Waiting for the lights to go out by citizen

For the same reason there's only one movie like Serenity, while mindless comedies and garbage like Sith abound: Assured profitability is the main thing in sight. Innovation does not guarrantee this, improvement in proven products with a niche does.
Computer control of the workforce will also advance computer technology without necessitating innovation.

Chrisisall

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Sunday, November 13, 2005 9:43 AM

Oh innovation isn't dead, it's just relocating.

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Sunday, November 13, 2005 9:59 AM

EMBERS

Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:

Personally I believe advancement of technology is increasing, while innovation is dropping.
Do you agree, why do you think this is?

I think you're right...but even the technology is frequently held back,
by powerful corporations that stifle competition
or the laws of many countries which restrict experimentation...

would we have flying cars by now if the car manufacturers & oil companies didn't discourage non fossil fuels?
And if the government wasn't quite so careful about 'air space'...(for public safety)

it does seem like it is harder to get new ideas a chance to develop

personally I've always wanted that flying car.

**********************************************
watch the R. Tam Session vids: http://www.hittarivertam.nu/
and buy the 'Serenity' comics published by Dark Horse,
and have you joined the Browncoats yet?
http://browncoats.serenitymovie.com/serenity/?fuseaction=tools.invlink
&u=embers&linkID=36

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Sunday, November 13, 2005 11:44 AM

Dreamtrove:
What do you mean?

Everyone else:
Innovation is the unknown. The unknown is bad for business, so I think Capitalism has a share in the responsibility here.
Companies know that X will make them money so they flog X to death and refine it to the point of stupidity, but Y they don't know about, so Y is risky, it may cost them so they leave it alone...

Edit: Edited for exceptionally poor grammar and spelling, what, I've had my Sunday beer, leave me alone

More insane ramblings by the people who brought you Beeeer Milkshakes!

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Sunday, November 13, 2005 11:53 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:

Innovation is the unknown. The unknown is bad for buissness, so I think Capitalism is has a share in the responcibility here.
Companies know that X will make them money so the flog X to death and refine it to the point of stupidity, but Y they don't know about, so Y is risky, it may cost them so they leave it alone...

Citizen, you're copying what I said, except, well, you said it more better than I.

Chrisisall, mumbling incoherently...

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Sunday, November 13, 2005 11:59 AM

Yep, I guess we agree here

More insane ramblings by the people who brought you Beeeer Milkshakes!

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Sunday, November 13, 2005 12:06 PM

Innovation is accellerating to new dazzling heights, but in different areas.

No one is out there craving for new types of consumer goods and household conveniences. The sci-fi vision that the kitchen debate of the 60s would perpetuate into the future to the robo-household is just not the direction innovation took.

The new levels are in advancement within whole new fields with no personal appliance application. The few that pop up, like iPod, are irrellevent, but clearly, this is what's pictured, so this person is in the kitchen debate mindset.

Here's where innovation is now:

1. Programming. Internet and office automation, etc.

2. Biotech. Bear in mind that the medical advances of the last couple of decades exceed all of history that come before them.\

3. New ways to do old things. Recently there have been dozens of advancements in alternative fuel cars, non-fatal alternatives to guns, etc. The typical even most advanced M16s and AK47s are really not that different in mechanism to the blunderbus, but things are definitely changing.

4. Transportation, new types of trains, planes, spaceships.

5. Other countries, particularly Japan, Korea, are taking the lead. Only when product come to market from those may the west even know they exist. I was once in the Seiko Inc. lab, and the number of products they had under construction there that had not yet even been leaked to the western press.

So, it may look like innovation is dead, but it's not. Mainstream America is dying, and quickly. But the spirit lives on. I mean seriously, what would you expect from a society that thinks the 21st century is a time to start rolling back evolution for creationisms and the mad rantings of a lunatic in 14th century BC.

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Sunday, November 13, 2005 1:17 PM

I'm not sure Dreamtrove.
Computers haven't seen a major innovation since the x80 IBM produced in 1980, and the basic core design hasn't changed since Charles Babbage. Programming hasn't changed since the introduction of the Object Oriented Paradigm with C++ in the 80's either.

Similarly all the technologies of the internet have been around since the 60's, nothing new there.

Planes, trains spaceships, again, nothing new, just refinement of old tech.

Quote:
Originally posted by Dreamtrove:
I mean seriously, what would you expect from a society that thinks the 21st century is a time to start rolling back evolution for creationisms and the mad rantings of a lunatic in 14th century BC.

I have to agree with you there

More insane ramblings by the people who brought you Beeeer Milkshakes!

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Sunday, November 13, 2005 1:50 PM

THATWEIRDGIRL

mmhmm.

We do seem to be stuck. Refinement and specialization seem to be the thing to do these days. Innovation went out with the craft-matic adjustable bed...

www.thatweirdgirl.com
---
"...turn right at the corner then skip two blocks...no, SKIP, the hopping-like thing kids do...Why? Why not?"

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Sunday, November 13, 2005 2:03 PM

FLETCH2

There are lots of developments just very few that have consumer application. Autonomous robots are being developed, but for space exploration not "rosie the maid" biotech will be big, nanotech could be depending on how it's managed.

The biggest problem is that the cost of developing new things went up. The Wright brothers built the first plane in a bicycle factory for around $20,000 in modern money, there is no way you could build a spacecraft for that today. The aircraft industry in the US between the wars was often small time small scale. Scaled Composites is probably the interlectual grandson of Douglas aviation but it needed Paul Allen's Microsoft Billions to back it.

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Sunday, November 13, 2005 2:13 PM

TWG:
Trust you to bring beds into this

Lowering the tone citizenisall
also, imitating the greats, citizenisall...

More insane ramblings by the people who brought you Beeeer Milkshakes!

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Sunday, November 13, 2005 6:23 PM

Citizen,

By the same argument, the wheel hasn't changed since Og the Caveman, so there's been no evolution of transportation.

The chip is done. The languages are done. There is no need to change them. But every program written is an innovation.

Fletch,

Agreed. I'm glad someone brought up Burt Rutan. That's who I meant when I said spaceships.

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Monday, November 14, 2005 2:03 AM

FLETCH2

I thought about it a little more and I think it needs to be pointed out that what we are talking about is "enabling technology" technologies that apart from being inventions in their own right fundementally change the technological base that follows. I think part of the problem today is that enabling technologies offten just let you do something better even though the basis on which they work is different.

Look at steam engines. You use fuel to boil water and use the steam produced to drive a piston to make mechanical power. That was an enabling invention, it made locomotives mechanical diggers, steam cranes, and steamships happen. In concert with the dynamo it gave us electric power and made "industrial age V1.0" possible. Much later someone had the bright idea of burning the fuel directly in the cylinder to make power and the internal combustion engine was born and that became an enabling invention in it's own right.

Now look at the Parson's steam turbine. Unlike the IC it owes nothing to the steam engines that preceeded it and after a while it replaced piston driven steam engines completely. It had it's own internal combustion child in the form of the gas turbine and that in turn gave us the jet engine.

The point is thatif you encounter a modern steam powered device today -- say in a power plant or a nuclear powered ship you are not looking at a decendent of Watt's piston driven steam engine but of Parson's turbine. Two radically different technologies doing similar jobs but offering different innovative children and offering different enabling tecnologies.

The transistor isn't a better vacuum tube, the enabling tech that lets you make transistors lets you make photocells LED's, solid state lasers and a whole range of other things. The microchip is not just a smaller ENIAC, it lets you do things you couldn't otherwise do --- like fly by wire aviation controls. There is no real way of knowing just where the tech we already have will enable us to go.

There's the promise of engineered materials. At the moment we have relatively few engineered materials -- composites like carbon fibre and plywood are classed of engineered material but on a much bigger scale than we might achieve. In nature almost everything is engineered --- bird bones have fantastic strength to weight characteristics because they are mainly hollow. Ivory, the tooth enamel, insect wings -- all have fantastic engineering properties and exist because at a microscopic level they have been assembled by organic cells into complex micro scale structures.

Imagine what materials like that, constructed to order, could do? A 747 sized plane that weighed the same as a cesna and could fly for 1000's of miles on relatively tiny amounts of fuel, solar sails giving you free access to the solar system, the base technology for teraforming....

It's being worked on..... who knows wht we can do with it.

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Monday, November 14, 2005 3:55 AM

I agree.

Often the technological niche is filled, and is being replaced by something else.

The other day I was driving through the utter wilderness here, far from civilization and powerlines. I came across a house, which itself is unusual because we sometimes have deadly cold winters. The house had a giant American flag out front, dead cars strewn about the lawn and random wooden structures. And solar cells. The solar cell isn't a recent innovation, but recent innovations in long life batteries make it a lot more useful. I know this doesn't excactly, but I thought that the whole idea would be kind of interesting to the firefly set, a new extreme of independence.

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Monday, November 14, 2005 8:27 AM

CYBERSNARK

Advancement is slow! Science needs energy!

Sorry. Been tinkering with SimEarth lately. . .

-----
We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.

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Monday, November 14, 2005 8:36 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Dreamtrove:
By the same argument, the wheel hasn't changed since Og the Caveman, so there's been no evolution of transportation.

Well, pretty much yeah. A car is pretty much the same thing as a horse draw cart, only tweaked and modified; the real difference is in the power plant.
Therefore the Tyres on your car are just a refined version of the logs the Ancients threw under stones to move them, not an innovation.

Quote:
The chip is done. The languages are done. There is no need to change them. But every program written is an innovation.

The chip is done? The current PC is exactly the same as the IBM of 1980, the architecture, the chips everything, the modern PC's of today are not an innovation, just a refinement, which was the main point.
As for languages the OO Paradigm was the last major overhaul, there's prologue and a few other fifth generation languages but they really haven't been picked up.
The major innovations in programming are algorithms, not programs, look at the code of Windows 95 and it's a refinement and retooling largely of OS2-Warp.
It may seem like programming has changed massively, but the actually algorithms used have been around mostly since the 70's, at the latest. Now with modern hardware they can just be employed in different areas.
My basic point is:
Seriously every program is not an innovation.

More insane ramblings by the people who brought you Beeeer Milkshakes!

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Monday, November 14, 2005 1:45 PM

AURAPTOR

America loves a winner!

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 19,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps only weigh 1.5 tons.
- Popular Mechanics, March 1949

But what ... is it good for?
- Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.

There is no need for any individual to have a computer in their home.
- Ken Olson, 1977, President, Digital Equipment Corp.

" They don't like it when you shoot at 'em. I worked that out myself. "

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Monday, November 14, 2005 1:50 PM

Except all of those innovations are too do with micro electronics, not computers per-se, Computer design hasn't changed since Turing.
IBM PC architecture hasn't changed since 1980.
Same for Apple Mac.

Also nothing has been innovated in micro electronics in forty years.

Where are the quantum or biological computers?

More insane ramblings by the people who brought you Beeeer Milkshakes!

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Monday, November 14, 2005 2:20 PM

THATWEIRDGIRL

Nothing useful or contradictory to add....just wanted to say 'Go science! Go tech! Go inventors! Go theorists! Go users! Go developers! Go humans! Yay!'

Oh and I like the solar sails and drive by wire stuff. yeah.

*climbs back onto the craft-matic adjustable bed*

www.thatweirdgirl.com
---
"...turn right at the corner then skip two blocks...no, SKIP, the hopping-like thing kids do...Why? Why not?"

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Tuesday, November 15, 2005 3:05 PM

"If you ask me, progress peaked with frozen pizza." - John McClane

Chrisisall

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Tuesday, November 15, 2005 3:05 PM

"If you ask me, progress peaked with frozen pizza." - John McClane

Chrisisall

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Tuesday, November 15, 2005 4:38 PM

ANTHONYT

Freedom is Important because People are Important

There's a lack of perspective here. Specialization and refinement of existing technologies isn't a bad thing. New ways to work old things is innovation in its own right.

How many thousands of years did it take to perfect the sword?

What about the bow? (I think we only recently capped its potential.)

Og's wheel is nice, but a rubber tire and spring suspension system makes it much more useful, no?

And these are all simple, simple inventions.

Now we come along and invent a microchip. Great. It may take another twenty years to fully optimize that technology. You may be looking forward to the bio-computer, but I'm still waiting for the potential of the regular computer to peak. I don't need quantum computing. I need a higher speed micro-computer to make City of Heroes lag a little less.

The fact is, our ability to refine is improving. Optimal sword designs took thousands of years to come by. We've come near to fully optimizing the airplane in about a hundred.

Frown on innovation, if you want, but it seems to me things are getting faster, not slowing down. Just look at the speed with which we refine our technology. We make the most out of it much more quickly than we used to.

--Anthony

"Liberty must not be purchased at the cost of Humanity." --Captain Robert Henner

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Tuesday, November 15, 2005 5:00 PM

Thanks anthony,

This is actually what I meant, but people took it the other way, and I'm seriously sick of arguing, so I ignored it. But yes, it is innovation. Once a task is done, there may not be another task like it that needs doing, but there may be a need for a better way to do it.

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Wednesday, November 16, 2005 5:08 AM

VETERAN

Don't squat with your spurs on.

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Oh innovation isn't dead, it's just relocating.

Yeah, to South Korea.

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Wednesday, November 16, 2005 5:14 AM

VETERAN

Don't squat with your spurs on.

Quote:
Originally posted by AURaptor:
I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 19,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps only weigh 1.5 tons.
- Popular Mechanics, March 1949

But what ... is it good for?
- Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.

There is no need for any individual to have a computer in their home.
- Ken Olson, 1977, President, Digital Equipment Corp.

" They don't like it when you shoot at 'em. I worked that out myself. "

You left out Bill Gates (1981):

"640 kilobytes of computer memory ought to be enough for anybody."

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Wednesday, November 16, 2005 4:02 PM

DANFAN

A few random thoughts…

1) What isn’t addressed in the article (or the study that is extensively referenced to support the article’s thesis) is what “innovation” really is. Is innovation something truly, completely new? If so, then almost nothing is innovation. Almost everything is an improvement (big or small) over previous technologies, or a new combination of previously unrelated technologies. If you buy this interpretation, then the difference between innovation and refinement isn’t a day/night thing… these are just two points on a more complex and continuous spectrum of progress.

2) The author of the article said (at one point):

“The evidence is mounting that our two sunny centuries of growth and wealth may end in a new Dark Age in which ignorance will replace knowledge, war will replace peace, sickness will replace health and famine will replace obesity. You don't think so? It's always happened in the past. What makes us so different? Nothing, I'm afraid.”

There seems to be a bit of fallacious logic in that statement. It tacitly acknowledges that the Dark Ages happened… and then ended. It does not seem to acknowledge the possibility that such a full cycle can repeat. It merely trumpets the possibility that progress can end. Then we are doomed. Few paragraphs were given over to the possibility that it might vigorously start up again as it has in the past.

3) So what is the engine for “innovation” (wherever we pin that human activity on the spectrum of “developing new stuff”)? I would propose that it is real need. What drove medical technology? More people, more crowding, more travel was making disease a non-local event. More dangerous activities (building big things, traveling long distances, fighting World Wars) was making trauma more horrific. So medical technology moved forward to meet the challenge. What would the next major challenge be that would require significant advance in medical technology? Seems like drug resistant microbes and genetically clever, new emergent viruses could do the trick. Who knows how medical technology will step up? I don’t know for sure… but if I were gambling, I’d say nanotechnology. A microbe can become resistant to a chemical. But it’s a lot tougher for a microbe to resist being cut into tiny pieces by a nanobot with knives for appendages.

We could play out the same scenario for oil. Right now, we are fighting for what’s left. When it’s not left anymore, we will have no other choice but to find something different. And the solution may not be a just new energy source… it may be several less “dense” sources of energy AND a new design for society that re-establishes the strength and efficiency of local communities. That would be true innovation… the application of an (apparently) unrelated technology to solve a problem in an existing technology. The article itself makes this point when it discusses the reinvention of Cuban society as a direct result of the embargo and the fall of its communist friends.

So why don’t we have quantum computers yet? Because we don’t need them yet. Ever more clever refinements of existing technologies are meeting the needs. When we have a genuine need for something truly new, then the possibility of real innovation increases.

4) One thing the article says rings distressingly true… one likely solution for many of the ills that our current stalling progress is creating is a dramatic and tragic reduction in the number of people on the planet. The planet will survive… of that I am sure. Even a world-wide nuclear winter would be nothing more than a blip in our planet’s health when viewed from a distance of a couple billion years… something like a planetary headcold. I think humanity is likely to survive (there’s some faith involved in that statement). When it comes to individuals and/or lifestyles, I am not confident.

5) The comment Dreamtrove made about evolution/creationism troubles me no end. Substituting the faith of a bronze-age culture in place of clear, scientific thinking as a valid technique for manipulating our physical world is one of the scariest trends I can think of. I personally believe that religious faith is a great way for exploring your purpose in life… and defining how you should treat others. But, as a technique for defining how the physical world will react when you poke it? Not such a good plan. I suspect that adherence to a belief that faith defines the physics of our world (and not the landscape of our souls) is the most likely reason that the population “thinning” I refer to in item 4 above will happen

Again... just some random thoughts. My personal opinions only...

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Wednesday, November 16, 2005 7:07 PM