Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation
The fuckery is in the details.I, too, wonder why so much of technological progress seems to have stalled. In a single century we went from the mass production of the automobile all the way to space; from telegraph to television; from typewriters to microcomputers. What an amazing period of technological development! There had been nothing like it in our history. Like the perhaps somewhat apocryphal Renaissance, we may not even realize the significance of this age for a very long time.So, what happened? Software has not, really, improved very much in many years. Our computers and phones and other devices have mated and borne tiny little offspring. But, these still feel like iterative changes on revolutionary designs.And, of course, there is the faltering space program....Except, Armadillo Aerospace and SpaceX and others are right around the corner, I hope.I think I've noticed a pretty ubiquitous pattern in certain kinds of projects: the sorts of projects that are huge in scope, with immediate deadlines, and a clear focus, and full of talented people whose responsibility it is to figure out how to reach the project goals as quickly as possible.They grab every available technology, and they make amazing advancements in combining it and putting it together, and in the end, if they reach their goal, they end up with something that works, but is inelegant. They build an enormous, amazing, beautiful ... hack.After that, if the progress is to continue, it's up to an entirely different kind of approach: the fucking about with the details.It's not enough just to put a human and some supplies in space; now the goal is to do it sustainably. Now we have to build reusable ships and things capable of lifting tremendous payloads into orbit while sipping their energy through a tiny straw and not costing anybody very much.And that's where the development is going right now. It requires tons and myriad tiny little developments in a huge array of sciences: in energy production and management, and in materials science especially. Like Intel, our space program has had its "tock"; now it's time for a "tick".At least, I hope that's what's happening. I'd hate to live in a world in which humans had given up on exploring and pushing against their boundaries.