Jul 5
Where the bias is in the innovation debate
Robin Hansen made a point (in a debate on AI) that people who are thinking about the progress of innovation should take to heart."The literature on economic, technical, and other innovation says most value comes from many small innovations – more useful and wider scope innovations are rarer, and usually require many small supporting innovations."
People who are skeptical that there has been much innovation recently should realize that in many cases they are missing real improvements not because they aren't happening, but because they are occurring in small amounts over many different areas. Sure, they don't have flying cars*, but different processes are being optimized by engineers everyday. There are people who blindly trust that society will keep innovating, and in some areas the institutions that typically drive innovation might be sufficiently broken that this blind trust is incorrect. However, those who believe that people will keep figuring out ways to make their lives better are more right than wrong.
*Incidentally, many of the people who use "Where are the flying cars that we imagined we'd have in the future?" as a rhetorical point about innovation in our society would also be quick to dismiss flying cars as a true technological innovation if they were actually common. After all, as the rhetoric goes, they aren't a new technology, just a combination of two existing technologies that have been around for a long time.
