Have we simply stopped the process of innovating new things that solve problems?
circuitbored.com
circuitbored.com
Sometimes they converge around the same time and it looks transformational. More often though, they are slowly incorporated into the progressive change we enjoy.
It's also likely that areas that are important to him, just don't have a market. It doesn't mean people aren't innovating, it just means that resource allocation towards innovation went to other areas (for good or bad).
In particular, why aren’t these problems solved?
> No one has innovated a cost effective way to update office ventilation properly, and workspaces to prevent the spread of contaminants, no one has made highly comfortable yet very inexpensive N95 masks, no one has invented a fool-proof vaccination that completely prevents infection...
> No one has innovated a cost effective way to update office ventilation properly
This isn't an easy problem but we definitely have a plethora of ways to solve office ventilation, it's just that most of them require air ducts which are expensive as all heck to boot strap to existing buildings that lack them - and most of the economic designs for central air involve air recycling (because that's good for the environment) while, during a pandemic, we probably want to focus more on air evacuation. The one area we've realized a highly effective ventilation system that is designed to operate in a closed loop is on airplanes but that system is pretty radically different than what we run in offices because, again, it's not super cost effective.
When it comes to N95 masks I've worn extremely comfortable disposable and effective masks - but they have been pricey like most disposable things - and N95 masks (from what I've seen) simply can't be sterilized properly after use and continue to be N95 masks - you might be able to make pandemic specific masks that are effectively N95 masks by forcefully sterilizing the outer surface with UV occasionally but they'll fail to be conventional N95 masks that block harmful particulates - so a cheap, comfortable, universal solution is out of reach... a cheap comfortable specialized solution is probably accomplishable, but then, after all that innovation, you'd need to handle the real uphill battle - making your mask an acceptable alternative to all the politicians everywhere who are hesitant to embrace new things in the middle of a pandemic.
Regarding the fool-proof vaccination - you know how immortality is that dream we keep futilely pursuing? Human bodies are hard to understand, we're no where near the point of having a needle full of a liquid-x that can regrow limbs and cure cancer - bodies are highly variable and we've come up with some absolutely amazing vaccines. Just because the efficacy isn't 100% doesn't mean you can sit there saying "Welp, that was a total failure".
In all of these areas we're currently making advances - but new ground breaking once a century discoveries don't happen every year.
I think the poster already addressed this.
>> The author makes innovation out to be something akin to "if we focus on this, then it will change", but that's not how this typically works.
This is correct. It's not like money and focus don't help, but you can't construct innovation where you want it, when you want it.
Particularly the idea that we haven't been "innovating hard enough" on vaccines is just silly. It was a innovation that let us have anything at all on the timelines we experienced.
> No one has innovated a cost effective way to update office ventilation properly,
I can find HEPA air filters in Amazon for less than $100.
> no one has made highly comfortable yet very inexpensive N95 masks,
The N95 masks I use are fairly comfortable. However, a N95 mask must be well fitted to provide protection, which means it has to be tight, which means it won't be highly comfortable. This is a physical limitation of the problem, no amount of innovation can avoid the fact that you need a tight seal.
> no one has invented a fool-proof vaccination that completely prevents infection
The mRNA vaccines are a great example of a pretty cool innovation. It doesn't completely prevent infection, yeah, but no vaccine does that. Having a vaccine in a year and a half, widely available, when the initial estimates were of two years if we were lucky...
N95 masks have been around for ages as well. I have ideas of course on how they could be improved, as I am sure many others do, but it gets drowned out daily by all the nonsense of debating whether masks are even effective... We can't deny that politicizing mask effectiveness is in the same distraction bag as flat earth debates, but somehow we all just shrug it off not realizing that it is what clouds real discussion about meaningful innovation.
No one is disparaging the innovation behind mRNA vaccines, that is not a related or accurate talking point, it's a side-track.
Can you retrofit a house’s HVAC for positive pressure ventilation for $500?
Because faces have a huge range of variance so the only solution is custom make masks. Technologies like additive manufacturing could solve this but like all new technologies it will take time to bring the cost down. So really, why don't they make cheaper 3D printers? So simple!
> no one has invented a fool-proof vaccination that completely prevents infection
Literally impossible!
> No one has innovated a cost effective way to update office ventilation properly, and workspaces to prevent the spread of contaminants
I do think this hits a large point because I see it from the perspective of business. Much like FAANG, if a competitor came out with a better, cheaper product just buy them and destroy the product. Free market at it's finest.
Ventilation is building infrastructure, and building infrastructure is difficult. To use a software analogy, it's sort of like saying, "Why hasn't someone found a cost effective way to update mainframe software to support Unicode?" Basically, there's a lot of it, most of it's custom, and you have to work around things on a case-by-case basis. And a greenfield replacement is expensive. There are buildings in New York where the central heating dates back a century, and most of the people with the expertise to maintain it are over 70. (And they're second-generation legacy maintainers in some cases.) There's no cheap or easy way to update these buildings with better ventilation. Your best bet might be window units, but that poses plenty of challenges, too.
EDIT: Another commenter suggested HEPA filters, which may work for central air (if circulation is already good enough), or if you place them in standalone room units. I think the science on the latter looker promising when last I looked?
> no one has made highly comfortable yet very inexpensive N95 masks,
I've been pretty happy with the KF-94s from South Korea. I bought 20 masks each from several brands, tried them on, and ordered a big box of my favorites. Depending on your goals, there are also good N95s and KN-95s.
One of the challenges here is that many people want masks that work, and that means some kind of certification or inspection. But this means that most countries tend to standardize on one basic mask design backed up by government enforcement.
> no one has invented a fool-proof vaccination that completely prevents infection
This is a genuinely hard problem. Immunology is super complex, and every disease works differently. The particular challenge with coronaviruses, as I understand it, is that they reproduce in the nose extremely soon after initial infection. Mucosal antibodies have certain limitations compared to other antibodies, and it's hard for the body to ramp up a defense inside of 24 to 36 hours.
But we have just seen the golden age of vaccine innovation.
True innovation in ventilation to mitigate Covid would look something like an inexpensive UV light air purification unit that can be mounted over the air intake of a home heating system... Many of us bought blacklights at Spencer Gifts back in the early 90s, but somehow relative lights are marked now as a "new innovation" and a high price tag is slapped on every solution involving it, along with cameras, internet connectivity, and even robotics...
This is a very generalized means of elaborating on problem cited here of course... A much bigger conversation on this could be made.
Real science R&D innovation is relatively slow and full of failures and false starts. Peter Thiel made a big stink about where are flying cars but then proceeded to invest in a bunch of normal incremental improvement type startups (DTC, finch etc.). Even where Founders Fund did invest in true science - there's not much to talk about since real R&D is a slog.
If the author took the time to do actual research into innovation and took a long view - there's a lot more happening.
Improving social media without taxing content creators (and crediting and paying creators fairly) doesn't have a market?
Making music streaming fair to artists doesn't have a market?
Improving the quality of consumer goods on a wide-scale-basis doesn't have a market?
Not creating tons of toxic landfills filled with discarded lithium batteries from electric cars doesn't have a market?
Not wasting tons of resources, money, and not polluting the environment for space tourism in favor of improving education and living conditions of third world countries... Doesn't have a market?
These aren't just "individual personal" concerns.
We don't need gradual global transformation in my opinion. We need more drastic and game-changing innovation towards better goals.
COVID mitigation is the closest, and...we've seen lots of innovation there, frankly. The damn disease has only existed for just over two years, and we've seen a variety of vaccines and at least a few different effective treatments appear.
Basically every other innovation you name is all about challenging powerful incumbents to improve things for ordinary people and/or the planet...and no, there's no "market" for that. Markets are terrible for that. The powerful incumbents are great at bending markets to protect the status quo, and ordinary people and the planet don't have much sway over them.
That's why we have things like regulation, antitrust laws, and government-funded science. What we need is to give them better teeth.
We don't have a lot of this going on - or more specifically, going from a rural farm life to industrial city life was a single huge step, and now any huge steps get buried in the massive crush of other innovation.
Going from nothing to 1 of something is an infinite step. Going from a million of something to 2 million is paltry in comparison, but 1,000,000 is much bigger than 1.
There's only "no innovation" if you start with that conclusion and don't look for contrary examples.
- antibiotics: just better drugs
- GMO crops or the Green Revolution: just being more deliberate about what people did for thousands of years
- going to space: we can barely go under the sea, this is just that but up
- the Internet: phones, you've invented phones
- phones: talking to people, you've invented talking
- talking: just grunting with more sounds
There is a lot of wonderful stuff going on in the world, but if you filter to stuff you can dismiss, you're just going to see everything as worthless.
This is a common thing a lot of people find really hard to understand. A good critic isn't one who places the bar so high that nothing meets it. A good critic is one who can separate exceptional from mundane. If nothing is exceptional, it is likely the problem is that you're not good at determining whether something is. Just in a Bayesian sense, if your barometer says it's 1 atm literally everywhere, more likely the barometer is broken than that pressure has equalized everywhere in the universe.
We haven't had a single new class of antibiotics discovered for well over 30 years [1]. And now, especially since humanity was dumb enough to use reserve antibiotics in farm animals, we're looking at a disaster.
Haha! This is such an entertaining technique. I can see why people talk like this. It's pointlessly dismissive.
I think what's driving it is that
1. The internet brought a ton of actual amazing innovation.
2. Because people are correctly excited about it, this brought marketing opportunities.
3. Today, it is profitable to market stuff that superficially appears to be like that older, actual innovation, but is not innovative in the slightest. This is happening SO much, that it's crowding out (the marketing and spreading of) real innovation.
Wikipedia looks like an encyclopedia. But I think it's better understood at the world's largest text-based MMORPG. The terrain is pages. The weapon is edits. Battles rage constantly. Anybody who has spent time on it knows the massive amounts of drama behind the scenes. But almost as a side effect, the encyclopedia gradually ratchets forward.
Maybe it's better to see tech like that? Vast sums of money are scooped up and channeled by investors, all seeking advantage over one another. Most of that money is wasted, as is most of the effort it pays for. But occasionally, in dribs and drabs, innovation almost accidentally happens.
In both cases, if we could deploy the resources involved effectively, we could get a lot more done. But until somebody figures that very hard problem out, we can live with the fact that everything kinda sucks but things still keep getting slowly better.
Medical changes take years to test and approve; AI takes ages to adapt; hundreds of companies already produce innovative products that are simply unknown and even air-conditioning companies can't exactly perform a 5 minute tweak to something to clean ventilation systems, any changes are likely to require training, availability of tradespeople, significant disruption and then ongoing maintenance costs.
There surely are ground breaking innovations every day, but especially lately, the unremarkable ones push them out of the way in favor of quick headlines that spur impulse-driven investment.
We all probably can recall how popular an effort to "catapult" very rich and famous people into the outer atmosphere was and still is, while we have already travelled to the moon, decades prior at that.... Whether any of the things getting the most public recognition and funding these days really be considered as "game changing innovation" is the real question raised.
I have a gut feeling that societal cohesiveness is somehow lost through 'profit-driven' maintenance.
This is the same with pretty much all innovation - even things like the invention of agriculture can be argued to have caused more problems than it solved (Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens makes this point).
Laptops and smartphones made computing portable, but then has people taking their work home with them and increasing stress. Robotics help manufacture things, but also put people out of jobs. The car helps us get around but also contributes to global warming. I just don't think the implied view that "old innovation never used to create brand new problems" is true.
Social media for example has created serious problems with mental health of users, which could be eased dramatically if engagement and exposure wasn't gamified and manipulated, and if there was less of a focus on engagement and closed content.
Many laptops and smartphones are now rendered obsolete quickly by software updates as new models are released every year by manufacturers, this creates a huge pile of waste that in turn pollutes the environment.
Most of the negative aspects that have made product reliability and quality decline, along with dramatic price inflation are market-driven...
The better way to counter market-driven innovation (in just one of many possible aspects mind you) is to create enduring and properly-priced products that don't get thrown away each year (at the expense of record profit) obviously.
Replacing old problems with new problems is probably an inherent part of technological advancement and innovation, you just hope the benefit is worth the cost (it would be great to find technologies that just solve problems with no cost, but that’s not what you see in history).
Robotics on the other hand is a good example of how technology is applied to maximize profits at the expense of people. Same could be said about social media which largely exists to gather information about people and sell it to marketers. The internet as a library to access information introduced a great convenience but it is trending toward a paywall mode that makes information harder to access (a regression).
The article is largely cynical, but there is much to be cynical about when it comes to the latest developments in technology. Overall the cynicism is justified.
Many of the smartest minds are dedicating themselves to Wall Street and Silicon Valley under the direction of the questionable leaders of large tech companies that are largely focused on artificial intelligence (for surveillance and marketing purposes) and social media (also for surveillance and marketing purposes). There are some outliers like Elon Musk, but they are in small number.
Agreed.
Many would say this is because the process of online communication has not really been "pushed forward".
We discouraged email years ago in favor of walled communication in social media communities. There are literally trillions of epic conversations happening in places where they'll never get seen or shared beyond within those communities...
Those communities also ratio (in many ways) the ability for ideas to be found and seen by others within and outside of those communities, and also incentivize others word-wide to parrot and copy ideas from the original authors and then present them as their own, without properly crediting or attributing the original author...
This is exactly where the conflict to real innovation that was meant for the Internet resides.
From the outside, it might look like making personal jetpacks for everyone is easier than transcribing youtube videos. After all there are videos of people using jetpack-like things going back many decades! Surely if it almost worked then, it must work now. That's how technology progresses, right?
I'm convinced that most people making points like this think tech is like a video game, and all you have to do is put resource points into it.
And don't even get started on all the innovations that they probably just aren't paying attention to. As if it's a total coincidence that more and more cancers are getting survivable over time.
Our best researchers are wasting half or more of their time chasing one tiny bit of research grant after another so that they can continue for a couple more months of work - how do you expect actual results to appear from that burst-like work? We need to fund scientific research in a more sustainable way, and that soon.
And of those brilliant minds who don't want to subject themselves to that kind of bull dung because they want to, say, start a family and want a stable life with a decent wage, most end up working for Facebook to sell ads or for financial traders. Neither of which is in any kind productive to the progress of society.
And the global mega-corporations that used to fund their own massive research institutions also seem to have lost their way, especially as R&D spending isn't received well by the stock markets...
Agreed.
This is the plot here... We're becoming so driven to cater every business towards investment driven goals that we don't realize how much it's strangling epic innovation that does good. Massive financial growth and market dominance of companies that do not truly innovate will only advance many of the negativity and problems we experience with the quality and reliability of consumer products, environmental destruction, erosion of worker protections and family life, and so much more.
- At some point the “…is just a slightly-better version of…” product changes to being a whole new ‘thing’ JUST because it is that much better / easier / prettier / cheaper. And when we step back we can see the increased impact from that. Maybe a whole new group of people now will use it. Maybe a new industry can take off because of it.
- When we look at the past, we have the rosy glow of nostalgia, and we filter out all the worthless, bad, unappealing, and unreliable. I started using computers in the early 80s, and the market was jam-packed with half-baked hardly-usable knockoffs of every successful piece of hardware and software. Web 3.0 has nothing on Personal Computer 1.0!
"Problems" to solve IMO come down to basic human necessities:
- How do we get more people food for a lower cost? - How do we get more people shelter for a lower cost? - How do we make more people less sick for a lower cost?
Everything past that is basically a "luxury", AKA innovation for the sake of entertainment/discovery/challenge/socialization. Also, people tend to pay for entertainment/luxuries, whereas providing access to necessities for a lower cost doesn't have as high of a profit margin. Ergo, less reason to innovate.
Why, then, isn't it profitable to do right now, and what solutions exist to make it so?
The industrial revolution could probably have happened in republican Rome -- they had factories, after all (peopled with artisans and slaves) -- but cultural and economic forces inhibited this. Today technology is focused on ad-tech and rent-seeking patterns -- these are our Roman factories.
A better question might have been what sorts of technologies are blocked by our current cultural and economic regime?
Before the printing press and modern steel processing? Before newton and other fundamental physics and chemistry innovations?
You are going to have to actively seek out these efforts. I assure you, there is more innovation occurring in technology today than ever before. The only problem is that there is also more noise than ever before too. I use HN to help cut through a lot of that noise.
Nuff said?
How incredibly reductive, evident by the “basically” and “just” minimizations of innovative apps. When twitch was launched in 2011 was it “basically” a streaming platform? Was WhatsApp, with its launch date in 2009 “just” another chat app? Are the content sharing, file sharing, whiteboarding, breakout rooms, panels, background effects, automated transcription of Teams and zoom not a significant improvement over the days of Skype?
Sure, it’s easy to look back 10 years and say X is just Y, cause it’s been around for 10 years!
The saying "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." is extremely relevant here - nearly all science and innovation is iterative (and this is a good thing as it allows us to progress without relying on occasionally having a universe-brained Leonardo DaVinci simply pull innovation out of thin-air). Dramatic and sudden breakthroughs aren't the norm, the norm is slow improvement and refining, building something that's a little bit better than what you used last year and sharing it with your coworkers and that form of innovation should get a lot more praise than it usually does.
That said, Meta's take on the metaverse concept falls short in many ways compared to what VRChat's been doing for years.
Exactly. If the author published this in 2008 he would be saying "the iPhone is just a rehash of Blackberry but with a touch screen." If he published it in 2004 he would say, "the Blackberry is just a rehash of Palm but with a tiny keyboard." I don't know what came before Palm but you get the picture: innovation is clearly a cumulative process.
Besides, the value of unifying recent (or even ancient) technologies in a new way should not be overlooked.
These days though, we reward far too many bronze medal winners with the most profit and investment.
Praising and being content with small victories is not the way to achieve gold... Praising large victories, and noting when they aren't happening enough is the way to inspire more gold medal winners AND the way to generate a lot more silver and bronze medal winners.
The small innovations and bolt-ons just aren't cutting it.
As long as there's a lot of money in rearranging the deck chairs of what is the "cool" social media site every 10 years, there's going to be a ton of "investment" in chasing that next big thing cycle. It's just fashion at this point.
I eyeroll at Web3 and crypto and all of that. But somewhere in that flotsam is the nascent ideas of "better crypto" + "web" that may produce something that isn't akin to a turnkey total information dominance infrastructure for the next Putin wannabe authoritarian with more wits and less hairspray.
Yeah there will be a lot of scamming. A lot. "Aaaand it's gone" will happen many many times.
Is SV working on global warming, alternative energy, species extinction, habitat destruction, artificial meat/protein sources, better housing solutions, and the like? No, SV hasn't done that innovation for a while, since the money is chasing social networks and programmer shutin apps.
Luckily, that is happening elsewhere. Like China, or the mystifying hated ElonMuskStan.
I think the author meant Second Life. Sims is not networked (as far as I know) and it's not a RPG.
I agree that Second Life sounds like a more direct parallel to ZuckVR
Claiming that is short-sided
In all seriousness, I don't know what impossibly high bar this article is setting for "new things" but innovation happens every day in software engineering - I'm not saying each one of us is accomplishing Turing level stuff on a daily basis, but somewhere somebody is definitely creating something brand new right now - and something that's highly useful. New packages and libraries are constantly rolled out that try and approach problems from different angles - whether these are branded as innovative is entirely a matter of opinion but I'm of the camp that building a tool that makes someone's life easier that didn't previously exist is easily in the camp of an innovation.
But, if your standard for innovation is the polio vaccine (or other once in a decade or once in a century discoveries) then yea - we probably have gone two years without a once in a decade innovation - simply because probability.
Things that feel new
> innovation happens every day in software engineering
Who cares if innovation happens in ink pens if no good novels are written?
The people who got ink on their fingers writing bad novels with the old pens. Not every innovation needs to directly impact everybody - and maybe some of those bad novel authors decided to become novel authors because the pens got easier to use and maybe they could have written a good novel.
That new thing feeling is pretty darn subjective - smart phones never felt new to me. I used a flip phone and a tablet for a long time, the tablet was basically a more portable laptop - and when I actually got a smart phone it was just a slightly smaller tablet.
And sure, understanding of the immune system has exploded by leaps and bounds in the last two years, but other than that...
And fine, we now have a reusable launch platform giving us relatively cheap access to space, but other than that...
OK, and carbon capture/terraforming are rapidly improving, but really, other than that...
And quantum computing has progressed by leaps and bounds, but other than that...
Sometimes, when this argument comes up, I feel like I'm in a Monty Python skit.
I'm terribly sorry that CS applications in a work context aren't moving as fast as the author would like to. I would like to see progress there, too. But I really think that the extrapolation from that tiny domain to "nobody is inventing anything" is maybe failing because it's lacking a whole number of steps.
This is a great example of support for Betteridge's law of headlines.