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The flip side of a major innovation is an entire category that was previously undiscovered or unutilized. Therefore, there are a finite number of breakthroughs that are possible, and how many there are is determined by two things: The nature of the universe, and how we characterize breakthroughs. If you characterize "innovation" very broadly, then you get few innovations that are even possible. Example: Would "augmented reality" be an "innovation", or simply an application of existing vision algorithms, 3D graphics hardware, and small computers? It's arguable either way, and I'm not making a claim either way. My point is that if you do say "That's not an innovation, it's an incremental improvement on the computer innovation", then you get a smaller set of possible innovations to draw from. Apply that standard across the entire set and you can shrink it to the point that there are only a handful even left (human-level AI, brain upload, space colonies, and maybe 10 or 20 more). On the other hand, if you broaden the definition of "innovation", you get more. Is a "web search engine" a valuable innovation? It's "just" an application of a computer, but it's a big and important one. That "computer" innovation is a particularly big source of this problem; there are many innovation-class things that are "just" an application of a computer. I don't think we've gotten that much less innovative. We're just taking some time to come to grips with the ones we've already got, and research on others is proceeding. I think this is an artifact of the way innovations get less and less flashy over time; "cure for cancer" have been very innovative, but there isn't just one, and individually they don't look like much. But they are, nevertheless, proceeding, and at an increasing pace as we bring more and more biology under our control. |