is viable, and building Mars colonies is with reach of many NGOs, never mind governments. At those prices, the fact that we live in a solar system with almost unlimited resources starts to become a meaningful statement. Once the culture has absorbed the fact that this is really happening, I would expect to see thousands of people emigrating off-world every year, to pursue the many opportunities elsewhere. This will be a BIG DEAL.

And it's happening right now. Starship's engines have completed development and are now being optimised for mass production. The first test-bed flew earlier this year. The first full prototype vehicle is under construction and will make its first trans-sonic flight as soon as next month. They expect to hit orbit by next year. Musk is saying as early as next Spring -- and this is undoubtedly too optimistic -- but at the pace they've been going, late next year is absolutely plausible.

Moreover, "the pace they've been going" isn't a matter of speculative kremlinology: they've been practically open-source about the whole endeavour, with all the parts laid out in a field and assembled in full public view. As if to try to convince the world: "hey, wake up, this is actually happening."

But so far, awareness of this seems to be largely confined to cult-of-Musk fanboys, and their equal but opposite anti-fanboys. With very few exceptions, few in the industry have noticed that this is actually happening. Based on what I've seen with the Falcon series, I fully expect this state of denial to persist for at least 5-10 years after Starship reaches orbit.

I don't think you can compare a vaccine with, say, cars. A vaccine works or it doesn't, there isn't much to be improved on from a usability point of view. Whereas the very first car compared to models, say, 20 years later - that's quite a difference. I wouldn't want a car for which I needed to study 6 months to learn how it works, so that I could fix it on the road every time it breaks down. Not to mention costs going down over time.

The article contradicts itself.

It starts with polio vaccine, which was an amazing product that people needed. It as not a hard sell at all, lots of people died because of polio.

Then he puts the counterexample with penicillin and says it took 20 years to sell.

But it is wrong in the sense that it took 20 years in developing the industrial process that made penicillin cheap. Not because people did not want it, but because it was a real hard problem to solve.

I read years ago a book about the history of Penicillin and there were tremendous technical roadblocks that made the industrial production of it a chimera(until they were solved). I believe they won the novel price for solving this technical roadblocks(the industrial process, not just the discovery).

You can't analyze it backwards, from the point when all these roadblocks were solved and say, hey! people did no like it!

The equivalent today is nuclear fusion. It has technical roadblocks that makes it a chimera until they are solved. It is not that people do not want nuclear fusion, it is that they doubt scientist will solve the roadblocks so financing is very weak.

The real problem is that nobody(or very few) believe in what does not exist, what they can not see. In the Bible it is called "Faith". Innovation is by definition creating something that did not exist before.

Innovation needs people that could see the future as real, even when it does not exist yet. They are called visionaries, and are highly problematic people. Most people can't understand them, because they are dreamers, "pie in the sky" people.

By the way, most of those visionaries are wrong in their visions, and consume the wealth of those from the "real world" that trust them. 9 out of 10.

In fact, for a long time inventors were considered "Snake oil" salespeople, scammers.

The only difference is that today failing 9 times out of 10 is considered normal business and VCs approach it like a numbers game: They know the 1 out of 10 that success will pay for the failures.

The article makes a wrong assumption: That technologies are fixed and finished, you sell them and people do not want them.

But that is not the case, technologies evolve continuously: Take lithium batteries:They have been improving 7% a year, looks like nothing but it is exponential change, you see 10 years, 15 and the product is completely different.

I bought a RepRap machine when 3d printers patents expired. It was crap, nothing to do with RepRap machines today once 300.000 or more printers have been sold, and in the future when millions of 3d printers are sold the change will accelerate more, because more people will use and modify their printers.

Electric cars, solar panels, wind energy technologies evolve. When they are mass produced, prices get cheaper, as they get cheaper, more people want it, as there is bigger market, more companies invest in R&D, and technologies improve more.