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.'"
Re:So in other words (Score:1, Interesting)
"Seems as though the first mover isn't always the winner in terms of market share and/or mindshare."
Seems to me the first mover though is the Johnny Appleseed though, the one that gets the first generation of the idea accepted by at least some in the population, where it gets copied and modified. Until an analysis is done as to how important those previous incarnations are, don't write off the earlier ones as failures just because Facebook is a success.
And there seems to be plenty of early inventors or those who got in real early in the game that seem to get rewarded--Amazon, ebay, Intel, and IBM come to mind.
If those earlier lesser successes don't happen, Facebook may not be as accepted. I personally think that if the MySpace phase hadn't occurred, and sites like Friendster hadn't gone up, people wouldn't have learned about and consolidated to Facebook, making it what it is today.
Then again, I don't get the whole Facebook thing anyways. I think it's stupid and crap, but maybe it's in line with how the narcissism of the population these days. And in comparison to the other mainstream industries out there (pharmaceutical, industrial, finance, defense, energy), Facebook is almost chump change. iow, maybe the perception of Facebook's "success" is only relative to the believer's choosing to ignore a fair comparison to everything else out there, even on internet terms (isn't Google bigger? even Google's "subsidiary" like YouTube?).
Re:Genius (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, all of those examples you cite may have tanked because their inventors sold them. Think about it. Once the creative drive and the instinct to do what's cool leaves the product, and is replaced by a lot of investment money that wants to monetize the cool in order to realize ROI, what do you think happens?
I predict that Facebook will do well as long as Zuckerberg retains control over it. Once he is no longer in charge of things, it will falter.
Re:Facebook has nothing to do with innovation (Score:3, Interesting)
There are people who actually believe that is possible. People like Niklas Luhmann [wikipedia.org] are trying to figure out how to arrange such a society. BF Skinner was also a man who thought along those lines.
Now, to these people, technological advances are inevitable; based on sheer probability and mathematics, the wheel was 'destined' to be invented when it did, and so was Facebook. The actual geniuses themselves don't matter, since they would be replaced by another if they weren't around. It is in fact necessary for this to be so, at least to a certain degree, or their entire theory fall apart (how can you otherwise predict the arrival of a genius, a singular event?) The article is basing itself on this line of thought.
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 (if a single person didn't matter, why would the Chinese government care so much about Liu XiaoBao?)
It was the chIcks that made FB (Score:3, Interesting)
You remember those hot babes who were Florida Gators fans who ended up in Maxim? THEY made Facebook take off.
Re:Obvious corollary (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
Steam-engine time (Score:1, Interesting)
Hardly a new idea.... Mark Twain noticed the same thing. " It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing - and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest."
When it's steam engine time someone will invent the steam engine...
Re:Obvious corollary (Score:4, Interesting)
Nothing. No one needs your steam engine. No one is able to manufacture an internal combustion machine or even refine the gasoline for it. No one has any use for electricity. There is not enough copper being mined to make for a decent wiring. You are missing the whole infrastructure to create large amounts of steel. No one has an idea how to process iron into steel in an industrial process (again a game changing invention with at least two inventors: Henry Bessemer and William Kelly), and the process in a forge with remelting and reforging iron until it is malleable is slow and expensive.
NOT Counter-examples! (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you've missed the point. With the exception of Concrete, these inventions were massively predated as you say, but they didn't prevail. There wasn't much application for such advanced technology, given that less-advanced alternatives were good enough and easier to produce - horse-before-the-cart and all that. To put it simply: Their Time Had Not Come.
Concrete is an interesting counter-example though. As a building material it's remarkable, and there were some things the Romans could (apparently) do with it that we still can't reproduce - real Wisdom-of-the-ancients stuff. The best explanation I can offer is that concrete requires a society to have not only some empirical knowledge of chemistry, but also a decent infrastructure and therefore a decent size and advancement of other technologies in order for the required components to be sufficiently available. The Romans had it for a while, but it was a long time after their civilization fell before the opportunity to rediscover concrete arose again. I suppose it's another example of "Steam Engine Time" in effect, but with the other examples it's due to the lack of pressing need while with concrete it's due to lack of supporting factors.
Necessity is the mother of invention, but its father is the Tech Tree.
Re:Facebook has nothing to do with innovation (Score:3, Interesting)
That's an insidious fallacy. There is no 'forward' with technology, it's not like a train that follows the tracks. Technology just evolves in some direction for a while, then switches to another direction, etc. Nobody knows in which direction it goes, and there are plenty of directions that are missed out on and will never be followed. All that anyone can say is that among all the technologies that will be found along the path of our civilization, many of the technologies have relatives found earlier in time.
Direction is irrelevant to the discussion. Any given technology has a pile of prerequisites. As those prerequisites are met, we move closer to having the ability to discover/implement that technology. You can call this "forward" if you want... Or "up", "down", "backwards", "hubwise", or whatever the hell you want. You're still getting closer to having everything you need to make whatever it is we're talking about.
Now, if you always call 'forward' whatever direction technology's headed in, then sure, progress looks like it's inevitable. But then you have problems explaining how some civilizations don't seem to go 'forward' in the same direction as us. For example, many South American civilizations did NOT invent the wheel.
Obviously some prerequisite was not met.
This isn't some MMOG or RPG where you can look at the tech tree and check things off. We're all just feeling around in the dark. But there's some piece of the puzzle that they didn't have.
You also have problems explaining why 'better' technologies sometimes fail, as when the direction switches but you still think the previous direction will continue forever. For example, in VHS vs Betamax the latter was further along the expected direction.
I've never really understood how a tape that couldn't hold an entire feature-length film was supposed to be superior to one that could... I mean, it might have looked prettier and worked better... But if you can't fit a movie on there, who cares?
Einstein said, make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. It's tempting to think of technological evolution as a simple straight line like a train track, but it causes more problems than it solves. It's better to think in terms of an undirected evolutionary model.
The tracks were a metaphor, nothing more. Don't worry, no puppies were harmed in the making of this post.
Re:Facebook has nothing to do with innovation (Score:4, Interesting)
It's the argument of someone who isn't a genius to claim that genius does not exist, or is really nothing special. Anyone can throw a football, or bang on a drum. Doing it with the practice and timing to actually entertain, or to reliably reach a wide receiver, or to achieve what Zuckerberg with the interface that people _accepted_ takes some noticeable skill.
Skill != Genius
Being able to entertain somebody with a drum or win a game with a football certainly takes skill. Skill that I do not have. But it does not take genius.
Building a nice website also takes skill. It's a skill that I do not have. But it does not take genius.
Genius is not skill, it is vision. It is seeing things that others cannot. You could argue that perhaps Babbage was a genius, since he saw a computing machine long before anyone else did. But Zuckerberg didn't build his website decades before anyone else. Other folks had the same idea at about the same time. Because it had become virtually obvious.
Which is the whole argument. That as technology progresses, and innovations pile atop innovations, it takes less and less vision to see something new. Until eventually it's right there in your face and somebody is going to "invent" it almost by accident.
"If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants."
If you stack up enough giants, anyone can see anything.
Re:Obvious corollary (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I am not entirey convinced (Score:3, Interesting)
Bell was the outsider. Bell was disruptive.
No he wasn't. The telephone is a classic example of "an invention whose time has come".
There were dozens, if not hundreds of persons and groups at the time all over the world trying to improve the telegraph, including trying to transmit audio, to make recordings and to create automated switching fabrics. Many knew the importance of those things. Bell was lucky to be first, nothing more. Read his biography. He spent the rest of his life, and considerable wealth, both litigating and trying to create the next big thing. He succeeded in the litigation but not in creating the next big thing. He was no genius or particular innovator. In addition his main interest was in assisting the deaf, the telephone was a sideline.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Re:Facebook has nothing to do with innovation (Score:3, Interesting)
So the real geniuses are people like Babbage, who shouted "oh no, that train is going to squish that puppy!" before that train was even built, and Leonardo da Vinci, who shouted "oh no, that train is going to squish that puppy!" before the idea of trains was even invented.
Yes. In my opinion that is true genius. That shows some kind of remarkable insight that just simply wasn't available to anyone else at the time. Or for years to come. There was something truly special about those people.
Of course people thought Babbage was a bit of a nutter at the time, and we probably wouldn't even know who Leonardo da Vinci was today if he hadn't also been a great artist.
Yup. Simply coming up with an idea doesn't do you too much good if you can't implement it. And if you're too far ahead of the curve then the infrastructure to implement it doesn't even exist.
Clearly being a real genius isn't of much practical value. The real money is in doing a good job at what someone else already thought up.
Indeed.
Which does take an awful lot of skill, talent, knowledge, foresight, and luck... I'm not claiming it's easy to put together something like Facebook at the right time, with the right interface, and then pull together the right investors.
But it isn't genius.
Re:Obvious corollary (Score:1, Interesting)
Patents are a joke. They just allow you to charge a premium price for a product based on it's authenticity. It does nothing to stop the Chinese from knocking off every innovation 2 weeks after it hits the shelves in America.
We might as well live in a world without patents. Speaking as an inventor: 9/10ths of the ideas I have, I'll never pursue because the patent system is broken and I wouldn't be able to make enough money on them to make them a worthwhile investment of my time.
Sadly: these ideas are frequently the ones which would most greatly improve the quality of life of Joe Six Pack.
Patents aren't even worth discussing until the China problem is fixed, and until then: this inventor is taking his ball and going home. If you can't beat them: join them. I'd rather make money as a knockoff artist than lose money as an inventor. At least this way: I can fuck over the huge corporations which have taken a "what are you going to do about it?" approach to buying patents.
I'm more likely to pursue an eBay-style brand-name based service than I am a hygiene enhancement for hospitals which would protect against the spread of disease. Which makes the world a better place?