
Are ideas getting harder to find? [pdf] - britishsheep
http://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/IdeaPF.pdf
======
lavrov
I would speculate that the decrease in "good ideas" is at least correlated
with, and probably causally related to, the decrease in government spending on
research (2% of GDP in the 1970's to 0.78% of GDP in 2014[1]). Considering
that the entire US technology industry was originally supported and sparked by
government research, I would imagine that a large part of the problem is that
corporate R&D is a poor substitute for the longer-term, non-profit-driven
perspective of government research. Further, I wonder if, in general, lack of
government-funded research leads to less competitive markets that are more
amenable to established monopolists, since in that scenario, research is
emerging primarily from corporate R&D departments and emerging players in
markets can't compete. I don't have any empirical evidence, but I think
interesting to consider.

[1] [http://www.bu.edu/research/articles/funding-for-
scientific-r...](http://www.bu.edu/research/articles/funding-for-scientific-
research/)

~~~
GrinningFool
1970 GDP in current $: just under 1,000,000,000,000

2014 GDP in current$: just under 17,000,000,000,000

Amount as a percent has dropped - but dollars spent has skyrocketed.

~~~
CalChris
No. Definitely no.

US GDP in 1970 was 1.0759T. 2% of that is 21.5B in 1970 dollars. This is
$132.91B in 2014 dollars.

US GDP in 2014 was 17.348T. 0.78% of that is 135B in 2014 dollars.

~~~
GrinningFool
I pulled the numbers from here, which states that they are in current USD:

[https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...](https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=ny_gdp_pcap_cd&idim=country:USA&met_y=gdp_production_current_us#!ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=gdp_production_current_us&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=region&idim=country:USA&ifdim=region&tstart=30430800000&tend=819349200000&hl=en_US&dl=en_US&ind=false)

~~~
CalChris
St Louis FRED. In constant dollars, pick a year, pick 2009, pick Chained 2009
Dollars.

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1)

1970 GDP was 4.7T in Chained 2009 Dollars. 2% of 4.7T is 94B.

2014 GDP was 15.7T in Chained 2009 Dollars. 0.78% of 15.7T is 122B.

~~~
GrinningFool
I'm honestly not qualified to know which data set is most accurate; certainly
the increase is less dramatic using this data set, but it still shows an
increase in $$ spent over time - vs the decrease that was the foundation of
the original comment.

~~~
CalChris
I'm qualified. Acid test: do you really think we were spending 1/17th of
research money in constant dollars in 1970?

Percentage of GDP spent on research has declined. The US was 200M people in
1970. We're 320M now. Per capita research spending in constant dollars has
declined as well.

This is a bad thing.

~~~
BTurkE
Also, I think the point of the paper is that growth gets harder, not easier.
From that perspective R&D spending should have increased massively in constant
currency to keep pace, not decline even slightly.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
Looking at it from the other side of the mirror, there's probably some other
suite of factors that causes both things. Taken as a prisoner's dilemma,
defecting from R&D may be perceived to have a payoff ( those engineers talk
funny and cost a lot ) which saps R&D and also slows growth.

I think that in an increasingly specialized workforce, the management team has
less bandwidth to apply to R&D. One stump hit and it's done for. Successfully
leading R&D has little payback in the larger economy; leading M&A is better
understood. This is a corollary of the general "tower of Babel" problem.

Remember that Amazon is slightly a tribe of madmen to most business types in
large companies.

------
jondubois
It's not that good ideas are getting harder to find, it's that poorly-funded
good ideas can't compete against well-funded bad ideas.

Investors are more interested in funding terrible ideas from people they know
than great ideas from people they don't know.

The market is monopolized on every side and good ideas can't compete against
sheer capital.

~~~
rmah
It's not that exactly. It's that investors are more interested in making money
than "ideas". And they feel that people who have a good track record of
delivering results are more likely to make them money than unknown an team
with a great idea.

Part of being a good management team (which is what VC's are looking for after
all) is being able to sell. Selling the concept to investors, selling the
product to customers, selling benefits to partners. People's history,
credentials, contacts, etc. are all part of how you sell.

Just think about how hard it is to determine if someone can do a specific,
relatively narrow, job when hiring. Then imagine how hard it is to determine
if a team can work together, be persistent enough to see things through but
flexible enough to roll with the punches as needed. To assess if the team can
deliver a product, manage their finances, hire a good crew, craft a compelling
marketing message, sell to customers, sound good to the media, etc, etc. This
is not easy. Is it any wonder that VC's put great stock in past successes of
any kind?

Maybe this isn't fair. But it's how the world works. Sorry for rambling this
morning :-)

~~~
aaron-lebo
_It 's not that exactly. It's that investors are more interested in making
money than "ideas". And they feel that people who have a good track record of
delivering results are more likely to make them money than unknown an team
with a great idea._

This is post-hoc justification.

Google, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter have been worth billions (Reddit the
exception) for more than a decade. They've collectively innovated how much
since 2005? They have a bunch of small improvements that anyone could have
anticipated and purchased many of the good ideas that have come along
(Occulus). Some are floundering in spite of having massive reach (Twitter),
some can't anticipate uses of their platform until after it happens
(Facebook). Some are dead and their founders have joined the VC game (Digg).
Did Kevin Rose not look like a pretty sure bet in 2006? Whatever happened to
Milk?

Yet according to the "they know how to deliver" logic, they should be knocking
new ideas out of the park. Where are they? Of course they have some successes
but you could have some successes too if you have billions of dollars to
subsidize yourself and an existing social network to support yourself and
advertise your success. You throw ideas at a wall and the ones that work are
evidence of know how. It's a broken metric.

Honestly, there is no evidence these companies are well run except for the
fact that they won, but they effectively won a lottery at which point money
starts flowing in. And that's the entire VC game - you'll have some moderate
successes, mostly failures, and some unicorns. As long as you hit jackpot a
few times you are ok. Meanwhile, part of the VC job is selling the idea that
they know what they are doing, too.

And with hundreds of thousands of the world's smartest kids being funneled
through the top colleges each year, you've got a lot of lottery tickets.

I think it's interesting that all of these authors are at Stanford or MIT.
Seems similar to the backgrounds of a lot of tech talent:

Gates (Harvard), Zuckerberg (Harvard), Brin and Page (Stanford), Reddit guys
(Cambridge area) you could go on and on.

Maybe there would be more diversity of ideas if the people behind them weren't
all coming from similar backgrounds and self-selecting to certain locales...

~~~
nine_k
I suspect that buying something that is a good idea and bring it to commercial
success is what an accomplished founder should be best at doing. A successful
founder is usually good at telling a better idea from a worse idea _ahead of
time,_ when the competition hasn't yet done the same.

A successful founder is usually good at execution, so the next logical step is
to bring the idea to fruition. OTOH coming up with a new and worthy idea by
oneself is much harder: most good-looking ideas do not survive a contact with
the reality.

This is why Google came up with Maps and Android, both hugely successful, by
acquisition. This is why Facebook got its iconic "Like" functionality by
acquisition.

As you noted, coming up with an idea and following it through to making
millions off it is a lottery. Acquiring a good idea in a semi-product shape
and making millions off it is also a lottery, but with much better odds. Guess
what an intelligent person would choose more often, given the choice.

~~~
saganus
Do you have links on how or when Facebook got likes by acquisition?

I don't remember seeing this anywhere, but it might as well have happened. And
if it did, it's weird how we can forget that Facebook didn't always had a like
button, seeing as how it's a fundamental part of their platform.

------
candiodari
After close to 8 years with zero or negative interest rates (QE is a form of
negative interest rates), there's 2 things causing this:

Anything -reasonable and otherwise- has been tried. Mostly on the taxpayer's
dime.

A number of industries, most famously big parts of the US oil industry, but
they won't be alone, are bad ideas that people really, really, really want to
see working. Therefore those companies have been using capital injections for
profits. It should be called a Ponzi scheme, but in some ways it isn't.

A lot of companies have been using credit and capital to do what every
economist assumes they use profits and free cash flow for : pay dividends and
share buybacks. In reality for quite a few companies free cash flow has been
steadily worsening since 2015 or so.

So we have the double whammy of the government making it VERY cheap for huge
companies to try every idea under the sun, which of course they have partially
used to make it impossible for others to try (e.g. Uber, Deliveroo and
Domino's pizzas have used capital to beat every reasonable delivery company on
price, the idea being to become the next Amazon, and of course, they have not
become the next Amazon. And I would say that Amazon itself is also a "become
monopoly - then jack up prices" play that so far hasn't even succeeded in part
1 of that. Their stock has done well, not because Bezos has kept his promise,
but because of his reports of progress).

So has every idea been tried ? Of course not. But due to sustained easy credit
it has become very hard to try new ideas. Those of us working for huge
companies best prepare for a few leaner years.

~~~
roymurdock
> But due to sustained easy credit it has become very hard to try new ideas.

If anything low interest rates and easy credit make it easier to raise capital
and explore new ideas.

Unfortunately when rates are kept artificially low to avoid financial
catastrophe, resources are misdirected into ventures that should never have
been funded in the first place, and we kick the financial can down the road.
As they say, necessity is the mother of invention, and right now we need
necessity (resource constraints/challenges to the status quo) more than ever.

~~~
clove
>Unfortunately when rates are kept artificially low to avoid financial
catastrophe, resources are misdirected into ventures that should never have
been funded in the first place, and we kick the financial can down the road.

Untrue. Rates are not kept low for an explicit purpose of "avoiding
catastrophe." They are kept low to encourage borrowing.

Resources are never "misdirected," as both the lender and the borrower must
agree on the venture. This system allows for experimentation and innovation.
As someone sitting on the sidelines, it is easy to call many investments -
usually after they fail to produce ROI - failures that should not have been
funded in the first place.

However, the economy is a cyclical process. Your comment projects your
thinking that it works as an equilibrium, which has never been the case.
Eventually, speculation dies down, rates increase, borrowing deceases, saving
increases, companies repair balance sheets... etc.

Then the cycle begins again.

~~~
roymurdock
QE, in conjunction with the Fed dropping FRR to 0% for 6 years, was a direct
response to the financial collapse of 2007-8. Obviously policymakers weren't
going to explicitly say - "wow guys we screwed the pooch on this one, time to
lower rates and inject liquidity to help banks (and the business/individuals
they lent to) clean up their balance sheets full of mispriced, risky assets
and avoid financial catastrophe" \- but sometimes you need to read between the
lines.

There is being (equilibrium) and there is becoming (cycles away from/towards
equilibrium). The economy is always becoming, but it is striving towards a
pure state of equilibrium where supply and demand in every market are working
to equal one another, but never getting there.

------
Animats
This isn't a new idea. The real peak for invention was around 1880-1900. Steel
production finally worked, electricity was known, the basic machine tools
existed, and steam power was working well. That's when Edison was most active.
His "invention factory" had a goal of a minor invention every two days and a
major invention every _three weeks_. There were so many easy hits available
waiting to be invented, and the tools were there to build them.

Some technologies develop rapidly and then hit a wall. Aviation developed
rapidly from the Wright's first flight in 1903 to the late 1960s, which
produced the Boeing 747 and 737 (both still in production), the Concorde, the
SR-71, the C-5A,and the Saturn V. Since then, improvements have been minor by
comparison. Yet technical documents from the 1960s project vast improvements -
hypersonic ballistic transports, single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft, atomic-
powered interplanetary rockets, and fusion drives. Even antigravity was
studied seriously. Didn't happen.

~~~
digikata
In aviation, it all slowed down after the tech started to require larger and
larger investments to research, combined with hitting harder boundaries on
fundamental energy and propulsion capabilities. Individuals were priced out
because of the increasing capital requirements, and institutions (gov't and
large companies) are so bad at making non-sure-thing bets that individuals
might otherwise pursue. Hence why rocketry is only advancing now after some
random billionaires came along to make investments, which as financial bets
would be disqualified in a heartbeat by most of the people holding the strings
of business investment.

There's still capability to be gotten in propulsion, but I suspect a lot of it
will revolve around basic materials research (which is definitely unattractive
to the vast majority of potential investors).

I worry that the aviation market is an example of how modern capitalism is
failing to systematically advance civilization (even apart from the more
political class inequality problems that is being argued about...).

Edit: and the failure is in any endeavor that doesn't fit typically short
investment time scales and 'calculability' of ROI, not just aerospace.

~~~
nine_k
Not just one, but _a number_ of "random billionaires" suddenly started to
invest in rockets and spacecraft during the last decade.

I'd rather link it to something else: maybe CAD advancements, maybe material
science, maybe avionics, maybe the release of some regulatory limitations.
Likely all of these in concert.

~~~
digikata
Sure, but my main point was that the advancement of civilization shouldn't
depend on the whims of random billionaires. We shouldn't prevent random
billionaires from developing the tech either, but multi-decade trend of
politics and society believing that "capitalism" provides a complete economic
system has big holes in it for certain advancements: space travel, for
antibiotics, for civilization-ending externalities like climate change. The
pileup of what capitalism isn't addressing is getting very serious. And if
you're being quantitative, skipping all/most long-term, low-visibility-payoff
risks still leaves your economy behind one that is able to make those
investments -- at least some of the time, in favor of the next social-chat
app, or k-cup juice tech.

And incidentally - IMHO, I strongly suspect there is nothing in avionics
algorithmically or computationally that modern rocketry needs that didn't not
already exist 30-40+ years ago (then again, I don't closely follow that
anymore...) One of the key structural advancements for SpaceX rockets - was
created 20+ years ago - friction stir welding... I may be too cynical, but
really the only real advancement there is parties able & willing to take on
long term risks.

------
bjelkeman-again
For me it is interesting to see that new ideas may be harder to find. My
experience is that there are lots of great ideas that are just lying around,
unused. In some of our work we are taking scientific or technical discoveries
from the early 1900s and implementing them in new ways, in combination with
mobile phones, for example, to make breakthroughs in possible uses.

We are building new water quality tests that makes the phone a "mobile lab"
using quite old science and targeting it at a huge market, the two billion
people that drink unsafe water. It isn't your normal Silicon Valley play, as
it requires quite a different set of resources to implement well. But the
impact can be massive.

------
scythe
I'm surprised that amid the sea of comments lamenting the demise of individual
experimentation, nobody has mentioned the vastly stricter regulatory
environment surrounding individual experimentation. You can't buy any chemical
equipment because you might be making drugs. Mechanical equipment might be
used to make bombs or guns. For now I guess you might be able to get away with
making transgenic bacteria in your garage, but it's only one or two media
panics away from being banned because you might accidentally make grey goo.
Plus, if you _do_ try to do any sort of substantial experimentation, be
prepared for your neighbors to report you to the police and your HOA to fine
you for smell and noise.

Orville Wright would be behind bars today. Jonas Salk would be a public enemy.
Alex Fleming would have been kicked out of grad school for not properly
sterilizing equipment.

Of course, you can buy seventeen kinds of homeopathic medicine at Walgreens.
Everyone knows it doesn't work, but they also know it's harmless, which in the
Rawlsian dystopia of a life lived behind the veil of ignorance, is the only
thing that matters.

------
ChuckMcM
I've always wondered about this aspect of idea research (from the intro in the
paper):

 _" For example, each new idea raises incomes by a constant percentage (on
average), rather than by a certain number of dollars. This is the standard
approach in the quality ladder literature on growth: ideas are proportional
improvements in productivity"_

I am not convinced they capture efficiency improvements (or externalizations)
in this model. Say for example you have an idea for scrubbing sulfur out of
coal. It becomes mandated by the EPA, it makes everyone around the coal power
plants live 1.5% longer but it doesn't change their income at all. Was it a
good idea? Was it an important idea?

We have invested billions in improving efficiency, from solar panels to cars
to power plants. How much of that has offset income gains from growth? For
example, you add 25% more cars on the road that are 50% more efficient, the
net total of gas consumed annually stays the same. So how is that represented
in economic GDP ? When you have a video game that is distributed digitally, it
costs a fraction of a cent in electricity to "manufacture" and copy to the
user. But it represents $1 - $10 in economic activity.

So clearly I've got problems with the definition of a "good" idea :-) I don't
like tying it to income improvements. I'd much rather tie to a balance of
externalities where the net change is fewer negative externalities. Harder to
measure for sure, but ideas that increase efficiency will get as much
"goodness" as ideas that increase income.

~~~
mattstreet
If we actually included the externalities of coal, the damage to property by
acid rain, the health effects, the tearing the tops off our mountains to strip
mine - then we could see things like scrubbing sulfur out as efficiency
improvements.

------
nradov
This is one reason why many people think a technological singularity will
never come. The rate of innovation isn't an exponential curve but rather an
S-curve which will eventually flatten out. That doesn't mean that innovation
will cease, but rather that the _rate_ of innovation (the first derivative)
will stop increasing.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
That's true, for any area of technology. It may not be true for technology as
a whole, though.

Take electricity, for example. It was climbing rapidly in from 1900 to maybe
1950. After that it started flattening out. But the transistor was growing
from 1950. One could argue that it started flattening out in 2010. It's still
growing, but not as much. But genomics is just getting started. And so it
goes, with the action moving from one area of technology to another.

~~~
dredmorbius
Different _areas_ of technology have profoundly different dynamics and
interactions.

Much of the 19th century boom drove directly off of coal and what it made
possible (steel, electricity, lights, electric motors, locomotives, mang), and
toward the end, petroleum and automobiles. Henry Ford's Model T began
production in 1901, just after the end of the era, and the Wright Brother's
flight was in 1903, enabled by low-weight, high-oputput gasoline engines
(we've improved considerably since then).

Vaclav Smil's _Energy in World History_ provides a really good illustration of
various technolgies and capabilities, many with semi-log plots (log power vs.
time). They show the overlapping-band dynamics you mention, _but_ that applies
pretty much exclusively to _energy_ technologies.

The thing about _information_ technology is that it only buys you so much. The
Boeing 747, and for that matter, the Dreamliner, both still continue the
design originally pioneered with the 707 (and its bomber/transport
predecessors). We've added avionics and controls and engine tuning and a slew
of other elements which are _far_ more advanced than was was available in the
1950s and 1960s when the airframes were first produced. There's been a slight
improvement in fuel efficiency, enough that today's turbofans are roughly
comparable with prop-driven planes of the 1950s (props are more efficient, but
slower, than jets). There's been a _big_ increase in _safety_ , witness the HN
article a few days back noting that it's been 15 years since a major widebody
jet fatality by a US carrier (smaller planes and non-US carriers, yes). Actual
travel times have _increased_ since the 1970s, due mostly to security checks,
also some congestion and routing changes. Prices are down from the late 1970s,
but _not_ from the pre-oil-embargo days, at least not by nearly as much. (The
airline deregulation story gets hugely oversold on that point.)

Genomics is another form of information processing, ultimately. It's not clear
to e that it will have the same impacts as, say, clean fresh water supplies,
sewerage, municipal waste removal, and public health and nutrition programs.
Certainly not at the same costs.

------
rdlecler1
My friend had a great quote a while back: "Not only are all the good ideas
taken. But so are all the bad ideas!"

~~~
czbond
If this were true, the next 100 years we would have no progress. Unless one
says "All of the ideas are taken, but few have executed on those ideas"

------
danieltillett
The basic problem is cultural fragmentation of the middle class who are the
main market for any product (the middle classes are the only class with the
money and size to be worth mass selling).

There is so much more diversity now in what middle class people want that it
is impossible for one idea to appeal to a large section of the population.
When everyone middle class listened to same music, watched the same TV shows,
saw the same movies, ate the same food, drove the same cars, lived in the same
houses, etc it was possible to create a product that appealed to most. Today
that is no longer possible so all ideas are small and niche.

Regulation and risk avoidance has also played a strong role in killing ideas.
For example, most of pharmaceuticals developed in the 1950 to 1970s could not
be brought to market today.

------
agentgt
I while ago I was thinking about Leonardo da Vinci and how today there really
aren't any "renaissance" individuals. By "renaissance" individual I mean
multidisciplinary prolific geniuses.

I sort of came to the conclusion that the paper proposes... new ideas are
harder to find. To really make a breakthrough in a field seems to require
intense specialization.

It is sort of sad because some of the greatest innovators have traditional
started in some other field and often use the power of analogy thinking to
come up with new ideas.

~~~
AndyRewtD
I've gotta say thatI disagree.

There are surely such individuals alive today and others that have been
between now and then. They may not be as visible or, if they are, are rarely
presented in the same domain as leonardo. I think it's better to say that no
one alive today is as fetishized for their multi-disciplinary capibility as Da
Vinci.

It's also not hard to argue that we have more surface area for innovation
today as well a society that offers the 'resources' (i say this broadly) for
individuals to pursue explorations and discovery.

~~~
agentgt
It is fairly hard to measure quality and I guess to some extent quantity of
ideas coming from individuals and I agree Da Vinci is vastly overrated.

But do you honestly think there are individuals alive today making extreme
broad breakthroughs like Isaac Newton?

Part of the reason I believe previous scholars were so successful in coming up
with a plethora of ideas is that it was easier to observe things. For example
Galileo just needed some really good glass aligned properly to see planets but
today the amount of manpower needed to see into the cosmos far exceeds a
single individual and their budget. To detect neutrinos required a multi story
tank filled with water with extreme precision instruments. Meanwhile Newton
took some glass (glass was damn useful back then... it was like the computer
for innovation) and noticed light could be broken into colors.

~~~
SolaceQuantum
Yes I think there are individuals making extreme breakthroughs in every field
of science in modern day.

~~~
agentgt
Of course but they are not broad ideas like creating a new type of math while
explaining how planets circle the sun kind of ideas.

Like I said earlier I don't know how you can place the value or rate ideas but
please point out some individuals making cross disciplinary breakthroughs at
the level of Newton today. I'm actually sincere because I would like to know
more about these individuals.

~~~
bigger_cheese
The big issue I have with the "solitary genius" theory is that ideas do not
occur in a vacuum Isaac Newton who several people in this thread have
mentioned went to great lengths himself to dispel this myth. One of his most
famous quotes is:

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Scientific progress is incremental it builds on the work and ideas that have
come before.

------
ThomPete
Ideas are by defintion always harder to find. I think thats true but trivial.
The answer would always be yes.

Ideas are mostly solutions looking for a problem and mostly based on companies
looking for wholes in the market they can fit into.

There is another way to think about it which is to ask are problems harder to
find and is it harder to get ideas for solutions to these problems.

I did an ASK HN called "What problem in your industry would be a potential
startup"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007)

takinola followed up on that with this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13139638#13145691](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13139638#13145691)

I think one thing that really stand out is that the real trick is to find the
real problem that hide underneath the obvious solutions. And they might be
harder to find because entrepreneurs especially in Silicon Valley are young
men who don't have much experience in what problems exist out there and is
worth solving.

I wrote a follow up on the HN thread too.

[https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-
problems-4...](https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-
problems-47ee63bb3511)

------
shubhamjain
> We present a wide range of evidence from various industries, products, and
> firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research
> productivity is declining sharply.

I think this is a natural course of things that is also suggested by "law of
diminishing returns" [1]. As I understand, it's unlikely to maintain the
growth multiple with the innovation even if number of people involved in this
field is constantly rising. What matters more, however, is if the returns in
absolute numbers are greater than what they were before.

Making a rough assumption that number of computers in 1970s were 100,000, a
performance gain of 10X would have meant a return of 1,000,000. Supposing that
number of computers have multiplied by 100,000, even a gain of 1% beats the
old figure by long margin.

I guess there could be time when gain in absolute numbers won't be significant
to justify the added costs but in today's world, it matters to squeeze out
small performance gains as long as more and more people are using products of
those industries.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns)

------
kylehotchkiss
No, people are just too attached to good ideas requiring an acquisition and/or
lots of cash. Some ideas might not have a cash or business value. I hope we're
not training the next generation to attach money and ideas _too_ much.

------
astrange
I found the problem with inventions (personal projects) is, you have to
maintain them after. And once you're maintaining too much you've run out of
free time for the rest of your life - I've been running one for ten years that
is famously unchanged and isn't going to.

If you're just talking about tech, the life pattern of forcing everyone in the
industry to move to Silicon Valley and work all day on someone else's ideas to
cover rent can't be helping.

------
dredmorbius
I find there's a lack of clarity on just what technology is, and how the
_specific mechanisms_ incorporated into it operate. I've been constructing an
ontology and identify nine discrete areas. Each has its own capabilities,
limitations, and consequences. Moore's Law applies to only a very limited
subset of dendritic and networked structures.

1\. Fuels & combustion, generally. Wood, plant and animal oils, charcoal,
coal, petroleum, steam, otto, deisel, turbine engines.

2\. Materials. Functions dependent on specific properties, and abundance of
materials they're based on.

3\. Power and transmission. Simple machines, shafts, belts, cogs, electricity,
magnetism, hydraulics.

4\. Sensing, perception, symbolic representation & manipulation.

5\. Process-knowledge. Arts and practical stuff, say, agriculture,
construction, boatbuilding, sailing, etc.

6\. Systematic knowledge. Science, geography, history.

7\. Governance and control methods. Management, business, institutions, and
systems.

8\. Dendritic and network technologies. Cities, transport, communications,
computers, organisations.

9\. Hygiene factors. Sinks & unintended consequences: Pollution, effluvia,
systems disruption, and their management.

More on this (from an earlier development):
[https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/klsjjjzzl9plqxz-
ms8nww](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/klsjjjzzl9plqxz-ms8nww)

------
DonaldFisk
That itself is not a new idea. Most of the ideas which are easy to find and
cheap to exploit have already been found. A possible declining trend for
worldwide innovation
([http://accelerating.org/articles/InnovationHuebnerTFSC2005.p...](http://accelerating.org/articles/InnovationHuebnerTFSC2005.pdf)),
published in 2005, arrives at a similar conclusion.

------
jontas
This video [1] has a great explanation and exploration of why innovation seems
to be slowing down. He uses data coming from the patent system over a period
of 100 years.

The video touches on much of what is in this study and does a great job of
explaining it.

[1]
[https://youtu.be/G0R09YzyuCI?t=44m39s](https://youtu.be/G0R09YzyuCI?t=44m39s)

------
Nevermark
Whenever the COST trend of something is being considered, it must be balanced
with the RETURN trend.

It might cost more to double a transistors capabilities (as a combination of
size, speed, manufacturing reliability, etc.) but as transistors not only
improve current applications, but take on whole new areas of usefulness, the
returns on investment may actually go up.

I am not saying they do or do not. But COSTS in isolation of RETURNS can't be
used to conclude anything about the effectiveness of research efforts.

------
spacehacker
Related:

 _The Size and Shape of “Idea Space” (2011) [pdf]_

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13072265](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13072265)

------
qwtel
I think it is getting harder to remain committed to bad ideas, some of which
are being referred to as 'good' after the fact.

------
otempomores
Breakthrough ideas are made by a diffrent type of mind then the usual one.
Chaotic,messy..recombinig stuff not expected to be recombined. People who
whoreship structure and efficiency murderd this one.

------
jcoffland
> "everything that can be invented has been invented." \- Charles H. Duell,
> Commissioner of US patent office in 1899

It tends to appear this way to those with little imagination.

~~~
DonaldFisk
According to the Wikipedia page about him
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Holland_Duell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Holland_Duell)),
which provides references to the original sources, the quote is bogus.

See also
[http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/22779.html](http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/22779.html)

~~~
jcoffland
OK, how about "The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our
credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human
improvement must end." \-- Patent Office Commissioner, Henry Ellsworth to
Congress in 1843.

My point was that this impression is human nature and thus suspect.

~~~
DonaldFisk
That quotation is accurate, but apparently taken out of context. See
[http://www.ideafinder.com/guest/archives/wow-
duell.htm](http://www.ideafinder.com/guest/archives/wow-duell.htm)

"But Commissioner Ellsworth was simply using a bit of rhetorical flourish to
emphasize the growing number of patents as presented in the rest of the
report. He even outlined specific areas in which he expected patent activity
to increase in the future."

------
ianai
Pretty simple production frontiers result. IT moved the production
possibilities frontier outward about 30 years ago. Everything experiences
diminishing returns.

------
NicoJuicy
Iterate and improve is my latest gamble, it doesn't has to be the latest and
greatest.

A lot of niches have room for another player in town ;)

------
slim
Because Intellectual Property. It causes artificial scarcity of ideas to keep
their price high

------
pyderman
For you who just scrolls to the end of the article to find out the bottomline
...

tl;dr: Yes.

------
EGreg
No.

Wow Bettridge's law really works!

PS: I especially like Godwin's law: when you confidently state something
inaccurate online, someone's bound to correct you. It's a great way to
crowdsource an answer that you might have a hard time looking up.

