The point I was trying to make is that just ordering take out food on a computer or storing files on a computer on the network or sharing URLs and comments on a public website are not ground breaking ideas - these are trivial ideas that I am sure anyone here could have come up with.
But the transistor? Or the laser? Are these things that were thought up by the layman independently on a regular basis? (i.e. like the ideas for a lot of the y-combinator startups have been thought up independently many times over by laymen) I don't think so. I feel like these scientific endeavours require years of hands on scientific research and hard work before they ever become anything meaningful, and not just an idea for an app that pops into your mind while sitting on the toilet one day.
I think articles like these and the recent "how to do great work" one recently shows quite how out of touch and how much of an over-inflated sense of importance people in the tech industry can often have - to even begin to think that booking a taxi on a computer is anywhere close to something like inventing the transistor is just absurd.
Storing file or sharing URLs aren't, y'know, the transistor but looking at say WeWork, or MoviePass, the companies that have succeeded at that says successful despite naysayers. I think it's overestimating their intelligence and under estimating yours (and mine) to think that you and I couldn't have come up with the transistor given the exact same set of circumstances, and over estimating yours (and mine) to think that our file or urls service cold be as remotely successful. We can agree to disagree, I suppose. The laser was preceeded by the MASER and was deemed to be a niche device, of no interest except maybe to a few. History proved otherwise, and I hope to be able to afford a 4k laser projector in the near future. It could have just sat in the dustbin of history like the memristor but the right set of people found it and brought us to the world today.
I don't think. credit card processing is curing cancer either, but the level of adulation some people have for others, and lack of respect for others, is either
worth calling out. Have a bigger perspective. I think you could have invented the transistor given the exact same set of circumstances, and I've never met you.
But the transistor? Or the laser? Are these things that were thought up by the layman independently on a regular basis? (i.e. like the ideas for a lot of the y-combinator startups have been thought up independently many times over by laymen) I don't think so. I feel like these scientific endeavours require years of hands on scientific research and hard work before they ever become anything meaningful, and not just an idea for an app that pops into your mind while sitting on the toilet one day.
I think articles like these and the recent "how to do great work" one recently shows quite how out of touch and how much of an over-inflated sense of importance people in the tech industry can often have - to even begin to think that booking a taxi on a computer is anywhere close to something like inventing the transistor is just absurd.