
Does innovation arc toward decadence? - razorburn
http://www.roughtype.com/?p=5452
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wanderingstan
I wrote a post some years ago about why screens have won over rockets.
[http://wanderingstan.com/2010-07-27/screens-not-rockets-
medi...](http://wanderingstan.com/2010-07-27/screens-not-rockets-media-over-
moon))

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.

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

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tomjen3
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.

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onnoonno
Arguably, that all is breadth, not depth.

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wanda

      Does innovation arc towards decadence
    

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

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0xdeadbeefbabe
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...](http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/fall2011/innovation-starvation)

