For what it's worth, in my experience the people talking about big innovation, actually ARE extremely supportive of genuine, plausible efforts at producing planetary scale improvements. In our case, we're trying to solve the economical energy storage problem (lightsail.com)
These folks put their money where their mouth is, and helped out greatly when we needed advice or funding or connections.
Particular people who helped us out and are known to publicly call for and support big innovation include:
Vinod Khosla, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, Ken Howery, Bruce Gibney, Patrick and John Collison, Michael Vassar, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Matthew Nordan, Nathan Myhrvold, Bill Gates
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By contrast, most of the other VC firms, and all of the banks, were much less receptive and we did not get anywhere with them.
So I think people are at least trying to act consistent with their philosophy. Generally, these folks will try to support great groups doing potentially great things, if there is good chemistry. They can't do it all, of course. There are not that many of them. But they try!
I think more of the blame should be on entrepreneurs and scientists who can and want to work in these areas but choose not to, and instead go into the hot software field of choice, or worse, undifferentiated finance. They should be encouraged to make some attempt at making the difference in the world that they want to see. It is not someone else's duty.
If you can do something important, and you have the resources to make a good attempt, you should try, because you may be in a very unique position to do so, and it's incredibly thin on the ground in many important areas.
There are incredibly few companies genuinely trying to make energy storage economical. There's only one, that I can tell, that's trying to make reusable orbit class rockets. There are very few trying to redefine personal computing. There are very few going after cures for cancer, broadly. There are very few effectively trying to make solar economical. There are very few well managed plug-in auto companies. There are very few trying to provide clean, low cost, distributed water. The list goes on.
People working on these major problems keep bumping into each other socially. It does not take long. The population of such entrepreneurs and innovators feels like that of a small high school. This scares me, because there are many, many problems to solve, and many reasons not inherent to the problem or solution that any one company or effort could fail.
There should be more efforts, more ideas, more entrepreneurs, more competitors. That would make me much happier, and feel much safer. At the moment, it feels like if the wrong few people are depressed, sick, or distracted, major world problems are just not getting solved, and the world is set back by as many days.
Ok, so here's a fun question: where do I find a list of the Big Problems? Because when I look at the world, it seems to me as if most of the really Big Problems are not technological but social. In the end, the conversion to solar energy won't be a single man's heroic effort, it'll be the combined efforts of an entire society that finally decided to go solar.
On the other hand, technological approaches to social problems seem like an excellent idea to me.
Really? What do you wish you could do that you can't? Let's make a list of things:
* I wish my body didn't start to break down as I get older.
* Related to that there are a whole host of diseases and disorders that I'll probably get one of and die from one day.
* I wish I didn't have to spend so much money on energy (not just directly on my monthly bill, but as part of the cost of almost everything I buy).
* I wish my internet connection was 100x faster.
* I wish I could travel to California from NY without having it sit on a cramped airplane for 5-6 hours.
* I wish I had a thinking interface to computers instead of having to take my damn phone out of my pocket and peck at it to get it to work.
* I wish my memory could be augmented in some way. I'm forgetting things all the time and that's really annoying.
* I wish that learning new stuff wasn't so hard. Can someone build on of those machines they have in the matrix so I can just download up some knowledge. I want to know Kung Fu!
* I worry about global warming. If everyone was as rich as Americans and lived like we do it seems like we'd have some pretty big problems. Can we do something about that?
* I hate that when I order something from Amazon I have to wait so long for it to show up. Why can't a machine in my apartment just zap it into being instantly? They've got that in Star Trek and it looks pretty awesome.
* Speaking of Star Trek, I'm bored of living on Earth. I want to go to the moon, or mars, or another solar system! How could we possibly do that?
OK. That's just five minutes of random thinking. I'm sure that I (or you!) could come up with many many other Big Problems.
Ah, there's the thing. I've spent too long learning how to deal with Real Life.
Actually, looking at it, many of these are social problems, as I had hypothesized.
* Technical problem
* Technical
* Partially technical, partially an issue of almost deliberately building energy-intensive civilizations.
* High-megabits and gigabit connections are on their way, but come with the social problems of installing new infrastructure.
* Bullet trains, supersonic flight, and that sort of thing, but again, infrastructure and societal preferences.
* On its way right now.
* Memrise
* In the research stages right now.
* Again: social problems of Americans deliberately building energy-inefficient civilization (like suburbs, for example).
* Ok, there's an interesting notion: can we make shipping and delivery better between vastly far nodes of a graph rather than using the center/periphery model currently employed by the shipping industry? The whole reason for center/periphery is that the fixed costs of each shipping vehicle are significant, making it far cheaper to distribute them through centralized shipping and mass distribution to the periphery areas. I've heard someone wants to revive the notion of "shipping tubes" through the ground, which would function a lot like packet-switched containerized shipping, but that's another infrastructure issue and may not be the optimal solution.
* Social problems of building a carbon-nanotube-based space elevator, torus-shaped rotating space colonies, and generation ships. Well, that or teleportation, but the latter is far less likely.
All of the things you call "social problems" can be solved by disruptive technologies.
What if robots could install the fiber automatically instead of with construction crews and do it via overhead instead of underground cables? Social problem gone.
What if they could build the entire bullet train track cross country (Almost all of that multibillion dollar California train is labor)? Social problem gone.
Or how about ultra low cost solar, geothermal, and wind power, again with robots to set them up? You think the oil/coal lobby can politically compete against all of the industries they fuel? Social problem gone.
How about cheaper automated air transport that's not developed by Boeing or Airbus (monstrosities who, in my opinion, only innovate because at those scales its impossible not to)? Social problem solved.
Only on space travel can I agree with you, and just barely. Have a search through Google Scholar some time. Search for gas core (late 60's, early 70's), pulse (70s and 80s), dusty plasma (90s), and gasdynamic (00s) nuclear rockets. The technology is there, we just have to work out the details. However, the social problem we're trying to get over is the lack of FUNDING for radical (read: risky) R&D pathways.
It's of course much more complicated than that but and the end of the day the beauty of technology is that a new invention can cut through all the crap we humans have put up and it can change everyone's life for the better. (look at the internet: even with so many governments censoring it and controlling it we nevertheless are more connected than we have ever been and there is so little anyone can do to stop it)
The social problem wasn't labor at all. Workers are easy to hire if you've got the money and can make money back off the result. Hell, the economy needs more and better-paying jobs anyway, right?
The social problem is that putting in infrastructure requires making deals with property-owners and municipalities. I'm getting this from people who've worked for ISPs and other such enterprises: the biggest problem with new infrastructure businesses is getting cities and towns to agree to let you construct overhead poles (which "ruin the view") or tear up the ground under their streets (which closes whole blocks of road for a while).
In many cases, the money can be made back, the labor is workable, the invention is workable, but the right-of-way on private and public property is uneconomical to obtain.
Yes, but when I say "social problem", I mean the kind where you have to convince people with whom you're not actually doing business, and who therefore have a larger stake in their personal whims than in getting anything out of your project.
For example, with the "package tubes" idea, you have to convince either reams of individual property owners or whole municipalities and states to allow you access to the space under the roads to build your infrastructure.
A business is the solution-method with the most minimal social component possible, and it's still hugely a social solution. Any other solution that will ever exist is going to require a much larger social solution. This is part and parcel of any innovation.
If you're going to disrupt society, it will be relevant to society when you do so. You don't get to be antisocial about this unless you're a supervillain.
Ya, you're looking for something that never existis. This stuff is hard man. To do things that are hard you often have to get down in the muck and deal with shit you don't feel like dealing with. Welcome to life.
I'm sure that DaniFong has to do that all the time for her energy project.
But hey, write everything off as a social problem if that's the excuse you're looking for to let yourself off the hook. Everyone's got to come up with something.
Well thanks for being a jerk about it, but it's not like I'm doing nothing with my life. I'm just so far choosing lines of work that keep me out of infrastructure negotiations with municipalities, and I'm only 23. We'll see.
Generating power through nuclear fusion is a technological solution to a social problem. Improving desalination might be another. Arcologies might be another. Fundamental improvements in human health would be a possibility.
If we could make exercise easy/fun/cheap enough to not require lots of executive function from participants, the economic and social impact would be stratospheric. That's a hard problem that probably can't be solve incrementally because the differential between regular exercisers and the total adult population is about 5x.
The good news is it's just a short matter of time until far more entrepreneurs begin chasing the larger problems you describe. Once these more ambitious ideas have one or two XX billion dollar wins, the leaders of those companies will replace the Zuck and Dorsey as aspirational figures and both funding and talent will spill in. Musk is doing this as we speak, and there is room for another. If you look at the timescale this is all happening, it shouldn't be so depressing. It just feels slow because you're on the inside.
These folks put their money where their mouth is, and helped out greatly when we needed advice or funding or connections.
Particular people who helped us out and are known to publicly call for and support big innovation include:
Vinod Khosla, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, Ken Howery, Bruce Gibney, Patrick and John Collison, Michael Vassar, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Matthew Nordan, Nathan Myhrvold, Bill Gates
---
By contrast, most of the other VC firms, and all of the banks, were much less receptive and we did not get anywhere with them.
So I think people are at least trying to act consistent with their philosophy. Generally, these folks will try to support great groups doing potentially great things, if there is good chemistry. They can't do it all, of course. There are not that many of them. But they try!
I think more of the blame should be on entrepreneurs and scientists who can and want to work in these areas but choose not to, and instead go into the hot software field of choice, or worse, undifferentiated finance. They should be encouraged to make some attempt at making the difference in the world that they want to see. It is not someone else's duty.
If you can do something important, and you have the resources to make a good attempt, you should try, because you may be in a very unique position to do so, and it's incredibly thin on the ground in many important areas.
There are incredibly few companies genuinely trying to make energy storage economical. There's only one, that I can tell, that's trying to make reusable orbit class rockets. There are very few trying to redefine personal computing. There are very few going after cures for cancer, broadly. There are very few effectively trying to make solar economical. There are very few well managed plug-in auto companies. There are very few trying to provide clean, low cost, distributed water. The list goes on.
People working on these major problems keep bumping into each other socially. It does not take long. The population of such entrepreneurs and innovators feels like that of a small high school. This scares me, because there are many, many problems to solve, and many reasons not inherent to the problem or solution that any one company or effort could fail.
There should be more efforts, more ideas, more entrepreneurs, more competitors. That would make me much happier, and feel much safer. At the moment, it feels like if the wrong few people are depressed, sick, or distracted, major world problems are just not getting solved, and the world is set back by as many days.
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I would welcome any hard data to the contrary.