
Silicon Valley hasn’t innovated since 1978 - kick
https://medium.com/@enkiv2/silicon-valley-hasnt-innovated-since-1978-f98f315f2bf
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theamk
So do we need massive, government funded research labs to create innovation?
Or is it the case that “The most interesting technical work is being done by
individuals and small groups”? Those seem like contradictory statements to me.

~~~
acuozzo
Paradigm-shifting research can be conducted in both of these seemingly-
contradictory environments.

The most important common factor is freedom: the freedom to play; to
experiment; to pursue whatever seems interesting; to fuck around.

An individual conducting research during leisure time is certainly free to
pursue whatever seems worthwhile.

Similarly, an individual conducting research for an institution willing to
lose gobs of money on the whims of its researchers (e.g. Bell Labs) is free to
pursue whatever seems worthwhile.

True invention of born of creativity and creativity is attenuated by even the
lightest shackles.

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danShumway
> Somebody who had used an Alto in 1979 could travel through time and sit down
> at a modern PC and know basically how to do most tasks — they would think of
> a modern PC as a faster but less featureful stripped down Alto clone, like
> the Star was.

I'm not sure what to say other than that this is completely absurd to me. It's
very difficult for me to think about where to begin describing how much I
disagree with that statement, I think it's almost a kind of wishful thinking.

I guess the most charitable reading I can come up with is it's taking an
extremely narrow view of innovation. My guess is if I brought up smartphones,
the author would say that people had thought of those before 1978, even if
they hadn't built them in a way ordinary people could use. Or, maybe they'd
make the argument that smartphones were an evolution, and that they weren't a
completely mind-blowing paradigm shift that fundamentally altered the world on
the scale of the Internet -- and evolutions don't count.

But, if that's your criteria for innovation, _nobody_ has innovated in any
industry or any public sphere since 1979.

> Meanwhile, to somebody from 1940, home computer tech of 1980 would be mind-
> blowing. Such a person, even if they were in computing, would not be
> familiar with the concept of a programming language (since stored program
> computers didn’t exist yet).

I can't think of any consumer-available technology or innovation that's
happened in the last 40 years in any field of research that fits this criteria
for me. The closest thing I can think of is quantum computing, which is a) a
stretch to fit this definition, and b) being heavily invested into and
researched by Silicon Valley companies like Google.

I do know that in my personal lifetime, the way that computers and the
Internet are used has evolved to such a degree that there are experiences I
can't share with kids I know -- there are things I describe to them that they
don't grok anymore. I do know that I regularly talk to people in their 50s and
60s that feel the same way about technology I'm familiar with. They don't feel
like it's a minor evolution in access, they feel like it's a small-scale
paradigm shift that they're almost not equipped to follow.

If your criteria for innovation isn't that it be on the scale of "we invented
programming", then it's undeniable that over the past 40 years society has
been regularly changing at an almost alarming rate because of new technology.
Purely looking around my desk right now, I'm seeing a digital art-station
that's good enough that I no longer need to scan drawings, I'm seeing my
smartphone, I'm seeing 2 Raspberry Pis, I'm seeing a pile of hard drives big
enough to fundamentally change the way I think about data storage, I'm seeing
a MIDI keyboard with good enough key-travel to substitute for a traditional
piano, and I've got a free 3D rendering program open that's powerful enough to
replicate the animation techniques Pixar was pioneering as recently as 1995.

