What happened to innovation?
blog.samaltman.com
blog.samaltman.com
It's not really the problem that there aren't very many people working on replacing jet engines. The issue is that the problem domain is full of physical limits. Ask yourself: why are we still using quicksort now, half a century after it was developed? Well, because theory tells us that any sorting algorithm based on binary comparisons is going to require at least O(n log(n)) such comparisons, and that is going to remain the case no matter how much engineering effort you throw at the problem. All you can really do when it comes to sorting algorithms is improve on the constant factors and take advantage of special cases (radix sort for small integer items, etc).
Software engineers don't usually have to think in terms of theoretical limits. But when I was in engineering school, as an aerospace major, every course began with: these are the theoretical limits in this particular area--all you can do is approach them more closely. A Brayton cycle has a certain efficiency at a given pressure ratio and an airfoil has a certain maximum lift-curve slope and there is nothing you can do about it. Improvements are in "hard engineering"--new materials that can withstand higher temperatures and pressures to eke out slightly more efficiency, etc. You're already seeing this in semiconductor manufacturing. As you run into the limits of lithography with ever-smaller wavelengths of light, semiconductor fabrication plants get exponentially more expensive to build.
These physical limits are what give the traditional engineering fields the shape of their "innovation curve." Much more happened in aerospace engineering from 1930 to 1960 than has (and will) happen from 1960 to 2020. The long-hanging fruit is gone, and all that's left is hard engineering.
And of course, this all plays into the "get rich quick" issue the author brings up. If you had a billion dollars lying around, where would you invest that money? A jet engine that's 0.5% more efficient? If you had $100 billion, would you spend it making an alternative to jet engines entirely (in an industry where people will fly on truly shitty airlines just to save $5 on a ticket)?
Factors of 2 or 3 in specific power and efficiency are possible. Due to the rocket equation, this could yield vastly longer range and more efficient aircraft (1/10 the weight, 10x the range, 10x the efficiency, 2x the speed...).
In particular, you point out the limitations of the Brayton cycle and material limitations. However, there are other cycles that are much closer to Carnot efficiency, or match it in the ideal case. There's a lot you can do when isothermal compression is possible. Additionally, if there is a thermal limitation, you can do isothermal combustion, such that much more heat addition is at the maximum temperature of your materials, and you can even design efficient reheating.
It's not a jet -- you want to pair this with a driven fan system or at least have high bypass, but it's fundamentally more thermodynamically efficient.
For supersonic applications, scramjets remain possible, but challenging. And rocketry + high altitude flight remains extremely exciting and potentially more efficient than standard jetliner transport. Just difficult.
So yes, there are physical limitations. But they are not what most people think they are, and they do not mean what people think they mean.
But: a) all that is risky and extremely expensive (and as the semiconductor example shows us, often exponentially so); and b) whatever technology you use, you will always be pushing up against physical limits--that's just the nature of the physical engineering disciplines.
These are novel concepts in a world where we see "technological progress" as the evolution of the internet from AOL in 1995 to Facebook in 2010 and wonder why other areas don't improve so fast.
PS) I'd be quite interested to see any specific papers you had in mind vis-a-vis alternative cycles for jet engines.
[1]: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/0...
I note that in it, Stephenson makes a prediction, as if it were a known fact, that I think we now have significant reason to doubt.
He says "Rockets are as close to perfect as they're ever going to get. For a few more billion dollars we might be able to achieve a microscopic improvement in efficiency or reliability, but to make any game-changing improvements is not merely expensive; it's a physical impossibility."
I think we now have reason to believe that for around a billion dollars ($1b is the estimated total R&D budget as of a year ago), SpaceX has already made better-than-microscopic improvements in efficiency. But more interestingly, there's reason to believe that with little or no additional outside investment (i.e. working on profits), SpaceX is pretty likely to soon make a very large improvement in efficiency, with Grasshopper &c. Rockets are probably not as perfect as they're ever going to get.
Still a very impressive achievement, but looking at the performance of SpaceX's engines circa 2012 and comparing them to what the Soviets built in 1960 or 1970 helps put the pace of the industry into context.
The relevant efficiency, to me, is "awesomeness achieved per human effort and non-renewable resource", and the useful proxy for this is "awesomeness per price". Arguably SpaceX rockets are cheaper (per given mass to given orbit, obviously) that most or arguably all of the competition. I say "arguably cheaper" because it's a little tough to figure out how to price the shoulders of giants on which they stand.
And really I only picked the word "efficiency" in the context of Stephenson's "efficiency or reliability".
Anyway, hopefully this explains why I think that true reusable rockets, Musk's often-stated ambition, qualify as a "very large improvement" in efficiency. Specific impulse is not expected to significantly improve, right?
Also, I apologize in advance for my legion failings in the area of comprehending aerospace engineering.
Do you think think it's unreasonable to call "payload per cost" a relevant "efficiency"?
I don't usually work from the literature (it is hard to access papers outside of academia, and they're usually weird, abstract, hard to read, and miss the point anyway) so I work from the first principles.
But at a high level, imagine either an Ericsson or Carnot cycle, (dependent on materials), where high temp, high pressure heat addition is contiguous combustion during expansion, and the isothermal compression is a secret sauce :-)
Amazing.
Say what you will about HN, but comment threads about seemingly impossible technical challenges that end in this make me immensely happy to be here :D
1. There are people it would inspire, and
2. There are people whose expectations would be shaken up
The latter group needs as much help as the former.
The important difference is that there are now millions of black American kids no longer growing up in a world where they just "know" as a first principle that "black people can't be president". That sort of example simply changes people's outlook. Inspiration and aspiration matter.
That's precisely the shakeup the world needs - to realise that whatever skin colour, male or female, people are people and you shouldn't judge them negatively or positively on how much melanin or testosterone they produce :P
In practice, the kinds of people that can discuss ideas that push the state of the art forward are so rare that you should be grateful that your society gets any, and not worry so much about their genitalia.
Effect of estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone on cognition.
> Factors of 2 or 3 in specific power and efficiency are possible. Due to the rocket equation, this could yield vastly longer range and more efficient aircraft (1/10 the weight, 10x the range, 10x the efficiency, 2x the speed...).
I'd like to hear about these, assuming they produce comparable amounts of thrust as jet engines while being a reasonable size (so as not to increase drag excessively).
The main one that comes to mind is nuclear fusion... The power of the sun. We see and rely on it every day. We know it's possible to create with a trivial set-up: lot's of crap thrown together. We haven't figured out how to control it yet but once we do, it'll change everything.
So you're right: there are physical limits and some absolute of course, but we're not at the absolutes yet: it's just going to be a very step-wise function on the way up.
edit: while this may seem tangential to a discussion of jet engines: imagine if we did harness fusion... think about the aeronautical implications. We could probably have helicopter islands like in a Sci-Fi film. :)
"The power production density of the core overall is similar to the metabolic production density of a reptile. The peak power production in the Sun's center, per volume, has been compared to the volumetric heat generated in an active compost heap. The tremendous power output of the Sun is due not to its high power per volume, but rather to its gigantic size." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_core
People romanticize the notion of Fusion. It's a great thing, no doubt, But to say:
> We could probably have helicopter islands like in a Sci-Fi film.
Feels a little bit to me like people saying the same thing when they first discovered refined petroleum.
Having said that we've made massive progress towards energy positive fusion with both magnetic confinement, and inertial confinement, And it's not crazy to think they may provide good usable power into our grid within our lifetimes.
But if you were able to contain a golf ball of sun, the heat it produced would be able to power far more than a reptile's brain as its heat was transfered to the environment...
_Perhaps_ you're pointing out that the sun's size is what allows it to 'contain' these many otherwise-uncontainable golf-ball size chunks. If so, I hear you... obviously the engineering challenge is developing a system on earth to contain. We've clearly shown with fusion bombs that we can harness this effect for a net energy gain for an instant.
My point was that these are engineering challenges, rather than physical limits.
It is you who is misunderstanding the concept here. A golf ball of Sun produces heat only about as much as the reptile brain. In other way - if you put as many reptile brains in one pile so that the pile will be as large as Sun, you'll get the pile radiating with Sun's black-body radiation temperature and intensity. The trick here is that amount of energy produced is proportional to volume, while radiating surface is just square-proportional, thus black-body radiation temperature (i.e. frequency, ie. energy of a given radiated photon) of a pile of reptile brains (or golf-ball sized chunks of Sun) would be much higher than that of a one brain or the same set of brains (or chunks of Sun) spread around with significant distances between each other.
Edit: it isn't to say that fusion power can't be used as a practical source of energy on Earth. It is just some forms of [stationary] containment are ruled out, mainly by bremsstrahlung (Sun overcomes it precisely because of volume to ratio being big enough). Dynamic forms of containment are proven to be working (net-positive) at least by H-bomb.
I think what you're saying, though, is that if you contain something extremely hot and dense, you cannot get any useful energy out... Because the energy needed to contain it prevents you from getting anything out. Right?
Because I'm coming from a perspective that says: if you can contain something like a small bit of solar core: and if you can let some of that heat leak to the outside environment: you can derive terrific power from the thermal dynamics at work.
The sun exists in the pressure-free vacuum and thus extends to a far less dense outer layer where the heat gradient (the argument against power potential per volume) is low. However if you could contain the sun into a smaller volume, it would have the same massive heat flux but over a much lower surface area and thus with far more power potential per volume.
I assume we're not so much disagreeing: over focusing on different issues. Is it correct that you're saying that the act of containment itself prevents the ability to harness the flux?
We have no idea where the theoretical limit is in automatic natuaral language understanding for instance. Yet the rewards of any breakthroughs there would be enormous.
But I'm actually not so sure if hardware and software are really that different in terms of theoretical limits. The incentive to optimize existing approaches instead of exploring completely new directions in hardware may be be a result of much higher capital requirements for anything physical.
Actually, I would argue that the opposite is true. Software hasn't really had any important innovations (using David Wheeler's definition, which is from a CS/EE perspective, and which is linked to every couple of months on HN[1]). The software required to run a smartphone isn't significantly different than the software needed to run a similar application on a desktop. On the other hand, the hardware on a smartphone now and a desktop from the 90s is different. We take hardware advances like reliable capacitive touchscreens and maybe this storage advance linked to on HN today [2], and Moore's "Law" for granted, but "putting more transistors in a circuit" and increased hardware capabilities were the bottleneck to producing today's technology, not new software techniques.
The reason that people associate software with innovation is because it has become the latest tech buzzword. When a word is overused in this manner, it is hard to have a conversation about it because the definition has been degraded to include pretty much anything. The granting of patents to trivial software ideas gives companies a claim to innovation that they do not deserve.
Rayiner's comment on this thread:
> The long-hanging fruit is gone, and all that's left is hard engineering.
will soon be true for computer hardware, and eventually "Moore's Law" will be broken. When software does not become significantly faster each release cycle, it will be more apparent that hardware is responsible for today's advances as opposed to software.
When you can picture someone using the word against itself, I'd say that's when the bell tolls.
E.g., "Our greatest innovation for this product has been not worrying about innovation, and focusing on incremental improvement"
That's because "AI" doesn't exist.
Are there people working on computer vision? Yes.
Are there people working on speech recognition? Yes.
Are there people working on robotics? Yes.
Are there people working on computers that answer questions? Yes.
Plus far too many applications of "data mining", "big data", "machine learning" to mention here.
Lots of people making lots of money on all of these things (or at least starting companies to try). But I guess none of those things are "AI".
All the "AI" tasks above are hyper-localizing things that interact with the world, but they aren't entirely integratable into something coherent. (Something we now have to call AGI because the fad establishment has cooped the term AI for lesser purposes.)
I find it slightly intriguing that a gatekeeper into the World of Funding™ is directly observing a disconnect between quick burn fads and long term usefulness. Will there be new offshoot Long Game funds? Software-based long-term problems these days don't take gargantuan funding, but people need enough to quit their job and live off of while working towards the future. These Long Game problems are especially pernicious because sometimes your first payoff isn't for years down the line. In today's Fundapalooza Party Round Frat Bro Extravaganza® land, you need users, customers, and sales within the first two weeks or you're dead in the water.
I'd rather see a pie in the sky fund where, if you can convince the gate keepers you have a chance at changing the world in the next 3-7 years, your team gets $500k per person up front to pursue your goals. That may sound like a lot for up-front nothingness, but we're living in an age of cash hoarding immortal corporations. Apple could create a $20 billion fund, get 40,000 people working on change-the-fucking-world problems, and not even feel the loss of cash under their kilometer-sized tempurpedic mattress.
Are we better than buskers? Do we have to be starving artists until we make it big or should we be taken care of and coddled while we work in minimalism? The only problem stopping Them[1] from funding every person with a plausible but at-first-glance crazy idea[2] is the problem of selecting the right people, not lack of funding in the world.
The only way to make those goals happen yourself these days is to first do a fast-fad application, sell it, then use that as your base of funding. That has a long and uncertain cycle time though and you can end up overcapitalized and distracted (let's all buy teslas and $1000 jeans and $20,000 road bikes!) unless you pull a Musker[3].
Let's give crazy a chance.
[1]: You know, Them. Them people with money.
[2]: Free energy need not apply.
[3]: Pulling a Musker is very different from starting out with nothing though. You've got tons of connected, capable, and rich people in-the-know connections by then, so "losing it all" isn't as special as it seems.
Well, I failed my first attempt (you were allowed 2). The reason the committee gave me for not passing was that my topic of choice was not a "significant improvement of basic science". This perplexed me. My committee was made up of members who were all 60+ years in age and had been the founding fathers of metallurgy. Collectively, they invented a completely new field called opto-electronics. When they gave me that response, I thought to myself, how the fuck do they expect me to improve basic science?!
It turns out the solution was much more nuanced. In the months that followed, my advisor would have thought experiments with me. He essentially helped me brainstorm problems that needed solving, but he always started our sessions with the question, "what is something that you always wanted to exist, but doesn't? What are you most curious about?" He then gave me the keys to his shop and told me to "tinker around". Take apart his vacuum tubes. Screw around with his argon laser and sputtering machine.
Innovation in the physical world comes from the same curious people that are inventing fun software programs. But we absolutely need to cultivate it, because that is what is dying. Put a workbench in every home, make it easier for people to take apart things they buy, encourage people to be creative without fear of punishment.
Fundamental Science THIS!.
1. Good healthcare. 2. Freedom to live in a peaceful safe neighborhood where you can have a family. 3. A reasonable education for one's children. 4. Ability to choose what projects to work on.
Why is anyone surprised that these are the priorities of entrepreneurs, when they correlate directly with basic human needs - safety, shelter ability to reproduce and freedom of choice. Few people will focus on the self-actualization of a truly world changing project until they have obtained some security for themselves and their families.
Jobs, Musk, Gates, Thiel, Google.org etc. are all good examples of this. (I.e. they got rich first, then they launched ambitious projects)
on the contrary, maybe when they need those things for themselves or others, then they created their inovations through hard work??!
The point is that they made their money with short term projects of limited scope, and then embarked on the more ambitious ones.
(Gates came from a rich family though)
Of course there are "fast bucks" stories like, instagram, tumblr and the likes.. but i thinks this is more of a bubble effect.. too much money around.. overvaluations, etc.. but (i think) that these stories are the exceptions, not the rule
The point is that they all established a tidy fortune by focussing on short term projects before they took on more ambitious projects.
That's why most entrepreneurs aren't focused on major world changing projects - they are trying to satisfy their needs for security first, and that is the general rule, not the exception.
There was no riots in the sense most people think about them. These were small groups of angry young men starting fires and throwing stones at the police. I don't know of anyone who wasn't dressed in a uniform that was hurt.
I would probably have kept my kids at home those 5(?) nights while it was going on if I was living in Husby myself, but I wouldn't have feared going out myself.
It is because Sweden is considered such a safe place that relatively small events like this get such a huge international coverage. Of course media pounces on anything that looks like a crack in paradise.
Would we ever have a company like Boeing or Douglas Aircraft or Bell Telephone (Who financed Bell Labs for years) or Xerox today, with the pressure to go public and cash in, rather than building a long-term viable business?
One of the few counter-examples would be Apple under Steve Jobs, but such cases are few and far between.
I'd be really excited if someone airline offered pilotless aircraft. I think this is technically feasible now. I know that we are currently capable of landing planes autonomously currently. Plus this would reduce door-to-door time as well since you'd reduce the need for long security lines. After all, if there's no cockpit to hijack what is the use of screening for potential hijackers?
Yes, we can take-off, cruise, navigate, avoid collisions and land autonomously (landing requires a certain ILS category which not all airports have, yet) today. I don't really think the limitation is software related - it is likely to be regulations and public opinion. "Human error" is more understandable to the average person than "computer error".
There are other concerns, such as safety against tampering/hacking. However, considering how robotic Airbus aircraft already are, I am not sure those concerns are warranted. Boing is somewhat less so, by design, but they are still fly-by-wire with a computer between the pilot and the actual control surfaces.
Now, I don't think autonomous aircraft would do much for security. After all, all you need to protect the pilots is a door lock. You still have to protect the inside of a plane and the passengers, however. But they would do wonders for private jets - having a competent pilot immediately available 24/7 without paying additional salaries could be very appealing for some folks.
Operations were further hamstrung by the very small fleet size. There are certain things that just have to be done to get an aircraft commercially viable (spare parts inventory for instance), and when you have a fleet of only 20, that will cost much more per aircraft than supporting something super-common like a 737.
It's also worth noting that Richard Brason, at least, thought Concorde was still viable, and made offers for the BA Fleet as high as £5m/aircraft, but was refused, at least partially because Airbus was unwilling to offer continued support.
Sure, there were exceptions to the theory of leviathan organizations of specialists. Intel is an exception, in that it was a start up. But it was a start up founded by people with the understanding of how a larger research entity would work (two of the main founders were established engineers at Fairchild). Talking about this sort of thing in the context of modern start-up culture, to be honest, is flippant and cheeky. Maybe "idea guys", business journalists, and a lot of modern hackers in general just need to stop thinking innovation as some substance you can bottle and beating us over the heads with said bottle until the word loses all meaning. The innovators who created the sophistication of the modern transportation and energy infrastructure we now enjoy, not to mention the fundamentals of computing, were a lot humbler than the baby boomer titans of technology and probably a lot of us out there, too.
Also, it's weird how short-term thinking has infected the government. Nobody's forcing them to meet a quarterly P&L, you'd figure that would give them more freedom.
Yes they are, that's the problem. Running for re-election is equivalent to quarterly reports and it results in most politicians thinking in just as short of time scales as corporations.
1. Molecular printing, mainly of food, as the end-state of consumer 3d printing. Print the protein folds and amino acids and make whatever food product you want, and cure world hunger with it. 2. Generational spacecraft running on a mix of fission, fusion, and solar power. Requires a construction facility in at least low Earth orbit. 3. A floating city on Venus in one of the temperate belts near the poles rife with CO2 to enable an oxygen cycle. 4. Embedded cybernetics, including the ability to interface with the brain, by properly decoding the human electrical signaling system the nervous system uses. 5. 3d printed stem cells to regrow any damaged tissue anywhere. 6. The end-state of current computer tech is embedded cybernetics that interpret brain waves. Bionic eyes that provide huds and vision in multiple spectrums, a wireless access point in your head, etc. 7. Elimination of bacterial infection by fabricating antibodies with 3d molecular printing (there is a trend here!) 8. Not really long-term game changing, but the natural evolution of learning systems moves towards self-maintaining infrastructure and transit, so that entire cities and the transportation of people and goods is done entirely by an automated interconnected grid. 9. A space-based solar array to power the planet that has a diminished orbit to stay in direct line of sight of the sun. I'd suggest a solar ring around the Equator, but it is more efficient to keep the entire thing pointing at the sun all the time. 10. Either the commercial fusion of rare earth metals, or asteroid mining, whichever is cheaper (more likely the latter) for scarce elements.
That's what we get for 40 years of culture war. One thing Peter thiel mentioned when I saw him a year or so ago which made a deep impression on me was that while he's a libertarian he has no desire to 'drown government in the bathtub' like ideologues such as Grover Norquist. Rather, he'd like an approach to governance that was a bit less procedural and a bit more accountable while still being capable of taking on big projects, citing the Eisenhower administration and Vannevar Bush (no relation) as his models.
And as others have pointed out, in a lot of the well-known examples, we've reached certain limits that make technological progress very expensive.
For example, probably the primary reason we don't have better airplane engines is because exceeding the speed of sound is a very noisy proposition.
I have an excellent book on the B-70 bomber, which in my opinion is the most beautiful airplane ever designed. And among the reasons it was not adopted is that sonic booms over populated areas piss people off. And flying higher makes the problem (counter-intuitively) worse.
But the main reason the B-70 was shelved was the ICBM.
And that forms my next point. The internet itself has (or should have) made some reasons for travelling pointless. And it works at a much higher velocity -- a nearly the speed of light.
So in a way the author seems to pine for a "faster horse" instead of a car.
When working in hardware or when working on long term software projects like AI you're in a vacuum. And even smart people are not going to do very well if they can't see the consequences of the decisions they make.
So long term projects take more people, more resources, are typically much harder problems and on top of that you won't be able to collect data early on to adjust course if needed. So the risk-adjusted return on an ambitious long-term startup is going to be horrendous compared to the low-hanging fruit most web startups go for. So investors avoid the big and ambitious ideas, and I can't blame them.
In particular, take a look at the Class 15 one - http://blakemasters.com/post/24122680868/peter-thiels-cs183-...
This "fact" bothers me. War causes such huge devastation, and yet the focus of this article is on innovation for its own sake. If you are going to write about the benefits of war, you should at least mention its cost.
The book misrepresents capitalism somewhat, but the journalistic research and examples presented provide a compelling case that there are people who have a "sane" or "rational" (from their perspective) view that they (and maybe some others) could gain economically from war.
Looking back at the technological innovations that came about at the early part of the last century simply due to the war effort, I have to wonder why it seems like no simulation games allow you to take advantage of that fact. Why couldn't declaring war with the right amount of propaganda lead to a massive spike in productivity and technical advancement?
Largely, becaues those acheivements are a result of prioritizing R&D in wartime (devoting more resources to it), and those simulators don't give you much incentive to deprioritize R&D outside of war. If you downplayed the direct "war weariness" effect and instead required devoting output to otherwise nonproductive ends (entertainment, consumable consumer goods, etc.) to maintain morale, and had long-term sortages of those produce unhappiness, then you could model that effect better.
That's an AI problem moreso than an economic problem. Modern warfare has elements of both chess and poker (and others of course, but roll with me here). The chess elements come from accumulating threats and counterthreats and so on which are all important, even if they never manifest. For a clear real-world example, look at the North Korea standoff, which has frozen the same basic threat/counter-threat model in place for decades; North Korea can not win a war, but they can cause more damage then its worth before we can destroy their ability to damage South Korea. It's a very "chess" situation, only there's no clear endgame. The problem is that in the context of those games, the computer players aren't smart enough to engage at that level of strategy; at most, if you build up a large force you'll make them "nervous" and they unconditionally attack, and that only for game balance reasons, not realism. The computer players are not able to take in a complicated situation and understand it deeply enough to participate in truly modern power struggles.
Your last suggestion is game unbalancing; in that case, everyone will simply be in a perpetual state of open total warfare, from the instant you start that bonus. That might be a viable game but it certainly would be a different game.
Then again, it is interesting to note that the more absolute the war, it seems, the better the long-term payoff.
Costs of spin-off technology: Cash and the Cult of the Founder
He defines 3 states: fragile, robust and antifragile. Fragile things weaken during times of volatility or uncertainty (such as a central government's power during a coup), robust things are indifferent (like the Pyramids) and antifragile things actually strengthen from uncertainty or upheaval (e.g. Syrian rebel's power during the current civil war).
It would seem innovation thrives in the antifragile state. The chaos and uncertainty of war certainly drives innovation.
innovating: (v) Make changes in something established, esp. by introducing new methods, ideas, or products.
inventing: (v) Create or design (something that has not existed before); be the originator of.
Apple is probably the most innovative company, in that they take existing technology and continually refine it into product. Which is crucial because nobody wants their phone to be a lab prototype.
On the other end, most invention happens in academia. You need a lot of flexibility and low expectations of commercialization in order to really try dramatically new things.
The magic companies of the last century are the ones who could do both, allowing people to have side projects that don't immediately show commercial promise. Bell Labs was a lot like this. So was PARC. And Google to some degree.
I think a lot of Silicon Valley startups now have the worst of both worlds. They feel pressure to monetize and sell for millions, so their creativity is limited and they just barely innovate. They're not content to play, or work on something just because they like it and find it interesting. We hold up Elon Musk as a great entrepreneur, but he started building rockets because he wanted them to exist, not because he wanted to make money. [1]
It takes a different sort of thinking to come up with SpaceX than it does to build Exec or Instacart. A different level of grit and disregard for fortune. It's unfortunately rare to find that spirit matched with incredible focus and ability to execute and sell. And even more unlikely that it gets funded. (There's a reason Elon started both Tesla and SpaceX with his own cash.)
I'm certainly not saying that one should disregard the economics of running a company. But you don't make radical changes in the world when your ideas start from them. [2]
Incidentally, I've actually looked into building ramjet aircraft. (Or scramjet, because why wouldn't you go supersonic?) It's physically possible, [3] but requires a breakthrough in energy storage and composites on the order of the transistor.
I've always thought there are two places in the world with huge market failures: developing world healthcare, and future-tech. In many ways, philanthropy such as the Gates Foundation helps mitigate the first, but I've yet to see anything other than war with a technologically-equal enemy push forward the second. Google is showing some promise which is exciting, but we probably shouldn't have all of our future hopes wrapped up in a single giant online advertising company.
I think we should create a West Coast "Institue for Advanced Study" in the middle of the desert with a few million dollars and a bunch of dreamers who want to get their hands dirty and try ideas that everyone else thinks are crazy. People do amazing things when nobody is looking over their shoulder.
[1] In fact, it seems he had to negotiate like hell to wrap a business model around that company, and got incredibly lucky that Shuttle was retired. You could also argue that SpaceX is still innovation but I would argue that the dramatic cost savings and reusability make it count as invention.
[2] Maybe unless you're a brilliant economist or politician, but how that world works is a mystery to me.
[3] Check out the WaveRider project. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WaveRider
Those past companies could afford to create creative playgrounds because they were monopolies or near monopolies. That is about the only way to create a situation where "nobody is looking over your shoulder". Google enjoyed that status for awhile but now seems to be in fierce competition with Facebook and Apple, so maybe not as much any more.
I don't really know how much money it takes. The MIT Media Lab was pretty cheap to get started, relatively. Google makes less profit than Apple, but they're still able to run Google[x]. Larry+Sergey don't seem to use revenue as a primary signal for success, so I'm not that worried.
The constraint seems to be people who are bright, determined, imaginative, and rebellious enough to ditch the status quo.
No thanks.
If you notice the pattern of innovation, its usually not driven by a bunch of dreamers trying to think of the next big idea. Its driven by people trying to solve a very specific problem and finding a solution that is more generally applicable.
The electronic telegraph was created as an electronic method of replacing the old optical telegraph systems.
The cathode ray tube was discovered in order to observe the waveform electricity for physicists.
The solid-state transistor was discovered at Bell Labs as a replacement for the vacuum tube amplifier.
UNIX was created at Bell Labs as a programming environment to create programs to drive the telephone exchange.
Follow the chain of innovation and this pattern appears over and over. Solve a specific problem, find a general solution.
I can't speak as confidently about the rest, but the impression I get is that people like Gauss were hacking up telegraphs very soon after enough basic components and knowledge were in place; i.e. the gating factor was not the need for better communications but the new knowledge out of left field. Likewise the CRT seems motivated by curiosity more than technological problem-solving: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray#History The Bell Labs transistor seems to fit your model, though I wonder about the Lilienfield patent 20 years earlier: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_transistor
"Invention is the mother of necessity" looks like a better fit for most of these examples.
Taxes are more fair in this regard.
Generally I'm also of the idea that monopolies are bad, but I'm not knowledgeable enough in the subject to know whether there's possibly a short time frame (5-10 years?) where a monopoly is actually has enough benefits (or can have enough benefits if the right constraints are placed) to society to make it desirable.
I spent the month of May out in the middle of the Mojave on a film shoot. Absurdly hard work, grueling conditions, but boy is it a productive environment to be in, not least because you are constantly forced to think about self-sufficiency and the quality of your environment.
The problem in Silicon Valley is that it has no money. This seems like an absurd thing to say, but consider that the yearly R&D spending of the top 50 tech companies is about $50 billion, most of which is "development" and not "research." In comparison, the federal government spends about $140 billion/year on R&D, and that is skewed heavily towards "research."
Modulo some details, I'm on this.
Also, Michael Grinich, is that you? Sorry I missed the housewarming. I'll have to have you back at the Firehouse and tell you about the Laboratorium project. We have some good momentum.
The only opportunity I can think of right now that might be similar in its capacity to fuel wealth creation as much as the internet has is perhaps a space elevator. I'm not sure how exactly it would be used, but similarly, nobody really knew how ARPANET would end up being used either.
I, like millions of engineers, would love to work in "truly innovative" industries beyond just software. However, innovation needs infrastructure to build upon. The amount of resources needed to work on the problems that Elon Musk takes on are prohibitive for the vast majority of entrepreneurs, investors, and engineers.
Fact is, unfettered capitalism will innovate to the direct extent and in ways that it is profitable to do so. Which is why you see very little "innovation" being done to benefit poorer citizens - why innovate for a market that can't buy what you're selling? Rather, let's spend millions developing "solutions" to the problems of those who have so very few of them. A sad irony, that.
This is where a well-run government can improve things - by artificially creating profit motives in important areas where there was none before. A tax on short-term investing or day-trading would be a great start to discourage utterly worthless short-term speculation and HFT, and is a great example of how unobtrusive policies can create desirable incentives.
Sadly, nothing but computers are subject to Moore's Law. And even there, it'll run out sooner or later.
More risk, less equity, success is uncertain, reward far away in the future - why bother with making world better?
My 2 cents :-)
P.S.: a better model might be if the founder pursuing next-big-thing commits to certain ROI for investors (2-3-5 times on capital), thus increasing this founder's potential upside and motivation to go the hard way. Critique and suggestions are welcome.
On the other side, those companies put large sums of money to "innovate" on the markets they already dominate, or in research to make them better in what they already do.. (so it doesnt really get into a innovation cicle)
Highly regulated industries, industries with network effects, or industries that require very rare natural resources (diamond mines) are exceptions. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
you may have opportunities when the market is new, or when you create the "market" yourself.. but with time monopolies will take control and no more inovations allowed.. until of course.. someone innovates aside of the system and a new cycle begins.. but the old status quo are still there trying to demolish the new wave that is a threat to its dominance..
i could quote a lot of cases here based on reality.. but anyone can find several examples of that just thinking a little bit..
But in 10/20 years.. it will have 2 or 3 players at most.. so maybe a new cycle will happen again.. in other scenarios.. that may or may not will break this monopoly down to pieces.. but its visible that it all tends to monopolies.. i was not questioning were innovation was impossible.. or small players could start a new game.. but a small player cant enter in a old game and spect to win because the big players will crush him, or in the best of the scenarios will buy him.. (waze being bought by google to nail the competition of google maps)..
did'nt meant to be rude, ok?! sorry ;)
1. Surprising to see an article on innovation that mentions Kickstarter only as a footnote. One of the reasons we lack innovation is because we've let one group of people, big name venture capital investors, to decide by themselves what's good and what isn't. It's important to note that the modern "VC" investment model had very little to do with the major innovations of the 20th century. Some of our greatest inventions came from government laboratories, people working on their own without organized investment and corporations who acted like VCs by internally funding good ideas. Modern VCs only appeared around the 80s to give us derivative works that succeeded by added branding to existing ideas. The beauty of Kickstarter et al is that we have a much larger pool of people to tell us what's good or bad, but it does no good if we keep looking down on crowdfunding as venture capital's weaker sibling. We need to focus more on "how much good do they do" than on "how much money did they raise"
2. Another reason we don't have much innovation is because "Inventor" is no longer a job title. Back in the days of (my hero) Thomas Edison you didn't need a VC firm or a trendy office to justify your intentions to make something new. You just did it, with no particular funding or social organization. People decided to dedicate their lives to the pursuit of making new and original things. Now it's so important to be a part of the "startup community", important to have social validation from big name vcs, important to never say no to any amount of money. Until people can declare themselves to be Inventors without all of the other trappings, we shouldn't expect unbounded innovation from them.
3. This line struck me "...one guy saying that they were going to do these crazy things like ship a phone with no keyboard running a real OS and require everyone to buy a data plan."
Another reason we don't innovate any more is because minor changes to an existing product now count as the the most significant innovations of our time. I understand that we need heroes and Steve Jobs is one of them. And a lot of people like the iphone. But Thomas Edison invented recorded sound. Tesla harnessed electricity and energy beams. Freaking Ben Franklin invented the concept of a lending library. And the best our generation has is something about a phone OS and data plan?
We can't expect the next generation to be true innovators when we direct all of our hero worship at people who make small improvements to existing ideas. Yes, this may mean one of your heroes too. But if we can't even make the sacrifice of focusing on those who actually do invent new things, how can we be expected to be so creative ourselves?
Finally, innovation isn't completely dead. People are working on fusion reactors, warp drives and brain interfaces. Their efforts just don't draw as much attention of big VC investments or the work of big name entrepreneurs. The biggest things that innovation is lacking are things that our society can provide.
Hard problems are hard. Easy problems are easy. In a world where autonomy can only be purchased by wealth, any rational actor will spend his/her time optimizing the acquisition of wealth by solving easy problems as quickly as possible. This will then allow him/her the necessary autonomy to tackle hard problems.
This applies to all capital intensive endeavors of creation: science, film, software, hardware, etc. Even the least capital intensive endeavors such as pure mathematics require autonomy in the form of a guarantee of food, shelter, and healthcare to be viable in the long term.
As such, the solution is simple: Increase autonomy. But do we increase autonomy for everyone, or pick and choose winners?
The first strategy is basic income, and the second strategy is venture capital. Those involved in venture capital are now seeing the weaknesses in their own system, wherein picking and choosing winners will skew heavily towards the best signalers (i.e. marketers), rather than the most qualified/talented.
If VCs want to hedge their bets, they can put their lobbying money where their mouths are, and support basic income. This allows savants who are unable to market themselves the required freedom to work on their ideas with a tiny but guaranteed degree of autonomy. It is the equivalent of buying a Vangaurd index fund instead of picking and choosing stocks for a portfolio.
The winning strategy is to do both simultaneously.
I do hope that certain countries, such as Canada or Germany, will take a preventative approach rather than wait till the malignancy of unemployment metastasizes, causing unnecessary and irreversible harm to the fabric of society.
But basic income for everyone to me now looks like casting the net that is two wide. Many people will just stop working and will sit in front of the TV with pizza.
Is there any research on how different forms of incentives, like tax breaks, grants, basic income affect (or may affect) the rate of innovation? To me that sounds like something worth of Nobel prize in economics if successful.
However, I have ever met anyone who use this to work on something creative (I'm sure there are some). Many of them just don't like to work or have a career, and a way of life that sometimes also transfers to their children.
One exception could be Linus, because created Linux while he was studying, there for receiving "studying income" from state. But usually smart people tend to get jobs, start companies, or freelance a bit to live and work on something.
I think minimal grant system would be better where you should have defined a focus what you're going to work on. Although problem might be that could be too short term thing again.
The author bemoans that we haven't done better than the jet engine, but honestly we're probably as far along the mechanical design of that problem domain as possible. The fact is, in very many fields, fuck, we've hit them to death. Concrete is pretty well understood, as is analog electronics. Some fields are simple innovated-out, and all that's left is making them more efficient or cheaper or simply more widely deployed.
(This fact, incidentally, is why I ended up doing computer stuff instead of being a mechanical engineer.)
Seems there are still certainly innovations/iterations left to be made in concrete.
I mean, I never used Loopt, so maybe I'm missing something but it sure looks like an example of what you're criticizing (though better than anything I've done). But that's okay, Zip2 wasn't that huge of a contribution to the world either. The impressive bit is what Musk did after Zip2.
So good luck! You're in a better position than most, to do more than talk!