[mikoR]

The above three comments to me summerise what has qualified as American Innovation for the last 15-20 years.

When you are surrounded by the superficial, building things for the superficial what else can you produce other than the superficial. It is sad as hell to watch. It isn't ironic to me that Trump is going to be leading this bunch of innovators soon.

[carleverett]

A few of the more significant American innovations in the last 15-20 years:

  -CRISPR, gene editing
  -iTunes, iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc.
  -re-usable space rockets (Spacex and Blue Origin)
  -IBM's Watson and Deep Blue, Google's AlphaGo
  -LIGO's detection of gravitational waves
  -MIT's improvements in lithium ion technology
  -NASA's exploratory discoveries on Mars, Mercury, Pluto, Saturn, etc.
  -Google
  -Wikipedia
  -Facebook
  -Tesla
  -Uber

It's hardly been a drought.

[haldean]

How does Uber always make these lists? It's a taxi app. You can hold it up as a well-done business, but you can't call it a technological breakthrough.

[msabalau]

If you think you can't use technology to innovate on the business model, you don't understand innovation.

[pmontra]

Actually AlphaGo is British. DeepMind was well ahead on that road when Google bought it. All the rest is American AFAIK even if other countries have similar technologies and successes for space exploration and detection of gravitational waves. If you go back more than 20 years, space exploration was USA vs USSR with an early Soviet advantage.

[clort]

Also, Elon Musk came from South Africa and did not become a US citizen until 2002.. I don't know that that makes anything that Tesla or SpaceX have invented to be not completely American, but if he is considered the driving force, then .. there could be a doubt

Hey, immigration is great! Steve Jobs was also the son of an immigrant..

[techterrier]

AlphaGo was a brit thing :P

[pharrington]

I don't understand. None of the above commenters mentioned anything about innovation; they just said the Spectacles looks like it'll be a successful product. Appreciating successful capitalism is half of what this forum is about.

[nxc18]

An alternative way of thinking about this is that we're fortunate that our needs are so well provided for that we can focus on entertainment and life enrichment.

A camera at eye level is extremely useful for many reasons, snapchat is just one, excellent use case. In my own life, I have a use for that specific tool, and am glad it exists - Google Glass was never widely released. And the price is great - at $129 this seems amazingly affordable.

I expect it to be a hit.

[ddeck]

>An alternative way of thinking about this is that we're fortunate that our needs are so well provided for that we can focus on entertainment and life enrichment.

It's a nice way of thinking of it and hopefully it's true one day, but unless "our" means the typical HN reader, I don't think we're there yet. Consider that in the US in 2015, 43.1 million people were living in poverty (13.5% poverty rate) [1], and income inequality continues to rise [2].

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2016/demo/p60-25...

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GINIALLRH

[nxc18]

The other part of my comment I didn't write because I thought it would basically be evident without spelling it out: problems like poverty and income inequality aren't solved by tech innovators.

The actual problems that do exist in the U.S and the rest of the developing world are social problems. No amount of big disruptive thinking (by tech folk) is going to solve them.

If you look at SV's attempt to solve medical problems, you start to see where regulation and oversight are necessary for the difficult problems. Then you see why large governments, large companies, and exceptionally smart people with the backing of those organizations are the ones who need to solve the problem.

On top of all that, there's so often no actual intent to solve those problems. Poverty in the US is a big problem because the people who are capable of solving it just don't care enough to. In the case of government, voters are too self interested in the short term to push for it - how many times do you see complaints about hard earned tax dollars being used for poor people?

Even when the tech people do try to solve a social problem because the public has decided to care about it, attempts are misled and ineffective. If you look at the problem of diversity, companies are tryin to solve their problems at demand side. Big companies compete for female engineers to boost their numbers and smaller companies can't match their offers. This looks good on Apple's diversity report, but the problem is disguised, not fixed. Actual solutions, like encouraging women to become interested in STEM when they're young are few and far between.

So yes, I'd like tech innovators to focus on solving non-problems with life enriching innovations (slack, twitch, twitter, facebook, steam, VR, AR, bluetooth audio, etc) then waste time on misguided attempts that are way out of range for them.

[madeofpalk]

Considering the snark was directed at the comments on this post, I'm certain "our" means us HN readers/commenters.

[PavlovsCat]

Don't assume all HN users are narcissists and politically uninterested. I for one have very personal needs that are directly connected to what is going on politically and socially in the world.

[madeofpalk]

I'm not - I'm just saying that, generally speaking, most of our 'needs' (the important stuff like food, water, shelter) have been met. Everything else, mostly all that's discussed on this site, is unimportant & frivolous 'wants'.

I'm not saying this as a criticism, just explaining the comment thread.

[ekianjo]

> life enrichment

Is this really what this product does?

[r0fls]

"Enrichment" isn't as strong of a word as you're thinking. If it makes life better or more enjoyable for someone, it's life enriching for them.

[Sir_Substance]

I would argue for a logical and in there. Cocaine makes life more enjoyable for almost everyone, but it's hardly life enriching.

[r0fls]

That's a good point, but "better" is a subjective word. If an individual is capable of enjoying life while using cocaine, without regrets that outweigh their experience, then cocaine has enriched their life. Drugs are always a mixed bag, and the bad generally outweighs the good, in my opinion. Others may feel differently though, so I don't want to deprive them of their definition of life enrichment. Enrichment is not enlightenment: If anyone claims these glasses will make a person's life more enlightened, I would then be skeptical. Enriched though, I can accept. Let's first imagine some of the less valuable things people may be doing with their time, specifically in the targeted age range.