Does innovation arc toward decadence?

http://www.roughtype.com/?p=5452

by razorburn • 12 years ago

31 9 12 years ago

kodis• 12 years ago

Another, simpler explanation for a slowdown in innovation is that the innovators have harvested all of the low-hanging fruit.

heurist• 12 years ago

I doubt that. A lot of "low-hanging fruit" probably wasn't low-hanging when initially harvested.

lerchmo• 12 years ago

Yeah they already invented the Wheel AND the lever. Pretty much nothing left to invent.

tomjen3• 12 years ago

Slowdown? It seems to me that innovation has _exploded_ recently (say the last 4-8 years) - soft AI is suddenly everywhere, new wearables are everywhere and can do things that seem like magic to me, philips put a wifi reciever in a lightbulb and I can talk to my phone (I am afraid of cursing at my computer, one of these days it is going to talk back).

On the not so electronic front serious steps are being made to put a colony on MARS, new innovations in medicine is being made, etc.

onnoonno• 11 years ago

Arguably, that all is breadth, not depth.

Futurebot• 12 years ago

This is the core of Tyler Cowen's "Average Is Over." I liked the articles premise, but I think Occam would lean towards Cowen's thesis as being correct. The ability to truly innovate (on the _level_ of steam engines and electricity, which is what we're talking about) now requires a lot more time and effort. We've also (since the 1980s) become a short-termist culture (transparency, accountability, and demands for ROI do, in fact, have a downside) which has caused us to pull back on R&D (especially using public money for moonshots.) The best we can hope for now is that our new Bell Labs-equivalents (Google, Musk and Co., even Facebook) continue to subsidize innovation R&D that does not guarantee a return, but would have immense effects if they did (Calico, autonomous cars, etc.)

wanda• 12 years ago

  Does innovation arc towards decadence

Of course it does. Decadence is sort of a human manifestation of entropy.

0xdeadbeefbabe• 12 years ago

Neal Stephenson[0] implies some innovators can't make good use of the information at their fingertips, a likely explanation for the information age.

[0] http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/fall2011/innovation-starv...

wanderingstan• 12 years ago

I wrote a post some years ago about why screens have won over rockets. http://wanderingstan.com/2010-07-27/screens-not-rockets-medi...)

Why are we now more concerned with melding media than melding matter.

I agree with the author that it's about values; now that survival, food, shelter, etc are cheaply met, our reward system has the luxury of indulging in TV watching, candy crush, etc.

Does innovation arc toward decadence?

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