Mass Innovation and Disruptive Change 194
bart_scriv writes "The new head of MIT's Media lab argues that societal advances, previously the domain of a small group of individuals, will now become the product of millions of people due to changes in education and technology. He also offers advice to would be start-ups and entrepreneurs, including an argument against instrumentalism: 'The successful will look for fundamental disruptive change.'" There sure do seem to be a lot of creative people doing projects on the web today. What do you folks think of this?
Well (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of creative people (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems to me they're far outnumbered by the un-creative people.
Concepts like "good design" and "good programming" are skills that take training, practice and work. Woodworking tools are cheap, ubiquitous and far more capable than what was available 20, 40 or 60 years ago. Where are all the people building beautiful, elegant and functional furniture?
Disruptive Change (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that looking where everyone else is looking is the surest way not to find disruptive change. If you want to invent a disruptive technology, the last place to look is where everyone else is.
What a crock (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A lot of creative people (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, with the possible exception of the power router I might argue with this, but I think I'll just restrain myself to the opinion that musical composition would be a better example.
Nowadays you don't even have to bother learning to play even a simple instrument to compose. Just type some ABC notation (plain, tagfree ASCII text) into a computer and let the computer convert it to midi.
Anyone can compose now, with only a few minutes of "training," and much of the music sounds like it.
The tool might very well do the work, but it doesn't know the job.
KFG
Re:He can't be serious... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The masses WILL innovate (Score:3, Insightful)
As always, big business and big government is the enemy of innovation.
nope (Score:3, Insightful)
What you have to remember is that good ideas are not distributed evenly. Some people are vastly smarter than others. Vastly more creative than others. Vastly *better* than others by any way you mean to quantify better. You may have access to the modern equivalent of the printing press, but that doesn't mean you can publish the modern equivalent of the Principia Mathematica (either one).
Blogs are an excellent example of this. Blogs are horrible. They allow people who are too lazy or too ignorant even to build their own website the ability to spread their tawdry and mindless blatherings to the rest of the world. People talk about blogs supplanting traditional news media in some ways, but this is true only because traditionally news media has become so watered down and useless that just about any form of media that doesn't talk to you like a child could supplant it. Blogs are *not* an improvement over a good newspaper... it is just that good newspapers are hard to find these days (the seattle times in pretty good though).
Re:The masses WILL innovate (Score:4, Insightful)
I hasten to dissagree.
MIT is concerned with astonishingly advanced innovation, but that is the rarest form of innovation.
Most innovation is in smaller products with more creative thought processes using existing technology, than in creating whole new technologies. Thes smaller products and projects can often easily be something a person or two do and create a 10-50 million dollar company.
Lots of examples exist, but they really don't get the headlines, as the pizzazz is not there for news orgs.
"Instrumentalism?" (Score:3, Insightful)
Mass Innovative Change? Hardly likely (Score:4, Insightful)
What the head of MIT's Media lab should have been saying is that there are a lot more people on the planet than there were before. With increased numbers over the whole and a constant percentage of "smart people," it would appear that smart people are on the rise.
In the overpopulation of our planet, we are witnessing a lot of smart people being born. We are also witnessing a lot of stupid people being born. Although there may be millions of intelligent humans out there now, there are still billions of stupid ones.
The group of individuals making the change is as small as ever..in terms of how much of the population they take up. And with more stupid people running around, change will happen just as slowly as before (try convincing billions that you are right!)
One last thought - Those making the changes have always wanted disruptive change, but look at the results of their desires. Communism would have been a massively disruptive change (on paper), but once it was implemented, people were able to smash it back down into the monarchy they were accustomed to.
Re:That's funny (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:True (Score:2, Insightful)
Because of the pro-rich administration, the wealthy have too much money these days (perhaps at our expense) and so are using their spare money to go out on investment limbs.
Generally good investors split their investments into 3 groups: Safe but slow-growth, medium, and high-risk. The high-risk end is essentially gambling money (but hopefully with better odds than Vegas). Thus, if you have 5 billion dollars to invest, you may decide to put 500 million into pie-in-sky startups, hoping you'll catch the next ebay.
Re:A lot of creative people (Score:3, Insightful)
A modern drill press is only a tiny bit more capable; I have to move a belt across pulleys to change its speed, while modern ones have electronic speed controls.
The story is the same for lathes. Table saws have seen little change; they're not even variable speed.
Woodworking tools are far cheaper than they were 20, 40, 60, or 80 years back. And some new types of tools have made some operations far easier (biscuit joiner, power miter saws). But the rest of it is still shaping wood with precision, and that takes time and skill and practice.
Changes in the IT world have been far more dramatic.
Disruptive change is a mistake. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That's funny (Score:3, Insightful)
My daughter's school is noticably better than in my day. Anyhow, I don't think school matters much in the US, to be frank. School tends to focus on physical concepts. The "physical economy" has been offshored for the most part because it is cheaper to do it there. The nuts and bolts are overseas.
Concepts such as ebay are essentially social ideas. Social ideas are where the innovation tends to come from of late. Partying and schmoozing is where you get those, not from books about icosolese triangles.
The US is the marketing capital of the world because we are the biggest consumers. Thus, we understand fads and marketing gimmicks and provide the best place to test them.
Physical is so 80's. I'm just the messenger.
Re:That's funny (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:He can't be serious... (Score:3, Insightful)
The question there was about attracting funding. In that context, you're completely wrong.
Getting startup funding is about offering 10:1 odds on 100:1 money. Minor, incremental innovations generally don't get you 100:1 money because established players are better placed to take advantage of incremental change than you are. But you can get the advantage with disruptive change because you can be more nimble than a company with a lot of existing procedures and an instinct to defend existing revenue.
Take digital photography as an example. For camera companies it was enough of an incremental change that the big camera companies handled it well enough. But for photo supplies and processing, it was a huge change, allowing the printer companies and all sorts of new players to nab a big chunk of that while Kodak, et al, stood around looking confused. That's why people like Ofoto and Flickr got VC money: they were involved in disruptive innovation.
Re:He can't be serious... (Score:3, Insightful)
The difference between an "evil" barrier to entry and a "good" barrier to entry is marketing.
Take Google. They have a huge database of webpage information that they've spent millions of dollars gathering. Anyone who wanted to enter the search engine market would have to find an enormous amount of capital and gather those same webpages. Should Google share their internal webpage databases to anyone who asks? Should they be open and let their information be free?
Nonsense! Google has a huge barrier to entry and that's why they practically own the search engine market right now. Google has marketed this barrier well and thus nobody notices or cares that Google has thrived on the backs of an Internet that mostly belongs to other people. They provide a service and they provide it well.
Take Apple. They deploy a DRM system in iTunes and a bazillion people own iPods these days. Nodoby cares that their music is or isn't free. People use their iPods and buy music from iTunes because the whole system is easy to use (a feature people want) and available at the right price (another feature people want). Why are these things so prominent so as to disguise the underlying DRM? Marketing.
The usual Slashdot response to this is that marketing is evil. But I propose that this argument, true or not, is pointless. The majority of people simply don't care. People love their iPods and people love Google.
Re:That's funny (Score:2, Insightful)
Not one giant heard, but many. Because of immigration and ad saturation, we are a fairly diverse test-bed for new marketing ideas. The best marketers hone there skills here and then export their gimmicks for profit, enough of it which flows back into our economy.
After all, who historically makes the biggest bucks: the inventors or the exploiters of the inventions?
Re:What a crock (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree, on three grounds. First, what the web brings is more of everything, makers and gawkers alike.
Second, innovation is synergistic. The first internet wave was much harder than the current one because we can now share so much more of the boring infrastructure stuff, letting us spend more time on the interesting parts. The software mashup culture is clear proof of that.
And third, creation inspires more creation. A lot of people have blogs because they look at existing blogs and suddenly have something to say. Sure, that means more crap. But it also means that a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't write much are now writing regularly. Some of those people will end up being excellent writers.
That same process happens with software. Go to something like Super Happy Dev House [superhappydevhouse.org] and you'll see what I mean. Seeing 30 people hacking away makes you say, "Wait, why am I not hacking on something?" Before that effect was limited to physical events and places like Boston and the Bay Area, where you have a critical mass. But now the web is its own critical mass. It doesn't make idiots into geniuses, but it does make potential geniuses into actual ones.
Oh, the irony (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It takes more than just innovation (Score:3, Insightful)
You either need money or need to know someone with money or just happen to get lucky to get those innovations to go somewhere. Given $50,000 to work with I could return at least $500,000 within the year just from minor innovations I have but getting that start-up capital is the hard part. Seed investments are always possible but take a lot of effort in itself which takes away from the time you can spend on your innovation. The best plan is to find a friend with some business savvy to partner with you and let them work on your investment money while you work on the tech but that means finding the right person for that role still.
Significant progress confirmed by meme theory? (Score:2, Insightful)
"Meme theory shows that the more information we all know, the more progress will occur. ...
We can think of the human brain as a computer: a meme processing unit (MPU). Most of what everyone thinks everyday has already been thought of, but, occasionally, a few memes come together in a way that has not yet been processed and progress occurs. Progress never comes in huge chunks, only tiny advancements at a time. Like coral, humanity's knowledge continually grows off the existing base.
Now, if you think of humanity as a distributed meme processing machine - a supercomputer of interconnected MPUs spanning the globe - then the more we know as a species, the higher the probability of new discoveries being found. The more discoveries we find, most often, the better off we all are."
-excerpt from u4Ya.ca [u4ya.ca]
To expand on your point (Score:5, Insightful)
But now with the Internet we are basically all connected, so it's basically like living in the same little village for your entire life. Especially since a record of what you say and do is kept on your home page, so you don't really need a third party to vouch for you. I can send off an email to the CEO of almost any company I'd ever want to talk to or work for.
Also, the fact that as credentialism replaced learning as the reason why most kids go to college, the quality of education greatly suffered. Now it's way more efficient to just sit in a library and read books than it is to go to lectures. I learn more reading a book or two that I did from most of my classes at Cornell, especially since colleges use extremely low quality textbooks most of the time. Some of the textbooks they used at Cornell had advertising in them! Which wouldn't have pissed me off nearly as much if they weren't not only completely useless, but also filled with scores of blatant errors.
Oddly enough... (Score:3, Insightful)
Frankly, I think the most significant thing undergraduate degrees teach people in preparing to enter nearly any field is how to deal with a hostile, overbearing, inefficient bureaucracy infested with sadistically egotistical ladder-climbing prats and their gaggles of sniveling sycophants.
In that sense, there is some worth to going to one of the cushier schools, since they are usually the worst cases and you're likely to come out with a nearly superhuman ability to navigate mountains of b.s. that would suffocate a mere mortal.
have to disagree (Score:1, Insightful)
It just plain isn't there right now. All the increased demand will do is drive up the prices and make it so the already well off can continue that way. You can go right down the list of raw materials and it is getting harder and harder to extract them. I'll cite two of them , both critical for modern tech advances. Look at the battle right now over silicon chips or silicon to make solar panels. Solar panels were a better deal two years ago then they are now, and efficiency increases are not keeping pace. Too much demand, not near enough supply is the problem. And energy is in even worse shape. We aren't hitting oil gushers anymore, they have to inject water or CO2 to get them to flow. Mexico is just reached peak, north sea has hit peak, US is well past peak. And demand is set to just explode during the next decade, like 3 or 4 times current demand, yet we just are not finidng the "superfields" that we need, that we relied on during the 70s,80s and 90s. they just aren't being found.. Look at world wide demand for oil right now, are prices dropping because "increased demand and market forces" just makes more oil happen? Nope, prices are a lot higher than they were a decade ago, and most refinery and pipeline and tanker capacity is already maxed out. All the oil rigs are out there working, all the drilling rigs are working, and they aren't making enough to drop oil prices back down, because it doesn't exist in the forms and quantities we used during the big growth phase of the 20th century. It's just...gone.
There are going to be a lot of tech and food hungry people but only enough to sustain maybe 1/2 of them at the rate things are going. This is coming very soon to a planet near you. We could double the efficiency of everything already made and the things to come, and there still won't be enough. Yes, technically the planet is "supporting" 6 billion people right now, and how many of them are not even close to being what would be considered poverty level in western nations? This isn't a case of the planet "supporting" 6 billion, this is around 3 billion barely managing to survive with the specter of drought/famine/disease/war etc always right in their face. Let alone getting them all cars and iPods and nintendos and houses with air conditioning and big screen TVs and various et cetera that a lot of us take for granted.
Of the other three billion, only one billion can be considered to be living in relative middle class status, the other two are still pretty bad off.
There's really only a shade over a billion people on the planet living more or less cool now, call it a billion and half to be overly generous, all the others are *wanting to* of course, but where are the resources for that? We're as close to being maxed out as you can get for most things.
I am afraid that what the world might get to enjoy in the way of universal high tech in the next generation will be dwindling resources put to advanced weaponry to fight over shrinking resource reserves. We needed a global manhattan project 30 years ago to develop alternative resources, for just about everything, and we should have been using the cheap raw materials and cheap energy that still existed then to accomplish that goal, and it just plain didn't happen. We wasted that time and opportunity because there wasn't any immediate bottom line payback, nothing for politicians and nothing for big business. So it didn't happen. We got academic "studies" and political committees mostly out of it.
The planet has been eating what seed corn there is ever since then, that's why a lot of these areas of the world that still have the resources all seem to be "contentious". This is only going to get worse as demand goes up, not better.
I don't wish it so, far from it, but this is just observable data. The "market" is not a panacea, in fact, the "mar
Re:View from the coal face... (Score:3, Insightful)
Vik
Inkorrekt (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, but its true.
Disruptive change never comes about via the masses.
What masses. Masses are composed of people, individual units. Le Bon's contagion theory of mass psychology has been fairly comprehensively disproven, to my satisfaction at least. There is no group mind. Just because they are not assembled in a mob at this exact moment in time does not make them any more or less susceptible to crowd psychology (Turner and Killian's diffuse crowds), as in this case, the internet. Even marketing, the art of influencing the masses and crowd psychology, is ultimately targeted at the lowest common denominator; a scattershot approach designed to attract individuals, as many as possible.
it would appear that smart people are on the rise.
Smart, stupid. Such a vast amount depends on the environment that one's genetic makeup rarely has anything but a passing influence on comparitive intelligence. Sorry for that, eugenics, back to the drawing board, I'm afraid.
In the overpopulation of our planet
The planet is so far from overpopulated its not even funny. You could quite comfortably fit the entire population of the planet in the state of Texas, and I don't mean three high, I mean a house and land each. The perception of overpopulation is a misconception.
try convincing billions that you are right!
If you are right, you are right. The opinion of billions does not make you less so. Sooner or later they will have to come to accept your point of view. Draw your conclusions, base your future actions on that, and move on.
Communism would have been a massively disruptive change (on paper), but once it was implemented, people were able to smash it back down into the monarchy they were accustomed to
People didn't smash it anywhere. A few individuals did, taking advantage of a poorly educated, impoverished, and frankly terrified population. I have tremendous faith in humanity and its ability to ultimately rectify its own shortcomings. Denigrating the teeming masses really isn't helping anything. Anyway communism was a fundamentally flawed social theory. Marx sadly did not think it through to its logical conclusion. What he did manage to do was sully the waters sufficiently that any even vaguely similar system can immediately be branded "communism" by those with a lot to lose in such a system. Indeed, any system outside the current one.
Do you really envision slavering mobs of semi intelligent buffons marauding up and down the countryside, crushing new ideas anywhere they go?