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Comment by Victerius | Hacker News Reader

Are we really seeing a lot of innovation? The last technological breakthrough was the smartphone.

We still don't have space stations that can accommodate more than a half dozen people (spoiler: I want to live on Cloud City). We don't have Moon colonies. We don't have 3D holograms (not the ones that rely on spinning a stick really fast and using a projector). We still don't have a cure for any type of cancer. No warp drives. No anti-grav. No 200 year life expectancy. No human cloning. No $25 000 flying cars. No mass produced technology or consumer products using graphene.

We make smaller chips, miniaturized computers, made fancier looking user interfaces, made rocket boosters reusable, and video game graphics are approaching photorealism. Great.

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> The last technological breakthrough was the smartphone.

That's fairly recent, and pretty damned significant. How often are you expecting such society-changing innovations to occur?

Your list of things we don't have that you want is kinda odd. Is there a need for cloned humans? What huge societal improvements do holograms permit? Why is a consumer product with graphene meaningful but the massive innovation in small, powerful batteries not?

> kinda odd. Is there a need for cloned humans?

Cloned militaries. Eliminating birth defects. Relieving women from the pain of childbirth.

Also to solve the problem of low birth rates, and allow people to perpetuate themselves. Elon Musk could clone himself and raise his copy to eventually take over his businesses after him.

> What huge societal improvements do holograms permit?

Look man, the Jedi didn't use Slack, did they?

> Why is a consumer product with graphene meaningful but the massive innovation in small, powerful batteries not?

Life is graphene. It's fantastic.

> A. Clone. Army.

So... are these clones slaves that are forced to join the army?

> Also to solve the problem of low birth rates, and allow people to perpetuate themselves. Elon Musk could clone himself and raise his copy to eventually take over his businesses after him.

He could also do this with his children?

We could almost certainly get to human cloning very fast; the technology isn't really the botttleneck. It's just that no one does it and for very good reasons. The only way human cloning could be useful and help "solve" any problem would also involve going back to chatel slavery. Why would any research go towards that?

It's not like star wars, human clones would still be human.

Also ignores things like electric vehicles at scale (battery and charging tech), mRNA vaccines, blockchain, OCD treatment, DNNs, cable television (I think some of the best works of art are TV series now).

We aren't innovating like we use to and it isn't even close. We are just such a histrionically ignorant society that has lowered the bar on innovation so we can pretend that we are a society innovating at lighting speed.

The smartphone was 15 years ago but we act like it was yesterday.

1900-1910ish we got air conditioning, plastics, airplanes, motion pictures, the Theory of Relativity..

We are just so clueless now. Even the smart people are clueless.

The smart phone doesn't even belong in the same category as the others you listed. The digital computer certainly does but it's been 80 years since that occurred. The smartphone is simply a refinement of that basic technological leap. Practically everything people are listing here falls in the category of refinement of existing technology rather than a completely novel form of technology. That is the scary and correct assertion of the article, we've almost completely stopped discovering or inventing novel technology or at least the rate of discovery has slowed to the point where 100 years of our present progress is equal to 10 years of the previous.

> The smartphone is simply a refinement of that basic technological leap.

There's very little that isn't.

Moon rockets are a refinement of thousand year old technology, fireworks. Steam engines are a refinement of little toys from ancient Greece. Guns are a refinement of throwing things.

Any definition of innovation that doesn't include smartphones is a silly one, in my book. It's quite clear they were novel and massively impactful on society.

This argument is being framed incorrectly. It's the fundamental discovery that counts, not the implementations. The discovery of steam power is more important than Hero's Engine because discovering that you can do useful work with steam allows you to build all kinds of things that didn't exist before. Having a whirligig that runs on steam gives you nothing more than a few minutes enjoyment. Guns are definitely not a refinement of throwing things, someone who only knows how to throw something cannot build a gun. Guns are a refinement of the invention of gunpowder and good enough metallurgy to produce the gun itself. Similarly, rocketry is a refinement of gunpowder and the discovery that pressurized gasses escaping from a hole or nozzle can propel something. A smartphone itself is not a truly novel discovery, it's essentially a handheld portable computer. All the same technology exists or could exist in other form factors. If we compare it to something simple like a hammer, it is just a small hammer good for doing certain tasks and not others. It doesn't compare to the discovery that if you attach a weight to a handle you can hammer things. There are other specialized forms of hammer that are better for other tasks. i.e. a smartphone is just a specialized form of computer.

That's ridiculous, the smartphone has changed society far more than desktop's or really any form of computer that exists. Vast numbers of people only access the internet via a smart phone. Doctor's visits across the globe, remote working from wherever you are, hand held GPS and maps, access to countless hours of entertainment, etc....

None of that is possible without digital computers and those generalize to a much larger domain of devices and technologies that have revolutionized the world in thousands of ways. So no, the smartphone has not had a larger impact on the world than the invention of the digital computer. As for the other examples, GPS is not possible without the Theory of Relativity, video calls are not possible without motion pictures, the integrated circuits that make up the smartphone are not possible without plastics, and I doubt we would have many close connections with the rest of the world without air travel. Besides that, remote working and doctor's visits are possible without a smartphone, same thing with GPS which predates smartphones by quite a bit, same with access to entertainment. None of those things are really very revolutionary. GPS is the closest since it does provide a novel and superior way of navigating but you'd be hard pressed to make a case for entertainment or remote working being on par with manned flight or plastics.

Is it possible that you don't appreciate the great innovations of the last decade, but looking back there will be just as many as the 1900-1910s?

In the last 15 years we got reusable rockets, mRNA vaccines, Crispr, workable quantum computers, AI capable of beating us at Go, and many other numerous breakthroughs. Sure 1900-1910 meaningfully changed the world but the bar form the 1800's was dramatically lower than the 2000-2010 bar from the 1900's. Ironic that such a ignorant comment laments societies ignorance.

The ability for mitumba in a village outside of Nairobi to whip out a little device in his pocket and learn anything his mind can conjure up a desire to learn and speak with any human being on the earth they'd like is not a small development compared to air conditioning, airplanes and plastics. And it's not an abstract academic example, a few weeks ago I video chatted with a real Masai warrior who I've never met, because my friend was casually catching up with family overseas.

And 15 years ago is not that big of a timeframe, it was ~50 years between first powered flight and men stepping on the moon. The kids born with cheap access to all the worlds information are going to do things with their minds that you and I cannot imagine yet. They're going to organize in novel ways and nobody can stop them.

The smartphone, fucking really?

No mention of CRISPR-Cas9, the explosion of deep learning and "AI," the James Webb Space Telescope, detection of gravitational waves...?

My god. Are people really that myopically spellbound by computing these days?

> The last technological breakthrough was the smartphone.

Indeed, already 15 years ago. Hurry up slackers, I want an innovation that literally changes our whole lives every decade please

> We make smaller chips, miniaturized computers, made fancier looking user interfaces, made rocket boosters reusable, and video game graphics are approaching photorealism. Great.

Damn.. I'm not sure what more you are wanting given the amount of time that has passed? You wanted humanity to go from its first flight and engine-powered vehicle to warp drives, cured cancer and Moon colonies in less than 200 years?

Yes.

> We still don't have space stations that can accommodate more than a half dozen people. We don't have Moon colonies. We don't have 3D holograms (not the ones that rely on spinning a stick really fast and using a projector). We still don't have a cure for any type of cancer. No warp drives. No anti-grav. No 200 year life expectancy. No human cloning. No $25 000 flying cars. No mass produced technology or consumer products using graphene.

All of these statements apply to Einstein's era as well.

We do, however, as of the past ten years or so have reuseable rockets (non trivial), inexpensive virtual reality goggles, mRNA vaccines, bioreactor grown meat, on demand access to an enormous quantity of humanity's artistic creations at any time, nearly-out-of uncanny valley digital human replicas, self driving cars with a low probability of killing you getting from point A to point B, and, yes, some really cool video games.

some cancers are curable with 95% success rate, but then again cancer is really more of an umbrella term, not a specific disease.

we do have physics of warp-drives somewhat figured out, but engineering remains a challenge. there are some warp fields experiments going on. if were to apply your metric, GPS was invented in 1915, by Einstein.

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