Comment by zach | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zach | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

There's a story on CNN right now about a woman with (at least somewhat) successful hand transplants. Both of them.

Somewhat successful because while she has feeling and movement, she doesn't have normal dexterity.

That feels pretty sci-fi to me.

It's debatable whether Jurassic Park is "great scifi" but Ian Malcolm says:

"You know what’s wrong with scientific power? It’s a form of inherited wealth. There is no humility before nature. And because you can stand on the shoulders of giants, you can accomplish something quickly." - that's in the book, not the movie!

I think what Neal Stephenson laments is not that we can't innovate, but that we haven't achieved our potential. Achievement is a world apart from raw data.

(Ironically, I only had to copy-and-paste the quote... http://manas.tungare.name/blog/jurassic-park-what-the-movie-... )

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.

Was WWII similarly significant in your "feelings"? Because that's what I feel putting a man on the moon with 1960s technology was similar to: a war effort, dangerous, expensive and ultimately, hard to justify. (Though of course peanuts in comparison to WWII.)

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