Innovation Getting Slower? 512
Daniel Dvorkin writes "A New Scientist article details the claims of Jonathan Huebner, a Naval Air Warfare Center physicist, that the rate of technological innovation is actually decreasing, not increasing exponentially as some people believe. Huebner says that there are now fewer 'important technological developments per billion people' than at any time since the 17th century! I'm far from convinced, but it's an interesting and thought-provoking article." From the article: "He says the rate of technological innovation reached a peak a century ago and has been declining ever since. And like the lookout on the Titanic who spotted the fateful iceberg, Huebner sees the end of innovation looming dead ahead."
I Blame (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I Blame regulators (Score:5, Interesting)
Did Alexander Graham Bell get a broadcasting licence from the CRTC [crtc.gc.ca]?
Did Mme Currie have a permit to work with radionuclides [washingtonwatchdog.org]
Did Captian Cook put up with this crap [wildernesscommittee.org] when he commissioned his vessels?
Re:I Blame regulators (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I Blame regulators (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I Blame regulators (Score:3, Insightful)
Technology has gotten so complex that launching a new product (let alone a new field) on your own is getting next to impossible, so investors are a necessary evil. But investors aren't interested in helping you, they are intereste
Re:I Blame regulators (Score:4, Interesting)
Edison innovated in his shed out back. The cost might have been significant in his day, but not prohibitive.
Some might argue that the cost of innovation now is prohibitive. The fair assessment of this article might be that all the "easy" innovations, or all the "cheap" innovations have already been discovered.
The other thing is this. There are a lot of books circulating about criticality. A big idea in criticality is complexity arising from very simple origins (Gutenberg-Richter Law). So there is the idea that the TREES of our major technologies going forward have already been discovered. The branches are being fleshed out now, but the trunks are all there in plain view. If that is the case, then innovation isn't slowing because of societal reasons, but is slowing because there's less new shit to discover, lending credence to a simple universe.
Re:I Blame regulators (Score:3, Insightful)
What happened to standing on the shoulders of giants?
lots of "garage software" still coming (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I Blame regulators (Score:3, Insightful)
I've actually studied a lot of physics. How this is relevant is uncertain. My argument is that the branches of physics in which we stand to make these discoveries ALREADY exist. We've already discovered those branches. If each discrete branch of physics is a tree, one argument might be that we've discovered all the trees and are now determining the branches and leaves. The details.
String theory? Not new. Dark Matter? That was Einstein's cosmolog
Re:I Blame regulators (Score:4, Insightful)
In each of those examples the good far outweighed the bad. It's a shame that Curie and Cook had to make those sacrifices. But just like many other explorers and boundary-pushers they contributed huge amounts to humanity. And at the time, Bell's monopoly probably did far more good for the communications infrastructure in this country than it did harm.
Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Blame Microsoft! (Score:3, Funny)
To Fix It (Score:5, Funny)
I was going to invent a solution to the problem, but who cares?
Re:To Fix It (Score:2)
Does inventing problems count?
Re:To Fix It (Score:5, Funny)
There is a fine line between (Score:5, Funny) and (Score:5, Insightful).
Re:You are closer than realize (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost, you say? With all this ridiculous patent crap, intellectual property, citizens suing each other or big corps for the slightest mistake, or trying to forsake all the responsibility for bad things that happen to them (McDonalds suers? Tobbaco Co. suers?) At least people still have freedom of speech, but how long will that last? How long till they sue you because some dipshit patented the metaphor you are using, or your accent (patent number 131313: Method for expressing irony using certain combinations of words), or some other such irrelevant thing? Damnit, they are patenting clicks these days! When will the people rebel? When it is too friggin late?
USPTO (Score:5, Funny)
Re:USPTO (Score:5, Insightful)
The purpose of a patent is to give an inventor a safe period of time in which to economically exploit their invention. In the past, if you wanted to avoid the lawyers, you didn't have to go far. Hollywood was started by people who didn't want to pay the royalties for film produciton equipment, so they just moved across the country. Today it is much harder to steal technology to make new things.
Whether this is a good or a bad thing could be the subject of an entire discussion, but the parent demonstrates more insight than humor in pointing at the USPTO.
What a wacky measure (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What a wacky measure (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What a wacky measure (Score:2, Insightful)
Perhaps because with more people should come more people making things.
Re:What a wacky measure (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What a wacky measure (Score:2)
Re:What a wacky measure (Score:3, Interesting)
More to the point... more and more people can be born... but if the edge of innovation requires internet access, reasonably powerful computers, access to chemistry labs, sub-atomic research facilities... then the rate of innovation is more likely to grow at the pace of GDP, or the amount of R&D investment, or something like that, not at the rate of which people in the third world are born (nothing agains
Re:What a wacky measure (Score:4, Insightful)
Overall global innovation rates haven't slowed at all. The statement that we have more world changing innovations per year than ever before I'd call rather questionable though. It is true that inventions affect everyone, although the ever growing artifical barrier to useage that intellectual property represents does deny the benefit of most of them to many people.
The articles premise that each generation of people is less innovative than the generation before them is still a disturbing one, and worthy of note and concern if there is evidence to support it.
It's really easy to chuck out the argument mentioned in the article, that invention is a finite thing and that we are close to discovering all of it, it consequently becoming more and more difficult, expensive, and unusual relative to the human effort put into it.
It's irresponsible to accept it though, because it's an easy out. Accepting this premise rules out all of human behaviors capacity to influence how inventive we are in the future, releases us from any collective responsibility for our decreasing inventiveness, and dismisses our collective capacity to correct the situation should we deem it appropriate.
I can think of a great many other possible explanations for a decreasingly inventive population, and none of them are as vulnerable to Occam's razor as the "we've almost discovered it all" argument.
Re:What a wacky measure (Score:2)
Actually for a long time I've suspected that the gross rate of innovation per capita has been dropping. But I don't think it is surprising. In smaller populations there is more incentive to innovate since there is usually no-one nearby with a solution to your problem. And bigger societies are generally dumber, well lazier is what I really mean. No-one has to innovate. Another factor may be that although a lot of people are innovating the mass media which fuels support (ie funds) for ideas can only handle a
Re:What a wacky measure (Score:2)
The main problem with this measure though, is that it assumes all innovations are equally difficult to create, which is obviously not true.
Re:What a wacky measure (Score:2)
Re: What a wacky measure (Score:4, Insightful)
> So who says innovations per billion people is a legitimate measure of the rate? Innovations per year seems to be the only measure that matters.
Surely it's exponential population growth that gives rise to the (perceived) exponential rate of innovations. At least in part.
Re:What a wacky measure (Score:5, Insightful)
In my humble opinion, this strongly suggests that the string theory is incorrect.
I base this opinion on the history of science. Back when Earth was thought to be the center of the Universe, the sometimes-reverse motion of planets on the sky was a bit difficult to explain. It lead to absurdly complex system of nested circular orbits. Then, the Sun-centric system was developed, and it was a slight improvement - but only slight, since planets were still thought to move in circular orbits with constant speed. What finally resolved this issue was the Theory of Gravity - it gave a single formula (F=f*m1*m2/(r*r)) which explained all the observed phenomenon in a single simple equation. Or, more to the point, the elliptical orbits with varying orbital speeds follow naturally from that equation, instead of requiring complex math to understand.
The same goes for the theory of Relativity - without it, different observers would observe different laws of physics, the most famous example propably being "what do you see if you move at the speed of light ? You see the light standing still, but that's impossible according to Maxwell's equations, so apparently those equations don't hold for all observers". Despite all the complex implications of the ToR, it actually simplified the way one looks at the universe - laws of physics are nonvariant, even if time and space are not.
Based on this, I conclude that if a theory about the fundamental structure of reality starts getting too complex for anyone to understand, the theory is almost certainly wrong. Or, to put it another way: there is a simpler, more fundamental way of looking at things.
Compare this with programming. You can make a fundamentally flawed design work somewhat by including tons of workarounds and special case fixes, but it would propably be better to scrap the crap and seek for an algorithm that is intrinsically correct.
Or it could be that people have gotten used to throwing more computer power to the problem, and therefore has less motivation to search for better algorithms. If this is true, then augmenting brain with computers would increase the problem, not decrease it.
After all, the development of both math and technology is mostly a way of reducing the effort required to do something - searching for better algorithms.
Re:What a wacky measure (Score:3, Insightful)
What we've essentially seen is a kind of oscillation between simple and complex - new observations require changes to be integrated into the existing theories, which are then getting more complex, until someone comes along and simplifies them again. Lather, rinse, repeat - the whole thing just keeps on repeating.
What you fail to realize, though, is that "simpler" does not necessarily mean "simple". I do agree that Occa
Re:What a wacky measure (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, this is pretty much my point. Remember, I answered to a post claiming that modern physics is by neccessity extremely complex mathemathically. I claimed that it isn't, it's just been stretched to the limits of its usability, and the next Big Theory will simplify it back to human understandable level eventually.
Bad example. If vertex operator algebras rise naturally from conformal field theories, then they are the consequence of a theory, and it is the cft that is the underlaying theory. And I did say that consequences of simple theories can be extremely complex.
Of course, I have no idea what cft actually is, so for all I know it could be the most complex theory ever ;(...
On the contrary, both Earth-centric and Sun-centric worldviews explained the same phenomena at the same time, and even today it would be perfectly possible to patch the Earth-centric view to explain all currently observed phenomenon. It would require an astronomical amount of rings, but it would certainly be possible.
Newton's mechanics were adopted because, as a model of reality, they are much more elegant and powerfull in making predictions than near-infinite amount of perfect circles.
The EartH-centric view is a buggy algorithm which can be made to work by patching it beyond recognition. Newton's mechanics is a newer algorithm that solves naturally all those cases where the Ec view needs patches. That is what I meant with my comparison to algorithms - once a theory has the first special case workarounds applied to it, you know it can't really perfectly reflect the fundamental nature of reality at the deepest level, and it's time to start looking for a new theory, even if the old one might still be usefull in the meantime.
I didn't say it has to be dismissed or that it is wrong - that would be rather difficult anyway, since I don't know string theory.
I did say that, historically, having lots of complexity has been a sign that that particular model is not an accurate description of underlaying laws of physics. It might give correct predictions, but it is simply not the best way to describe the underlaying reality.
Really? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Really? (Score:3, Informative)
Could be (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Could be (Score:3, Insightful)
Shoulders of giants (Score:2, Interesting)
The breakthroughs in the mathematical methods required to solve the problems are just as various, just as thought provoking, and the solutions will prove to be just as ingenious.
Re:Shoulders of giants (Score:2)
You also had very smart people working out theories based on flawed assumptions. Many people's works were also lost over the ages, their potential unrealized. I wonder how it might have been if the library of Alexandria hadn't been lost? I'd say the turning point was pretty much the development of the scientific method. Before that, research wasn'
Restrictions should be lifted (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Restrictions should be lifted (Score:3, Funny)
Patents... Lawyers... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Patents... Lawyers... (Score:2, Funny)
It has been brought to our attention that you have complained on an online "news" service, http://www.slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org] about companies being able to claim copyright infringement on your complaint.
I must warn you that complaining about companies that hold copyrights/patents on your complaint has already been patented by our company (pat. 913,745,182,891). We demand that you immediately cease and desist such complaints about complaints, and you must also pay us $134,580,317.01 US for damages
It's broadening... (Score:2, Insightful)
Two factors... (Score:2)
Second its out patent system and its ridiculous enforcement. In a system where a case like the one with SCO can go on for so long without them showing any prove who can expect you to invent stuff?
Peter.
It became a buzz word. (Score:2)
Not a big surprise there... (Score:5, Insightful)
Patents pretty much hobble innovation. They work when you have a relatively small population base, but not when the population is in the billions. (And not when patents keep getting extended to longer and longer periods of time.)
During the 1800s there were no improvements to the pistol for about 20 years due to patent restrictions. Patents are supposed to promote science and industry, but often have the opposite effect.
There is a large amount of huberis involved with the patent process that says "no one is as smart as me, so anyone who has a similar idea to mine must be stealing it". The problem is that when you have large numbers of people working on the same problems, you are going to encounter the same solutions over and over again.
If we continue to have a "first one to patent wins" on a global scale, we will have crippled ourselves to the fastest filers, not the fastest thinkers.
We no longer stand on the shoulers of giants because we are crippled by midgets.
Re:Not a big surprise there... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not a big surprise there... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not a big surprise there... (Score:5, Informative)
Patents haven't been extended, copyrights have.
During the 1800s there were no improvements to the pistol for about 20 years due to patent restrictions. Patents are supposed to promote science and industry, but often have the opposite effect.
Even in the 20th century handguns haven't really been innovated upon. This is not because of patents, but because there is no market.
If there is a real need for a product, there are many ways to innovate around a patent (excluding software patents which is just screwed up and doesn't really represent what patents should be). That's why even though Viagra is patented there are like a dozen similar drugs a few years later. I work in electronics manufacturing, there is a huge movement towards lead-free processing. Patented alloys makes it difficult, but there are lots of ways around them. In general the shared information of patents outweighs the restriction. All patents do is make you think a little harder.(once again software patents excluded).
I would agree the time of patent protection is outdated due to the time to market differences of the 18th and 21st century.
Re:Not a big surprise there... (Score:3, Informative)
But the problem is that patents have always been too long for software, the proof being that patents are supposed to spur innovation, but for this particular problem domain, innovation seem to occur irregardless of patents. Most software innovations are never patented at all.
-- John.
Re:Truth. (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is more insidious than that. As long as there is no connection between patent duration, investment cost, time to develop and time to generate ROI, patents encourage investment in low or zero-cost 'inventions'. The value of the patent becomes only the monopoly, the costs to obtain the monopoly detract from ROI, and you end up with patented inventions that would have been invented even with only time-to-market incentive, as those are th
Patents? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not a big surprise there... (Score:2)
You don't say (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry, I just don't see anything to be concerned about. The per capita rate of development may have gone down in the last 200 years, but the numbers have gone way up.
Re:You don't say (Score:2)
Exactly. I'm sure that there are not only more people, but a larger percentage were educated and had time to invent things. We have a very large percentage of humans on the planet living in countries like China and India where they have to work every day to stay alive. They probably don't have much time for inventing. Combine that with t
Critical Flaws (Score:4, Insightful)
Hell Yeah! (Score:2)
What's innovation? (Score:3, Insightful)
My feeling is that much of what now passes for "innovation" in the developed world is really refinement. Faster ways of searching for information, endless new ways of distributing capital, methods of communication. Humans face two major hurdles to existence: scarce resources and disease. A true major innovation -- vaccines, mechanized agriculture -- will make one of those problems less of a burden. While it does seem like we're making good progress with modern medicine, I don't think we've made much progress with our energy, food and water supplies in recent years.
politik! (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately the modern beauracracy and political structure just doesn't value innovation. Patents, grants and research facilities are becoming harder and harder to access. On top of that, multinational corporations are pushing the little guy and his innovative ideas out of the market, so that the only innovation that remains is profit-driven and commercial, which more often than not locks us into the age old cycle of repainting the tiger's stripes and selling him as a new animal because anything too radically new 'wouldn't grab the market'. And government institutions are consistently failing to innovate because their focus is not development, but rather generation of jobs = votes, and any new innovations might risk public sector jobs (NASA, anyone??)
All the great innovations of the past took enormous risks, and sometimes they failed. It's great to see some private companies with the financial backing there taking those risks (Armadillo Aerospace, Scaled Composites...etc) but it's a pity that government makes it so difficult.
Who knows how many brilliant innovations have gone unnoticed because the inventor didn't have the money to run R&D privately and couldn't be bothered with the government red tape...I think that we should be encouraging private innovation because you never know where the Next Big Thing is going to come from!
It could also be that a large number of people are (Score:2)
I don't buy his analysis (Score:4, Insightful)
As far as the number of patents declining I'd have to say that this isn't the greatest metric for measuring technological innovation. From the number of crap patents out there (Amazon One-Click, NTPs patents, etc, etc, etc) I'd have to say that just because lots of patents are being generated doesn't mean that innovation is thriving or perishing (In fact I'd fear that too many patents would stifle innovation by preventing people from experimenting with new technologies).
The reason I have such a problem with Huebner's analysis can be summed up by this one quote from TFA:
Huebner disagrees. "It doesn't matter if it is humans or machines that are the source of innovation. If it isn't noticeable to the people who chronicle technological history then it is probably a minor event."
So, if something passes under the radar of those stalwarts who have charged themselves with chronicling technological history then it really doesn't matter. By this logic a technological historian of the early 1970s would probably have been writing volumes about the space program and nuclear research while ignoring things such as the nascent revolution in semi-conductors that was being created by the folks at Intel and other engineers in Silicon Valley, which by any measure has affected our daily lives as much, if not more than the space program or nuclear research. By admitting this Huebner is, at least to me, showing that his analyses are totally arbitrary and therefore valueless.
Re:I don't buy his analysis (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm also reminded of how people have argued we were going to run out of this, or run out of that, and haven't because other technologies move in in a timely way. It's an important technology if it keeps us from running out of s
We are a society that is scared... (Score:4, Insightful)
The big innovations, the ones that change our culture fundamentally are going to come at a cost that most people are afraid to pay. Namely religous beliefs.
Stem Cells, Cloning, Space Exploration, Quantam Computing, all these courses of study have the ability to alter views on creation itself.
And most people are not willing to pay that price.
Re:We are a society that is scared... (Score:2)
I, for one, am still waiting for handheld teleporters. Not everyone likes to be stuck in traffic, assuming even that you can afford the gasoline.
Stem Cells, Cloning, Space Exploration, Quantam Computing, all these courses of study have the ability to alter views on creation itself. And most people are not willing to pay that price.
I am anxiously awaiting all of the above. Who cares abou
The biggest lie that Einstein told (Score:3, Insightful)
As long as America lives in dread of the millitary strength of its rivals, there will be millitary innovation.
I really don't buy the 'innovation is slowing' argument to begin with. Back in the early 1900s you could make a discovery in physics with a cloud chamber and a few resea
Yay for Truth! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yay for Truth! (Score:4, Interesting)
Anti-retroviral medication, designer drugs, endovascular stents, non invasive diagnostic imaging... Some fields are exploding exponentially. 20 years ago we had a very hazy idea of how virii worked. Thanks to HIV, not only do we know how they work but we've taken great steps towards creating drugs that block its replication - and these drugs can even be applied to other virii (Hepatitis B and lamivudine, for example).
This is something completely new - the ability to create drugs based solely on our knowledge of a biochemical pathway. Used to be trial and error - for some reason people who take "x" develop this, this and this, lets find out how "x" works, and try to apply it to some disease. Now it's the other way around - this disease is caused by "y", lets find or build a drug that binds to some receptor and prevents that.
Or how about me being able to use a spiral CT scanner and software to build a 3-D image of your entire digestive system and take a "virtual" tour of your intestine, to find that tumor? This is amazing and also completely new. Before, you got the knife. Now you just lie still on a table for 20 mins. I can inject you with some radioactive material and get a dynamic, moving image of your beating heart - in 3D, and SEE where all the blood is going (and where it's not). Wow.
I could go on and on, and this is just in ONE field. My point is, there ARE some pretty new and radical things out there, you just have to look in the right places.
Re:Yay for Truth! (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps in another 20 years, we'll all learn what the plural form of "virus" is.
But otherwise, you have some good points.
What You See is What You Get (Score:3, Insightful)
The fields of molecular biology and nanotechnology are two examples of new information opening up and being engineered. New fields of information, and, its implementation, can open up further fields and so on.
Perhaps one of the most immediate problems we face is a deluge of information that must be investigated and peer reviewed. Recently, a post grad, posted on /. that, in his opinion, there are too many Phds. I think there aren't enough Phds, and, further, we don't have the systems in place to gardner the results of the Phds now doing research.
P h d... is that pronounced fud?
Rate per unit of population??! (Score:3, Insightful)
But even if you are concerned about rate per unit of population, averaging over the entire planet is a stupid idea. The population increases are in the underdeveloped countries - who (pretty much by definition) aren't innovating much.
If you counted the rate of innovation per unit of population in DEVELOPED countries (whose populations are actually DECREASING) - then you'd see that the rate of innovation amongst those who are actually doing the innovating is still on a steep curve.
Maybe it's been said before in this article (Score:3, Insightful)
A: the apologists who say "innovations per capita don't matter, total number matters!". Give it up. People just don't think anymore. American Idol is probably on somewhere, stealing those innovative minds away.
B: people saying "all the easy things have been invented" The only easy day was yesterday, and they only seem easy because they were simple. Just wait, more "easy" things will be invented, and people will slap their foreheads and say "Why didn't I think of that!"
Singularity? (Score:2, Insightful)
Patent office should have been closed in 19th c. (Score:2)
This reminded me of the story about how supposedly somebody recommended that the Patent Office be closed in the 19th century because there was "nothing left to invent". I smell a UL, because while I was googling around some people said it was the US patent office and others said it was the Brittish counterpart. Snopes search came up dry.
Anyway, UL or not, this story reminds me of that.
"If it's in the computers, it's just some program. (Score:4, Interesting)
So, if we write code that can quickly automatically reconstruct 3D models from video footage, and put it into every computer, it'll be "just another computer program."
If we write really smart translation systems, and hook it up to speech-to-text and text-to-speech, it'll be "just another computer program."
Make any machine, but make it run inside a computer, and it'll be "just another computer program."
Just a minor innovation.
But I don't think we can afford to think of things that way.
These are really big innovations. Just taking an existing innovation, and just putting it into everybody's hands: should count for something.
But I think people are fooled, because they just see a geek and a computer. "Oh, nothing new. He's still sitting in his chair at his computer."
Science is going faster (Score:3, Insightful)
Technology depends on ecomonimcs. When the next greatest thing is in sight before the previous greatest thing is out of R&D, it forces technology to try to pre-empt or co-opt science. And still technology can't afford to herd up and pay off all the scientists.
"What we need is a Manhattan Project for dumping flash memory data directly to DVD in one flash." Figure the odds.
First, necessity is the mother of innovation (Score:2)
Also from my perspective a lot of innovation happens when a new method, technology, or understanding of nature opens up and broadens possibilities to do things better, easier or differently. Some good cases in point are the microcomputer, the internet, Linux and other FOSS tools (which opened the internet to development to us mere mortals), and micro-sized lasers.
Onc
$16 billion spent on Erectile Dysfunction research (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is a large proportion of research energy is focused on what will return the most in the marketplace instead of what will return the most to mankind. People lose sight of the big picture in their sprint to make the most money they can and people suffer because of it.
There has to be a balance between altruism and greed and we aren't anywhere close to the middle right now.
Re:$16 billion spent on Erectile Dysfunction resea (Score:3, Interesting)
Erectile dysfunction was a very important problem for mankind for tens of thousands of years. A tremendous amount of cumulative effort was spent with hundreds of different folk-remedies over the centuries -- several of them no-doubt fatal.
Then some drug company cured it a couple of years ago. The problem was more-or-less gone from that day forward.
And you're complaining about it and belittling the accomplishment.
Re:$16 billion spent on Erectile Dysfunction resea (Score:3, Interesting)
At this point, we can use satellite imaging/GPS, etc. to target the areas where it would be most effective. Using DDT was highly questionable back when it was first banned, but now it seems irresponsible to not use it in measured doses.
That's my position. Following the thread, it appears that your position is simple: We had a solution, which
Has this guy EVER researched nanotech? (Score:3, Interesting)
Pfft... talk about uninformed people. Better go to http://news.nanoapex.com/ [nanoapex.com] and get REAL information. (Yeah I know, Drexler is the father of nanotech - but Drexler's nanotech is NOT the nanotech that countries are investing billions in R&D. Too bad for him, tho)
Nanotechnology isn't just about molecular-level manufacturing. It's about nanoelectronics, nanomaterials for energy storage, new diagnostic machines with nanoscopic precision, analysis of biology in the nanoscale (a completely UNEXPLORED field so far), new materials for permanent artificial bones, filters which will separate the salt (and microorganisms) from seawater at the molecular level... and of course, your 6-million-dollars bionic eyes. Yes. All of this is possible.
Now, Want a real-world example of technology innovation?
Vehicle with the highest fuel efficiency sets new world record [physorg.com] . "PAC-Car has now achieved its goal: it finished the course at the Shell Eco-Marathon taking place on the Michelin test track at Ladoux, France, using only 1.07 grams of hydrogen."
Hey, if that's not innovation, I don't know what it is.
Now think of the advancements in say, molecular engineering (chemistry) that will be possible by the time we start comparing home computers by their teraflops.
So, innovation getting slower? Yeah, right.
From TFA (Score:4, Interesting)
"In an effort to find out, he plotted major innovations and scientific advances over time compared to world population, using the 7200 key innovations listed in a recently published book, The History of Science and Technology (Houghton Mifflin, 2004). The results surprised him."
Um..... let me just interject my interpretation: That book won't likely have the key innovation for the last, say decade or so, because they aren't widely known yet until they impact us. For instance, Einstein's first theories weren't widely considered important/innovative until years AFTER he developed them and us dumblings could finally tune into his wavelength and say "AHA! They are useful."
Or like Arpanet might have been viewed as a cute military playtoy in the 70's...... until it evolved into the internet.
"Rather than growing exponentially, or even keeping pace with population growth, they peaked in 1873 and have been declining ever since (see Graphs). Next, he examined the number of patents granted in the US from 1790 to the present. When he plotted the number of US patents granted per decade divided by the country's population, he found the graph peaked in 1915.
The period between 1873 and 1915 was certainly an innovative one. For instance, it included the major patent-producing years of America's greatest inventor, Thomas Edison (1847-1931). Edison patented more than 1000 inventions, including the incandescent bulb, electricity generation and distribution grids, movie cameras and the phonograph."
Do we really have to get into a discussion of why Patents are not the best measurement of progress?
The low hanging fruit has long since been plucked. (Score:2)
I blame (Score:2)
2. IP Lawyers (actually, all lawyers)
3. Software Patents
4. Patents on Business Methods
5. Patents on Math
Who wants to innovate when all of the above could get you, your children, and your children's children sued, or worse, jailed.
"Nothing left to invent" dupe (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a reflection of Population Growth... (Score:3, Insightful)
A similar statement could read: "the percentage of educated people in the world is decreasing". (or more directly: the percentage of people *capable* of making innovations is decreasing).
Population growth in poor and developing nations (and the word "developing" is unfortunately only used out of political correctness) is out of control and is at a dangerous tipping point where we could conceivably see mass famines (as in 'millions dead') any year where drought, blight or oppression get ugly.
Innovation is alive and well within the population that can innovate.
Poverty and illiteracy (as a percentage of population) are growing at a furious pace.
There's a real problem here (Score:5, Interesting)
The hard problems are not being cracked.
Exponential advancement was never very plausible (Score:3, Insightful)
Exponential advancement was always as unfounded an assumption as the assumption of linear advancement that it replaced. While the death of science has been proclaimed many times before, always extremely prematurely in retrospect, I believe that there is only so much nature is prepared to give us, and as we approach this natural limit we're making fewer and fewer revolutionary discoveries and doing more and more refinement, and as the refinement progresses, as with any refinement process, apparent progress slows as you near an ideal state.
Simple example: there is a really, really good chance that space travel will always be slower than light with no cheats like wormholes ever found, no matter how much we advance, even if we became infinitely advanced, because the laws of physics probably do not permit FTL travel and apparent loopholes may prove completely unusable for anything above the subatomic particle scale.
I am deeply, deeply skeptical of the promise of nanotech. Our capacity to engineer de novo really interesting and effective enzymes (i.e., examples of real nanomachines) is dismal, we're still working on understanding how natural ones work and making our first crude protein designs, and "nanotech" as we usually think of it, little molecule scale versions of machines we're more familiar with, is IMO somewhat chemically ludicrous. Although some enzymes like ATPase actually look and act soemthing like those kinds of ideas and are super nifty. Still, when we get good at real nanotech, I think the reality is going to cut our fantasies down to scale despite being wicked cool.
I recall from reading Analog magazines in the 80s :) that it once seemed very fashionable to assume an exponential rate of growth in human technological enlightenment. Authors and commentators self-conciously talked about the previous assumption of linear progress (which you can see in older science fiction in which centuries are posited for what in hindsight are laughably modest achievements). This led to some predictions for our own time which have not been borne out - where is my flying car, godammit? :)
I thought about it a bit and came up with the hypothesis of an S-shaped curve as the function of human progress, and I believe observation has borne and will bear it out. I was inspired by titrations, which I think progress most resembles. At early stages of the curve, of course, advance is very slow because you need technological advances to make technological advances, it's self-promoting. At some point as you come close to an equivalence point, advance is extremely rapid. But at that point you start to rapidly reach the limits imposed by nature and progress levels off into more and more trivial refinement, but never entirely disappears. It's not exactly analogous but I think the resemblance will prove striking.
Progress looked linear from the point of view of the first plateau, just like the increase in pH before the equivalence point might seem linear in a base titration. Progress of course looks exponential when you are closely approaching the equivalence point. This is still an illusion.
Certain technologies, if they are truly available and do not turn out to be beyond the realm of technical possibility, like uploading ourselves into computers (I think this is easier said than done, because I think the human self only possesses the illusion of cohesiveness to itself, but is not actually unitary or cohesive - I wonder if a human mind is really readable to anything but itself), or immortality, could radically transform our very nature and hence change everything. But barring that, I think the highest goal of our species should be to get through the equivalence point to the new plateau alive and basically ourselves, and we need to hope to hell that that plateau includes, for example, truly sustainable sources of energy.
So, um, summary of long winded spiel, exponential progress = bullshit. No doubt in my mind that there is a limit to what technolog
The Bard said it best. (Score:4, Insightful)
Whenever I hear someone talking about the death or decay of technological advancement, "evidence" is presented that the really important stuff happened X yrs ago (where X >= 50). A trully revolutionary discovery is rarely seen for what it is until years later when people have had time to investigate and digest the implications. Even when it is immediately acknowlaged, (eg: Watson & Crick), it takes decades/centuries, to work out the full implications and utility of such a discovery. Maxwell's equations were not particularly "useful" until ~80yrs later when Edison created his Electiric light company and begrudgingly hired a mathemetitian or two. My generation (baby boomer's) were the first to really feel the importance of Darwin on our society and it may yet take another 150yrs to be fully absorbed into our collective phyche.
There are also alot of people in this thread complaining that IP laws are killing innovation. IP laws are killing the profit to be made by a "small shop" creating innovative gadgets. IP laws cannot stop people such as Eienstien, Maxwell, Turing, etc, finding fundemental insights that in turn drive the technological innovations that corporations so desperately want to profit from. There is however a good argument that when IP laws adversely affect communication between individuals and groups then technological progress will naturally slow down.
Einstien's equations have been tested to death but yet there is still something "wrong" with our understanding of gravity (on a large scale, "it just don't add up!"). I don't have a crystal ball but I assume in another 50-100 yrs, something like string theory, (at the moment only "useful" as a head scratching excersice), will be seen as having a profound influence. It will be used as evidence by unimaginitive writters to show that physics is dead, they will be sure to point to Godel, Turing and [insert your favorite genius here] as proof that most of the really important stuff has already been discovered.
Population is a very deceptive measure (Score:3, Insightful)
1) There are over 6 billion people on earth right now. In fact, most of the people who have EVER lived are alive right now.
2) Most of these people live in 3rd world ratholes where "innovation" is limited to finding ways of keeping a roof over your head and food in your belly. In some cases you can add finding ways of avoiding the local warlord's henchmen.
Measuring how much innovation there is per billion population is nonsensical because most of those people never have the opportunity to contribute anything. As far as innovation is concerned they don't even exist.
If he wants to attempt to model the relationship between population and innovation, he needs to limit the population in his model to that of developed nations with strong educational systems. If he ever gets around to doing this, I already know what his reaction is going to be:
"Doh!!!"
Lee
Re:Diminishing Returns (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Diminishing Returns (Score:5, Interesting)
But today, the easy inventions are over with. The majority of the things some general jack-of-all-trades in his garage could invent have been invented. Even the personal computer, invented in a garage, has already been invented.
If you want to make some great discovery today, you're not going ot be doing it in your garage or while going about your business. You're going to be doing it in relation to funded research, government grants, a decade in college and many degrees into it. So, yes, of course innovation is "slowing down". Because you spend so much of your life just "catching up" to the knowledge that is now needed that you're a geezer by the time you've got enough behind you to start "inventing" or "discovering". Discoveries aren't cheap. You can't just stare at the sky a few minutes every night to sketch solar flares in your log book to document the behavior of the sun. You're going to need a billion dollar facility with computers, staff, and a big ass telescope.
So yes, perhaps innovation seems to be stagnating in general - but that's largely because the entry-point for great discoveries and innovation is so high now.
Re:Diminishing Returns (Score:2)
'nuff said.
Re:Diminishing Returns (Score:5, Insightful)
Not necessarily. This kind of thinking assumes that there is a fixed pool of things just waiting to be discovered, and it is getting closer to being exhausted. I believe quite the contrary; there's a nice quote by someone I forgot, that "the greater the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder". For example, the invention of the transistor opened up possibilities for a whole industry of new inventions.
As a scientist, I believe there will always be new discoveries in science, that the supposed pool of knowledge is infinite. Therefore there's an infinity of possibilities for practical inventions as well, especially when we consider that the science in a certain field usually precedes engineering.
In fact, I think the rate of innovation is getting higher, but there's so much of it going on that it's impossible to pinpoint single, major inventions like it was a hundred years ago. Also, many significant inventions are results of many people with many smaller inventions working together, such as the Internet. In those cases it's hard to pin down even what the invention actually is.
Inventions and discoveries are becoming an increasingly important part of our lives, since we are past the struggles of basic survival. Thus it's naturally less noticeable.
Re:Diminishing Returns (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Diminishing Returns (Score:2, Insightful)
Invention = (Discovery + Innovation) Therefore to more we discover the more we can innovate and invent.
Re:Diminishing Returns (Score:2)
What do you get when you subtract one from infinity?
Re:Diminishing Returns (Score:5, Interesting)
How about this: the ratio of revolutionary innovation to evolutionary innovation is decreasing.
Re:Diminishing Returns (Score:3, Insightful)
No More Low Hanging Fruit (Score:5, Interesting)
Pick up a textbook about digital signal processing or communication theory. The concepts are straightforward to understand because they involve linear systems. When systems are not linear, we try to linearize them because linear systems are more easily grasped by the human mind than non-linear systems.
We have already picked off all the fruits of linear systems. The next step, nonlinear systems, is a tad more difficult. So, innovation will slow.
I presume that other endeavors outside of signal processing face a similar situation.
As a last example, consider physics. Newtonian physics was the low-hanging fruit. We can see its application in almost everything from cars to buildings to aeroplanes. Beyond Newtonian physics is a very difficult, non-intuitive step: quantum physics.
As integrated circuits become so small that quantum effects appear, humankind will face a brick wall, and innovation will slow to a crawl. Of course, there will be bright ideas. Science-fiction writers also have brilliant ideas, but implementing them will not be feasible.
In order for technology to be developed efficiently, it must be framed in a way that is intuitive to the mind. This intuition gives brilliant people a way to reason about a problem and to find a neat solution. Linear systems and newtonian physics are intuitive and fit well within the mental framework of the human mind. Nonlinear systems and quantum physics are quite the opposite.
Re:End of Days. (Score:2)