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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

I guess that people who are living with change can't see it clearly. Whenever someone tells me "we're not innovating any more" I suggest they try a simple exercise;

Revert your life to the standard it had at the 'end' of the innovation period (this guy would have to go back to 2000). Remove all of the things you couldn't do then, today. Convert your utilities to the same that you had then (for many that would mean going back to dial up Internet but I digress). Now spend a week in that life, come back and tell me that innovation has stopped since then.

Fundamentally, people seem to start 'seeing' innovation in their teens, which seems to be coming out of everything, and then by the time they hit their 30's they stop seeing it. My thesis is that it isn't because innovation and change has stopped happening, it is because they have become accustomed to it. Hence the exercise to 'see' what you couldn't see because you were in the middle of it.

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The article is talking about Silicon Valley specifically. So play with the parameters of your hypothetical a little bit: would you be willing to give up everything Silicon Valley has come up with in the last 10 years?

High speed internet, 4G, etc, isn't Silicon Valley. It's Japan (DoCoMo), San Diego (Qualcomm), Dallas (AT&T), New Jersey (Verizon), etc. No need to give up your Ivy Bridge CPU's (Portland/Haifa). Google was in place before 2002, and basically peaked at that time.

What would I be giving up? Facebook? Flash ads? Done! Go back to Photoshop 7.x? Even if you assert that Microsoft is more culturally associated with the Valley, despite being in Redmond, then you might be running Windows 2000 on your new Ivy Bridge processor. Sounds great! The hardest thing to give up would be my iPhone (Cupertino) and I guess Hacker News. Although Apple is arguably the last vestige of the "old" Silicon Valley. Think about it: they're basically making their money these days selling cool-looking RISC machines running UNIX...

It is a fair point that not everything that changes starts, or ends, in Silicon Valley. It is also true that Silicon Valley is a lot more than just Facebook and Apple, its Genentech and Amazon's embedded devices and switching gear, and flash chip research, web publishing and all sorts of stuff.

Doing the exercise is one that helps you pull out the changes that you may have overlooked rather than highlight a specific location. Once you can see the changes you are in a much better position to evaluate both the relative innovation from a previous period, and the contribution to innovation.

I don't know if that thought experiment really understands what "innovation" means, though. An alternative thought experiment, proposed by economist Robert Gordon (see http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/28/is-economic-grow...), gets closer to the heart of the matter:

You are required to make a choice between option A and option B. With option A you are allowed to keep 2002 electronic technology, including your Windows 98 laptop accessing Amazon, and you can keep running water and indoor toilets; but you can’t use anything invented since 2002.

Option B is that you get everything invented in the past decade right up to Facebook, Twitter, and the iPad, but you have to give up running water and indoor toilets. You have to haul the water into your dwelling and carry out the waste. Even at 3am on a rainy night, your only toilet option is a wet and perhaps muddy walk to the outhouse. Which option do you choose?

The fact that somebody would even consider comparing 10 years of progress to several thousand years implies that some pretty good stuff must have happened in the last decade.

Frankly, that's an absurd comparison. Has anyone ever asserted that the iPad is on par with sanitation, running water and indoor toilets? Why not throw in the wheel for good measure?

Kevin Kelly mentioned a counterexample recently: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2013/01/the_post-prod...

I sort of agree but I think the danger with your exercise as it pertains to this article is that it takes into account everything - not just tech. My washing machine is way better, car runs longer, better medications, etc.

I think in terms of traditional Silicon Valley tech (as it is today) his point is largely correct and natural. While software is increasingly ubiquitous, the pace/rate at which its able to be a driver of new innovation/change is increasingly less in my opinion - computing and the internet has been maturing over the last 50 years and we should expect to see less life altering changes as a whole. It doesn't mean the gig is up - it just means computing progress is now eating away at the fringes and that the delta in how much computing drives innovation will be somewhat less through 2010-2020 than it was from 2000-2010.

What's disappointing is that my quality of life would decrease much less from 2010->1970 than 1970->1930. In that sense, innovation is decelerating.

Change and innovation aren't the same thing. Some of my favorite changes since 2000 have been things like proliferation of online banking and billing, or the steady march of improved wireless integration and operating systems.

None of this is novel stuff, and anybody could have predicted them 10 years ago. Not innovation, IMO.

Another thing I would miss is the ubiquity of Craigslist. However, it was created in the 90's. The biggest improvement in Craigslist in the last 10 years is simply that more people use it (not that I feel it needs other enhancements)

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