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.
I suspect there is something wrong with how you were educated by "the system," but it's not what you think.
“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.
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.
Web applications don't seem trivial -- they are trivial. Scaling them means being creative, but don't confuse that with true innovation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
“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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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."
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.
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...)
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).
Anyway, thanks for your comment and pointing me to MIT Tech Review.
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.
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.
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.
For example, the winner of the MIT 100K contest develops sanitation devices for third-world countries. Read more over here: http://bostinnovation.com/2011/05/11/sanergy-wins-mit-100k-b...
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...
Also, why America? How is it different in other countries? Genuinely curious.
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.
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.
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.
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.
internet = tubes
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
