Sheesh. I always disagree strongly with this mindset. The false dichotomy that if an idea doesn't immediately raise everyone's standard of living it isn't a "big idea."
There are several technologies on the horizon that can change everything (as Steve Jobs would say)
Real virtual reality - For a big chunk of the world who need to see it to understand it, that will open the doors to a learning, design, and experiencing new things.
Carbon based circuitry - the first all carbon integrated circuit will be 10x faster and 5x more efficient than the best silicon out there. This will put even more amazing compute and sensory power into everyday devices. We chuckle at wizard's wands but they make for a easy to carry universal remote.
Graphene based charge storage. So often we throw energy away in friction brakes because that is easier than reusing it. Charging gear in seconds to run for hours. Recapturing more solar energy both from visible light and latent heat.
Fusion power for unlimited base load power. Completely re-defining the economics of industry, water supplies, transport, and urban HVAC.
Genetic designs, e.coli that synthesize chemicals of our choice without risky refineries. Curing genetic diseases not just treating them, repairing organs, limbs, brains, with targeted stem cells.
Robotic automation that can assemble or disassemble thousands of different products. Reducing waste, eliminating toxic dumping, and allowing us to get ahead of the clean up curve.
If we don't have millions of robots in space, at least collecting energy and exploring, we still have lots and lots to do, many things can still be improved.
Once we do have AI and robotics in the reach of programmers then I bet we haven't even began to realize all the things we don't have now. I am a contrarian in that if computers added more work then so will robots, there will be more to do because there is more you can accomplish and unseen needs will arise. People could build companies and products almost individually like software today. When you lower the groupthink and bureaucracy around ideas/innovation, let individuals run with it, then it always opens up.
We could still do electric highways (interstate system for electric cars), drones are just getting started, ai/self driving or automated function free us up to do many other things, medicine/health advancements, virtual worlds that really improve your life, pipes that don't degrade, water desalinization, solar, we still need massive jumps in broadband and new ways to send/store/archive data (always will be a problem) and many many more.
We don't even really know the bottom of the ocean or the inside of the planet we live on really, robots will help us in that as well. So much to still explore, learn and innovate on.
Another Musk or Tesla could come along and open up ideas we had no idea were possible spawning all kinds of innovation and quality of life improvements.
I think this is because as capitalism solves more and more problems, a greater proportion of the remaining problems are caused by capitalism. It's difficult for the system to solve these problems without reshaping its boundaries.
But don't a lot of policies like for example a carbon tax indirectly reflect components of a triple bottom line in the bottom line of businesses? I would argue that making externalities show up in the annual report has been part of economic policies for a long time.
I honestly just meant the term, but to what you are saying, I think it depends. If a company outsources their work force to a sweatshop in Asia is that following the TBL? Maybe, but probably not. It will, however, cause their stock price to go up and make them more competitive in their market.
Most public companies only started reporting a sustainability report about 4 years ago.
That isn't true for everyone. Innovation happens with non profits too.
The difference though, and why you see so much coming out of private companies, is that more people are motivated by money than are motivated by altruism. But there are still plenty motivated by altruism.
None of this has translated into meaningful advances in Americans’ standard of living.
Regulations have raised the bar for commercializing new ideas while directing a growing share of innovative effort toward goals with benefits, such as cleaner air, that don’t translate into gross domestic product.
So cleaner air does not count as improved standard of living just because it does not show up¹ in the gross domestic product? This seems more a case of a broken metric than a broken development.
¹ On a second thought, it may actually show up in the gross domestic product via healthier people with less sick days and less medical spendings.
Agreed. The thinking of many people is incredibly screwed up. People have enormous trouble counting the suffering that did not happen as having any value.
Keeping your lungs: Does not count.
Lung transplant after you get deathly ill: Big bucks and doctor is a hero!
bottom line: several key technological leaps can't really ever happen again - electrics, indoor plumbing, motor vehicles, air travel, telecom - these made huge fundamental changes in living standards - no comparably huge changes remain
i'd say: fusion power might be one - automated cars, considering our dependence on them in current suburbanism - cheap orbital access - brain augmentation - life extension - a foolproof recipe for homemade pho
> bottom line: several key technological leaps can't really ever happen again - ... - these made huge fundamental changes in living standards - no comparably huge changes remain
I have some ideas for "huge fundamental changes in living standards": cheap (as in almost free) housing, not having to work 40 hours a week. Why are these not on a list of technological possibilities?
Given that we don't know what advances lie in the future, I just don't understand how one can say "no comparably huge changes remain", as this is equivalent to a prediction about the future, and those are notoriously terrible.
Future predictors always want you to ignore the hundreds of times they've previously been wrong, and just get you to focus on this one call here.
brain augmentation, space travel and life extension would reshape humanity just as much, if not more than indoor plumbing, telecom and air travel.
No to mention that we actually lack the ability to grow abundant food without destructive environmental effects. Lots of research and business capital is going into new ways to grow food in smaller spaces. There is even development of meat that can be grown. These would fundamentally change society.
Given Krugman's history of predicting the future (i.e. saying the internet was incremental like the fax), I view his endorsement as an indictment of the book
Krugman was also a very lonely voice going against conventional wisdom and time has proven him right on some big bets.
Contrarian Call #1 - He called bullshit on the rationale for the Iraq war very early.
Contrarian Call #2 - His models showed that the stimulus and bailouts after the financial collapse would not cause runaway inflation.
If you read his review of the book (not an endorsement) you'll see that it's Contrarian Call #3 -- that maybe the bulk of productivity improvements from the internet have already been achieved.
Let's discuss the ideas, evidence and models, not take ad hominem shortcuts.
To clarify your criticism, the definition of ad hominiem (from Wikipedia) is: "argumentum ad hominem, is a logical fallacy in which an argument is rebutted by attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument...".
I criticized him as having a bad history of predicting things (not his personality, position, or viewpoint), and history is the best predictor of future performance. Krugman said that the internet was similar to the fax (back in the 1990s), and was wrong; however, I will grant that Krugman may not be as bad as other NYT columnists.
Krugman, circa 1995:
"By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."
> There are more scientists and engineers in the U.S. than ever before. None of this has translated into meaningful advances in Americans’ standard of living.
It seems like this article is attempting to state a problem that doesn't exist to create a stir. No meaningful advances recently? I cannot take this statement seriously when I now have the entire internet easily accessible in my pocket at all times compared to 10 years ago. I can talk face to face with my grandmother miles away from the comfort of my room. And virtual reality seems to be on its way to becoming a game changer for many industries if (or when) it catches on.
> Electric cars, for example, cost more and perform worse than equivalent gasoline cars; the batteries subtract space and add weight, and mileage is limited especially in extreme temperatures.
This statement has for too many variables to me to accept as true. There are many different ways to measure performance of a car. If the writer is talking speed performance, the Model S blows every competitor out of the water. Mileage is a different story, but maintenance from what I've seen appears to be cheaper (no oil changes, belt/chain replacements, etc). And the batteries and motor take up less space when compared to the engine and drivetrain of comparable vehicles. Maybe now electric isn't the most economical choice, but it seems like that's slowly changing.
His point about slowing growth in tech certainly may be true, but some of the statements he makes towards the affects of this lack of growth seem backwards to me.
>None of this has translated into meaningful advances in Americans’ standard of living.
My five year old likes space stuff. This morning, he wanted to know what the planet Venus was made of. To find out, he spoke to my phone and was immediately given an answer along with lots of other details.
When I was growing up, the cost to find out such basic information was high - I'd need to find someone who knew, or dig out a paper encyclopedia after visiting the library, something I wasn't allowed to do by myself when I was five.
By he time I could do so, it usually didn't matter to me any more.
My son's standard of living far surpasses mine at the same age.
Exactly. Pick up any half-decent sci-fi book, or even rewatch Star Trek: TNG. There's plenty of cool stuff left to be done, and even more improvements to things that are already here.
The real problem is that current economy doesn't let those ideas grow.
I'm hoping, as the "duck and cover" generation dies out, we might see a renaissance in nuclear engineering. Some revival is going on at the moment, but civilization only worked on nuclear ideas for about 30 years (1940-1970). We barely touched the surface. I imagine Musk would have a nuclear rocket division, if that was politically acceptable. Maybe a nuclear technology ecosystem is only possible off Earth.
It seems that the commercialization impact of R&D spending is more complicated than I had thought (https://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/measuring-the-impact-o...), but I would still encourage you to look at how much various places spend on R&D, and how many people they manage to move through STEM university programs (in terms of percentage of their own native-born population).
We also may need to spend more effort explicitly targeting our R&D industry towards finding mysteries and solving them. Basic scientific advancement, after all, comes precisely from exploring the unknown rather than from merely innovating within the bounds of the already-known.
And then there's patent reform and such to think about. Blah blah.
But you should take everything I say with a grain of salt, since I work for an R&D company.
Big ideas take a long time to play out. Take electricity, for example. Maxwell published his equations in 1861. Yet useful new applications of electricity were still coming out in the 1960s (microwave ovens).
Or take transistors. They were invented in 1948. What we call "electronics" didn't really start happening until about the 1970s. Moore's Law didn't really slow down until maybe 2005.
The problem is that we don't have a big idea that has already substantially begun taking off at the right time. But there are some candidates:
Genomics.
Low-cost solar.
Fusion.
If any of those really takes off (with genomics being very likely to do so), then will have the next idea that we'll ride for decades.
Nitpick: Moore's Law is about the transistor density, not clock speed. So while clock speed increases slowed down around 2005, transistor density kept marching[1]. The extra transistors just went to bigger caches, more parallelism, and more complex cpu architectures.
Even if we can do sustained fusion, that doesn't make it a game changer. It looks like it will be hugely expensive. It's easy to say "fuel is nearly free and unlimited!" but that's also true of solar power and solar is too expensive to take over the world's energy. Fusion would be worse because it would require more maintenance - such as frequently replacing radiation damaged parts.
I agree. I work in AI and I feel like it gets a lot of the brunt of the "game changing" tech hype, but to be honest if someone solved fusion that would be an absolute societal game changer.
I keep wondering when some dictatorship will sidestep rules and use genetic tech (crispr et al) to breed smarter humans. Maybe such humans could then figure out FTL, fusion, teleportation, and other Star Trek stuff.
Well, I think you'd probably have to start with some vague idea how to use genetic tech to breed smarter humans. The problem is pretty far from an ethical one right now. Nobody has the faintest idea how to do it.
(Also: if it were possible to breed generally smarter humans using genetic technology, I have a somewhat hard time believing that there are a lot of dictators who would be like, "Subjects who are way smarter than I am? SIGN ME UP!")
That's what happens when researchers are pressured by management to publish, publish, publish... which forces them to pursue quick-payback, incremental-research projects instead of dedicating themselves to difficult questions and taking on long-term projects with uncertain payoffs. With few exceptions (AI, for example), this is the norm in most fields. Ask any PhD student.
I dunno what big ideas out there are not being investigated to some extent. It's just that we've saturated the domain. Anything you can imagine we've done something about it. I mean we don't have teleportation. We will soon have robotics to do everything. We will soon be colonizing space. I mean there is only so much you can do in the world and we're already doing it. Infinity is saturated. The problem is that we can't make society work with what we have invented. So the problem is not that we don't have ideas. The problem is that we can't make society work in the way that it has, and that's a good thing. But not for people who run society who don't want to lose power. But their time is up.
Shareholders are irrelevant. CEOs are irrelevant. And management is irrelevant. Just like employees are irrelevant. Anyone in the future can come up with an idea and be empowered to bring that idea to market through manufacturing done by robotics which is completely automated. You tell mama AI what to make and it makes it on demand for whoever wants it. Society needs complete re-engineering with completely new rules.
That's really the big idea. And yes we can not work on that within the framework of current system. Because it's transcending the system and requiring new rules.
Resource constraints are an optimization problem. Some things don't get made because other things need to be made which are more important for the system to function. Right now these resource constraints are not even optimum. In that we waste tons of resources for no good use. We call this stuff garbage, packaging, waste food that's simply thrown in the trash. These are optimization problems that AI can solve much better than we ever could. It simply means that some things get made, and some things don't. It's as it is already, but probably much better.
In the end the only reason to choose Capitalism is people. People are difficult to manage. Capitalism makes them easier to manage and to motivate them. Without people, you don't need Capitalism. Machines are not lazy. Machines don't need motivation. Machines don't need the sort of human management. Machines are faithful. Machines are true. Long live the machines!
We currently have 10s of millions of highly educated scientists, engineers, programmers, technicians in the world. We have tools to collaborate and communicate. Global GDP is like 100 trillion.
With that magnitude of resources available, we should be able to do big things. But, those with the capital have pretty much everything they need, so there's little motivation.
I deleted my tongue in cheek remark from earlier to the effect that I am just getting started. I think it can be done, but you have to find a lightweight means to do it.
Big ideas of each era have their own fingerprint and are unlike the big ideas of previous eras.
Personally, I don't think we are out of ideas - perhaps we are just trapped in a local minimum for a while.
Much Internet innovation is stifled by two factors:
1. The current economy of the Internet is paid for by advertising, which goes to two main players; Google and Facebook. A system of micropayments never successfully took off, but bitcoin or its successors may yet.
2. Few startup companies aim to IPO anymore like they did in the 1990's. This results in them being bought out and assimilated into larger, less creative established organisations.
Generally, in the USA, startup company formation is now at its lowest level since 1977. In general we have fewer and fewer but larger and larger companies. This allows for less "creative destruction".
RnD investment is more risky than lobbying investment.
Not bad, the decision to cut the article right there. Of course, it's just clickbait, but very precisely executed. Makes me curious to know if WSJ editors use analytics software to engineer these.
If not, perhaps I can interest you in a demo of one? If you don't see an increase in turnover, well make the trail period free!
Didn't physicists of the old once say they were close to closing in the the grand theory of everything, it was Max Plank or someone who was told by some Physics Prof that Physics as they knew was completely discovered .. point being there will always be a big idea around the corner that will surprise everybody
Yes but the situation is very different. We have fast declining productivity, and nothing seems to be able to arrest that.
Now what is declining productivity ? Well, it's a measure of how much you make, on average, from one unit of human labour. In other words: how much can one single average human produce, given the odds of them having a job (so automation is not really a positive factor for productivity anymore).
This is a critical figure for lots of reasons. Firstly, it's effectively an upper bound on average income (not average pay, as unemployed people should be included in the average). It's the maximum amount you can possibly spend, as a nation, on average, on a human, per year, without going in debt. So one might say, the maximum you can spend, sustainably.
Of course the current productivity figures have already been propped up majorly by unsustainable debt spending, which won't be possible in the future unless we start really growing the economy again. And let's face facts here : if Obama's Government and FED spending couldn't do it (and they didn't), nothing can.
So that means the average "value" available to a single American, or citizen of the world in general, needs to go down from this point forward. Note that I didn't say money, and in fact, Trump's fiscal spending, assuming it happens, will increase the money, but increase prices more. So everyone who isn't dirt poor or 0.001% or so will have to deal with less means available on a sustained basis from here forward. Less living space, less food, less traveling, ... unless we get productivity rising again.
The theory that is making the rounds is that we're demand-bound. And indeed, you find support for this all around. The concept is that productivity is lagging because producers are demand bound. We have to idle car factories almost 30% of the time worldwide and still have more cars than can be sold. Oil is in a price trap, and despite a 60%+ drop in price production went up by maybe 5% (of course oil is famous for it's price elasticity, but still). Chinese exports and even total production are flattening (assuming you take the real figures of what amounts pass through harbours, not the Chinese state's frankly untrustworthy figures, even those show lower growth though).
On the plus side, this does seem to be the idea behind Trump's trade sabotage. Fix the demand problem by taking non-American supply out of the picture through isolationism and/or tariffs. That may work. Of course, historically, it's also caused more than a few wars. But keep in mind, it won't be Trump that goes to war, nor will America likely be the target.
So if we are indeed demand-bound, well ... euhm ... Keynes had a solution for that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Keynesianism (an economic analysis of the situation will immediately show however that just building a military doesn't work. You have to actually blow up more than a few countries to make this work. WW2 did that for Keynes)
These are large scale economic issues. It makes little sense to discuss one idea, in one line of business. It only really makes sense to look at the whole and what is happening there.
Economic Growth relies on a pyramid system, the hidden problem is in exploiting new resources (people eg slavery and stealing other countries resources) is getting harder
There are several technologies on the horizon that can change everything (as Steve Jobs would say)
Real virtual reality - For a big chunk of the world who need to see it to understand it, that will open the doors to a learning, design, and experiencing new things.
Carbon based circuitry - the first all carbon integrated circuit will be 10x faster and 5x more efficient than the best silicon out there. This will put even more amazing compute and sensory power into everyday devices. We chuckle at wizard's wands but they make for a easy to carry universal remote.
Graphene based charge storage. So often we throw energy away in friction brakes because that is easier than reusing it. Charging gear in seconds to run for hours. Recapturing more solar energy both from visible light and latent heat.
Fusion power for unlimited base load power. Completely re-defining the economics of industry, water supplies, transport, and urban HVAC.
Genetic designs, e.coli that synthesize chemicals of our choice without risky refineries. Curing genetic diseases not just treating them, repairing organs, limbs, brains, with targeted stem cells.
Robotic automation that can assemble or disassemble thousands of different products. Reducing waste, eliminating toxic dumping, and allowing us to get ahead of the clean up curve.