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Comment by epenn | Hacker News Reader

There are corporate exceptions. For example, Google seems to be working on a few big problems, such as the self-driving car and Google Glass.

I'm not entirely sure I would classify Google Glass as a "big problem." Self-driving cars can address driver safety, fuel efficiency and route efficiency, among other things and therefore certainly rank up there. Google Glass, although I like the concept and very well might even purchase a unit when they become widely available, seems to address the same areas already covered by smart phones, just with a new interface. I think there are huge strides that can be made in the area of pervasive computing, but I'm not sure Google Glass is what will propel that.

(I would love to be proved wrong though.)

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I think SpaceX and Tesla Motors (Elon Musk) are better big-problem solving examples than Google Glass.

I get why you'd say that about SpaceX, but why is Tesla in that category?

Consumers have been very reluctant to drive electric vehicles / hybrids instead of regular combustion-engine vehicles. It has huge implications for the petroleum business as well as the future of transportation.

Tesla is focused on a niche: Luxury / high-performance cars, which is a tiny fraction of the market in units, and even if they were wildly successful they would not even make a blip in the carbon emission statistics.

It is for now, but see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5310911 for discussion from the weekend about Elon's post from a few years ago about his plans to enter the mainstream with Tesla.

Isn't that a category error? From what I know Tesla is interested in building good electric cars, where luxury/high-end gives them the profit margins to enable further improvements. Though I'm sure it plays some role in their marketing, I don't know that they are currently measuring their success in terms of overall carbon emission statistics.

Sorry for the multi-day delay in responding. The electric vehicle thing is only one aspect of their innovation.

They also have a direct sales model that removes the pain of negotiating with car salespeople and dealerships. You can buy the cars online and everyone pays the same price! I bet they don't charge extra for floor mats and undercarriage rust protection.

> I'm not entirely sure I would classify Google Glass as a "big problem."

It's novel, it opens up new applications not possible with smartphones and it can get widespread adoption. It might not be hard because most technology necessary is already here, but I think you can say it's big by the amount of disruption it can introduce.

I don't think the potential effect of a venture can really be said to reflect the "problem" it addresses. The world is not clamoring for a way to view data without a monitor or search for the best deal on Frosted Flakes. Unless I'm missing the sense of "big problem" here --and I can't tell, since the site is down -- this seems like mistaking "difficult technical problems" for "large-scale social problems."

> The world is not clamoring for a way to view data without a monitor (...)

Are you kidding? We cram a screen in everything we build. In that sense, a HUD is the ultimate screen, since it sits between you and everything else.

There are two kinds of solutions. Solutions that solve known problems, and solutions that solve unforeseen problems.

Plenty of technological innovation has come from the latter. Google Glass is precisely the kind of thing that has the potential to solve unforeseen problems.

Well, it doesn't matter all that much that each of us agrees that building Technology X will help with Big Problem B. Why?

1. It is hard to predict how innovation unfolds, builds on itself, and cross-pollinates. For example, who predicted that 140-character-or-less social media messaging would benefit democratic uprisings in Egypt?

2. We aren't going to agree on the big problems.

My criteria is simple: somewhere/somehow in the economic system and public spheres, we need diverse investment in technological advancement across many time scales.

Well.. depending on how pervasive it gets, I would put Google Glasses on the same scale as the iPhone when the consideration is the bigness of "big problem".

So, how big was the iPhone?

I think the cell phone was bigger. The iphone was just an evolution of the concept. Processors became powerful enough and efficient enough to run a full OS in a phone, Apple jumped on it, the rest is history.

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