In case no one’s noticed recently, we seem to have a real innovation problem in the world today. I say this only because we live in an age where people think that innovations are happening all around us non-stop, yet no one really seems to recognize that we’re actually stagnating, doing nothing new and pretty much living in the successes of the past.
What am I talking about? Think about it. When was the last time something truly innovative appeared that has enriched humanity? I mean REALLY think about it.
What are the great innovations of today? The computer? The Internet? The microwave oven? The cell phone? Self-cleaning ovens? Google? Viagra? Honestly, I can’t think of an actual innovation that doesn’t have me thinking, um, that’s just an improvement on a previous innovation. The computer is probably one of the few that might be arguable as an innovation, although I would argue it’s really not that much more innovative than a calculator. It’s a machine that reads numbers in binary and then translates them into an operating system language that then gets used to produce computer programs. Nothing it does is really truly innovative. It’s not even all that useful if you think about it because the old arguments that the computer would make our lives easier were incorrect; the computer has arguably made our lives more difficult and as a result has increased the amount of paperwork we use, although it was supposed to cut down on it at some point.
The Internet is an improvement on the computer and email. The microwave oven is an improvement on the oven, and some people even argue that it’s made us a lot less healthy as a consequence of the types of food that can be produced from it. The cell phone is an improvement on the actual telephone, and I’d argue that it doesn’t make our lives any better as it now forces us to be “on” all of the time rather than letting an answering machine take a message for us so we can get back to people later.
Which brings me to the realization that there’s really nothing new that’s defining our current age when it comes to innovation. To make it even worse, people are no longer innovators either. Fewer people invent things, and fewer people are actually involved in the process of producing things. The rich people of our time don’t actually do anything other than move money around, or even worse, speculate about money. The people who do the most work get paid the least while the hardest workers are controlled by the people who haven’t made anything with their bare hands during most of their lives. Patent lawyers make far more money than the people who make the products that are patented and arguably wouldn’t be able to make the items they’re arguing about even if they tried.
The days of a lone scientist sitting in his laboratory trying to solve the mysteries of the universe are over. Instead, we have academics who sit in university libraries and then write papers that they discuss with other scholars who argue the merits of theories with people who generally don’t make anything themselves. Most current day scientists go into the science without producing new science but begin to theorize upon a foundation of theories that someone discovered centuries ago, and quite possibly that new scientist would never have been able to figure out the logic behind that theory himself/herself if presented with a blank state today. The line is “built upon the shoulders of giants” but we have so few people who are capable of creating the shoulders these days. Everyone stands on shoulders, profiting off the marvels of those who came before us.
Part of this problem may stem from the very nature of specialization, which makes the general theoretical scientist almost obsolete. But without those philosopher-scientists leading us forward, what exactly do we have to say for ourselves when we start to run out of new ideas? Conceptual innovation doesn’t really give us anything new but lets us figure out new ways of using what we already know. Which is why I argue that while Google is interesting and fascinating, it is by no stretch of the imagination an actual stretch of the imagination.
So, no one should be really surprised when we start looking for enlightenment from our world leaders and we keep coming up with the same, bad responses and answers. Instead of some great 21st century logic of how to move the world forward in areas of peace and understanding, we are still sending soldiers into hell holes to kill people who seem to be living in the ways of the 12th century. You see, as much as we like to think that we’ve emerged far better than we once were, we’re still the same barbarians we once were. We just have better toys than we used to have. So instead of pointing a spear at some Visigoth, we point cruise missiles at Libyan SAM missile sites. But in reality, it’s all the same thing. We never grew up; just our weapons did.
In the end, I hope we one day realize that we’ve stagnated in our technological growth because what that means is that our cultural growth is equally stunted. And until we start to realize that, we’re never going to move to the next stage of an evolution we keep thinking we’ve already achieved.