I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation selling ads, making social media startups – slaves with white collars. Internet hype has us chasing VCs and tweets, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no AI Winter. No Project MAC. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be Zuckerbergs, and Bill Gateses, and rock star programmers, but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.
Precisely. Just because all the 25-year-olds are proving themselves by working on ad clicks today doesn't mean tomorrow's Elon Musk isn't among them.
A generation of kids cutting their teeth on smaller, more approachable products is going to grow up into a generation of seasoned entrepreneurs who can meaningfully allocate capital to solve bigger problems.
So....after wasting a few years on failed useless ventures, then 10+ years on a successful useless ventures, then hopefully being one of the dozen companies in a decade to make billions either thru an exit or revenues, enough to finally launch your world changing venture and accomplish success in another 10 years or so?
Yeah, that explains why America is morally and monetarily bankrupt.
Oh, boo-hoo. You've also apparently been raised to believe that someone (probably the government in some form) owed you the life of your dreams, and as it dawns that you might have to work for a living, you assume your "rights" are being violated, have a tantrum, and compose yet another leftist manifesto.
I suspect there is something wrong with how you were educated by "the system," but it's not what you think.
I think there is a bias in where the author, and a lot of the people who have commented below, get their data points on innovation.
If you're routinely reading tech blogs and forums, the usual suspects will appear and you'll naturally assume that the innovation taking place is all web-app related and social media related. If you're reading scientific journals on the other hand, you'll be overwhelmed with the amount of R&D taking place in whatever field you're following. American corporations spend hundreds of billions annually on R&D. These innovations show up in subtle places most people take for granted. Just because you can't see it, or it's not on TechCrunch, doesnt mean it isnt happening.
I would politely suggest that this author, and anyone that routinely reads the same 7 tech blogs, subscribe to MIT Tech Review. It offers incredible insight into more... "fundamental" (for lack of a better word) innovation (not to say improving the way people communicate and access information is not fundamentally innovative).
I just subscribed to Tech Review, haven't received my first issue yet but I have been reading the site a lot. Seems to feature a lot more interesting tech news and information then most sites/magazines including Wired.
I'm thinking, your comment probably will change my life in some way. I've been following HN for almost two years and I can see how the content and discussions shaped me into a different person. Looking at the MIT Tech Review, I get the feeling the same will happen.
Anyway, thanks for your comment and pointing me to MIT Tech Review.
I don't get this meme. Innovation can happen anywhere - and in fact it often does regardless of how seemingly 'useless' the application is. Livejournal is 'boring', but out of it we got Memcached; Facebook is a 'PHP doodad' (actual news article called it that, I kid you not!); out of it we got HipHop and Cassandra and Thrift. Friendfeed is a 'frivolous social app', and out of it we got Tornado.
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”
Sound true at face-value. But guess what? In order to process the huge amounts of data necessary to 'make people click ads', we use map/reduce, and we get and/or improve Hadoop. Both of which may then be used for other Big Data applications.
Sure, web applications seem trivial. But the innovations created as an aside to them very often are not.
When I think 'innovation' I'm generally not even thinking about web applications - but you've got some great examples!
I think of more physical projects like RepRap (reprap.org) OpenFarmTech and SpaceX that are really pushing things in a new way. I'm sure there's plenty more if people look for them outside the software space.
All of these are hacks. Interesting and useful, but hacks. None of these will be around in ten years. It's not the kind of future-inspiring innovation the author was referring to.
Web applications don't seem trivial -- they are trivial. Scaling them means being creative, but don't confuse that with true innovation.
Don't be so quick to dismiss 'hacks'. Important innovations often start out in unrelated fields, or build on discoveries or solutions attempted in unrelated fields. We don't have to look too far for evidence of this: the Internet, the laser, and the computer were all important inventions that changed the world in ways its creators never intended them for.
I'd argue that innovation happens in widespread tinkering. So it could be true that most of the tinkering today happens to be on webapps. But it's presumptuous to assume that none of these attempts would result in innovations of significant worth to humanity.
I say this without irony: I think that Facebook changes everything. If Facebook is not around in 10 years, then at least one social networking site will be. People want to be able to easily communicate online with the people they know in a global way. Facebook is becoming the global human database.
You're right that a global database, partially about us and our relationships (including a social network), is the future. Many are working on it, including me. And Facebook has some seed data for that, but that's the extent of it.
We'll remember Facebook in ten years the way we remember MySpace now: We don't. Facebook changes nothing.
I can see the changes Facebook has made in how people communicate right now. This is not a prediction, I can observe it. I know people who no longer use email and exclusively use Facebook for online communication. They share vacation photos with their family and friend sthrough Facebook. They announce life-changing events through Facebook. I, personally, have maintained communication with people that normally I would have just stopped talking to. These are not hypotheticals. These are real, actual changes in how I and others communicate. Facebook has an order of magnitude more users than the previous attempts - Friendster and MySpace - and is able to have much more impact than them because of it.
If you're working in the same space as Facebook, you're not doing yourself any favors by denying its impact. One, it harms your perspective, and two, it harms your credibility.
Hadoop rather mapreduce came from Google which is a great innovation.
Cassandra came from Dynamo;
And Dynamo is from Amazons R and D efforts.
Btw Amazon is an innovation as it leads to large amount of savings in energy.
Thrift,Tornado,HipHop -> not innovations useful programming tools but not gonna change anything.
Rarely any innovations have come out of Web Applications.
In fact the best innovation in data mining [The correct term for Big Data], have come from Universities or R&D efforts of IBM/MSFT/Google/IBM/Amazon.
"The people that are using digital innovations to solve real world problems like energy, health care, agriculture, and transportation are ahead of the curve."
Those are all capital intensive. Most 20 year olds don't have that much capital. It would be great to see more investment in this space, though.
I'm sure someone straight out of school could write software to improve healthcare records management, but the cost of maneuvering through healthcare regulations would be higher than most could afford.
My point is that people fresh out of school who want to be independent are tackling the biggest problems they can on a budget of $1-2000/month.
Maybe that's the real lament then - that so many people fresh out of school have such a strong desire to be independent that they don't contribute to efforts to solve the problems you listed in your quote.
I'm not saying people aren't justified in wanting to not "work for the man". I'm just saying that maybe the fact that working for the man is perceived as such a bad thing (or is such a bad thing) is a bit closer to a root cause of America's problems than the idea that making people click ads is the best way to make a buck today.
true, but why is working for the man perceived as a bad thing? Could it be "the man's" fault?
I happen to work for the man and here are some issues. I can't release code as open source, I get paid the same regardless of whether I work my ass off or just do enough to be ahead of the curve, I have virtually no say in our products because I'm just an engineer (we have product people for product design), I have to get an act of congress passed to setup a server in a non company standard configuration, etc, etc, etc.
There are some up sides, one is that I get to focus and think deeply about my specific problem space which at one time was search relevance, and is now data mining. I don't have to do sys admin work, even though sometimes I'd rather do it, I have access to a very large hadoop grid that non startup would have built prior to success, there are a lot of really smart people with diverse backgrounds to bounce ideas off of, etc, etc.
Oh, but this man I work on is focused on ad clicks :)
You're ideal man is a university professor, he gets funding from NSF and NIH, and if you do work your ass off, Yes you do get significant share of the credit.
Go to a CS PhD program if you really want to innovate, forget all the crap that is spread on HN if you do get into top 5 or top 10 school, you will have equal amount of resources and at University even though they do have their own interests, they still want to see you succeed.
This is main difference between working and PhD, at a job you are a replaceable number at university depending on your advisor they are more concerned about your success and theirs as well.
There are a few assumptions I'd like to question in your comment.
First, innovation is not limited to what is of interest to a CS PhD program.
Second, I'm not interested in "innovating" per se, I'm interesting in creating things that add value to peoples lives and not being pigeonholed as either an engineer or a product person. I don't care if the ideas I'm using are new or not, only if what I'm building is enriching someones life and that my product has users.
Third, I've never been a replaceable number at a company, even large companies. If you work on hard problems, and are good at it, you aren't easily replaceable. People realize this, even when you're working for the man.
Finally, at university you often don't have access to real world data to do research. I know some big universities like epfl do partnerships where they work with researchers and engineers at companies in exchange for access to that companies data for research and publication.
So, if that "perfect man", the university advisor ask for so much invention that there is no time for innovation you are warmly welcomed to life in the ivory tower.
The best "man" is your free will. Its not the "perfect man" but the best we have.
"working for the man"(in his 60s) is the fastest way to stop innovating fast. They are earth grounded not "pie in the sky" reasonable people.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard Shaw
Get a traditional job on your youth and wait to have a family to sustain and not being able to take risks. That is the definition of killing innovation and creativity. Kids are creative, middle age people are not. Kids can think out of the box, adults are "inside the box".
How dare you go against the Cannon of YC/TechCrunch
Everyone who is 30+ is an idiot.
People are smartest when they are in High school and progressively detoriate as they learn more
People are smartest when they're old, but they're also the most risk-averse when they're old.
60 year olds today are generally uninterested in creating the future. Their main concern is with their own health I find. The more active 60 year olds also seem to love playing with real estate, buying/selling/renovating.
It's very hard to get them to invest in some future technology which will change the world.
That's assuming that you can even break into the industry. Beyond regulations, most healthcare companies and hospitals have contracts with companies that basically prevent any sort of real competition. Much like the health insurance industry, health technology is in dire need of a revamping.
"My point is that people fresh out of school who want to be independent are tackling the biggest problems they can on a budget of $1-2000/month."
As a teenager, I agree here. I know that I can build a trendy little web app for relatively nothing if it has the possibility of making me rich. However, any ideas I have for robotics, healthcare, and energy are going to require me working in a job at a large company (which I wouldn't like) or getting an unusually large amount of VC investment (which would be unlikely.)
I think the problem could be experience. For a recent graduate, it's hard to acquire the amount of VC funding you need for a hardware-based, regulated field when you can't say you have any entrepreneurial experience. For conservative VCs, there's a big difference between giving $20,000 to a college-age kid and giving $100,000 to a college-age kid.
You're exactly right. The barriers to entry are significantly higher when trying to innovate in "real world" problems (vs entertainment based ventures). Hopefully incentives, incubators, and resources will come into play to help navigate those challenges. Some are there already but don't really receive the media coverage to inspire others to follow suit.
I don't agree with you, I went to the MIT 100K business plan awards the other night and there were very few types of companies of what you talk about. I think you're basing your assumptions on reading too many TechCrunch-ish articles that focus on the consumer web-based marketplace.
I can think of tons of other examples, but don't have time to go list them out. Just don't read a website like Techmeme or TechCrunch and think you're really getting a total picture on the startup scene. I can tell you stores of many of my friends working in high-tech ceramics and crystals, and new recylcing technologies...
Sounds like something I'd love to be hearing about since I started in Chem myself. Is there a non-software tech news aggregator? Or even a blog by you with interesting developments.
But isn't this just the natural flow of innovation? We solve trivial cases first and then once the all of the idiosyncrasies of the technology have been fleshed out, we proceed to more advanced use cases?
We had Geocities with animated butterflies and horribly designed Guestbooks for others to exchange comments. Now we have Facebook that keeps people connected in realtime regardless of geographic boundaries with a fairly compelling user experience (relative to Geocities and that of 15 years ago).
I have faith in the current generation; trivial problems always become boring so hopefully this pushes into a more meaningful considerations in our software development.
Wake up. "Web" is not the largest nor the most innovative startup scene. Bio-tech, medical tech, and energy are all much larger. That's where the the innovation happens. It just doesn't seem that way because they happen not to be industries based on _diffusion of information_. Think about it.
If you want "fundamental" innovation, you simply aren't going to get it in a jiffy.
Imagine if a person dead over a 100 years ago woke up today. What present day technologies would he have no trouble recognizing ?
1.Movie Projector.
2.Bulb.
3.Car.
That's about it. We use pretty much the same 35mm format and film projector that was originally invented some 110 years ago( George Lucas's constant lament ). We drive around in cars powered by the internal combustion engine invented a 100 years back. We come home to a dark house and turn on the bulb invented a 100 years ago.
If you allow some leeway for time, you can add a few more "genuine" innovations - Air Conditioning, Transistor/IntegratedCircuit, Antennas/SW/MW/AM/FM, ...
The rest is just fluff. That's always going to be the case, unless you have some major genetic mutation that'll cause all of us to wake up tomorrow & fly away in our flying cars or jetpacks we rig up in the basement toolshed.
They used to call lightbulbs, airplanes, and combustion engines "fluff". Don't make the mistake of assuming that you can see all ends... Even the wise cannot see all ends (keeping the movie references alive). As others have stated, what people are working on today as side projects and hobbies will pave the way for the breakthrough's of tomorrow.
1. You are being rude. Don't write anything that you wouldn't say to someone's face.
2. I believe you completely misread the parent's point: that there are only a few technologies that are 100 years old. (Not sure what that means with regards to the 'transformative' argument, but still...)
Thanks. The "only 3 innovations have lasted over 100 years" premise isn't original. I first heard it at a graduation ceremony and it made a lasting impact on me. Ofcourse the speaker was very charismatic & way more dramatic than I am :)
But the phrase keeps popping up in several places. For instance, in Hedgehogging, Barton Biggs goes to a pre-2000 tech conference where they famously declare that technology innovations will propel the Dow to 20,000 in 1 year! Biggs calls bullshit & points out that genuine innovation like Air Conditioning & steam engines are once-in-a-lifetime event. He is asked if the internet is a "fundamental" innovation & he disagrees. He becomes a laughing stock. The next year the Dow drops 2000 points.
It pops up in Nicholas Nassem Taleb's works, too: "the technologies that run the world today (like the Internet, the computer and the laser) are not used in the way intended by those who invented them", and: "the three most significant inventions of the past 100 years (...)"
While I agree with you, there was no need for the personal attack. If you disagree with someone, say it politely and directly. Don't call them stupid in a roundabout, passive aggressive way.
The products that are being developed by the new startups in the Silicon Valley are gradually shifting from technology to entertainment, like Hollywood. Google was still a productivity-tools oriented company, while Facebook is mostly Hollywood style entertainment, a new TV if you wish. This can be evidenced by the fact that Google is never blocked at work places, while Facebook is almost always blocked as a productivity killer. The people that this new TV show industry attracts are naturally different from the people that the makers of productivity tools attract.
Not to make this a mutual admiration society, but I couldn't agree more. I sent that BusinessWeek article to all of my friends that work for Google and eff-book.
One of the problems is that doing innovative things is, by defacto, riskier. I perceive that the general appetite for risk has decreased a lot for whatever reason.
People are happier than ever hitting singles or doubles rather than opting for the grand slam that really revolutionizes industries and... solves the goddam problem. It's been the hardest thing for me to hire smart/talented people to join an awesome team with a bold vision alone when well capitalized companies can provide safety, enticing salaries, back massages, free food/beer.
One thing that I think could help are solving problems that are really concrete and tangible -- Like putting a man on the moon. We need more of that sort of drive in order for people to be inspired to swing for the fences.
It's pretty easy to disprove statements like "America Lacks Meaningful Innovation" by counterexample. The iPhone. kiva.org. Tesla. SpaceX.
Something along the lines of "Much of America's so-called innovation is meaningless" might be more accurate. But any environment that is sufficiently conducive to innovation will produce a lot of meaningless innovation along with the meaningful stuff. Innovation consists of a huge number of failed experiments and a few successful ones.
to be able to do things like SpaceX one need to have starting capital. While i'm also disgusted by it (mainly i guess because i haven't been able to utilize it :), this meaningless innovation is the fastest track to make such starting capital. What i'm surprized about is why so few SpaceX around. A lot of people have made the enough money to start work on cancer cure and the likes. May be at this level of money, one just don't care anymore. Well, the more is my respect to Musk.
So you're saying that if people just keep making photo sharing apps (flickr, facebook, color, instagram)....eventually those people will invent space travel or nuclear fission?
Seriously though, the chap who figures out controlled nuclear fusion will quite likely work out of a physics lab in a University both of which are funded by the ad dollars I you & the rest of humanity spend on facebook.
These articles constantly surface and they are beyond stupid. Facebook is VERY meaningful, 99 Designs (Helping small companies exist) is very meaningful. Marginalizing innovation because they arent curing cancer is stupid and misses the value.
But n th Facebook app/game, photosharing, UX/Design nonsensical blogging platform is surely isnt innovation.
The issue is that while Wealth might be a non zero sum game, talent is a zero sum game.
More people making crap apps mean lesser people working on meaningful innovation in Healthcare, Energy and Computing.
And this sad trend is started by YC/TC and the likes.
Actually all traditional VC firms such as KPCB do fund real innovative companies, e.g. BloomBox
So put your money where you mouth is and pay me to work on robotics and space travel.
Offer any 25 year old this choice:
a) You can be paid $100k/year and work on space travel.
b) You can go found a photosharing startup and I'll fund it.
The far majority will choose (a).
But guess what? No one is funding space travel, and when they do fund space travel, the 25-year-olds they hire are generally just sexy female secretaries who fetch them coffee.
Offer a 25 year old a challenging job in the space travel field and he will take it. The jobs aren't there. No one with money gives a fuck about space travel aside from Richard Branson who won't hire me because I don't have 30 years of experience being a rocket scientist.
Why is it so hard to become an apprentice to a rocket scientist? Why are there so few jobs in this field, and so many in sharing photos and affiliate marketing?
I don't really agree. It's more that innovation isn't publicized and talked about as much as companies that are looking to score big. It also takes longer to mold innovation into something that can be sold; in the end, we still need to eat.
Also, why America? How is it different in other countries? Genuinely curious.
I don't think the author thinks it's better elsewhere. I assume he's American and is just lamenting that this generation isn't living up to his standards. I don't really know that it matters how much innovation there is or isn't. We can always get better. I'd rather see this argument than the opposite.
It would be great to have a comparison of fluff to meaningful innovation today vs. decades ago. How many man hours were spent on silly military ventures? Manned surveillance satellites, nuclear artillery, boomer subs, ICBMs, MIRV, the Orion project etc. These particular projects led nowhere and had few useful side effects. It would be interesting to add up the man hours and compare it to the web economy.
Rhetoric is enjoyable to read, fun to write but in-depth analysis of our economic and technological progress is a hard problem.
As far as the web goes, more can be done on it even before we resort to poorly served enterprise/medicine/energy markets for new ideas. It's the same problem desktop software once had when that market was over-saturated with word processor or email client clones. It's only today that there are word processors with new features, like the no-distraction theme. That could have been done then, but there was a bad environment for new ideas.
Web people are chasing clone ideas because there's a bad environment for ideas again. There's too much feature overlap between various social network and communication tool attempts like conversate, qonversation, twitter, reddit, HN etc. Focus on execution over ideas might matter more for your personal success, but it's horrible for technological progress.
Also I don't expect the web culture of young hipsters and hackers getting excited about enterprise/medicine/energy. Such markets could be served indirectly, through some generic CMS/communication/portal/DB thing.
Most serious innovation happens behind the scenes and out of the public's eye. Among other reasons, most of the public (the laypeople) do not understand the actual innovation concepts and technologies, so even if time was spent marketing it, it'd still end up as...
At the risk of unpopularity, let me be the devils advocate here.
Warning: I am going to support 41 M investment in Color and will point out some odd issues with the way Ph.D./University research is funded.
What is the ideal environment for innovation? Give some hard problems to smart people, give them enough time and money to solve them. At the end even if the effort fails one learns what does not work. I feel that the people at Color Inc. have this sort of freedom with a committed 41M funding. No? Do you think all they will do with this freedom is just photo sharing? I doubt.
On the other hand, innovation gets stiffed by short term targets/pressures. It gets stiffed when you need your research proposals to go through a large peer review committee (at NIH or NSF). Why? Most innovative but unproven ideas are killed right there. Feature prominent people as co-investigators or consultants and your chance of funding greatly increases. Of course, this system is still better than in many other countries, but there is some room for improvement.
While many of the best and brightest try their hand with media companies, the bane of the American economy – health care – is begging for talent and innovation.
"Health Care" and the medical industry are not the same thing and that's one of the biggest mental blocks America has. I did the homemaker and full-time mom thing for 2 decades and it allowed me to keep my son with cystic fibrosis remarkably healthy in spite of not having a diagnosis until late in life. Later we were both diagnosed. Because I did the full time mom thing for so long and my idea of "health care" included things like cooking and cleaning (instead of drugs and surgeries), I was able to get well after spending a year at death's door.
I've got your health care talent and innovation right here: http://healthgazelle.com/ and it has nothing to do with the current medical industry.
Now I just need to grow it, learn to write code and create a more information-dense delivery mechanism (aka game).
Making life longer? Making life better? Creating options? Creating experiences?
I think everyone here can agree on the basic idea that some things have meaning and some do not. Reaching consensus on what specifically has meaning, though, is impossible.
Finally, is it that far fetched to posit that technologies developed and refined to predict consumer desires or the financial markets can be repositioned to predict weather, disease (both on a world-wide level and a cellular level). That these predictions can be used to improve the quality of people's lives, the availability of food, and otherwise? These techniques are the byproduct of the current bubble, and targeting them at the physical world, scaling them up (planetary) or down (molecular) will be the focus of the next century.
Finally, in relation to my earlier point, 42... Discuss.
Today's most celebrated young 'engineer' is Mark Zuckerberg, creator of a really cool way to rank hot chicks, measure faux popularity and extend the social dyamics of high school into the real world. We make dramatically scored movies about his trials and ultimate triumph and rank Facebook as the greatest company to emerge in the last half-decade with a $50bn valuation.
Where is our Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla or even Howard Hughes? Is it Steve Jobs and his charisma? What we consider innovation has taken the form of the iPhone and the iPad, fancier toys in polished packages with glaringly less functionality than is a technical possibility today, conveniently dumbed-down so it is easier to keep us not thinking too hard and, God-forbid, doing anything really imaginative.
Sure there is interesting work being done out there in green energy, space, biotech and nanotechnology research. These were all conceivable decades ago. We are unable to create good science fiction anymore because our imagination is just as bad as it was in the 1800s. My God, they built driverless cars that work, why isn't that game-changing Google spin-off the hot new company of the decade? Does anyone even know the name of the former Stanford Professor whose work could lower accident rates, eliminate traffic jams and parking problems, make automobile ownership obsolete and drastically cut down emissions and manufacturing waste? We could have a real transportation cloud that actually does something useful other than being a repository for our videos and photos that allows 'sharing with family and friends'.
We are complacent enough to only care about things that distract us from actually being productive. Just about any system out there leaves huge room for improvement. Everything is broken or needlessly inefficient: the government, the legal, financial, energy, educational, healthcare, transportation, and disaster management systems. Even the Internet is broken. We should be building efficient sustainable systems that scale, not software. Real innovation requires an iterate-or-die mindset.
I am an African. Don't even get me started on the developing world.
Helping to connect all humans on the planet is not important? This has been said many time before and you don't have to agree with it, but imho Facebook is a really important and revolutionary tool that has improved many lives including my own. Sometimes the benefits where beyond my expectations.
I think, the reason why you see so much development in software, is because its easy! I'm a mechanical engineer and still spend most of my time writing code. Why? Because, all I need as PC! No staff, regulations, no material, no manufacturing tools. This saves time and money and makes you independent and fast.
The entrance barrier is just very, very low, so as long as there is any demand for innovation in software, there will be someone who will try to code.
I have this "to much software" feeling all the time, too. We definitely need more innovation in hardware. Luckily, with innovations like 3D printers or Polycaprolactone the entrance barrier for hardware is becoming lower, too. However, in my experience, even these trends are largely fulled and based on software. We are living in the Information Age.
Email already connects everyone on the Internet but billions of people are not online by an accident of geography and birth. Mobile phones connect a reasonable percentage of the rest. I may be mistaken but it is doubtful that many users' quality of life would be dramatically affected by the sudden demise of Facebook. It may be as bad as losing your favourite TV channel, but life goes on. Facebook is a convenience that does not solve any of our real problems or alleviate human drudgery in any way, It only increases the enjoyment of existing wealth at idle time.
Incidentally, an explicit statement of what mankind's actual goals are and what resources are being committed to solving them would go a long way to show that we really all want the same things. Anyone that believes our interests are best served by large corporations and governments at war is delusional. These entities rely on the premise that success can only come at the expense of the 'other guy'. In the grand scheme of things they are local optima that promote the very scarcity that they have evolved to manage. Open Source Software can teach something here, there are multiple distributions and programs, each freely borrowing from the successes and avoiding the failures of the other. The healthy but open competition between them means that we get the best operating systems that no money can buy. Even OSS is not immune to meaningless rivalries and sabotage.
The information age gives us new tools to approach the physical world which is where ALL the real challenges still are, even in computing (think the end of Moore's law, and the potential of quantum computing and communication). You mention mechanical engineering, we should have amazing open-source mechanical modelling software that realistically simulates the physical properties of large systems, allowing you to design, build and test machines from a catalog of reuseable components and subsystems in a virtual lab (Tesla did this in his head), and send it out into the cloud for fabrication and delivery.
We all seem to agree that life is hard, why can't we approach it as an engineering problem? I would like to see someone attempt to engineer a society in a systematic scientific way. Evolutionary algorithms, game theory and a few Petaflops of modelling power for the common objective function. No secrecy, sentiment or ideology just let the best algorithms decide.
Health care's problems in the United States are not technical. Health Care's problems are regulatory, and systemic. (My day job is in health care for the last 20 years in 35 hospitals in 5 states.) Health care's problems in poor countries are primarily due to a lack of hygine and clean water. Most of the rest of their problems can be helped with decent tropical disease vaccine research. That’s not an interest or willingness issue, that’s a funding and economics issue.
There are massive amounts of funding for clean/green tech right now. Those innovations are going to be hard, and come slowly, but we do have a lot of brilliant minds working on those problems.
I dare say I have a front seat at the innovation table by hosting the largest group of garage stage startups at Hackers & Founders Silicon Valley. I see a lot of amazingly cool stuff months before it hits event the startup press.
Here's what I see:
Founders building social media startups are rare. Precious few founders think about monetizing via ads, unless they are building a search engine. Funding for ad based, or social media startups are hard to come by unless they show tons of traction before funding.
The coolest apps I'm seeing built are hardware peripherals to mobile phones or mobile devices: An ultrasound probe attached to an iPhone that can serve as a fetal heart monitor. Motion tracking devices that can be attached to your head and ankle so you can control a racing game on your iPad while excdcising on your bike.
There’s a ton of innovation happening around the food space, creating new markets for food producers and consumers.
There are also companies like Genomera.com, which is building a system for crowd sourced clinical trials. Factual.com is building an open source model around big data.
BioCurious is a very cool hacker space/community around DIY bio that’s getting organized. As the costs of bio hacking come down, there’s going to be a ton of innovation there.
There’s tons of innovation surrounding the Kinect. I talked with the CEO of Health 2.0 a few weeks ago, and a Neurologist and a programmer got together at one of their hackathons, and in a weekend, built a pediatric gait abnormality monitor. Wait until the official SDK comes out, and drivers are included in Windows 8, and you’re going to see some really cool things.
The very fabric and character of Silicon Valley is changing because of innovation in how companies are funded (Angel List). Hundreds, and soon thousands of two to four person startups are going to be funded. I believe what’s going to happen is because of that, the rate of innovation in Silicon Valley and around the globe is going to accelerate dramatically.
You complain that there's no innovation because everybody is just building gadgets. Gadgets like cell phones are revolutionizing 3rd world economies, and mobile payments via cell phones are creating truly disruptive innovation like electronic banking and electronic money transfer. I visited my brother doing economic development in Honduras, and most everyone carries a cell phone, even if they live in a house with a dirt floor.
Have you looked at the innovations that are happening in robotics? My nephew is studying at a community college in rural Minnesota right now, and he’s in a robotics competition. He’s programming a robot that can crawl around and check to see if a seedling tree is dead or not. If it’s dead, the robot pulls the seedling. If not, it keeps driving.
Open your eyes. Stop reading Tech Crunch. Go to Maker Faire. Awesome things are happening and you don’t even realize it.
And, if you're sick of the lack of innovation... then create something. Complaining about it online does nothing.
I don't think it's a blanket article, despite the blanket language. It is addressing a very select group of people, the ones trying to make money rather than meaning.
There are a lot of very talented people doing innovative things, but this might be my ignorance, but I'd say they are minority. That's probably because I just haven't heard about them, a lot of real innovation tends to go unnoticed. I find the smartest people I know don't like talking but prefer working anyway.
But something about the article resonates. My heart broke a little bit when I found out that multiple social networks for knitting enthusiasts, have gotten venture funded.
Awesome post, thanks a lot! I saw the headline and the first thing that popped into my mind was "Tesla Motors".
My country has spent millions over decades and decades to make German car builders to innovate electric cars. Now those companies bought shares from Tesla because they think those guys are to far ahead to close the gap otherwise.
Heck, if America lacks meaningful inovation, then where else will you find it on this planet?
the elephant in the room for healthcare is and always has been that the majority of healthcare is bullshit. or, in more technical terms, has no effect on health outcomes.
Even assuming what you say is true, that "minority" of non-bullshit healthcare is very important.
Chemotherapy is a crude and harmful way to eliminate cancer, but I know several people alive today because of it.
Without insulin injections, mortality of type one, childhood-onset diabetes would be dramatically higher.
Viagra.
Vaccines for numerous diseases are still incredibly effective and one of the most successful innovations of the 20th century.
And innovations continue. Fifteen years ago, a patient diagnosed with Macular Degeneration would be told eventual blindness was certain and the possibility of ever finding a cure was very low. Google macular degeneration stem cells to see how that has changed.
Yes, there's a lot of healthcare focused on controlling risk factors like high cholesterol and we don't really know how much that's helping, but I'm not sure I'd marginalize everything else by calling it an "elephant in the room."
Life expectancy is going up due to a variety of factors: better trauma care, better vaccination regimes, better sanitation, better nutrition, some better treatments (some amazingly so).
Nevertheless, a large fraction of medical screens and procedures does not improve average life expectancy when people actually try to measure their impact. Intensive end-of-life care does not improve life expectancy when similarly measured.
not just life expectancy in toto which you would rightly expect to have a huge number of variables that interact in unknown ways. many medical procedures have proven to be directly detrimental to health in double blind studies yet remain standard procedure.
The author mentions healthcare as an area of innovation but until something happens to the massive regulation hurdles that are in place, healthcare is hard to revolutionize. I'm working on a research project that could be used for clinical stuff but it would be the process of going through FDA approval for the software and all is a major deterrent.
This article is geographically myopic. If you're in Palo Alto, you think that all the smart kids are trying to make yet another Color. If you're in New York, you think that all of the best STEM grads are trying to get into the financial industry. Both viewpoints don't capture the big picture of "American innovation."
There might be more to selling ads than initially meets the eye - the ability to connect specialized products and services with interested audience can help drive all sorts of innovation quite unrelated to social media. Many of these projects may never take off without advances in targeted advertising.
Indeed better segmentation and the abiolity to get real time feedback could bring about some rather fundamental changes to the very nature of the consumer economy and the way demand is estimated and prices are set on a very broad range of products - full consequences are not easy to appreciate.
Are the claims about 'top graduates' in 'top programs' flowing into startups at a rate that is any different than in the past substantiated by fact?
This whole article reads to me like a statistician selecting and manipulating certain data to prove the desired result, except, there seems to be little more than limited conjecture in this piece.
This article uses shadow fringes around the letters, which makes it hard to read. Luckily, there is a Readability AddOn [1] for Firefox. I see myself more and more using this handy AddOn... is 'designeritis' spoiling web usability?
I'm very skeptical of all those marketing centered developments as well, but throwing entertainment in that same bucket is nonsense.
Entertainment is an end in itself. Marketing is a means to an end without (much) intrinsic value. These two things are as far apart as two economic activities can ever be.
The problem is the political and legal environment is such that a company can more profitably spend its capital in Washington trying to erect barriers to competition than to actually do something new.
The important point is that the startups doing meaningful innovation are not founded by college and high school dropouts, but rather PhD students, or Scientist or Consultants.
That is why the idiots such as Peter Thiel and others in Techcrunch/HN/YC who stupidly argue that college education is worthless, should silenced.
Also an important point to note is that nearly all YC startups are also of the same Crap Crop as mentioned in the article.
See I can blog by sending an email [and trash talk by competitors] how innnnooovative!
The big perhaps too obvious criticism of the OA is that it's making a broad generalization and is overlooking all the actual innovation and Big Ideas going on. I for one am also sickened or at least unexcited by all the unimaginative and incremental and "me too" startups and products out there. But rather than just complaining about it, I'm doing something about it. Innovation starts with you. If you want the world to be a certain way it's up to you to help make it that way. Start small, think big, act today but aim for the future.
I agree with most of what you said so I'm sorry to nitpick.
The distinction between "complaining" and "doing" doesn't make any sense to me. The OA's intention is to change the way people innovate. This isn't something he can be "doing" in his basement by himself. If he wants the world to be a certain way he can't just _make_ it that way. At some point he's going to have to persuade other people and "complaining" on the internet is a fine place for it.
The Web? On the whole, it is wildly 'innovative'. Moreover, it is a huge aid to economic productivity and, thus, standard of living and quality of life.
Search engines? On the whole, they are wildly innovative and productive because they help solve a huge problem on the Internet -- finding stuff.
More in search engines? Yes, needed because the only search, discovery, recommendation, curation engines that work well are the ones based on keywords, and they work well for only about one-third of the content. How to get a search engine that also works well for the other two-thirds? That needs some 'innovation'!
A better search engine will likely have to make progress with how humans understand 'information' and 'meaning', and that will need some 'innovation'.
The author views 'innovation' mostly just in terms of what happened in the first half of the 20th century. Innovation is in different areas now. The author is also missing that to support the new approaches to innovation, Intel is now making 3D transistors with 22 nm feature sizes, and that in itself is history-making innovation.
Ads? So far the Internet is heavily supported by ads. Why? Because it's important to connect people with products and services. Why important? Because a key part of a higher standard of living is having people better allocate their limited resources, and key to this is getting people the information they need for such better allocations. One way to get the information is to have a person use a search engine to find the products and services. Another way is to have a vendor of products and services use ads to find the people. So far both ways are important.
The article wants to assume that ads are bad, and this is not good. There must be something very important about ads since they support nearly all of TV, radio, professional sports, just say, old media, and now the Internet. Pro basketball players? Basically they are in the ad business.
One reason entrepreneurs are rushing to Web x.0 companies is that's where the money is. And the money is not just in the US: The US companies that lead in this work rapidly become successful internationally. It's foolish to say that all this activity, internationally, is bad.
But not everything has to be international: The US did just fine, thank you, from about 1850 to 1950 growing mostly just internally and with relatively little role for foreign trade. So the claim in the article that there's something wrong with the US selling to itself is wrong: The better standard of living we want is from getting the work done, and we get it done by specialization with one person selling to another. All this does better when there is more efficiency, and the information via the Internet is a key here.
More information? Currently the US and more important world economies are in a Great Recession. The core reason? Bad information. Thus much of the solution will be better information. Generally information is just crucial for higher standards of living. The best thing that's happened for information so far is just the Internet.
Internet blogs are important, too: They can clear up misunderstandings caused by confused people!
But for some of the innovation the author seems to be dreaming about, that's coming: The foundation is Moore's law, the Internet, and infrastructure software. Broadly the path to more economic productivity is to automate, that is, have the machines do the work. Yes, we want the machines building houses and cars, growing crops, tending livestock, manufacturing boxes, bottles, and gadgets, making fiber, thread, cloth, and clothes, analyzing data needed for progress, yes, including in medicine, etc. It's coming.