

Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade? - dnsworks

I still have the same DSL upload speed I did a decade ago. So at least that's status quo. I've been trying to think of something that humanity has done, besides come up with new ways to sell advertising. Any important diseases cured? Any increases in privacy, civil rights, human rights, intolerance?<p>Anything?
======
gkefalas
In terms of medical advances, there may not have been any major blockbuster
disease cures found, but there were several very important advances &
innovations. I'll crib from ABC News and call out a few that I think are
impressive as a layperson: [http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Decade/genome-
hormones-top-10-m...](http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Decade/genome-hormones-
top-10-medical-advances-decade/story?id=9356853)

\- Heart disease numbers dropped considerably: so many heart-related diseases
and emergencies that previously would be fatal or have many more severe
consequences are now survivable and livable.

\- Stem cell research: even with the lack of US/federal funding, stem cell
research started to bear fruit, and looks to only grow from here.

\- Improved cancer survival rates for many types of cancers: Huge. We're a
long way away from a real cure, but survival rates have never been higher.

\- Incredible advances in arthroscopic & noninvasive/outpatient surgery &
procedures: In 2004-ish I blew out the "terrible triad" of knee ligaments; my
surgery scars are just little dots. My brother had similar surgery just about
6-8 years prior to that, and he bears the ugly long scar over his kneecap.

That's just gleaned from one decade-end retrospective article, and is just
focused on medical advances.

But also, stop and think back to the internet in 2000 versus where we are now.
There's been a hell of a lot of innovation there, as well; think of all of the
things that are now possible or even commonplace to do online that were merely
a gleam in our minds a decade ago...

If anything, just thinking about the pieces and foundations that were put in
place throughout the 00s excites me for the possibilities of this next decade
even more. It should be a very exciting time.

~~~
dnsworks
I will definitely buy this. Stem cell research might be the one "world-
changing" innovation that's happened since the dawn of the internet, but I
don't know if we'll have a clear view of that for another decade.

Arthroscopic surgery is also pretty awesome. So maybe it isn't all bleak.
Maybe it's just the tech industry that has failed to do anything but sell us
more crap, invade our privacy, and advertise us into submission.

~~~
evgen
Are you kidding? Let me rewind you to Y2K in case you were still nursing a
collegiate hangover or two. Banner ads were everywhere, advertising was in
your face, the marquee/blink tags had not yet been banished, and the only way
to avoid it was to run an actual http proxy so that meant that only the tech-
savvy could get away from it (and almost no one was blocking cookies or other
"simple" tracking mechanisms.) In Y2K some of us were still worried about
whether or not crypto would ever enter the mainstream (most people had no clue
what we were talking about or why we cared) and while the crypto export laws
had only been relaxed a couple of months earlier it was still recent enough
that including strong crypto in a product was considered a political/legal
risk. We were finally to the point where you no longer needed to use a generic
crypto library API (so that users could link against a non-US crypto lib) but
SSL certs were still rare for most web sites.

The tech industry has changed significantly for the better in all of these
areas.

~~~
dnsworks
Cute. I've been building infrastructures for almost 20 years now. There's
really nothing new under the sun. The last time I drank the koolaid was at
Napster, since then I've never been really excited about a company. Fusion-IO
is the closest tech that has even made me take pause. Web startups are the
worst. I worked at idealab in 2000. We invented the me-too web site business
model that is now Web 2.0. It's all kind of a joke.

But at least we have new ways to advertise!

------
whatusername
The # of people lifted out of extreme poverty in China/India is pretty
substantial.

The Human Genome project and sequencing.

Wikipedia is pretty substantial. All that information for free for everyone.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Lifting people out of poverty is pretty important. The biggest bang for the
buck in "curing diseases" is getting more out of the cures we already have.
Just because malaria is old news in the USA doesn't mean that it doesn't kill
1.5 to 3 million children per year.

Remember, also, that a side effect of technological progress is complacency.
These days we don't applaud when medical geniuses cure the pandemic flu within
less than nine months of the first US case (have you noticed that there's an
H1N1 vaccine now?); instead we complain that it wasn't cured far enough in
advance. Or we allow statistically ignorant people to start moral panics about
rare or nonexistent side effects of the new cure.

------
brlewis
This has been a great decade for computing. 1.4MB removable storage was the
norm 10 years ago. Right now I have incredibly fast 4GB removable storage in
my pocket. Ten years ago we didn't have USB 2.0. Wireless protocols weren't as
good. Digital cameras were mostly toys, and digital video was almost
nonexistent. CVS was state-of-the-art version control. Hosting was expensive.
I love 2010.

~~~
gkefalas
Agreed! Technology has continued to march on, and entirely new product
categories have gone from "an idea"to gain popular usage. I mean, even just
the advances in pure hardware and technology manufacturing are pretty
impressive and have opened up so many more possibilities than what we had a
decade ago.

------
makecheck
Part of the problem is that there are too many lock-in and obfuscation
mechanisms in place: monopolies, patents (ironically created to "help"
innovation), and legal nonsense making everything 1000% more complex than it
often needs to be. How many people have jobs whose sole purpose is to sift
through this crap: be it insurance forms, etc.? The argument is always, "well
at least they have jobs"; when the reality is that it's not a good sign for
society to have so many people with jobs that are not directly adding value.

Part of the problem is the end of the Cold War. When the U.S. was interested
in "beating" the Soviet Union to space travel, etc. there were lots of things
going on. Now, perhaps China and India will step up to compete in this way and
drive future developments. If there aren't superpowers, things slow down.

Part of it is that some people just don't _care_ where we are, versus where we
could be. As crappy as life can be, the average quality of life still seems to
be higher than at any point in the past. It seems that the majority of people
stop demanding something better, once they are basically comfortable. (There
are exceptions to that, of course.)

These things all have side effects, such as fewer jobs, less chance of
receiving a good education, etc., so that after awhile, a small problem
becomes a big one.

------
jacquesm
I think it may be that you simply have enough bandwidth to do whatever it is
that you want to do, would you be willing to pay a premium to get more ?

I have 20Mbps here and 90% of the time I'm under 10% usage.

And I consider myself a pretty heavy internet user.

Innovation is probably not measured very well by looking at your DSL upload
speed.

A decade ago your pc would have been running at 3 to 400 MHz tops (single
core!), have 32M of ram and maybe a 40G drive (if you had the money).

By those measures the price of storage and of processing has come down
considerably. (edit: and don't forget the SSD revolution that is about to
become true, if you like spinning media have a good look at them because
they're about to go extinct).

And then there are lots of fields outside computing where we have advanced
tremendously in the last decade, one of my favorites is the 'camera pill'.

<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3606947/>

But there are _plenty_ of others.

~~~
dnsworks
It's an imbalance. I've never really needed more than 5mbps down, but I _NEED_
20mbps up or greater for my daily interest in the internet, mainly video and
photography. Broadband is just another case where status quo has been
maintained by lobbying and corporate bulling at the cost of losing our
competitive edge and restricting our ability to grow.

Cheaper isn't terribly exciting, it's just .. well, cheaper. As to more
storage, memory and processing power, so what? My desktop still feels as
sluggish and kludgy as it did a decade ago. The use case changed. Browsers are
still awful, maybe not in direct feature for feature comparison, but how we
use them now (flash, ajax, multiple tabs) they're just as slow and unreliable.

~~~
jacquesm
Ask around, when I was living in Toronto I found out that a neighbouring
company had pulled in fiber, they let me piggyback on to theirs for a
relatively low fee.

If you need it then I assume it's work related so you probably have some
budget available.

You'd be surprised how much fiber has been pulled in metropolitan areas.

If you're in the sticks or some small town then it's a different matter, but
you could conceivably do something with channel bonding, or ask your ISP how
many dineros they want for a symmetrical arrangement.

~~~
dnsworks
I live in SOMA. Downtown San Francisco. Twitter is across the street from me,
literally. My best option is 6-30mbps down, and 1mbps up, or comcast which
gives 10mbps up. I'd gladly pay $250/month to get 20mbps up. Unfortunately
Comcast is allowed to force apartment building to sign exclusive contracts.
Nobody is allowed to put fiber or coaxial into the building but comcast, and
DSL just doesn't cut the mustard. After Microsoft made a mockery of the anti-
trust system in the US, the fed has seemingly lost all interest in protecting
the rights of the American people against monopolies.

Innovation loses. Comcast wins.

~~~
jacquesm
I used a short haul directional rig for high speed wifi (short haul being
anything up to a mile or so) in another location, it cost me some money but it
worked like a charm.

I got it from these guys: <http://www.star-os.com/>

They really seem to know their stuff. Using that trick you could likely jump
from your balcony or window sill to any location in the neighbourhood that is
in line-of-sight, to get you significantly more bandwidth than you have today.

They also sell a transmitter that isn't entirely legal in all parts of the
world that will do significantly longer distances.

------
ynniv
_Any increases in privacy, civil rights, human rights, intolerance?_

These are ancient problems... don't expect a quick fix, especially via
technology.

[http://www.ted.com/talks/billy_graham_on_technology_faith_an...](http://www.ted.com/talks/billy_graham_on_technology_faith_and_suffering.html)

------
jsz0
I think you're being a bit too hard on humanity..

-Dozens of extrasolar planets discovered. -Confirmation of water on Mars. -Completed the principal construction of ISS -Cassini–Huygens -AIDS drug therapy drastically increasing life spans -US elects a black President -Lowest number of homicides in the US since the 1960s

~~~
dnsworks
I won't be impressed until humans no longer fgeel the need to point out that a
leader is of a specific color. That's just proof that racism is very real. And
Mr. Obama himself is filled with religious hatred, as seen by his turncoat
stance on the "Defense Of Marriage Act" that he originally promised to repeal.
A black man denying others equality is pretty messed up.

~~~
jacoblyles
I am pretty sure he is the first black man elected head of state in any
country that is not majority black, and I know of no precedent of a leader
being elected from any racial minority that makes up only 13% of a nation.

Outside of cutting into people's brains and taking out in-group preferences
that have existed since before the Cambrian explosion, I don't know what else
you want us to do. Barack's election does say something about how far the
power of racism has declined as a force in American society.

Now the rest of the world, they are still racist as hell. Try pulling the same
stunt in Japan, or France.

~~~
shabda
> Now the rest of the world, they are still racist as hell. Try pulling the
> same stunt in Japan, or France.

And thats statement is not racists at all

> I know of no precedent of a leader being elected from any racial minority
> that makes up only 13% of a nation.

India. We currently have a Sikh PM(religious minority, 1.3%, from wikipedia),
our last President was Muslim(13.43%). There have been 3 Presidents of India,
from religious minority groups below 13%.

Thats not racial minority, of course, but afaik, US is yet to have a non
Christian president?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_India>

~~~
jacoblyles
>And thats statement is not racists at all

No, it's more culturalist. The United States has had a multi-racial society
for a long time, and over the last few hundred years I think we have made
strides in peaceful coexistence that few other places can replicate.

Religious tolerance, however, is not our strong suit. It was a big deal when
we finally elected a Catholic (John Kennedy) to the Presidency.

------
shib71
Access to knowledge through things like open courseware and one laptop per
child. These movements are in their infancy now as they get bigger the 00's
will be known the decade they were born.

Mobile phones (and the related communications) have gone from first world
luxury to being more common than clean fresh water in many third world
countries.

------
epochwolf
Well we have wikipedia now. I think that's a huge leap forward.

------
lmkg
I, for one, agree that the pace of technological innovation has somewhat
slowed down of recently. Compared to nuclear energy, television, the space
race, the complete eradication of small pox, personal computers, test tube
babies, and the internet, the last 10 years seem a little disappointing.
Modern miracles like the iphone and even-faster broadband and faster
JavaScript engines seems like incremental improvements rather than major
breakthroughs like quantum computing or true AI or whatever. On the other
hand, a lot of people are trying and succeeding and changing people's everyday
lives with the technology we have, so maybe it's good that we've had a little
breather for industry to catch up to science, as it were.

Technological development in the United States between WWII and the last
decade was propelled by a couple of conditions that don't exist currently,
most notably the Cold War spurring billions of federal dollars into
technological research and a few big-ass monopolies dumping billions of
dollars into long-term research.

The Space Race raised the profile of science and math education in the US, and
quite a lot of modern technology has roots in the space program or military
programs, including a lot of CS-related technologies. The internet was a
military project, and the US has had AI run their logistics since 1991. A lot
of industrial-type innovations, including manufacturing and deployment
operations, nuclear technology, and the first digital computers even trace
back to WWII. The US government was also a huge early adopter of computing
technologies like mainframes, spurring private development.

Meanwhile a few large monopolies had major research labs, most infamously Bell
and IBM. I'll be the first to admit that monopolies have drawbacks and usually
aren't a good thing, but because they didn't have to worry so much about
quarterly earnings they dumped massive amounts of revenue into long-term
strategies. Such research investments are arguably important primary causes of
desktop computers and our national communications infrastructure. Google and
Microsoft seem to have assumed these mantles. Microsoft, for its part, is
putting a lot of work into more fundamental research, although we haven't seen
a big payoff yet. Google seems to spend a lot of time on pet projects like
Wave. That's probably an unfair assessment, but their long-term horizons are
more on the order of 18-month product cycles than 10-year research projects.

So that's my take on it. The military-industrial complex and industrial
monopolies allowed for massive projects to create big-ass breakthroughs.
Without those drivers, academic research has delved into political infighting
for funding and companies have become myopic so our view of 'innovation'
becomes faster paced, but incremental rather than revolutionary. There's been
more focus on use and users, but at the cost of fundamental developments.
Whether this is "better" is anyone's guess. Faster incremental improvements
get to market faster and therefore affect day-to-day life more, but my
personal opinion is that the pendulum ought to swing back towards the
breakthroughs, at least temporarily, to give the rabid markets something big
and juicy to improve upon some time soon.

------
robryan
As a society we put a lot of effort at the moment into incremental improvement
rather than completely new innovation.

When TV, Cars, Computers, The Internet were invented they were all breaking
new ground in innovation because they were big areas that helped with life.

Now I think more smart people look at the way things are and can't see as many
obvious things missing, so instead choose to incrementally improve what we
have, either that or the goal is very ambitious and puts people off
attempting, such as manned spaceflight beyond low earth orbit and a cure for
cancer ect

~~~
evgen
When TV, cars, computers, etc. were invented they were breaking new ground
because they were areas where the low-hanging fruit were within easy reach.
The hard part, the one that took decades for each invention, was turning them
from a neat curiosity into an indispensable part of daily life. I hate to
break it to you, but "the Internet" may have been quite innovative for the
first two or three decades of its existence, but it didn't mean jack shit to
humanity. Back when midnight cabling runs through campus steam tunnels to
deploy a SLIP line was "cutting edge" it may have seemed like the coolest
thing in the world and an obvious game-changer to us at the time but it had
absolutely zero impact on 99.9999999% of humanity. The past ten to fifteen
years of so-called "incremental" improvement have turned a glorified research
toy into useful and productive part of daily life for a large portion of the
planet.

------
tigerthink
Google Maps is pretty cool.

------
gabrielroth
There were a lot of innovations in the financial sector in the last ten years,
because that's where a lot of the incentive to innovate was coming from.
Unfortunately, some of those innovations were very destructive, and most of
the rest had no benefit to society. There were probably some new tools that
resulted in more efficient allocation of capital, but those gains were swamped
by the damage done.

------
dazzawazza
It may not seem like a revolution but I think the micro loan model is a huge
revolution. Not just because it lifts people from poverty and empowers.

One of the most important things it does is show people in rich countries that
poor people are both hard working and honest and are not in need of charity
but are in need of help.

We've been stuck in a cycle of giving charity to poor countries and nothing
seems to be getting better. MLs have helped to break that cycle and empower
ordinary people (not warlords, clerics or politicians).

So I think that's an innovation :)

------
samstokes
Smartphones are transformative. They're already affecting popular culture and
will do so even more as they become more widespread. (One simple example:
arranging to meet a friend at a location new to one or both of you can be more
spontaneous if you both have GPS-enabled local search.)

I suspect most of the changes are for the better, although I'm sure there's an
argument to the contrary.

------
tungstenfurnace
Affluent people are aggressively hooked on entertainment and stress-based
productivity, which has dampened creativity and optimism somewhat, imo.

One field generating a lot of exciting discoveries seems to be materials
science.

------
csuper
Because all of the necessities are covered? Death by comfort?

~~~
dnsworks
But they aren't. Humanity is a social failure. The number of people who go
without food, shelter, and basic healthcare in this world is pretty
staggering.

~~~
jacoblyles
The proportion of people who go without basic necessities is at or near an all
time low.

~~~
dnsworks
And that somehow makes it better? Can you say with a straight face there's a
good reason that anybody in this country should be homeless or hungry when
we've spent a trillion dollars fighting enemies who weren't really enemies in
the past decade?

------
slvrspoon
i work with a hacker startup focused on impact of these issues and there is a
ton of info there: <http://www.givewell.net>

------
jodrellblank
I'm in bed typing on a triple radio, camera, touch, motion, sound and
proximity sensitive phone so I can't easily get links for citations from the
wotld's first distibuted volunteer enyclopedia, but I think I read there that
Guinea worm infection is well on the way to being the next eradicated disease,
with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation.

I think you have rose tinted glasses on the past - in 2000 I was at university
where they ran NT4 with Netscape, and was rocking a Celeron 433, with a new
USB1 100Mb zip drive. Now a 4Gb pen drive holds 400x more and costs 1/25th the
price and tranfers data faster.

New cars today can have vision recognition blind spot checkers, radar based
cruise control, pedestrian sensors, brake appliers, regenerative brakes, head
up displays, Internet connections, all in ordinary models not 100k luxury
ones.

The UK has migrated to digital TV and Radio. In 1999 I bought a VHS recorder,
now HDD recorders are standard.

In 2000 there was nothing as good as Skype, train times were on paper in
stations, airport checkins had queues, maps were paper based, polyphonic
ringtones on phones were fancy, the HP200lx was the netbook of choice, the L
prize for LED lights was nowhere to be seen, nor were snooks or really Amazon
and Internet shopping and consumer reviewing on such a grand scale. Joule
Biotechnologies, the LHC, ITunes university, the idea of an OLPC, virtual
machines all absent.

China, new fastest train recently.

Now, if I had the cash, I could put a deposit down for a personal space
flight!

I hear you on the computer still chugging thing, but don't want Netscape back.

------
DTrejo
HN was created.

------
gprisament
The movie Idiocracy explains it all.

------
drcode
I agree completely- I don't know why so many people insist that technological
progress is improving at an exponential rate when the empirical evidence seems
to contradict this so clearly.

~~~
mechanical_fish
... and what empirical evidence would that be exactly? Surely, if it is
empirical, you can cite it!

Could you at least define what you mean by _technological progress_?

~~~
drcode
Cheaper food, better cars, faster computers, improved life expectancy, cheaper
energy, better education, enhancements to human intelligence, better public
transportation, more efficient manufacturing, better understanding of biology,
better understanding of physics.

Empirically, it seems to me all of the above have seen noticeable, but merely
linear improvements in the last decade. (admittedly, computers are much faster
for parallelizable algorithms, such as 3D graphics, but not for the majority
of software which is serial in nature)

"access to information", "density of storage" and "communications tools" are
three that I think could be argued to have improved by an order of magnitude
in the last decade. I would guess though that out of those, only
"communications tools" will see similar dramatic changes in the next decade
(cell phones and other communication links are still pretty crappy right now)
I think the amount of information on the web in the next decade will increase,
but at a surprisingly modes rate.

(BTW- I hope I'm wrong and we have more exponential improvements to look
forward to)

~~~
dnsworks
Everything you've cited here just says "marginally better and cheaper crap to
buy". Education has not improved in the past 20 years. Neither has public
transit. Manufacturing has gotten cheaper, but it also puts out cheaper
products in terms of quality. Oh, and we have better video games. Yippee!

~~~
onedognight
Are you kidding? Education has made great strides if you don't need it shoved
down your throat. Every person with an internet connection can take any class
they want from MIT and Stanford for free! That's progress.

~~~
dnsworks
Have you noticed the inability of anybody under the age of 21 to spell common
words?

