Are we stuck on a innovation plateau - and did startups burn through fifteen years of venture capital with nothing to show for?
The theses I would like to discuss goes as follows (and I'm paraphrasing): during the last 15 years, low interest rates made billions of dollars easily available to startups. Unfortunately, this huge influx of venture capital has led to no perceivable innovation.
Put cynically, the innovation startups have brought us across the last 15 years can be summarized as (paraphrasing again):
- An illegal hotel chain destroying our cities
- An illegal taxi company exploiting the poor
- Fake money for criminals
- A plagiarism machine/fancy auto-complete
Everything else is either derivative or has failed.
I personally think spaceX has made phenomenal progress and would have probably failed somewhere along the way without cheap loans. There's also some biotech startups (like the mRNA vaccines that won the race to market during covid) doing great things, but often that's just the fruits of 20 years of research coming to fruition.
Every other recent innovation I can think of came from a big player that would have invested in the tech regardless, and almost all of it is "just" incremental improvements on several decades old ideas (I know, that's what progress looks like most of the time).
What do you think? Do you have any counterexamples? Can you think of any big tech disruptions after quantitative easing made money almost free in 2008?
And if you, like me, feel like we're stuck on a plateau - why do you think that is?
There's also a whole of of tech that are NOT oriented towards regular human consumers that are absolutely life changing and invisible unless you've used it. Here's just a few I head of recently:
Cold caps so humans can keep their hair during chemo.
Paralysed man able to walk using implant that reads brainwaves
Newer research into gut biome and health
Surgical navigation systems take your MRI scans and CTs and stuff and overlay it live in front of surgeons so they know exactly how many millimeters they are away from an artery or the tumor or your spinal column or knee joint.
Drones that deliver life-saving supply's to remote places within the hour so that resources can be centralized AND distributable.
They're not making hundreds of millions of dollars in deals so tech bros don't see them, but we've had a ton of new good things and are continuing to get good things, despite the showy pets.com garbage going up in flames. Steady people doing steady work less loudly.
This is exactly what OP is talking about though, everything here is merely iterative (not downplaying how huge these are for the end user). Nothing you have listed is revolutionary and I think I agree with OP's thesis, that we are definitely in an innovation plateau and that could translate into stagnant economies and civilization, the next one hundred years may not look anything like the last hundred in terms of radical human progress.
I can't think of a single technology that isn't iterative. Vacuum tubes were an iteration of the lightbulb. Transistors were an iteration on that. Diodes iterate on transistors, as did integrated circuits.
Internal combustion engines have history of iteration that can be traced back 2000 years.
Nuclear power generation iterates on a turbine generator, it just uses a nuclear fuel to generate the steam.
We all stand on the shoulders of Giants.
Of course everything is iterative, that's just how invention works, but it's also being pedantic. We can clearly say that some iterative technological revolutions (e.g. industrial revolution) have grossly more societal and technological impact than simple iterative technologies (e.g. web 2.0)
While I agree, it's very easy to look back into history and say "that was absolutely revolutionary!" when, being in that period yourself, you would have thought as all did that innovation was stagnant. It's easier to see things negatively, especially when you can't be aware of all the different innovations going on.
I'll agree. I don't think anyone thought the horseless buggy was a real game changing technology at the time.
I think technology innovations are inherently "good" until they get gamified.
Look at social media. In the beginning it helped connect people that otherwise never would have reconnected. Your best friend that moved away in 4th grade? Just search their name and send a few friend requests until you find the right George A Shimp III. It wasn't until my 10 year reunion in 2002 that I finally got on Facebook. It amazed me that in 48 hours we had 200 out of 215 people from my graduating class in a group to discuss plans.
Geocities/Angelfire begat MySpace which begat Facebook which begat Cambridge Analytica. Sharing any and all information to everyone begat sharing information with friends/family which begat that information being weaponized in different methods (from trying to sell us stuff to literal revolutions). Yet nobody ever thought GeoCities was going to change the world at the time. Mostly people just complained about the banner adds and autoplaying music, lol.
The cold cap thing is interesting. To me the most interesting thing about it is that it mostly happened because patients were hacking their own treatment, and experimenting (somewhat riskily, don't mess with chemo) with their treatment.
I had chemo recently. It was CAPOX (capecitabine and oxaliplatin). It tends not to cause baldness, but it does cause extreme sensitivity to cold ("cold dysesthesia"). This can cause spasms in the muscles in your throat, making it hard to breath. It's also deeply deeply unpleasant[1].
At the moment all the advice from English healthcare professionals is about keeping warm, wrapping up well, etc. When I had my infusions they used a warming pack on my infusion arm; they told me to bring warm clothing with me so I was ready when I left the hospital; they made sure I had a scarf (and the really did check!) and hat and gloves. They told me to buy gloves for home so I could get food out of the fridge. I was not able to drink cold drinks, and I had to make sure they were at room temperature before I drank them (I only made that mistake one time and it was pretty scary).
So, given all of that, it is interesting to see something that's come about mostly from patients hacking their own healthcare, and trying to avoid this all by using icepacks during infusions.
[1] About the cold sensation in my hands: It's difficult to describe what happens, but here's my attempt. You know when you're outside in the very cold, playing with snow without gloves on? Your hands get very cold. And then you come inside a heated home, and try to warm them up and they suddenly feel like they're burning? The sensation was a bit like that, except it came on almost instantly as soon as I touched anything cold. I'd take a jar out of the fridge and my fingers that touched the jar would be burning. It would take about ten minutes for that to subside.
Thank you for the extra note about how it feels more akin to burning: humans tend to forget painful experiences and it is easy to down play feelings that we don't have. Oh big deal you're cold: no, your brain registers it as extreme and dangerous pain, and your vital systems can be overwhelmed and stop functioning properly.
And with folks hacking their own treatment, absolutely! I'm sure some of it came from sharing on the internet for advice, getting advice from others who know a ton, and then the discussion reaching researchers and onto companies to manufacture things.
Humans have never done a cool thing that isn't iterative or done alone. We might have had any number of insane inventions ideas that went nowhere exactly because it was communicated to and passed onto nobody.
Lastly, how'd it all go? Is your chemo all done now? I sincerely hope that you make a complete recovery and that this will be the last time you ever experience chemo :)
Oh! Yes, I keep forgetting to mention this. I had colorectal cancer. There's no good cancer to have, but mine was more treatable. I had big surgery, I had a little bit of chemo that finished in January this year. I've been discharged from oncology now, and I just need to have a couple of blood tests and a few scans per year.
Oh yay! And hopefully that's the end of all that forever for you :) yearly scan
two things at least come to mind that have changed the landscape in our lives and our businesses: streaming and food delivery
streaming has changed how we watch things, when we watch them, how those things are financed, how the artists/workers are paid, and how we structure our days as a result. from netflix and chill to a friday morning walk with all the newly released music curated via spotify playlist, i think it's hard to understate the impact the technology has made on our day to day. youtube, spotify, twitch, netflix, etc..
the other one, food delivery via app, might be a bit smaller, or a more natural evolution of what was there before, but it has made take out a thing that (here at least) went from a birthday occasion to a weekly/daily thing for certain people (i cook to relax so last time i did take out was.... months ago? but i think the point stands).
i guess i'm also wondering if your question makes sense? you call it a plateau, but say airbnb is destroying our cities, and uber is exploiting the poor, and admit progress takes time. i think you're partially too close to the curve, and can't see the horizon hides the curvature
You're a 100% right, but I do want to raise the point that streaming has done pretty severe, if not terminal, damage to the concept of ownership, particularly in games and music.
It used to be that you technically licensed some things like games, but you practically owned them. That's no longer true, and the increased use of streaming means songs can disappear from your library and games can simply cease exist altogether.
I'm not contradicting your larger point, I just want to say that it fits the general theme above.
Streaming isn't the only option though. You can still buy physical CDs or MP3s. In fact, the vinyl market has never been bigger!
I sympathize with your point though. Platforms revoking access to content after you "buy" it is incredibly frustrating. But there are more data hoarders than ever, so media is much less likely to be truly lost.
Oh, absolutely! I used to have Spotify, but now I exclusively buy my music. After catching up, as long as I'm buying less than 10 songs a month, I come out ahead. But that catching up is a pretty steep cost.
I'm honestly less concerned with movies and music. Ultimately companies can only go so far before piracy starts becoming the ideal option, and it's impossible to both hide and display. Games, however, are a different story, because they're complex enough that of a company takes down their servers, it's quite likely that no one in the planet knows how to enable gameplay. It's particularly bad in the mobile space, where games are born and die like flies, and there's no attempt at preservation on any level.
Good point, I completely overlooked streaming.
I thought about food delivery, but in the end I decided the tech side is too close to Uber and/or classical pizza delivery. But you are right, of course, the social impact is certainly there.
And I see yours point about AirBnB being very obviously disruptive, since it's changing laws and entire cities all on it's own. I might have gotten carried away by subconsciously requiring the disruption to be... good.
I was probably overly contrarian in my response as I generally agree with the examples you gave. Meal delivery in particular is overly expensive, in my opinion, for the value proposition. Pay 3x the price of the meal for tip and various service fees to save yourself the 10-30 minutes of going to get your own food. I have not used an AirBnB myself though I have heard many people complain about them and the various rules. I've found that hotels still meet most of my requirements and the prices haven't been much different for a property.
I think the area I would most push back on is ride sharing. I found traditional cabs to be inconvenient and expensive. Even worse are the shared vans for transport to/from the airport. Now I can order a car and generally get where I am going at a nice midpoint between the cost to drive myself and what I would have paid for a cab. This is especially a savings for both time and money when parking is involved.
With that said, I agree these are all incremental "innovations" rather than something truly new. If anything, they've joined common services into an easily accessible marketplace as phone apps. Nothing too unique there except requiring a proprietary app which does not invite competition. Honestly it was a stretch to think of disruptive technologies rather than incremental changes. I think there would be a lot more if technology played better together. I'm not sure what smart fridges do but I would bet they don't scan in my grocery receipt and let me know that I should drink more milk before it goes bad.
Streaming in and of itself is not particularly innovative, though. It's roughly equivalent to "pay-per-view via internet". And a whole host of supposedly innovative stuff is just "stuff via internet" and I hesitate to call that innovation. And further, many of the concepts predate the time period in question, making it less realistic to call them innovation so much as they are just scale and efficiency reaching a point where they're viable. A good example is video teleconferencing, a la Zoom. That is not innovative. The concept is at least as old as the 1950s, at a guess, and there have been implementations in the past century.
I think streaming is a good example for new innovation, because it's much more than just "pay per view over internet".
It changed how movies and shows are produced, it made shows with ongoing plotlines much more common, it changed how we decide what to watch, it changed how we interact with the content creators. Because streaming is not just Netflix (which would be big a enough innovation on it's own), it's also Twitch and YouTube.
I guess we probably have different ideas of what is innovative. To me, all of that is just incremental adoption and refinement of existing technologies that enables new interaction modalities but isn't necessarily innovative. And, I think COVID quarantining had more to do with the changes you've suggested -- certainly around the production and distribution of movies. For example, producing movies specifically for direct-to-consumer distribution is not new. It's just "over the internet" that's relatively new. Plenty of movies went straight to VHS or straight to DVD, when those were king. However, with all the cinemas on the planet shutdown during quarantines, distribution had to change or shutdown. But, I mostly don't know what I'm talking about, here.
Food delivery is also interesting, because people think of it as a next step from the illegal taxi company or an evolution of pizza delivery or whatever...but the sudden boom of local delivery apps is more shallow than that.
The food delivery app market was already hot in China beforehand, with the largest (Meituan dating back to 2009 and having a revenue of 28 billion dollars to DoorDash's 2013 and 6.5 billion). The second place app, Ele.me (founded 2008), is an Alibaba subsidiary. Both are profitable companies, as far as I'm aware, and are in a competitive market that has kept the costs to the user low.
Essentially, DoorDash and Uber eats are in a mad race to bring an idea from elsewhere here (not exactly innovation) while burning piles of VC money to attempt to corner the market...while still being unprofitable despite the hefty markup to food prices and essentially siphoning equity from drivers' vehicles.
The actual innovation happened on the other side of the world, before smartphones were anywhere near the norm in the US.
Edit: On a similar note, touchscreen kiosks for ordering fast food are hardly new. Despite all of the talk about them being new or innovative, or detractors wringing their hands about them, they're just doing something ramen shops in Japan have done for decades. You select your menu items, put your money in the machine, take a receipt, and pick your food up from a counter. This was done without computers, even...
Along the lines of food delivery, I would add ride share / wide availability of taxi-like options.
In small regional cities and towns, taking a taxi anywhere used to be almost impossible and required pre-scheduling. Now, just about any where you go (within reason) in the US can be serviced by Lyft or one of it's competitors. It's a service that used to only be available in the largest cities in the country.
Is ride sharing worse in many ways? Yes, but it is available now which is something most of the USA didn't have access to before.
Another thing I think that's happening is that regulation to protect consumers and workers alike isn't happening at the same time scale that these innovations are happening, so it seems like all we get are the shit end of the stick when a lot of these ideas are great, but there is no one telling them to stop price gouging or exploiting their workforce for pennies.
Like all "social" things, ride sharing, AirBnB, DoorDash, etc are good in theory until they are gamified.
They all started with a business model of "I have ____ that I'm not using, I could "sell" usage of that on a temporary basis." It used to be "Hey, I'm going to the airport anyways, here's an app that will let me take someone else and split the cost of gas" or "Hmm, I have a mother-in-law cottage that's sitting there, I could rent it out a few times a month.."
Now both drivers AND the company have gamified the **** out of it. The companies (AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, UberEats, et al) are always trying to game the system while they just collect more money while letting the drivers/owners/operators take all the risk (insurance, repairs, wear and tear, liability, etc). Remember when various companies were charging the tips against drivers' base pay? The drivers are gamifying it by trying to turn it into a living. AirBnB owners are charging stupid outrageous "cleaning fees" after providing a full page of chores customers need to do before they leave.
I would argue this is somewhat reductionist and minimizes many of the upsides we've seen recently. Working from home is not only possible but a material part of the workforce thanks to advances with telepresence, broadband speed, and ubiquitous intuitive technologies such as Zoom. I can order almost anything, be it physical or digital, and have it delivered quickly. Information flow is easy on a worldwide scaler and really only limited by timezones (as in I might need to wait for the other party if they are asleep).
There is some merit to the argument that we have had an exaggerated economy due to easy money. Businesses that could prosper from low interest rates and easy access to VC fund raising will be less feasible and some will fail. We saw something similar with the dotcom bubble in 1999-2000. So while pets.com (I believe) didn't make it, Amazon did. It was a similar time of gogo technology and easy money throwing everything at the wall and seeing what stuck.
There are many areas that have thrived and are arguably better than they ever were such as music. Subscription services are very reasonable and retro tech such as vinyl are highly accessible. Now a fan can listen to music, but the latest album, follow an artists tweets and find concert tickets with ease. Middlemen such as ticketmaster are making this less reasonable than it should be but that is more of a failure to ensure competition rather than the fault of technology.
I would say that the best comparison is to look at the office imagined "present day" in Back to the Future" or "20,000 leagues under the see". These works of fiction imagined many great things which we don't have (where's my Mr. Fusion?) but also missed out on many of the luxury items we take for granted such as pocket cell phones and Wikipedia. Still, I think where have had most of the investment and incremental improvements are not necessarily what we would look for. Facebook and YouTube I'm sure have robust user engagement technology whereas our space tourism and clean fuels seem stagnant.
I'm not denying that we've seen progress here. It just doesn't make my (arbitrary) metric for innovation. Zoom is just slightly better Skype. Microsoft would have eventually pulled through anyway. Broadband is old as dirt (still, many people didn't really have access until a few years ago). And where I'm from, free overnight shipping with Amazon Prime was hugely popular in 2006.
But yeah, as I said in another comment I completely overlooked streaming.
Off the top of the dome, we've seen:
But I think it's this last point that's the important one. Where everything has become incredibly easy, and we can do so much more with less time. I was playing final fantasy 16 last night and the graphics are next level. Compare that to a game 15 years ago.
That's one example, but the same type of innovation is happening yearly across all industries. We just don't see the innovation, we just see the end result of incrementally better goods and service.
Maybe a slightly different take, but I think some of these (non-)advances are cooking up something that doesn’t have apparent utility to you or I but will demonstrate sudden, large leaps in the near future.
My canary in the coal mine will be when we can generate real-time movies/shorts based on prompts and fill in the blanks with content sourced from your social media/email/location data. Interactively through AR. And humans will somehow form emotional ties to this. I honestly don’t think we’re far off, it’s just being cooked up as “tools and technology” teams build it incrementally. Once that happens, current understandings of society will be f’d.
I'm pretty pessimistic about the current branch of generative AI models, but this is something I could imagine. The requirements for precise output are much more lax when you (and nobody else either) knows what the correct answer would be. So having a scene in a story be created from a prompt might actually be a thing (as opposed to a CAD model of a part being created for an engineering department). We'll see how long it takes, and how difficult going to 3D will be for the models.
I was very, very sad when Google killed Google Glass and when Magic Leap could not fulfil most of the promises they made for their hardware. I think AR in a package smaller than ski goggles would quickly supplant smart phones. But it seems to be a difficult problem from the tech side of things, and there's also some social problems to overcome. People really hated the fact that Google Glass could record video of anyone at any time, and Apple will realize that people absolutely hate talking to a person wearing the Vision Pro, whether you paint a pair of eyes on the front or not...
There's a very large segment of the economy that exists for no other reason than to sell advertising. I have no idea how large that segment is, but 4 of my last 6 positions were, at least tangentially, involved in this. It feels like most of the value being produced these days is not actually adding anything to the human experience. It's all just different ways to monetize eyeballs. So, from my POV, the past however many years have mostly been about extracting value and not actually producing anything. Many of the so-called innovations of the past decade seem to fall into this category.
That said, I'm pretty sick and tired of our culture and am somewhat gleefully awaiting its collapse, while simultaneously dreading the pain it will cause.
Feels like you are underplaying a lot of the last 15 years to me. We've seen huge advancements in tech:
Not to mention tech that is more consumer friendly:
And you downplay AI but what we are doing today with AI is amazing! Generative AI is the flavor of the month but there is the less flashy but still highly impactful stuff like:
Then there are things that are a combination of many aspects and not directly invented by anyone:
We see crazy new advances every day from getting ever closer to self driving cars, to drone deliveries, smaller faster and more efficient technology that puts power into the hobbyist rather then the company... If someone from 2005 walked into my house I'm pretty sure they would be amazed.
I was trying to figure out how to express it, but you touched on a lot of the points I was thinking of.
Yes, a lot of this tech had some form of 'early' versions prior to 2008, but they were large, clunky, rudimentary, and definitely not at a cost or friendliness to make them consumer available; the research and incremental improvements in computing power, production, size, etc. have combined to yield products far greater than any of the individual parts.
I kind of wonder if there's a perspective issue at play, too. When I think about 'innovations' of the previous century, I'm only aware of big flashy moments, like the space race, colour TV, the first personal computers, or the internet. But I didn't live through the less flashy incremental improvements that surely led up to these.
I feel like it's easy to miss the big moments of the past decade exactly because we've been living through them.
In the AI/ML land I would also include that in use of healthcare AI is making huge moves.
I work on software that is able to identify a variety of problems from diagnostic images (MRI, CT, Xray, etc) in a fraction of the time. Now they have software that can identify issues in a couple minutes that are as good or better than a trained Radiologist. In many circumstances a patients images can be taken and by the time the doctor is back at their computer the AI has performed inference on it and ready to be read.
It's used in countries like France where ER doctors had to read the XRays themselves because the backlog for radiologists was too great to provide care in a timely manner. Now they can use our software to better help identify problems faster and more accurately.
I know what you mean and that's what I tried to touch on when I wrote that there was plenty of incremental improvements - and that's how most technical innovation happens. In boring, small steps, that are mind-blowing after accumulating for a decade.
But what I am looking for are not the incremental improvements being constantly rolled out by established players in the industry, I'm looking for the disruptions. The things that "should" have bloomed during 15 years of extremely easy money for high risk projects.
Apple releasing the iPhone, Amazon releasing the Kindle, Tesla releasing the Roadster. And all those happened "in the last era" (pre 2008). As did Amazon moving from selling books into selling everything, and then moving from being a retailer to being a cloud tech giant.
And the rest of your list is good, too. I'm not denying that we saw lots of change. But many of those things were firmly established in 2008 (LED flash lights were cheap and powerful, Arduino itself exists since 2005 and micro controllers were accessible to hobbyist before that, and while batteries have gotten insanely cheap, energy density itself hasn't actually improved that much since 2008) or their lasting impact on our lives is still kind of questionable (IoT, AR/VR, AI).
AI especially is going to be an interesting one, but as of today, I don't see the impact yet.
I think you might be overestimating the rate at which innovation happens. Money can only get you so far -- we've invested tens of billions of dollars in fission research globally, for example, yet fission is still not viable for energy production (although there have been promising advacements). Moreover, venture capitalists are foremost concerned with making a return, not necessarily creating disruptive technologies.
Think of all the greatest inventions in the past few hundred years: cars, planes, radio, the internet, the steam engine, transistors, smartphones, the printing press, etc. Should we really be surprised that these sorts of developments don't occur multiple times in a fifteen year period? And even if they did, would we be able to tell? A new technology will feel like a novelty at first and only later (through iterative advancements, mass adoption) feel groundbreaking.
That said, to answer your question, I think there are two technologies that are in their critical development phase and have the potential to be enormously disruptive: (1) quantum computers and (2) large language models (and whatever their successors will be). However, I don't think we can say right now what their impact will be -- we might need to wait another fifteen years before we have our answer.
Maybe it's an unfair comparison, but 2008-2023 was 15 years, and 1993-2008 was also 15 years. And boy does it feel like things moved over the latter period. Maybe it really was an exceptional time?
Did the end of the cold war accelerated everything? Did left-over inertia from cold-war tech funding still propel us forward? Or were the development of computers the once-in-a-century leap we won't see again soon? I've read that argument as well, the 3 industrial revolutions:
The IPhone, Kindle, and Roadster all released in 2007/8 respectively so I figured that was still in the timeline, albeit it on the cusp.
Can you give an example of an innovation that isn't based on the small work of things that came before it? Everything has predecessors that slowly evolved over time. Computers for example started as almost mechanical machines, then you had tube-based logic, then eventually circuit based logic -- but by your definition it feels like that is derivative of existing work.
Television was predated by movies and telephones, so adding data for visuals was not especially more complex and could be considered derivative.
Prior to 2007/8, what is an example of a true innovation in your mind?
I think two things.
And 2) Kaizen - a process of improvement through gradual refinement has crushed a lot of "let's just throw out a random product and see if the market likes it".
A company can take their existing product and make the processor a little bit better, add a bit more ram, make the display a bit nicer, shove it all in a newer shiner case and increment the model number. People sell their old phones on the second hand market, or hand the phone to children, and then upgrade to this new model. or
A company can risk billions in R&D[1], developing some new thing, and try to launch it, only to have the market pick up very quickly on first-product-teething problems and slating the company, meaning none of the product sells. And then some other company replicates the product and releases a better version.
[1] Like, Xerox Parc or Bell Labs are difficult to do today.
This has already happened. China isn't only making the crappy stuff they sell on wish.com. The manufacturers in China have long learned to make quality products. They're not just copying stuff either; they actually have some pretty competitive technologies and industrial designers these days. There are some niches where China has basically captured the market.
Quality products? Care to enlighten?
I know they've captured, cornered, many markets. Not sure about actually quality stuff and would like to know
Technology products are probably the most obvious because they make brands you have probably already heard of like Huawei, Xiaomi, OnePlus, Oppo, etc. But there's also less obvious ones like Lenovo (who also makes Motorola brand phones) or DJI, and there are also big niche product makers like Insta360 and Segway Ninebot.
There are a lot of brands out there that are headquartered in English-speaking countries, but have products made exclusively in China. It's just much harder to trace them.
Another example of US HQ and Chinese production is Rad Power Bikes. They're the largest ebike company in the US, and they've done a lot to standardize and promote electric bikes.
Anker is also Chinese, and they're seen as one of the most trusted brands for their party charging products.
And, yeah, it can't really be overstated that DJI is the high end camera drone company. Nobody else comes close. And Lenovo is pretty much the company for corporate computer fleets, outside of Apple (if you're in software engineering).
Also, Geely is huge. They own Volvo, Smart and Polestar.
The way VCs think about the startups they invest in is this:
I think it's not surprising, given that investment strategy, that we can only name a few major startups from the last 15 years that innovated successfully. Basically, the startup world is a playground for founders as much as it is a way to develop real businesses. Because as long as you can convince a VC that you've got a crazy new idea with the potential to make a billion dollars you're funded.
It's really interesting watching Shark Tank where people with a real physical SKU want just $100,000 of capital to build their business. I know people with no product who have investors approaching them with a starting offer of a $100,000 check (for a few % ownership). Silicon Valley is a world where you can pretty much just ask someone for a million dollars and get it.
I define the word "innovation" as completely new things that haven't been there before; so it's kind of a synonym for "invention" to me, maybe a bit stronger than that word.
So, in my books, there hasn't been any real innovation in the last 50 years or so; only improvements (albeit some very major ones) since then.
The internet or even 3D printing (which are the latest "new things" unless I'm forgetting something big) have been done in the mid to late 20th century.
The age of groundbreaking inventions / discoveries seems over to me, everything anyone does these days is improving on existing things. Now, this is obviously a good thing, I'm just saying I highly doubt that we will see any real innovations within our lifetimes, except maybe a strong AI which I'm honestly not looking forward to.
I'd argue mRNA vaccines are a major advancement! While the research started last century, the breakthrough was extremely recent. It's crazy that we were able to formulate an effective vaccine in under a week, and there are tons of related biotech advancements on the horizon.
mRNA vaccines are part of a sort of “cyborg” revolution we are living through. It’s hard to appreciate it now, but we’re making huge advancements in the area of manipulating and augmenting our own biology. Sometimes I wonder if in the future when people study the 20th century if they’ll care less about computers or atomic bombs or artificial intelligence, and more about advancements in birth control.
This might not be what you're looking for, but the one I can think of is wireless earbuds. The innovation isn't the technology used in its creation, but how.
In the 2010's a company called Bragi launched a Kickstarter for the first truly wireless earbuds. Before then, wireless earbuds needed wires between the two buds. Wirelessly connecting the buds through the head is tricky. Bragi solved that using tech from hearing aids. They debuted their earbuds that had touch controls, light indicators on the buds, and a charging case in a small form factor. The earbuds even had an earbone mic and health tracking.
By the time Bragi launched their product, Samsung and Apple were already developing their own basic versions of wireless earbuds. Now wireless earbuds have become a standard.
Bragi took existing ideas and made a product that created a permanent shift in the industry. Thats pretty innovative to me
The goal of most VC-funded startups is to make their founders and shareholders wealthy with an acquisition or IPO. If they happen to innovate or "make the world a better place", then that's a happy accident.
I am not 100% sure about the effects, but I'm relatively sure I know the cause: Mobile Phones and Advertising.
iPhone debuted in 2006, by 2008 it was a major force. Mobile web also preceded the terror of the ad-tech industry. Phones lacked privacy features and it was easy for folks to use trackers, and a more walled-in, captive audience for advertising.
As advertising became more pervasive and aggressive, the internet as a whole suffered. As mobile users took over desktop users, fewer orgs pay much attention to the design of their websites. They all use the same generic-ish templates that are all mobile-first.
Desktop users are a dying breed, and companies are now becoming "app-only" for things that simply don't need to be apps. They do it because they can capture more metrics, and advertisers/trackers eat those things up.
Basically advertising and mobile web ruined the internet.
Fancy autocomplete is actually useful though. It has the potential to democratize a lot of advanced power-user features, like macros and automated scripting, as well as automate a lot of tedium that normal UI interaction paradigms can’t seem to smooth out. People almost immediately started coming up with clever productivity hacks and uses for it, and the technology itself is broadly replicable and relies on actually delivering new value instead of just engaging in a weird sort of regulatory arbitrage where you ignore labor laws by putting the human labor behind a slick interface and calling it “tech.”
We’ve not really built out the actual tools and productizable uses for AI yet so it’s still just kind of raw technology and a lot of neat tech demos. But, unlike crypto, people can find uses for it right now that aren’t just speculative or rooted in fundamental misunderstandingings of monetary theory. Most of what people are writing about AI currently is stupid, but that’s largely because most culture writers (and the tech press) are too scared of math to actually understand what it is (automatically digesting a bunch of input, creating a web of statistical relationships between terms, and generating output that’s similar without being the same) and what it is not (artificial intelligence that thinks and solves problems).
It has the potential. But today, Google tells its own employees to never use code produced by their own AI Bard. The output is often very wrong (e.g. it hallucinates packages that don't exist) or, worse, subtly wrong.
The cases where it's useful today is almost inevitably the cases where putting the problem into a search engine (without AI) quickly brings up a Stackoverflow thread discussion the exact problem or where you need to create lots of boilerplate code (in which case a modern IDE also has tons of non-AI tools helping you automate that).
It's certainly going to stay interesting, and I'm not denying that "fancy autocomplete" itself can be very helpful when you're coding. Whether that will allow any software company to cut developer head count by any perceivable amount is questionable in my opinion.
I wouldn't put anything of it into production sure, but it's a great first pass at doing a lot of things that I can then apply my actual knowledge and expertise to get over the finish line.
I'm not even really thinking of stuff like ChatGPT or Bard honestly. Those are just surface level tech-demos/toys IMO. But tools like Notion are using it to do things like automatically take meeting minutes and summarize them into executive summaries and action items. That's super handy! It's also extremely convenient for doing things like deduplicating files where the files are actually kind of similar but not quite the same. For example, photo libraries tend to have a ton of stuff where people only want to keep 1 or 2 of a sequence of pictures. There's plenty of little things like this, where if this were Victorian times you'd hire some street urchin to run for you as an errand. You couldn't count on a street urchin who probably doesn't know how to read to do a lot of stuff well, but in places where doing it well isn't important and you just need something thrown together fast and it's all subject to informed review anyway it's ideal.
I think it's the concept of "innovation" that we a currently too close to to judge properly.
To take your list in order, the hotel chain and taxi chain were innovations, not in hotel chains and taxies, but in dispatching through a distributed network of mobile devices. That's the innovation. That a couple companies slipped under the rules and undercut the established business networks and fucked a bunch of people over is just business 101 par for the course. That will always happen. The networking and dispatching innovations stay and are used everywhere now, even by the established businesses.
The illegal money machine is more networking. The blockchain might be overblown, at least for the moment, but the use of digital currency is not. In the US and Europe and other well established places, there is a well established banking system; all's well and good, no need to tread those waters except to make a buck. In other places, the local brick and mortar banking system is not well established and the banking is done through smartphones. And as for the blockchain, the trustless money machine establishes a way of moving currency around that doesn't go through banks. For illegal use, legal use, that's kind of up to the user, no? But it starts a conversation, and once it becomes regulated, the tech can be a real financial tool. The financial system as a whole is kind of skeevy in that way, even with government back currencies. The only reason dollars or euros are any good at all for purchasing a candy bar at the corner store is that there's regulation to prevent the games billionaires play from affecting the value (too much). Put that onto the blockchain, and digital currency's a real currency again.
And for the fake plagiarism machine; this is just a display of raw computing power. The concepts they are using were laid down on paper in the 80s, but the machines to implement them are just now being built. Is it useful? Who knows. Right now it does the same thing college grad English majors do for minimum wage when they make SEO websites for a few bucks. It's been out for all of 2 seconds and it's kind of a cool toy. I am curious about it's usefulness as a tool, particularly to summarize and reformat writing without losing meaning. The only thing that's clear right now is it's a super expensive and resource intensive way of interpolating words. As far as "intelligent", I think it's pretty clear it's not, but it does kind of redefine our methods of measuring machine intelligence and the limits of our current methods of going about AI.