It's rare I want to call someone with conservative technological estimates unrealistic. Usually I see the opposite. But I don't think Kasparov is on the mark here.
The cellphone was invented after that and has forever changed the way we reach people and fundamentally how they are reachable.
Do you remember life pre-cellphones? When you left your house you literally dropped off the map. There was no way of anyone knowing where you were or where you were going. Unless you let them know beforehand, there was no way for people to catch-up with you when you got there. All sorts of tiny events required massive planning.
Now when you leave the house, should you so please (and the vast majority do) you can be reached. Climbing a mountain? In another country? Nobody knows this? They can still contact you! You can be at a place you've never been before and your friend can contact you and meet you there!
I actually think this disrupts my zen a little bit; I'd rather not be reachable at all times. I rarely pick up my phone - maybe for my father, my brother, or my girlfriend. Everyone else can leave a message.
Ubiquitous cell phones are definitely a revolutionary development. This becomes obvious when you read or watch fiction of any sort. How many story lines would be completely disrupted by the presence of a cell phone? As it turns out, a great many, even for stories being written today, as many writers haven't fully absorbed the way things have changed.
This drives me nuts whenever I read anything by Connie Willis. Her time travel books play (partly, obviously) decades in the future yet there are constantly people running around and frantically looking for each other and not finding anyone. I always want to scream “Pick up your goddamn cellphone!” (Some of those were written in the nineties which explains their lack of cellphones but even her most recent books from this year have the same problem.)
It's weird that the lack of portable phones requires more suspension of disbelief than time travel. Maybe that's a testament to the writer. In Doomsday Book there are a few plot points where even an answering machine would have helped.
Pity the poor artist who establishes their reputation in one medium, then sees the medium do a big shift.
Willis probably could write books which fully encompass the cellphone-era worldview. But will they be Connie Willis books? Or will the loss of all those old tropes make her new style inevitably different from her best-selling old style?
Think of PG Wodehouse, blithely writing novels set in early-twentieth-century England as late as 1975. (Though this example is a bit contrived, since some would argue that Wodehouse wrote about a society that never existed.) Or Bach, plugging away on his late Baroque masterworks years after the Baroque went out of style.
Of course! In fact, I just discovered that The Art of the Fugue, which I believe Bach wrote toward the end of his career, really does sound better to me than his earlier stuff. Good for him for plugging stubbornly on in the genre he had mastered and which he knew best.
I feel like the situation is even more extreme in a sense. It seems like ubiquitous information disrupts a large percentage of all possible story plots.
Most story plots hinge on ignorance and discovery. With no physical personification of ignorance, a plot is simply less compelling.
Imagine -
* Odysseus travels through exotic, distant lands, that he just forget to do Google earth on beforehand, * Why wait for Godot when you can just give him a call? * etc.
The Orange ads are more about clueless producers ruining film ideas with rampant commercialism. I don't think there have been any Orange ads where a plot has been ruined due to the presence of a phone within the movie itself.
Haha yes, even Star Trek, they can travel at warp speed but the away team can't send an MMS back to the ship, the captain has to beam down personally and see for himself...
This is even sillier in the case of Star Trek since they could use even a Polaroid or film camera and beam the film/photos back up to the ship (or, of course, a data crystal or what-have-you).
The ironic thing about Star Trek (and part of what makes it so kitschy-great) is that you don't suspend disbelief about the future tech on the show; you suspend disbelief about the lack of present-day tech on the show. GPS, for starters, to say nothing of SMS, MMS, etc.
It's best not to think too hard about why a society capable of telling you from orbit precisely how many lifeforms inhabit a planet is incapable of telling you exactly where their captain is when his badge is removed.
You're forgetting that in those cases, beaming down was a result not of lack of video, but because of interference, or the classic "You have to see this for yourself" bit. More importantly, it made for a better show that way.
Interstellar video was common enough, but I'd question the importance of having video conferencing on top of their voice only communicators. I'd go further, but then I'd be showing how much time I've wasted thinking about this.
I seem to recall at least one episode where they showed the image of the person being communicated with in the communicator. Am I just imagining this? Or was it in one of the movie versions…?
The HN title of this needs fixing - I think Kasparov is talking about innovation within the U.S. (although the article itself is maddeningly unclear, saying "thinks the U.S. has become complacent when it comes to innovation" but then seeming to push a worldwide brush that the "last technology that could be thought of as revolutionary, he says, was the Apple II"; I think he meant in the U.S. and this is just sloppy journalism).
You're spot on about mobile phones changing things; the first mobile phone network was in Japan, and the Nordic countries were second up. The revolutionary innovation, which Kasparov is talking about, was not within the U.S.
The first mobile phone network was done by NMT in Japan, but the first commercial mobile phone was invented by Martin Cooper of Motorola and the first call made on this phone was to the head of a competing program at Bell Labs.
Heh. The problem with mobile phone history is that all the companies have similar acronyms. You are correct, it was NTT in Japan that was first and NMT that was second in deploying "1G" networks.
You've got your chronology wrong, the cell phone was introduced 1973 (that's why the OpenMoko device was called Neo 1973), predating the Apple ][ by four years.
Actually motorola unveiled the cell phone in 1973 and the brick phone design was pretty much unchanged from the beginning until the 80s when miniaturization began in earnest.
With cellphones around people are never alone anymore. To my mind, this "aloneness" (does not mean you are feeling lonely, but could) is an integral part of a meaningful human experience.
you can always leave your cell phone at home, but for many the cellphone is an integral part of going somewhere. planning en route, picking alternative an rendezvous etc.
I've noticed that some groups of people never meet at the place previously discussed. It's like "Hey, let's go to X" really means let's go some as-yet undisclosed location downtown.
Your story is missing critical parts and makes no sense as written. It is unclear to me how not having a cellphone resulted in the law telling your brother's account that it is now mandatory for him to flee from the cops.
It's non-trivial to compare cell phones with the combustion engine or flight, but I think we can agree with Kasparov that more inventions of that magnitude are something we should strive for.
Yet engines are actually getting replaced by other alternatives, but those alternatives require different sets of infrastructure which are non-existent (such as for fuel cells or electric cars) Also, there are external forces driving the way to the opposite side of the story (aka keeping combustion engines, for money, of course)
Sometimes I just think that the Americans use too much cars (one person driving a car with four seats is an insult to the nature.)
> Sometimes I just think that the Americans use too much cars (one person driving a car with four seats is an insult to the nature.)
I'm guessing that you'd be mad if more of us had multiple cars, one with one seat, one with two seats, one with three, and another with four. (An extra car just for gas mileage rarely saves money because $5-7k buys a lot of gas.)
I would like to know how you know how many other people that driver will transport before returning home. After all, if they're going to need four seats at any point before they return, they need to start with four seats.
BTW - most of those "four seat" cars actually have five seats.
The obvious alternative is not to have several different cars, but to live closer to where you work, shop and play.
Another alternative more obvious than keeping a garage full of differently-sized vehicles is to improve the fuel-per-passenger-mile ratio by banding together with other travellers who are going the same way. This is how buses and trains work.
>> one person driving a car with four seats is an insult to the nature.)
> The obvious alternative is not to have several different cars, but to live closer to where you work, shop and play.
Reread the complaint - driving less doesn't solve it.
> but to live closer to where you work, shop and play.
Those are three (or more) places. You may not be able to live close to all of them. For example, I work in Sunnyvale, my wife works in SF, and we play in Monterey. At times, we've worked other places between PA and SJ.
Where can we live that would be close enough to satisfy you?
> This is how buses and trains work.
Buses and trains don't necessarily go where I want when I want.
Consider 101. It looks like a lot of people going to/from SF until you look at the individuals in those cars. There aren't a small number of end-points. And many of those folks will make side trips that trains/buses don't acomodate.
I've ridden Cal Train (I was on the first baby-bullet and that wasn't my first commute). It's great for some things but it isn't a general solution. That's why it doesn't have much ridership.
> Reread the complaint - driving less doesn't solve it.
By "live closer", I mean "within 4 miles", so that you can walk. That does solve it (unless I've completely misunderstood)
> I work in Sunnyvale, my wife works in SF, and we play in Monterey
Yes, but you've chosen those places due to the prevailing social norm in your society to drive all the time. Looking at a map, were I you, I'd live in Sunnyvale/Santa Clara/Cupertino, so that one of you could walk to work, and you wouldn't have to do too much urban driving to get to Monterey.
> Buses and trains don't necessarily go where I want when I want.
How precise do you need to be? Unless I'm going somewhere obscure and far away, or travelling on Sunday, a train can normally get me to within 2 miles of where I want to be, within about half an hour of when I want to be there. That's plenty accurate enough, and certainly as accurate as urban driving.
OTOH I don't trust buses, because there are too many cars jamming up the road.
> > I work in Sunnyvale, my wife works in SF, and we play in Monterey
> Yes, but you've chosen those places due to the prevailing social norm in your society to drive all the time.
You've got it backwards. We chose those jobs because we like to make money. Driving makes it possible for us to earn much more money than we would if we didn't drive.
> Sunnyvale/Santa Clara/Cupertino, so that one of you could walk to work, and you wouldn't have to do too much urban driving to get to Monterey.
There's no "urban" driving between Sunnyvale/SC/Cupertino and Monterey. Urban is inside SF, Oakland/Berkeley.
> Unless I'm going somewhere obscure and far away, or travelling on Sunday, a train can normally get me to within 2 miles of where I want to be, within about half an hour of when I want to be there.
Middle of the day CalTrain schedules aren't every half hour and CalTrain isn't within 2 miles of everywhere I want to go on the Penninsula.
But, let's assume all that AND that CalTrain doesn't take any time to get between destinations. The half-hour schedule gap and 2 miles is an hour travel time.
Only one of our typical weekday trips are anywhere near that.
> That's plenty accurate enough, and certainly as accurate as urban driving.
No, it's not. It's significantly worse than what I've got now. Then again, the only urban driving that we do is inside SF, which is a small minority of our driving as we live in San Jose.
For some of the SJ to SF trips, Caltrain works for us. However, it doesn't a large fraction of the time.
I am seeing that urban transportation doesn't work because people don't use them, so they fail to make money and in the long run getting worse and worse.
I am guessing, if the gas price triples the same thing may not happen just as it is right now.
> am seeing that urban transportation doesn't work because people don't use them
The regions under discussion aren't urban so urban transportation simply isn't relevant.
Urban transportation requires a lot of density or a lot of folks going between common end-points. The latter is fairly rare and is very different from a lot of people going past a given point.
You have a point, although I feel you talk more about social disruption rather than technological. Switched communication and voice transmission over electromagnetic signal were genuine technology breakthroughs, and both are over a century old now. Cellphone is a combination of both, and while it was out of technical reach in 1900s, the concept still would've not sounded alien to the engineers of the time.
Kasparov complains that there aren't enough revolutionary technologies that push the world forward, as opposed to incremental improvements driven by wanting to please consumers. And then he says the last genuine technological revolution was ... the Apple II? Huh?
The Apple II was a fine product. But it was an incremental advance on its predecessors like the Commodore PET and, er, the Apple I (whose existence Kasparov might perhaps have been able to guess from the Apple II's name).
And: Mobile phones (as already pointed out by simonsarris). GPS. Affordable laser printers. The internet. Functional magnetic resonance imaging. Compact discs. Digital cameras. Etc., etc., etc. There's no shortage of things at least as revolutionary as the Apple II since 1977. (Some of them are based on fundamental developments a few years earlier, but none of them as much so as the Apple II.)
The internet is older than the Apple II. Apart from GPS and FMRI, i dont agree that the other consumer-products are revolutionary at all. CDs are notoriously unreliable data storage mechanism which are already obselete; laser printers haven't done much other than enable people to waste more paper ; digital cameras are just dense CCDs, nothing great or new about that.
Depends on what you mean by "the internet". The core protocols are older than the Apple II, but e.g. the linkup between ARPANET and NSFNet wasn't until the 1980s.
> CDs are notoriously unreliable data storage mechanism which are already obsolete
CDs were revolutionary because they were the first widely used digital music format. And they may be "notoriously unreliable", but my CDs are holding up better in terms of sound quality than a similarly-aged collection of LPs would without heroic measures. Sure, they're certainly obsolescent now, if not actually obsolete, but so is the Apple II.
> laser printers haven't done much other than enable people to waste more paper
Laser printers made it possible for anyone to produce near-publishable-quality documents. This is a Big Deal, even if for whatever reason you don't like it.
> digital cameras are just dense CCDs, nothing great or new about that.
And the Apple II was just a slightly better personal computer. Digital cameras have made traditional film cameras obsolete. They have completely changed the way in which people take pictures by drastically shortening the feedback loop from initial capture to inspection, and by making it essentially free to take large numbers of pictures. They have greatly increased the role of photography in most people's lives. (Still more as they have become commonly integrated into mobile phones.)
Now, if you wish to define "revolutionary" very strictly, then of course you can say that none of these things is really revolutionary -- but then the Apple II will come out also not being revolutionary. Kasparov is wrong either way.
The next revolution is happening right now- it's consumer level 3d printers (cupcake, reprap etc) and they're going to change everything, more than computers and cell phones combined did.
The 3-D printing industry now, looks a lot like the computer industry around 1976, doesn't it? We have the equivalents of big expensive mainframes, as well as cheaper, but still pretty pricey, minicomputers. Cupcake & RepRap strike me as being analogous to something like the Altair 8800 or the Aim-65: fun for seriously geeky hobbyists, but not really ready for prime time.
So the 3-D printing industry doesn't have its Apple ][ / Pet / TRS-80 yet. In the computer industry, back in '76, those were only a year away. And then in 5 years there was the IBM PC, in 6 years the Commodore 64, and in 8 years the Macintosh, and suddenly these little machines were everywhere.
Is 3-D printing going to advance that quickly? I doubt it. The technical challenges, and especially the price issues, look pretty tricky. I do think we'll get there before too long, though. It should be interesting to watch.
We went from basic monochrome computers that could barely hold the text of a single book in memory to having instantaneous access to the sum of human knowledge from a device that fits in your pocket.
Perhaps my definition of revolutionary is different than his.
Oh sorry, before my time. The general thrust of my point stands. You could always look back at the first breakthrough and call it revolutionary and every subsequent innovation derivative. Even when the "breakthrough" device was mostly useless in comparison. Evaluating innovation in this manner will always make the large advances appear to be in the past.
Good current example would be sequencing the human genome. As of right now its mostly useless, but 30 years from now it may be seen as that revolutionary spark. Then some other critic will talk about how nothing big has happened since.
I'm not sure that being the best chess player in the world is evidence that Kasparov is very intelligent--any more than being the best poker player, the best piano player, or even the best marketer. Chess is a learned skill just like any of those.
Put another way, looking at all of the world's very most intelligent people, the fraction that care enough about chess to become the world champion if they had the aptitude is very slim.
Point of fact: chess is learned but only to a point, probably around 2100-2150 ELO. That is the limit of what most people can accomplish with a lot of study and hard work.
Pushing beyond that and into the Super to Elite Grandmaster range (2550-2800) requires extraordinary levels of memory, concentration, calculation and pattern matching. Levels that can't be instilled in someone through any amount of training. A person either possesses them or (s)he doesn't.
I lack the evidence at hand, but I'm certain I've seen it before that aptitude in those areas correlates strongly to high intelligence.
You don't only lack the evidence, I think it is fair to say that the evidence contradicts your opinion. If you look at people like Judit Polgár, it seems like practice is far more important than any kind of intrinsic ability.
I'm willing to bet that the best Poker player, piano player and marketer are all very intelligent people. Being the best at something often takes both extreme intelligence and a lot of practice.
They've demonstrated that a brilliant chess player doesn't have to be intelligent. They haven't demonstrated that a brilliant human chess player doesn't have to be intelligent.
However, computers have not demonstrated brilliant chess play is possible without intelligence, unless the programmers of deep blue were not intelligent.
There are lots of people who play chess as much as Kasparov does. Few of them are even remotely near him in skill.
I'm not sure who the best poker player would be, but I've met most of the names that would be thrown out there if you asked the top people, and they're all scary smart. Piano playing is a different type of intelligence than poker or chess, but whoever the world's best piano player is I promise you has a lot of that type.
The only industry left that might fit Mr. Kasparov's prescription is the aerospace industry. There are still cowboys with calculators if not slide-rules and things moving from cad space to real space that are more than revolutionary and a damn site more than an incremental improvement...
Your comment is interesting, in that I don't see how it can possibly be true. From my POV, aerospace is the quintessential example of an industry that showed great promise and was revolutionizing our world, and then ... just stopped. The planes I fly on today are basically indistinguishable from the ones my father flew on back in the 1960s -- except for the TVs, but that's not really aerospace. Meanwhile, no one has been beyond LEO since 1972. NASA has produced lots of nifty unmanned spacecraft with cameras, true, but the only thing they've done recently that I would call revolutionary is the Mars rovers, but that's more robotics than aerospace.
So, could you explain? (Or were you perhaps being sarcastic, and I missed it?)
In a way you are both right. There are currently two aspects of the American space industry.
One, the moribund aerospace giants that are largely just making the same old rockets, entrenched in their job creation programs.
And two, the new space companies, which are making suborbital rocketplanes and cheap boosters. At present, they may not look impressive because of small steps they are taking, but you just have to look at Scaled's Space Ship Two to realize that radical innovation in their design is not dead.
This has been a long time coming, and there has been a dark age in aerospace.
Aside from aerospace. While I agree that there have been game changers like the cell phone, I do agree with Kasparov that there is an atmosphere of risk aversion. For instance I don't see any daring research programs like when DARPA funded Engelbart's augment research that led to Human User Interface objects like the mouse. And that disturbs me. Often visionaries look very crazy or at best very hard to understand because they are operating out of the scope of our context. I don't see people having the patience for these visionaries. And the people who do claim to be visionaries seem to have very conservative imaginations.
Some very smart people here have mentioned mobile phones. Some other smart people have made the point that the original mobile phones predate the Apple II. Indeed, car phones go back way far in history but have more in common (historically) with radios.
There are three revolutionary things about mobile phones that came after the Apple II:
SMS (1984/5)
GPRS (1997)
The ubiquity of mobile phones (late 90s to mid 2000s) with data services.
The technology itself is rarely revolutionary (although developers of HIV treatment drugs may disagree - this also came after the Apple II). The thing that makes it revolutionary is what happens when it reaches ubiquity. Mobile phones with data used to be amazing things. I still remember using a Nokia Communicator for the first time, over an incredible 9.6k link from almost anywhere with GSM coverage. These days your average person in the street probably couldn't tell you whether they were on GSM, HSPDA or Wifi (my wife certainly can't, other than sometimes her phone goes 'slow'). That's what's revolutionary about mobile phones, that they're no longer magical and part of everyone's day.
Well said! I agree with all of it. I'd only add that the U.S. isn't the only country that can innovate, and that innovation needs purpose beyond energy production. I feel that purpose should be:
- Colonizing space.
- Making better use of our land for sustainable agriculture to feed the hungry and the children of our future.
The how is of course the tricky part, but as to the why - well, to quote George Mallory,
"Because it's there"
That's good enough for me, but there are plenty of other reasons why. Species survival would be one of them.
There are plenty of possibilities for extinction events right here. Super-volcano eruptions, radical climate change, polar shifting, airborne super-bugs (hello zombie apocalypse!), nuclear mayhem, etc.
Our local environment also has plenty of hazards. Asteroid impact, engulfment in a large solar flare, orbital shifts are the ones that spring to mind.
Our little niche in the galaxy might also have to deal with wandering black holes, gamma-ray bursts from a supernova that is just near enough, the long-term problem of the collision with Andromeda, etc. We won't overcome any of those by colonizing Mars, but still some things to keep in mind.
On a more practical note, extreme endeavors like colonizing space require some radical thinking (and re-thinking of existing concepts). Colonizing means establishing a foothold outside Earth that is self-sustaining (i.e. can do without a lifeline to Earth). We can't actually do that right now. If we set that as a goal we're going to come up with some very interesting stuff, a lot of which is bound to be useful down here.
Life expands or dies, that's the way it works over here. What the universe really seems to abhor (apart from vacuum), is an equilibrium.
Earth serves as an effective spacecraft, we're just running low on supplies and making a mess of it; the economically and ecologically optimal move is migrate mining and industry to heaven.
I'd add emphasis on the why. I see no urging reason to build a base on moon.
Unless we plan to be done destroying earth soon and need to be autonomous out there asap.
Space program development requires: a) Technology b) Infrastructure
Boosting those boosts economics, creates workplaces and moves towards a better future. Even if they don't invent a hyperdrive or any other way to outsmart spacetime.
Another good thing about it for the countries is that it boosts morale, gathers everyone under national colours etc..
>- Making better use of our land for sustainable agriculture to feed the hungry and the children of our future.
Comparative advantage dictates that some massive chunk of land is devoted to cotton; that way when one of our shirts gets a loose thread we can throw it away as fast as possible so that we aren't seen by others as a leper.
I’m not sure that Kasparov (or anybody) has a right to criticize the rate of progress for the last few decades or centuries. Since the Renaissance, human progress has grown leaps and bounds at such an astonishing rate, compared with before, that we may have outpaced the ability for the human animal to adapt without negative repercussions. (Some might argue that this already happened all the way back to agriculture.)
Even if things have slowed down for the last few years, so what? Humanity may naturally have occasional refractory periods to catch its collective breath. Complaints like this make me think that such people regard light speed as too slow and try to push humanity to “ludicrous speed,” right past “ridiculous speed.”
IMHO, that's exactly the thinking that got us into trouble in the first place: that we have the capability to change nature, however we want, and yet we can't even predict earthquakes or give accurate weather forecasts.
Heck, we even have problems estimating the ecological footprint of anything.
E.g. that proof of concept electrical car that's extra efficient might require some rare metals to produce, and the manufacturing itself could have a bigger impact on nature than its usage. Only in the US there are tens of millions of drivers that will wait in line to buy such a car. And that electricity has to come from somewhere, like a nuclear power plant (which according to many, is less destructive to nature as wind or solar power).
This is a social problem that cannot be solved by technology.
If you want to change the world, find a way to make people consume less.
Consuming less (I mean at the consumer level, not raw resources) is hardly a way to promote the progress of our civilization. Finding a way to sustainably consume ever more will yield much greater outcomes in technology and happiness.
When the consumption rate is increasing exponentially, I don't know how you can even imagine that we'll ever be able to sustainably consume more.
Unless you're talking about StarTrek where food can materialize at the push of a button, or after a "warp maximum; engage" they can arrive at an inhabitable planet in one minute.
In the meantime, this planet doesn't grow any larger and its resources are limited.
I'll provide an example of what I'm thinking, as it may be that we disagree less than it appears.
I believe that one of our goals as a species should be ubiquitous travel, so that any person can afford to travel anywhere within a reasonable amount of time. The current approach of burning highly refined fossil fuels to power airplanes is obviously unsustainable, but that doesn't mean we stop flying. What we should be doing (and this is a very long-term view) is developing alternative energy storage mechanisms dense enough to power airplanes. One approach that seems reasonable to me is using nuclear power to store energy as biofuel, then switching to solar/wind/hydro power once it is possible to do so. Hypothetically we could design fuels and engines that result in zero harmful waste entering the atmosphere, and direct any byproducts from combustion into the next batch of fuel.
I will concede that Star Trek's unlimited energy universe is a bit like playing Sim City with the money cheat, though.
Though I agree with some of the above comments that the technological innovations since 1977 haven't been altogether uninspiring, I do wonder: Who right now is funding innovation that doesn't directly have a business model tied to it? i.e., innovation for the sake of innovation, without the startup pitch, killer ceo, etc - the scientist pushing the limits for the sake of science?
Is NASA a place where this happens?
And is it frivolous to suggest that this kind of innovation without an obvious money-making scheme is important?
It's not frivolous because fundamental research often leads to unexpected commercial benefits. One example - Japanese physicists doing research into quantum tunneling led to the shrinking of satellite dish antennas from 2m to about 30cm.
On some levels I think Kasparov is right. You could fly from London to New York faster in 1977 (on the Concord) than you can today.
Primarily, the people doing innovation for innovation's sake right now are the guys who've already made their fuck-you millions or billions, and can now afford to fund out-there research. Folks like Paul Allen, Elon Musk, (to a certain extent) Peter Thiel, Sir Richard Branson, etc. Sure, there's occasionally a commercial motive behind some of their side projects -- but not always, and often as a pipedream. In a way, it is refreshing to see people's throwing money at pipedreams simply to make them ever so slightly more realistic. Will Branson make space flight affordable to the masses in his lifetime? Almost certainly not. But he realized that if he didn't kickstart the process, it would have taken the world a lot longer to get started.
As industries grow too large sweeping changes become more difficult. There are too many dependencies in the current tech stack for computers. Processor architectures, people used to certain UIs, lots of jobs dependent on the status quo. Society may have caught up with the possibilities of yesterday's computers, jumping on social networks, ubiquity of devices, but the tech stack itself is stuck.
The most recent opportunity to move it forward are mobile devices. Companies are finally rethinking the OS (iOS, ChromeOS), compilers (LLVM), processor architectures (ARM, integrated graphics).
Kasparov probably thinks such steps should not be driven by market forces alone, but by technologists interested in experimentation. The right market conditions came about after decades of the same old more MHz, more HD space rat race. The market is not fast enough, it has other priorities, like getting the products to everybody.
Our biggest technological leaps came about when people with vision got others to invest big. The Industrial Revolution in 1800s, World Wars, Manhattan Project, Space race, PCs, GUIs, .COM bubble, GPS, CERN, LHC etc.. were all obnoxiously big gambles. These have become less popular, people prefer mindless market driven evolutionary change instead of vision.
Maybe I missed something here, but...when did Gary Kasparov suddenly become qualified to comment on technological and computing progress? No mention of the internet, for instance, which kind of tends to undermine the ability to take his comments seriously. For that matter, what makes the Apple II so revolutionary compared to it's predecessors and successors? No mention of that.
He beat it by being a better chess player. When he can explain how the supercomputer works and talk knowledgeably about the algorithms underlying the game software and it's design, then he would be an expert on technology.
I think that it is wrong to say we aren't trying to innovate. I rather think we are at a point where incremental improvements are yielding better results in shorter time than revolutionary changes.
Examples: How many revolutionary replacements for DRAM have been proposed since the 1103 was introduced? Yet what do we use today? DRAM, because it could incrementally improve to be better and/or cheaper before competing technologies could be introduced
How many revolutionary replacements for the ICE have been proposed? Various jet engines have largely replaced it for aircraft, but the ICE is used just about everywhere else.
How about von neumann computers? There have been many other architectures proposed, but for general purpose computing it still wins out.
The fact that I am writing on this with something that is merely the sum of many incremental improvements to the Apple II just demonstrates the huge amount of untapped potential in the design when it was introduced, not that innovation has stopped.
Apart from the internet itself I think digital content distribution is revolutionary, it certainly has drastically changes the way we acquire games, books, music, movies etc.
It's changed the content that an average person has access to without replying on what as being distributed locally. It has allowed those that would have never been able to get wider distribution of their content, those producing niche material to access a big enough market to make their projects viable.
So it may not have changed the content on the whole but it has certainly changed the content that most people are actually able to experience.
Ability to experience mayn't align with actual experience; while radio could've increased music diversity, it's effect seemed ultimately homogenizing, and the same may be true of online content.
Maybe Garry's limiting his discussion to computer-y tech, but for me, I think biologics-as-drugs is pretty damn revolutionary. Having an number of antibodies that can stop rheumatoid arthritis in its tracks is pretty amazing in my book.
Tech? Portable music/video players have totally changed how I travel, flash memory makes those little plastic thingies from Star Trek work and room-temp color sensors (digital cameras, etc) are pretty amazing.
Could you explain your analogy in a bit more detail? Google Maps is like pornography, and ... what ... is like sex? Physical paper maps? (I'm not seeing the big difference compared with electronic ones.) The actual full-size terrain itself? (OK, sure, but that's a bit tricky to carry around with you and use for route planning.)
nice article!
For those trying to do research, for research's sake... how many path-breaking PhD's in Computer Science has US produced? (For that matter, any country in the world-but let's stick with US)
I feel that the entire culture has been skewed towards incremental improvements.
I bet, 90% of papers churned out, would be having conclusions something like.. "improved the performance of X by y% under the conditions L,M,N"
where (L,M,N) might be near-impossible to occur simultaneously in real life.
You cant disregard/dismiss Gary's points- sure,Apple II might not have been the last technological innovation, but overall- he has raised a valid point.
Innovation may be down in the USA, but it's definitely better than in other places. The potential is there - the same cannot be said for anywhere else in the world.
Europeans take their ideas to the U.S. because in Europe there's no money for innovations. There's no infrastructure for it. China is trying the wrong approach and producing nothing. Japan has incremental improvements ingrained in its culture.
However I think he's right about the stimulus and money. The big government approach doesn't produce anything innovative either. We're building roads in the USA - that's good, but... not gonna change the world now is it? Printing money is currently undermining the USA - it's surprising inflation isn't much worse than it is but at some point something will have to give.
It reminds me a bit of the housing bubble - for years house prices were going up, way into silly territory, and beyond. But eventually, the market corrected itself. Now, we're printing US$ Tns every year and there seem to be no negative effects - but that, also, is going to eventually hit home. It's going to make America a country of cheap labor. Inflation will catch up.
The cellphone was invented after that and has forever changed the way we reach people and fundamentally how they are reachable.
Do you remember life pre-cellphones? When you left your house you literally dropped off the map. There was no way of anyone knowing where you were or where you were going. Unless you let them know beforehand, there was no way for people to catch-up with you when you got there. All sorts of tiny events required massive planning.
Now when you leave the house, should you so please (and the vast majority do) you can be reached. Climbing a mountain? In another country? Nobody knows this? They can still contact you! You can be at a place you've never been before and your friend can contact you and meet you there!
I actually think this disrupts my zen a little bit; I'd rather not be reachable at all times. I rarely pick up my phone - maybe for my father, my brother, or my girlfriend. Everyone else can leave a message.