

Ask HN: Where is the real innovation of the past decade? - king3andre

I'm an Engineer and I wanted to know this, am I the only one worried that our society has not seen true innovation in past decade? Maybe I'm wrong but ever since the recession, all we've created is a bunch of iPhone apps and websites. How do we get our brilliant minds to work on things meaningful?
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pg
If you base your opinion on anecdotal evidence, you get fooled by the fact
that consumer apps by their nature are more likely to have come to your
attention.

If you really want to measure rates of technical progress, you have to be
rigorous and do it bottom up. I.e. decide in advance what you consider to be
important, then go look at the trend. Cancer survival rates might be a good
place to start.

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dgant
Progress is usually evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, in nature.
Hindsight allows us to identify specific developments that we glorify and put
in textbooks. But in the moment, it can be less obvious what those
developments will be.

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benthumb
I, for one, am not worried; especially b/c "true innovation" is an entirely
subjective quality, and even if we could agree on a comprehensive definition
agreeable to all camps, the effect of innovation is not necessarily salutary.
I think it's important to point out that creativity, 'constructive'
engineering endeavors included, is literally destructive. You understand
probably better than I that nothing that gets designed today by a reputable
engineer is done so w/o giving consideration to its ecological impact. From my
perspective, this is where true innovation needs to start, in cultivating a
deep understanding of how we fit into the earth's ECOSYSTEM and cultivating
technologically appropriate responses to the same.

On a side note, I also think you highly underestimate the technological
advances that continue to be made under the infrastructural hood of the
internet, b/c it's almost completely transparent. iPhone apps and websites in
and of themselves may not be a big deal, but the growing scale of digital
distribution channels and the level and scope of our interconnectedness
certainly is. Not to mention, managing this growth in a way that is
environmentally sustainable? Not a trivial engineering problem, and, in my
estimation one of pressing concern...

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ScottWhigham
I think there are four key places where we've truly innovated over the last
decade or so:

1) Solar power is vastly improved today and on a trend that follows Moore's
Law

2) Cell phones can be found all over the globe (all thanks to innovations in
tech)

3) Rechargeable batteries are lasting longer and making it easier to take
complex machines into difficult areas

4) The ability to talk, tap, and rotate our phones/screens is a big innovation

It's pretty impressive to me. Some of these are incremental pieces that are
built on top of decades of research. However that does not diminish the true
innovation that led to Lithium-Ion batteries being so dominant today vs. 10
years ago.

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tom_b
Genomics and bioinformatics for one. Identifying specific cancer tumor-
specific gene mutations on a per-patient basis is happening today in small
batches.

This is a direct result of hard-core hacking in sequence alignment software,
advances in sequencing hardware, and piles of normal data management tasks
being focused on helping flow the necessary information back to pathologists
and doctors who make actual treatment decisions on this data.

I also think this is a "ground-floor" area in medical treatment. There is just
a deluge of previously unknown results and even analysis techniques. This work
just wasn't possible before . . .

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transfire
We need to de-commercialize our society. Right now, far too much time and
energy is being wasted on going after the quick buck. And, no, I am not
talking about communism. I am talking about creating a system that rewards
long term efforts and true innovation, and most importantly gets the
disenfranchised back into the game.

But this requires major reform and a new way of thinking about society. And
unfortunately, at the moment, right-wing ideologues are busy pushing an agenda
that move us in the wrong direction and misses the real problem. (Most of the
left-wing, btw, mean well, they just don't have much of clue either).

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sharemywin
I don't think top down approaches work well. I think you need a grass roots
movement that's based on people committing 5 hours per month to projects more
benificial to society.

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sharemywin
Peronsally I think crowdfunding is a huge innovation and has the potential to
comletely change the game of everything. <http://icancer.org.uk/> is an
exmaplte of crowd funding cancer.

~~~
king3andre
I wouldn't go as far to say crowdfunding is indeed true innovation. As a
society, we've been using this method for a long time, again, we've just
created a website to make the access to cash flow a lot easier. However, with
the advent of crowdfunding, I do see more creative projects being worked. But
are these projects innovative? Granted, most innovation requires time and
extensive research. I'm just worried that we have not spent the time to invent
meaningful things. We are obsessed with the word "Entrepreneur" and the quick
buck that comes along. The link you've provided is a great example of how
crowdfunding should be used to fund real innovation.

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contingencies
This post would be more meaningful if you defined meaningful.

Certainly, engineers at large have a disgraceful record for enabling horrible
technologies that are a detriment to society: surveillance, censorship,
stacked financial systems, weaponry.

On the whole though, engineers are logical beasts. Perhaps you would have
greater success convincing the HN community to spend their time on positive
impact projects by researching and presenting compelling evidence that one or
more areas they support are ultimately trivial and/or have a negative social
impact.

