I found this quote interesting: "There are a decent number of people working on more efficient jet engines, but not very many civilians working on replacing the jet engine with something new."<p>It's not really the problem that there aren't very many people working on replacing jet engines. The issue is that the problem domain is full of physical limits. Ask yourself: why are we still using quicksort now, half a century after it was developed? Well, because theory tells us that any sorting algorithm based on binary comparisons is going to require at least O(n log(n)) such comparisons, and that is going to remain the case no matter how much engineering effort you throw at the problem. All you can really do when it comes to sorting algorithms is improve on the constant factors and take advantage of special cases (radix sort for small integer items, etc).<p>Software engineers don't usually have to think in terms of theoretical limits. But when I was in engineering school, as an aerospace major, every course began with: these are the theoretical limits in this particular area--all you can do is approach them more closely. A Brayton cycle has a certain efficiency at a given pressure ratio and an airfoil has a certain maximum lift-curve slope and there is nothing you can do about it. Improvements are in "hard engineering"--new materials that can withstand higher temperatures and pressures to eke out slightly more efficiency, etc. You're already seeing this in semiconductor manufacturing. As you run into the limits of lithography with ever-smaller wavelengths of light, semiconductor fabrication plants get exponentially more expensive to build.<p>These physical limits are what give the traditional engineering fields the shape of their "innovation curve." Much more happened in aerospace engineering from 1930 to 1960 than has (and will) happen from 1960 to 2020. The long-hanging fruit is gone, and all that's left is hard engineering.<p>And of course, this all plays into the "get rich quick" issue the author brings up. If you had a billion dollars lying around, where would you invest that money? A jet engine that's 0.5% more efficient? If you had $100 billion, would you spend it making an alternative to jet engines entirely (in an industry where people will fly on truly shitty airlines just to save $5 on a ticket)?
> We were once great at innovating in the physical world...But recently, software (and mostly Internet software) has been the focus of innovation, and its importance is probably still underestimated—there are compounding effects to how it’s changing the world that we’re only now beginning to see...But innovation in the physical world (besides phones and computers) over the same time period has been less impressive.<p>Actually, I would argue that the <i>opposite</i> is true. Software hasn't really had any important innovations (using David Wheeler's definition, which is from a CS/EE perspective, and which is linked to every couple of months on HN[1]). The software required to run a smartphone isn't significantly different than the software needed to run a similar application on a desktop. On the other hand, the hardware on a smartphone now and a desktop from the 90s is different. We take hardware advances like reliable capacitive touchscreens and maybe this storage advance linked to on HN today [2], and Moore's "Law" for granted, but "putting more transistors in a circuit" and increased hardware capabilities were the bottleneck to producing today's technology, not new software techniques.<p>The reason that people associate software with innovation is because it has become the latest tech buzzword. When a word is overused in this manner, it is hard to have a conversation about it because the definition has been degraded to include pretty much anything. The granting of patents to trivial software ideas gives companies a claim to innovation that they do not deserve.<p>Rayiner's comment on this thread:<p>> The long-hanging fruit is gone, and all that's left is hard engineering.<p>will soon be true for computer hardware, and eventually "Moore's Law" will be broken. When software does not become significantly faster each release cycle, it will be more apparent that hardware is responsible for today's advances as opposed to software.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5911347" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5911347</a>
"It’s harder to raise money for software companies working on uncertain, long-term, high-reward projects (like AI)."<p>That's because "AI" doesn't exist.<p>Are there people working on computer vision? Yes.<p>Are there people working on speech recognition? Yes.<p>Are there people working on robotics? Yes.<p>Are there people working on computers that answer questions? Yes.<p>Plus far too many applications of "data mining", "big data", "machine learning" to mention here.<p>Lots of people making lots of money on all of these things (or at least starting companies to try). But I guess none of those things are "AI".
I did my undergraduate in Engineering Physics then went on to do a PhD in Materials Science. After a couple years of graduate coursework and research and passing exams, it was time to pick a dissertation topic. We then had to defend it before our committee and get their approval.<p>Well, I failed my first attempt (you were allowed 2). The reason the committee gave me for not passing was that my topic of choice was not a "significant improvement of basic science". This perplexed me. My committee was made up of members who were all 60+ years in age and had been the founding fathers of metallurgy. Collectively, they invented a <i>completely new field</i> called opto-electronics. When they gave me that response, I thought to myself, how the fuck do they expect me to improve basic science?!<p>It turns out the solution was much more nuanced. In the months that followed, my advisor would have thought experiments with me. He essentially helped me brainstorm problems that needed solving, but he always started our sessions with the question, "what is something that you always wanted to exist, but doesn't? What are you most curious about?" He then gave me the keys to his shop and told me to "tinker around". Take apart his vacuum tubes. Screw around with his argon laser and sputtering machine.<p>Innovation in the physical world comes from the same curious people that are inventing fun software programs. But we absolutely need to cultivate it, because that is what is dying. Put a workbench in every home, make it easier for people to take apart things they buy, encourage people to be creative without fear of punishment.
An often overlooked point is that "Getting rich quick" is often portrayed as a crass and shallow pursuit, whereas in reality in the US, it translates into:<p>1. Good healthcare.
2. Freedom to live in a peaceful safe neighborhood where you can have a family.
3. A reasonable education for one's children.
4. Ability to choose what projects to work on.<p>Why is anyone surprised that these are the priorities of entrepreneurs, when they correlate directly with basic human needs - safety, shelter ability to reproduce and freedom of choice. Few people will focus on the self-actualization of a truly world changing project until they have obtained some security for themselves and their families.<p>Jobs, Musk, Gates, Thiel, Google.org etc. are all good examples of this. (I.e. they got rich first, then they launched ambitious projects)
I actually think this is a much longer term thing, and Wall Street is to blame. Back in what most would consider the heyday of American innovation (Say, roughly 19th century thru the late 1950s), most large corporations were private. Leaders with vision could undertake long term plans and actually pull them off, without the obsession over quarterly earnings.<p>Would we ever have a company like Boeing or Douglas Aircraft or Bell Telephone (Who financed Bell Labs for years) or Xerox today, with the pressure to go public and cash in, rather than building a long-term viable business?<p>One of the few counter-examples would be Apple under Steve Jobs, but such cases are few and far between.
Regarding super-sonic flight in particular. IIRC, the main reason for Concorde service being discontinued was the lack of people willing to pay for it. Further, when door-to-door times are extended by excessive security and waiting at the airport it doesn't really matter if you've cut your in-air time in half.<p>I'd be really excited if someone airline offered pilotless aircraft. I think this is technically feasible now. I know that we are currently capable of landing planes autonomously currently. Plus this would reduce door-to-door time as well since you'd reduce the need for long security lines. After all, if there's no cockpit to hijack what is the use of screening for potential hijackers?
I think the fact that we are talking about "innovation" so much is a sign of an excessive degree of self-awareness. People used to be at peace with having a specific interest and true expertise and were not thinking "okay, I'm smart so let me 'disrupt' a market and shake things up." Many were okay with simply being a useful, necessary and perhaps not-so-widely celebrated part of a larger whole. Larger wholes like NASA, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, IBM, Bell, Digital Equipment and others that gave rise to this much lauded period of innovation (the mechanics of which the author doesn't entirely seem to understand). It also goes without saying that the larger players in academia were expanding in to engineering in a much more serious way due to Cold War competition.<p>Sure, there were exceptions to the theory of leviathan organizations of specialists. Intel is an exception, in that it was a start up. But it was a start up founded by people with the understanding of how a larger research entity would work (two of the main founders were established engineers at Fairchild). Talking about this sort of thing in the context of modern start-up culture, to be honest, is flippant and cheeky. Maybe "idea guys", business journalists, and a lot of modern hackers in general just need to stop thinking innovation as some substance you can bottle and beating us over the heads with said bottle until the word loses all meaning. The innovators who created the sophistication of the modern transportation and energy infrastructure we now enjoy, not to mention the fundamentals of computing, were a lot humbler than the baby boomer titans of technology and probably a lot of us out there, too.
It's weird that a few people are challenging short-term thinking, and they're all friends with each other (Thiel, Musk).<p>Also, it's weird how short-term thinking has infected the government. Nobody's forcing them to meet a quarterly P&L, you'd figure that would give them more freedom.
The author has a romantic notion of technical progress. That's fine, but I'd argue that today's innovations have as much relevance as yesterday's, even though they lack the sex appeal.<p>And as others have pointed out, in a lot of the well-known examples, we've reached certain limits that make technological progress very expensive.<p>For example, probably the primary reason we don't have better airplane engines is because exceeding the speed of sound is a very noisy proposition.<p>I have an excellent book on the B-70 bomber, which in my opinion is the most beautiful airplane ever designed. And among the reasons it was not adopted is that sonic booms over populated areas piss people off. And flying higher makes the problem (counter-intuitively) worse.<p>But the main reason the B-70 was shelved was the ICBM.<p>And that forms my next point. The internet itself has (or should have) made some reasons for travelling pointless. And it works at a much higher velocity -- a nearly the speed of light.<p>So in a way the author seems to pine for a "faster horse" instead of a car.
Another reason why / short term & software / is the currently the sweet spot is because it allows for short feedback cycles. A startup is a company that searches for a viable business model -- a product-market fit. When you create web based applications you can gather data, A/B test and do a lot of stuff that allows you to make <i>measurable progress</i> in the right direction.<p>When working in hardware or when working on long term software projects like AI you're in a vacuum. And even smart people are not going to do very well if they can't see the consequences of the decisions they make.<p>So long term projects take more people, more resources, are typically much harder problems and on top of that you won't be able to collect data early on to adjust course if needed. So the risk-adjusted return on an ambitious long-term startup is going to be horrendous compared to the low-hanging fruit most web startups go for. So investors avoid the big and ambitious ideas, and I can't blame them.
Great post. If you liked this I also suggest taking a look at Peter Thiel's CS183 lectures at Stanford. Blake Masters did a great job taking notes: <a href="http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup" rel="nofollow">http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup</a><p>In particular, take a look at the Class 15 one - <a href="http://blakemasters.com/post/24122680868/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-15-notes-essay" rel="nofollow">http://blakemasters.com/post/24122680868/peter-thiels-cs183-...</a>
"We haven’t had a really capital-intensive war in a long time, and while that’s obviously great, I am always astonished when I read about how much real innovation has involved the military or national security—it’s hard to get effectively unlimited budgets and focus any other way."<p>This "fact" bothers me. War causes such huge devastation, and yet the focus of this article is on innovation for its own sake. If you are going to write about the benefits of war, you should at least mention its cost.
I think many people often mistake innovation from invention.<p><i>innovating: (v) Make changes in something established, esp. by introducing new methods, ideas, or products.</i><p><i>inventing: (v) Create or design (something that has not existed before); be the originator of.</i><p>Apple is probably the most innovative company, in that they take existing technology and continually refine it into product. Which is crucial because nobody wants their phone to be a lab prototype.<p>On the other end, most invention happens in academia. You need a lot of flexibility and low expectations of commercialization in order to really try dramatically new things.<p>The magic companies of the last century are the ones who could do both, allowing people to have side projects that don't immediately show commercial promise. Bell Labs was a lot like this. So was PARC. And Google to some degree.<p>I think a lot of Silicon Valley startups now have the worst of both worlds. They feel pressure to monetize and sell for millions, so their creativity is limited and they just barely innovate. They're not content to play, or work on something just because they like it and find it interesting. We hold up Elon Musk as a great entrepreneur, but he started building rockets because he wanted them to exist, not because he wanted to make money. [1]<p>It takes a different sort of thinking to come up with SpaceX than it does to build Exec or Instacart. A different level of grit and disregard for fortune. It's unfortunately rare to find that spirit matched with incredible focus and ability to execute and sell. And even more unlikely that it gets funded. (There's a reason Elon started both Tesla and SpaceX with his own cash.)<p>I'm certainly not saying that one should disregard the economics of running a company. But you don't make radical changes in the world when your ideas start from them. [2]<p>Incidentally, I've actually looked into building ramjet aircraft. (Or scramjet, because why wouldn't you go supersonic?) It's physically possible, [3] but requires a breakthrough in energy storage and composites on the order of the transistor.<p>I've always thought there are two places in the world with huge market failures: developing world healthcare, and future-tech. In many ways, philanthropy such as the Gates Foundation helps mitigate the first, but I've yet to see anything other than war with a technologically-equal enemy push forward the second. Google is showing some promise which is exciting, but we probably shouldn't have all of our future hopes wrapped up in a single giant online advertising company.<p>I think we should create a West Coast "Institue for Advanced Study" in the middle of the desert with a few million dollars and a bunch of dreamers who want to get their hands dirty and try ideas that everyone else thinks are crazy. People do amazing things when nobody is looking over their shoulder.<p>[1] In fact, it seems he had to negotiate like hell to wrap a business model around that company, and got incredibly lucky that Shuttle was retired. You could also argue that SpaceX is still innovation but I would argue that the dramatic cost savings and reusability make it count as invention.<p>[2] Maybe unless you're a brilliant economist or politician, but how that world works is a mystery to me.<p>[3] Check out the WaveRider project. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WaveRider" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WaveRider</a>
The beauty of the internet is that it was this unthinkably big project that was eventually thrown into the laps of the public. In my view this is government at its best: building infrastructure that lays the groundwork for huge wealth creation.<p>The only opportunity I can think of right now that might be similar in its capacity to fuel wealth creation as much as the internet has is perhaps a space elevator. I'm not sure how exactly it would be used, but similarly, nobody really knew how ARPANET would end up being used either.<p>I, like millions of engineers, would love to work in "truly innovative" industries beyond just software. However, innovation needs infrastructure to build upon. The amount of resources needed to work on the problems that Elon Musk takes on are prohibitive for the vast majority of entrepreneurs, investors, and engineers.
Profit. It's far easier to cut costs, reduce taxes, and expand existing products/services into new markets than it is to conduct applied research and commercialize new products.
The real hard part is that so many of us grew up on a: Moore's Law, and b: science fiction. We want to believe Moore's Law applies to everything, because it fits the mythos and the observed behavior of the world we grew up in.<p>Sadly, nothing but computers are subject to Moore's Law. And even there, it'll run out sooner or later.
I'm rather surprised this hasn't already been mentioned, but if you want to read more on this thread of thought written by an economist, check out the ebook, "The Great Stagnation" by Tyler Cowen. Alternatively, watch his Tedx talk.
Existing model of financing long-term game-changing next-big-thing companies via equity dilution with angel/venture financing is less optimal from the founders' perspective than pursuing another feature start-up.<p>More risk, less equity, success is uncertain, reward far away in the future - why bother with making world better?<p>My 2 cents :-)<p>P.S.: a better model might be if the founder pursuing next-big-thing commits to certain ROI for investors (2-3-5 times on capital), thus increasing this founder's potential upside and motivation to go the hard way. Critique and suggestions are welcome.
Capitalism tends to monopolies, monopolies tends to sustain its power and its dominance so innovation is a threat to their dominance and developed markets..
Also when a company or group of people innovate the dominant dinosaur buys it and shut it down..<p>On the other side, those companies put large sums of money to "innovate" on the markets they already dominate, or in research to make them better in what they already do.. (so it doesnt really get into a innovation cicle)
Some thoughts on this:<p>1. Surprising to see an article on innovation that mentions Kickstarter only as a footnote. One of the reasons we lack innovation is because we've let one group of people, big name venture capital investors, to decide by themselves what's good and what isn't. It's important to note that the modern "VC" investment model had very little to do with the major innovations of the 20th century. Some of our greatest inventions came from government laboratories, people working on their own without organized investment and corporations who acted like VCs by internally funding good ideas. Modern VCs only appeared around the 80s to give us derivative works that succeeded by added branding to existing ideas. The beauty of Kickstarter et al is that we have a much larger pool of people to tell us what's good or bad, but it does no good if we keep looking down on crowdfunding as venture capital's weaker sibling. We need to focus more on "how much good do they do" than on "how much money did they raise"<p>2. Another reason we don't have much innovation is because "Inventor" is no longer a job title. Back in the days of (my hero) Thomas Edison you didn't need a VC firm or a trendy office to justify your intentions to make something new. You just did it, with no particular funding or social organization. People decided to dedicate their lives to the pursuit of making new and original things. Now it's so important to be a part of the "startup community", important to have social validation from big name vcs, important to never say no to any amount of money. Until people can declare themselves to be Inventors without all of the other trappings, we shouldn't expect unbounded innovation from them.<p>3. This line struck me "...one guy saying that they were going to do these crazy things like ship a phone with no keyboard running a real OS and require everyone to buy a data plan."<p>Another reason we don't innovate any more is because minor changes to an existing product now count as the the most significant innovations of our time. I understand that we need heroes and Steve Jobs is one of them. And a lot of people like the iphone. But Thomas Edison invented recorded sound. Tesla harnessed electricity and energy beams. Freaking Ben Franklin invented the concept of a lending library. And the best our generation has is something about a phone OS and data plan?<p>We can't expect the next generation to be true innovators when we direct all of our hero worship at people who make small improvements to existing ideas. Yes, this may mean one of your heroes too. But if we can't even make the sacrifice of focusing on those who actually do invent new things, how can we be expected to be so creative ourselves?<p>Finally, innovation isn't completely dead. People are working on fusion reactors, warp drives and brain interfaces. Their efforts just don't draw as much attention of big VC investments or the work of big name entrepreneurs. The biggest things that innovation is lacking are things that our society can provide.
This post is missing the forest for the trees.<p>Hard problems are hard. Easy problems are easy. In a world where autonomy can only be purchased by wealth, any rational actor will spend his/her time optimizing the acquisition of wealth by solving easy problems as quickly as possible. This will then allow him/her the necessary autonomy to tackle hard problems.<p>This applies to all capital intensive endeavors of creation: science, film, software, hardware, etc. Even the least capital intensive endeavors such as pure mathematics require autonomy in the form of a guarantee of food, shelter, and healthcare to be viable in the long term.<p>As such, the solution is simple: Increase autonomy. But do we increase autonomy for everyone, or pick and choose winners?<p>The first strategy is basic income, and the second strategy is venture capital. Those involved in venture capital are now seeing the weaknesses in their own system, wherein picking and choosing winners will skew heavily towards the best signalers (i.e. marketers), rather than the most qualified/talented.<p>If VCs want to hedge their bets, they can put their lobbying money where their mouths are, and support basic income. This allows savants who are unable to market themselves the required freedom to work on their ideas with a tiny but guaranteed degree of autonomy. It is the equivalent of buying a Vangaurd index fund instead of picking and choosing stocks for a portfolio.<p>The winning strategy is to do both simultaneously.
The biggest issue I've got with this is at the beginning many goalposts are set and our lack of performance is then paraded out without any regard to how silly they are.<p>The author bemoans that we haven't done better than the jet engine, but honestly we're probably as far along the mechanical design of that problem domain as possible. The fact is, in very many fields, fuck, we've hit them to death. Concrete is pretty well understood, as is analog electronics. Some fields are simple innovated-out, and all that's left is making them more efficient or cheaper or simply more widely deployed.<p>(This fact, incidentally, is why I ended up doing computer stuff instead of being a mechanical engineer.)
Well, sama, I'm glad to hear that you feel this way, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you do about it.<p>I mean, I never used Loopt, so maybe I'm missing something but it sure looks like an example of what you're criticizing (though better than anything I've done). But that's okay, Zip2 wasn't that huge of a contribution to the world either. The impressive bit is what Musk did after Zip2.<p>So good luck! You're in a better position than most, to do more than talk!