Technological Genius Is Timeliness, Not Inspiration 255
Hugh Pickens writes "Ezra Klein has an interesting essay in the Washington Post about 'simultaneous invention,' where technology advances to the point that the next step is obvious to multiple people at once, and so they all push forward with the same or similar inventions. While the natural capabilities of human beings don't change much from year to year, their environments do, and so does the technology and store of knowledge they can access. 'The idea of the lone genius who has the eureka moment where they suddenly get a great idea that changes the world is not just the exception,' says Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, 'but almost nonexistent.' Consider Adam Goldberg's CU Community, created in 2003 at Columbia University, a social network that launched first and had cooler features than Facebook, with options for pictures and integrated blogging software. Klein writes, 'Zuckerberg's dominance can be attributed partly to the clean interface of his site, partly to the cachet of the Harvard name and partly to luck. But the difference between Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Goldberg was very small, while the difference between what Mark Zuckerberg could do and what the smartest college kid in 1999 could do was huge. It was the commons supporting them both that really mattered.'"
Obvious corollary (Score:5, Insightful)
This is one of the reasons software patents are stupid, why patent trolls exist, and why the patent system in general needs cutting down.
Facebook has nothing to do with innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
The network effect has more to do with being in the right place at the right time than on the technical merits of the application. A much better solution that occurred 1 year earlier or 1 year later would have failed in the market. Facebook was "good enough" and that is all that was needed.
But let's not confuse this with innovation.
!news (Score:5, Insightful)
"There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come." (Victor Hugo)
The internet just mad that stronger.
And yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet our society and our legal systems enshrine individual innovations and creations as sacred property, while suffering the very existence of a commons or a public domain barely with tolerance, denouncing it as communism.
Sounds like a reason to abolish patents (Score:2, Insightful)
A useful invention will happen when its time comes. The patent system will not make it happen faster. The only thing patents do is prevent further inventions. This seems to be especially true for software 'inventions'.
There was an electronics writer, Don Landcaster, who spent many column inches demonstrating that patents were absolute poison to the small inventor ( www.tinaja.com/glib/casagpat.pdf ). Patents work for companies that can pay big bucks for lawyers to keep down the small inventor.
The classic case of an inventor being screwed was Armstrong, the inventor of FM radio. RCA stole his invention and kept him in court until the day he died. He would have been much better off if he didn't think his invention was protected by a patent.
Genius (Score:4, Insightful)
If Facebook is now an example of "genius", what word shall we now use to describe actual genius?
And yes, I'm aware that Zuckerberg gets more ass than I ever will, and probably has more than 100 lifetimes of my wealth. My dick doesn't work that well anyway. Question still stands, IMHO.
Social networking? Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's your best example?
Calculus, dude. It's the calculus. The Newton-Leibniz rivalry is the go-to example of simultaneous invention. What you've got instead is a shaggy dog story set up to let you imply that Zuckerberg is in some way a genius.
Re:Obvious corollary (Score:4, Insightful)
Patent trolls exist because we went from owning implementations to owning ideas. What if Thomas Edison went through 10,000 different materials for filaments just to find the right one and then ran against some patent troll who said "Give me $$$, I own the idea of a filament!!!" Most ideas aren't very useful when run up against initial reality, it's the work done to overcome those obstacles that is useful.
The patent office tries to act almost like a branch of zoology, except instead of classifying and categorizing animals, they do it with ideas. And they just aren't very good at it and the government never will be with centralized planning of this sort. IMO, the more advanced society gets, the more obvious the 18th/19th century character of the patent office becomes and that it's not sustainable. It may be like keeping the booster rockets attached to the shuttle of society, long after it cease helping us get off the ground.
Re:And yet... (Score:2, Insightful)
We're also helping creators and their heirs hold legal monopolies on innovations for much longer, extending individual copyrights to the life of the author plus 70 years, for instance. Would we lose so many great ideas if the monopoly lasted only until 15 years after the inventor's death?
[...]
You need intellectual-property rules that ensure space for new ideas and uses. You need a tax code that encourages research and development spending. You need, in other words, to furnish people with an environment in which innovation can take place.
It could work. (Score:5, Insightful)
But the patent office would have to require a WORKING prototype of whatever you're trying to patent.
The biggest problem is that the patent office will now accept patent applications for items that do not exist. This allows companies to block other inventors by having a patent filed prior to the inventor inventing the invention.
Re:Tech Genius != Financial Success (Score:4, Insightful)
Neither Mark Zuckerberg nor Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs could program a fucking VCR.
But Ballmer can throw one quite a distance.
This is known as "big man's disease" where the belief that physical size, the ability to bellow and pound on a desk has some economic value in the management of a modern business. Back when I worked for a power company, there was some value to this. The foreman on a line crew had proven himself in a largely physical profession and was therefore accorded some level of respect.
They can't program a program either their skill is in finding someone who can and telling them to "get it done" then having the resources to write their paycheck.
Which raises the question of why the generic talents like managing an office, raising capital, keeping the stationary cabinet full, etc. commands higher wages than the people who actually build the systems.
Counter Examples (Score:3, Insightful)
The Steam Engine of Alexandria
Archimedes celestial clock device
Concrete
All discovered, then subsequently lost and even as technology advanced beyond the point where each was originally invented no one at the time came up with them until centuries after the point this hypothesis would postulate.
Re:Obvious corollary (Score:5, Insightful)
This is one of the reasons software patents are stupid, why patent trolls exist, and why the patent system in general needs cutting down.
Your point is valid but I think it transcends software patents. Some patents, inventions or discoveries are simply a product of timing as the article suggests, and they aren't limited to software patents, or even patents.
A classic example would be the two of the biggest game changers in thinking, and both were co-discovered. Of all the times in history for these ideas to come about, they came about simultaneously from multiple sources:
Calculus: Leibniz and Newton
Evolution: Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace
Also...
Using laser pointers to amuse cats: Patent 5443036 and anyone who has ever seen a cat and laser pointer
Re:Social networking? Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Also natural selection, with Darwin having sat on the theory for a while, and only publishing after corresponding with Wallace [wikipedia.org] and realizing that Wallace was on his way to beating Darwin to the punch.
Re:Genius (Score:3, Insightful)
If Facebook is now an example of "genius", what word shall we now use to describe actual genius?
And yes, I'm aware that Zuckerberg gets more ass than I ever will, and probably has more than 100 lifetimes of my wealth. My dick doesn't work that well anyway. Question still stands, IMHO.
And your question is valid. It wasn't "genius". It was sheer luck. Nothing more. There were others before Facebook, but his became the "popular" hangout. That's it. No "genius" or even "magic" there. No way am I going to compare someone who hit an Internet "lottery" to some of the greatest minds of the 20th Century.
Besides, someone sitting around acting out a bullshit fake persona for 763 "friends" they hardly knew or know is about as far from being "social" as one can get...Guess I'm one of those old-fashioned humans that still prefers actually sitting down and talking (gasp!)
Re:Facebook has nothing to do with innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem I see with it is that genius actually does matter. If we all sit down and wait for new inventions because 'surely someone will do it' then no one will do it. A single person can change the course of a nation, and it is impossible to predict individual people
I think you may misunderstand. The argument is that actual genius doesn't really exist. The argument is that the specific individual who comes up with the "invention" is irrelevant. The argument is that there is no stunning ray of sheer brainpower that makes such an "invention" possible - it is, instead, inevitable.
Imagine, if you will, a train barreling down the tracks towards a helpless puppy. When the train is 1,000 miles away from the puppy, nobody really knows what is going to happen. You can't see the big picture. The folks looking at the puppy don't see the train, and the folks looking at the train can't see the puppy. If somebody were to shout out "oh no, the puppy's gonna get squished!" at that moment in time, it would be genius. But as the train gets closer and closer to the puppy, it becomes more and more obvious. And eventually it is almost impossible not to realize that the puppy is going to be run over.
This is the argument. As technology rolls forward, it eventually becomes almost impossible not to invent something new.
You get enough computers chattering away with each-other... Enough people on the web... Enough folks trying to share photos and connect with other people... Cheap enough server infrastructure.. Ample enough bandwidth... Powerful enough databases... And eventually somebody is bound to say "Hey, why don't we throw together some kind of web page where people can keep in touch with each-other and share photos and stuff?"
Re:Ezra Klein is a political shill (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Obvious corollary (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd say that's what copyright is for. If you spend thousands of coder-hours implementing 1-click purchasing on Amazon, that doesn't mean it's inherently patentable, because anyone that looks at it from the outside can throw the coder-hours themselves at it without needing any special research. They shouldn't be allowed to just come along and steal the codebase, and that's where copyright protects you.
I am not entirey convinced (Score:4, Insightful)
It's arguments like this that trouble me.
That's what happened with Alexander Graham Bell, who in all likelihood invented the telephone after Elisha Gray - and both of them came after Antonio Meucci, who couldn't afford the fee to keep his patent current.
Elisha Gray was the audience while Bell demonstrated his telephone at the Centennial World's Fair in Philadelphia in July 1876.
Gray was no stranger to self promotion.
He was an electrical engineer with a national reputation and a lucrative portfolio of some seventy patents. This is guy who co-founded Western Electric. The guy who would later go on to invent an early and commercially successful "fax machine," the Telautograph.
The first Bell telephone exchange opened in Hartford, Connecticut in January, 1878. By 1882 this single exchange had gone through two stages of expansion to become Southern New England telephone.
If Gray had a working telephone in 1876, what the hell was he doing with it?
The answer to this riddle is that - like all the others who had grown up with Western Union - he probably thought all he had in his hand was a plaything.
Bell was the outsider. Bell was disruptive.
An investigating committee established by the British Parliament found Edison's work on the electric light "unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men." Edison himself thought his phonograph "not of any commercial value."
The renowned British physicist Lord Kelvin announced in 1897 that "radio has no future." A decade later a business executive told radio pioneer Lee De Forest that he could put in a single room "all the radiotelephone apparatus that the country will ever need." De Forest himself announced in 1926 that, "while theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming."
So it goes: Year after year, decade after decade, century after century, our ancestors have made fools of themselves. We always laugh at the electrical toy; van Gogh never sells his paintings; Melville always dies unrecognized. The only safe prediction is that people will go on making dumb predictions.
Hindsight, Foresight, and No Sight [americanheritage.com]
Re:Facebook has nothing to do with innovation (Score:3, Insightful)
The beauty of free markets and capitalism (regardless of their flaws) is that profit drives invention. The profit motive will bring out the geniuses to do their thing. Enough geniuses working on the same problem is bound to show results.
In a centrally planned economy, the who is very important. All the central planners know is that they have some vague goal of a type of technology, and it's up to them to make sure the correct person is in place to do create it.
So I would in fact imagine that in communist China, and individual can be very important, while the opposite is true in a capitalist system. That seems to go contrary to conventional wisdom where in freer countries there is more value on the individual while communist nations focus on the whole, but as I ramble on here, that seems to make sense.
Of course, I could be wrong.
Re:Facebook has nothing to do with innovation (Score:3, Insightful)
It may be a "noticeable skill" but it is not a *unique* skill. Perhaps a "genius" is required, but it is clear that any one particular genius is not necessary. Had Zuckerberg gotten hit by a buss back in the day, someone else would have put together the "winning formula" for this particular application.
Re:Facebook has nothing to do with innovation (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong. We can sit and wait all day, but some portion of the human population will still do it, because some portion isn't content to sit and wait.
Re:Genius (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Tech Genius != Financial Success (Score:3, Insightful)
ever tried building a system without an office, stationary(or the digital equivalent), or capital? Exactly.
Yes. On my kitchen table (more or less).
Ever try to build a system with an office, capital and a nice mahogany board of directors' table but no talent. Exactly.
The problem arises when you get something up and running and need capital to expand. The cost of that is to put the VC's idiot nephew on the board, hire MBAs from his Alma Mater's frat house and give them the checkbook.
Re:Obvious corollary (Score:5, Insightful)
It's serious. Just look at Douglas Engelbart and his team. Google for Mother of all Demos.
He came up with all that but 20+ years too soon, and some of his ideas that aren't widely implemented yet are probably still valid too.
Despite him being too early, his work led to stuff in Xerox PARC, which led to Apple's GUI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_interface [wikipedia.org]
So the patent system rewards those who come up with stuff like "one click" and trolls, but the real innovators often won't get rewarded because by the time the masses "get it", your patent has expired.
To me "Prizes for Innovation" would work better for that. Since hindsight is better than an overworked patent examiner figuring stuff out from vague descriptions. Could have two categories of prizes one selected by the Public, and one by "Experts in the Field".
Inventing the wheel and a chariot before figuring out how to tame a horse or cow, wouldn't get you as far ;). But when someone else finally tames a horse, a horse drawn cart/chariot might be more obvious to them.
Re:Facebook has nothing to do with innovation (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow! That makes it doubly impressive how people invented all those important things in the thousands of years before capitalism and markets even existed!
Re:Obvious corollary (Score:5, Insightful)
Or here's an idea: if you come up with a great idea, you work with a company to manufacture and sell it (or do it yourself) and make a lot of money until someone comes out with an improvement.
I've always found it interesting that the same people who believe in "free markets" also believe in anti-competitive tools like patents. Does anyone really believe that without the protection of patents there wouldn't be any new products or ideas?
Re:Genius (Score:4, Insightful)
Depends on who that woman is. I just broke up with one and find myself _flooded_ with free time to spend on coding and other projects.
Re:It could work. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do you believe that?
Re:Obvious corollary (Score:4, Insightful)
"Does anyone really believe that without the protection of patents there wouldn't be any new products or ideas?"
But... without patents, the person who originally came up with the idea wouldn't be able to make shitty products until their patent expires! They might actually have to... make a quality product that outdoes their competitors! We can't have that.
Re:Facebook has nothing to do with innovation (Score:4, Insightful)
Whereas in a planned economy, the planners must find the person who can make it happen. Like finding a needle in a haystack.
Re:Obvious corollary (Score:5, Insightful)
Software copyright already gives plenty of protection and it protects only implementations of an idea. The Phoenix BIOS that overthrew IBM's monopoly of the PC and allowed PC clones to exist (to everyone's benefit) had to surmount copyright protections only, and Phoenix had to spend *a lot* of money to surmount copyright. This is from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_BIOS [wikipedia.org]
If we had software patents back then, all the new PC's Macs, Amigas, etc. , almost any device that used BIOS-like ideas would have been stillborn; we'd just have really awful clunky PC's made by IBM for a really long time. Implementations of software are already protected by copyright. Software patents patent the idea; ideas are easy to come by. They prevent competing implementations of an idea, where the real hard work is. A software patent will prevent *any* implementation of the idea, if the patent holder is lazy
Re:Obvious corollary (Score:5, Insightful)
Calculus: Leibniz and Newton
Evolution: Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace
We have had thousands of game-changing inventions in the history of mankind. What percentage of those were arrived at by multiple inventors, independently, and at roughly the same time? Champions of the belief presented by the article commonly bring up the "classic examples" of Leibniz/Newton, Darwin/Wallace, and Marconi/Tesla. Well, how many non-classic examples are there? Seriously, even if there were a hundred more examples, in the face of all the major scientific/philosophical/mathematical discoveries ever made in every field that would still seem statistically insignificant. I mean, c'mon guys, how about a little critical thinking and perspective here...
Here's a quote straight from Wikipedia on RADAR:
"In the 1934–1939 period, eight nations developed, independently and in great secrecy, systems of this type: the United States, Great Britain, Germany, the USSR, Japan, the Netherlands, France, and Italy."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radar [wikipedia.org]
Eight nations? Independently and in secrecy! The individuals who independently created RADAR showed some critical thinking but the fact that everything up to that point both physics, technology and drive really allowed them to succeed.
Think about what would happen if you were transported back in time to the 1600's. What could you really do with all the knowledge you have about today?
Re:Facebook has nothing to do with innovation (Score:3, Insightful)
You think the concept of invention for profit is new?
Re:Genius (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong. The kind of science productivity that gets you noticed falls off a cliff. Actually useful stuff ends up getting done but on a new steady schedule rather than fits and starts and explosions.
Re:Obvious corollary (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Genius (Score:3, Insightful)
That's exactly backwards. Science productivity falls off a cliff from scientists who get married.
That's why the plan called for getting scientists hookers, not wives...
Re:Obvious corollary (Score:3, Insightful)
Patent trolls exist because we went from owning implementations to owning ideas.
No, you neither own an idea or an implimentation. You have a 20 year monopoly on it, not ownership. If you own something you own it until you sell it, give it away, or it gets stolen.
Re:Clean interface? (Score:1, Insightful)