Innovation’s low-hanging fruits: on the demand or supply sides?
Cross-posted at Practical Ethics.
This is an addendum to a previous post, which argued that we may be underestimating the impact of innovation because we have so much of it. I noted that we underestimated the innovative aspect of the CD because many other technologies partially overlapped with it, such as television, radio, cinema, ipod, walkman, landline phone, mobile phone, laptop, VCR and Tivo’s. Without these overlapping technologies, we could see the CD’s true potential and estimate it higher as an innovation. Many different technologies could substitute for each other.
But this argument brings out a salient point: if so many innovations overlap or potentially overlap, then there must be many more innovations that purposes for innovations. Tyler Cowen made the interesting point that the internet isn’t as innovative as the flushing toilet (or indeed the television). He certainly has a point here: imagine society without toilets or youtube, which would be most tolerable (or most survivable)?
But the flush toilet can only be invented once. We might have access to talking super toilets with multi-coloured fountains—but all the bells and whistles are less useful that the original flushing toilet aspect. That’s because flush toilets responded effectively to a real human need: how to dispose of human waste in urban areas. Once that problem is solved, further innovation is mainly wasted.
This suggests that while we may indeed be plucking the innovation low-hanging fruits, it might not be because we lack a supply of innovation, but because we’re exhausting the easy demand for innovation. What current needs do we have that we’re waiting for innovation to solve? What’s problems are we facing that are as important as removing human waste from urban areas?
There seem to be very few. Maybe solving death and disease: and we can make a very strong case that medical innovation is indeed slowing. Poverty is another one; but it’s not like we know of a specific technological innovation that would solve poverty, if only someone would develop it. We might want easy access to space, or effective alternative energies: but the way people and governments spend their money confirms that this is not a top priority for many. Even if we had teleporters, would future Tyler Cowens be writing that they’re not as innovative as the car—and would they be correct, in that a teleporter is just a more efficient way of solving a problem that cars and airplanes had already partially solved?
In summary, outside of the medical field, I don’t see any conceivable realistic technological innovation that would be as transformative as the flush toilet, vaccinations, birth control, telephones, cars and airplanes. We might have exhausted the low-hanging fruits in our desires.
EDIT: some have suggested “high-throughput atomically precise manufacturing” as a general solution to material poverty, which would be an interesting counterexample.
Figuring out a non-eugenics technology to raise IQ’s would go a long way towards solving other problems. Nick Bostrom in one of this talks argues that raising everyone’s IQ by ten points would revolutionize the world for the better, not by making the smartest people marginally smarter, but my “uplifting” billions of dullards above a threshold where they became more educable, more employable, more law abiding, more likely to save money and plan for the future and so forth.
Psychologist Linda Gottfredson of the University of Delaware would probably agree with this outcome:
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997whygmatters.pdf
Interesting argument. But though the “demand” for this is there in some sense (it seems it would be extremely useful to have this) the demand isn’t there in another sense (lots of people or rich organisations willing to put up money for this).
This pretty much describes most of the innovations I’m personally interested in, where the fruit hangs low enough that twelve-year-olds can pick them, but nothing ever comes of them, presumably because of lack of sufficient market pressures / sufficiently rich and motivated investors.
The concept generalizes, it seems. Are there other (successful) innovations that overcame such hurtles in the past? I don’t know where the Rite Brothers got there funding/supplies, for example; I don’t know what the astronomy market thought of Galileo’s telescope at first / how his spat with the Pope impacted its development; etc. People do seem to be interested in the logistics of spreading useful innovations, at least more so than in my pet game-changers; what sorts of efforts are being made on that front? Givewell’s identifying the most efficient charities seems like a good component (why haven’t we tiled whole African countries in mosquito nets, yet?), but teleportation would obviously be much better.
Nitpicks:
1) Galileo didn’t invent the telescope.
2) What “astronomy market”?
Note: I’m not sure if I have a core point, but I did find this thought provoking and wanted to post what I had worked out so far.
Based on the Wikipedia page about Iodine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_deficiency , it sounds like figuring out a way to distribute Iodine to everyone better so that noone experiences an Iodine deficiency in childhood would be an example of a non eugenics method to raise IQ. Although I suppose that implies the problem is not “The technology to solve this problem doesn’t exist.” but “The technology to solve this problem isn’t getting to everyone who would benefit from it.” And that can be the case with other transformative technologies that Stuart_Armstrong mentioned. Some areas don’t have access to vaccines, some areas do have access to vaccines but are opposed to them, some people do not let women in their area use some contraceptive methods...etc.
I guess a way to describe the problem is that “How do we get everyone in the world access to the technological developments that we have already generated?” has several cases which are not a low hanging fruit. Even If I came up with a new nanopill that provided intellectual benefits similar to resolving an childhood Iodine deficiency, that could be stacked on top of it for even more gains, I’d still have to find a way of getting that nanopill to everyone, but that would be the same kind of problem I would face getting Iodine tablets, Iodine rich food, or even Iodized salt to everyone.
Good news. A recent study into incentives and IQ scores has shown that a monetary incentive of more than $10 can raise someone’s IQ score by 20 points. Looks like we can revolutionize the world pretty cheaply.
http://news.sciencemag.org/2011/04/what-does-iq-really-measure
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3093513/pdf/pnas.201018601.pdf
Good news. (Which isn’t to say that IQ-boosting tech to hurry things along wouldn’t be useful.)
One of the problem of our time is that the average person has less friends with whom he can talk about everything than he had a hundred years ago. It’s not clear that the solution is technology but it’s probably innovation.
At the moment I have the problem that I can’t be as loud as I want in my flat. Especially after 22 o’clock. It would disturb my neighbors. Having an efficient way to build houses in a way to shield neighbors from each others noise would be worthwhile.
We have a political system that’s very messy. Finding a way to improve it requires good innovative thinking. Concepts such as liquid democracy have the potential to be viable.
Working lie detectors would revolutionize our legal system.
I think the whole education system has a lot of potential for innovation that radically improves it.
Divorce rates are really high and that suggests that either people make errors in matchmaking or that people are bad at doing the work to keep up a relationship. Both are problems where innovation might help.
Running prisons in a way that the people who get released don’t commit further crimes is an unsolved problem.
I don’t think airplanes were considered conceivable and realistic before they were invented. I don’t think people did conceive of flush toilets before they got invented.
Village dwellers (at least here in Ukraine) don’t have toilets and don’t lack them much. It is only important in cities.
Lots of. As example, the most mundane of the important problems: housing is absurdly expensive.
No, they would be wrong. Teleporters would be indeed transformative technology. Among many other changes, they mean that “place where you live” and “place where you work” are not connected at all, at least within national borders.
I think there were a lot of predictions of this kind in the past.
Is it? We do mass produce housing in the form of trailer homes. It’s not much but it is a roof, and I’ve never had the impression it’s absurdly expensive. Manufactured yurts seem to be available at pretty low cost too. What’s expensive is housing in particular locations, and as you say, that’s tied to the necessity for a living space within reasonable distance of working space.
Maybe a good candidate for useful innovation, if not teleportation, is something else that decouples the location of work and residence. Teleconferencing helps with this, but not all jobs can be done by telecommuting and not all bosses are willing to allow it.
I’ve heard the theory that a large part of it is not wanting to live near people prone to violence. Since discriminating by proneness to violence is illegal in much of the west people wind up using wealth as a proxy.
Partially that, and partially it’s the school system. Parents with school-age kids tend to select a town to live in on the basis of how good the public school system is and there is pretty good correlation between that and house prices. Wealth, of course, correlates well with all of that as well.
Does “how good the public school system is” vary on a length scale short enough for that to be relevant?
What do you mean? Parents face a choice of where to buy a house at a given point in time and (statistically speaking) they are willing to pay more for a house in a good school district compared to a similar house in a bad school district.
Can the quality of schools change? Of course and, as usual, it can go down much faster than it can go up.
I mean, what sizes do you mean by “district”? 5 km? 50 km? 500 km? If the first, the kids can just commute to a different school (assuming halfway-decent public transportation, or a parent who passes there on their way to work, or a parent with enough spare time); if the last, no-one is going to move that far just because of what the schools are like; so I assume you mean something in the middle. Does the quality of schools actually change that much from place to place in such a range of distances?
Agreed, but that was not my point (I said length scale, not time scale).
Oh, I see.
In the US school-level education is local—it’s run by towns via school boards and is paid for in large part by local property taxes. It is not run by state or federal government. Typically each town has its own school district or several small towns might have a joint school district. The quality of school districts varies a LOT, even for districts physically close to each other.
One consequence of this arrangement is that if you go to a public school you must go to the public school of the town in which you live (there are some exceptions, but that’s the general rule). You cannot go to the school of the neighboring town—it will not accept you.
That is why buying a residence in a town is simultaneously a choice of which public school your kids will go to.
Obviously if you are willing to pay for a private school your kids can go wherever.
Thank you. Things make sense now.
For anyone reading this: The thread “Worth remembering (when comparing ‘the US’ to ‘Europe’)” is interesting. (I’d promote it to Main so that new additions to its comment thread are more likely to be seen.)
Part of that is whether the school is full of undisciplined kids prone to violence.
BTW, there’s a topical blog post on MoreRight.
At the low end, yes. At the high end what matters is basically whether it’s cool to be smart.
Either way, my point is that it depends on the other kids more than the schools themselves.
It’s a feedback loop. The kind of kids you have (from what families they come, with what IQ and what culture) is very much determined by the kind of town this is and that certainly drives the school reputation.
Taboo “poverty”. By the 19th century standards we have indeed solved it, at least in the developed world.
how about a teleporter combined with a toilet. It could sit somewhere in your house, scanning your bladder and colon periodically, and then removing accumulated waste without you having to do anything. While it is doing that it could also remove any viral particles or unhealthy bacteria from your bloodstream, excess ear wax, unwanted body hair, tumors, arterial plaques, unpleasant memories, etc. THAT would be a real innovation!
… excess fat, misconceptions, bad ideas, unpleasant emotions, character flaws …
You need to think bigger. Agriculture, remember?
I’d say the big four were agriculture, metallurgy, electromagnetism, and germ theory. Fossil fuels would get the cut but they have an expiration date not terribly far in our future all things considered. Come back in 200 years and we get to see if molecular biology makes the cut for #5.
Mi big list would include more items, such as (but not limited to):
Domestication of fire (it should be on the flag of the future One World State)
Domestication of food (i.e. agriculture/cattle raising), from which comes the next item:
Cities (terribly underrated)
Writing (this alone increased a thousandfold the pace of cultural evolution as compared to Neolithic times; only the Internet starts to barely compare)
Legal systems/human rights (a.k.a. what prevents you from smashing your neighbor’s head to take his wife)
Contraception (especially the pill)
I think Stuart meant future innovations.
I know. I was giving an example of the scale of innovation that is needed.
For what? Clearly not to make his point, which is what he was trying to do, not make whatever point you’re trying to make.
Molecular nonotechnology? If we can replicate any item at low cost, this could eventually eliminate poverty, once you get to the point where all the basic items that people need in order to live a reasonable life are no longer scarce goods, and are incredibly cheap to produce.
Very interesting. No objections to your main points, but a few comments on side points and conclusions:
You say “it’s not like we know of a specific technological innovation that would solve poverty, if only someone would develop it.” I would identify Greg Cochran’s ‘genetic spellcheck’ as such a tech, along with what other people are suggesting. http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/typos/
“We might have exhausted the low-hanging fruits in our desires.” I think this is right, but it’s complicated. I think the Robin Hanson way to frame this could be the following: innovation has been this rising technological tide that has made it a lot easier to meet most of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. But now most of the ‘gains’ from innovation are made in positional goods and services, which aren’t the same sort of gains as, say, flush toilets, so they don’t feel “real”.
This is definitely relevant to the point here—thanks!
I expected a better pun…
Let’s see… Traffic fatalities, to become extinct within 30 years or so, as self-driving vehicles take over. Also will transform the transportation and urban landscape to unrecognizability.
You can’t “solve” poverty, the distribution will always be there, it’s statistical mechanics and probability at work. Not even the former soviet union, with no unemployment and with the standard of living near uniform, was able to bring up everyone to this admittedly low standard.
“Solving” is a strong word. But cancer research keeps chugging along, with new ideas popping up at least as fast as before. Augmentation, miniaturization and automation is progressing well, too. The latter would be much further along if not for the many regulatory issues. Medicine is ripe for an industrial revolution, with surgical conveyor belts replacing master craftsmen and their apprentices.
That’s just silly, if someone claimed that. There is more difference between an airplane and a teleporter than between an airplane and a rickshaw. Imagine, no roads, no travel time, no humans clustering into cities and countries… Unfortunately, there is no indication that teleporting is anywhere on the horizon, we don’t have any clue about the new physics that would allow that.
As for something as revolutionary as the birth control, responsible eugenics is getting closer to reality, and is held back mostly by the prevailing hypocritical morality.
I suspect that this OP is sort of a devil’s advocate and you personally don’t believe Tyler Cowen that the pace of innovation is really slowing.
Hang on, isn’t that conflating (1) raising the minimum of the income/wealth/welfare distribution and (2) eliminating the variance of the income/wealth/welfare distribution? Poverty could still be basically solved by the first route (and arguably is being solved) even if the second route isn’t realistic.
The papers you linked do indeed show the reduction in poverty, but it’s nowhere close to being “solved”, given the number of poor people in the first world (admittedly relatively more in US than in Sweden).
Depends on your definition of poverty. A lot of people define it as some lower quantile of income or wealth distribution.
Fair point. I’d automatically assumed S_A was thinking of poverty in absolute terms but I didn’t see him say so explicitly.
It depends what you mean by transformative. Perhaps there aren’t many innovations left that would change the lives of ordinary people, but there are plenty that would change the scale of our civilisation: space industry, robotics, fusion, etc.
Good pain control meds, though admittedly, there are legal barriers in the US to making good use of the meds we’ve got. Anyone have information about intractable pain in Europe?
Anti-aging tech would see a lot of demand. On a smaller scale, getting connective tissue to heal quickly and completely would be quite popular.
Simple tech which would enable people to keep track of their stuff.
Do you mean the location of people’s physical stuff?
Because if that’s what you mean, there’s a company that sells bluetooth stickers you can track with your phone.
This makes a lot of sense. On the podcast Startups for the Rest of Us, they say that solutions to problems are either aspirin or vitamins. Entertaining movies are a vitamin, because they’re fun to have, but people didn’t feel like they had a lack of entertainment problem before cinema was invented. Flush toilets are an aspirin sort of solution, because bad sanitation is a really obvious, really unpleasant problem. Though, most of the “aspirin” examples they use are more like email than flush toilets, so maybe flush toilets are more of an antibiotics innovation than an aspirin innovation. By that standard, there aren’t many antibiotics-level innovations left outside of medicine, for the parts of the world with the most money to fund them. (I could also see there being some left in ways of avoiding or dealing with pollution, and psychological and social things.)
I’m probably missing the main point of the article here, but this is really interesting to think about.
Are we assuming that everyone keeps using outhouses if there are no flush toilets? Just from thinking about it for a few minutes, I can picture a relatively sanitary city where people defecate in plastic bags and trash pickup is much, much more frequent to account for that. If we were still using outhouses, communication technology (including the internet, but before that, telephones etc.) would be really important as a way of letting the population spread out (and work from home) to avoid sanitation problems.
There’s the general interesting point that information technology allows the recreation of “lost” technologies, or at least close substitute. If we had the internet before the flush toilet, then we probably would have invented the toilet before long.
I don’t think so, because there are threshold effects. For example, consider the airplane vs. the car: having airplane travel available doesn’t just mean your trips are shorter; it enables many trips that otherwise would not even be considered, and therefore enables many kinds of activities that otherwise would not be considered. If I can fly to a distant city in a few hours, that enables me to have relationships, both business and personal, with people in that city that I couldn’t have if I had to take days to drive there. If things can be shipped across country overnight on an airplane, many more economic activities requiring “just in time” delivery become possible. And so on.
I would say:
AI (non-conscious AI), replacing various service jobs and labor jobs, freeing up humans time).
Fusion Power, providing much cheaper energy, which can then also be used to power electric cars. Anti-agathics. Providing long life or even conquering death. In addition to the individual benefits, allowing people to be productive for longer helps the economy. (For this, you need to make people HEALTHY for longer, not just survive longer, of course). Virtual environments reducing the need for transportation, offices, etc. If most people eventually can work from home and still achieve the same results as working together in an office, then you safe on infrastructure costs (less people driving the roads), energy costs, time, etc, and possibly improve happiness. Genetic Engineering. Cure diseases, enhance intelligence, etc.
There are more. And those are just some of the ones we have already thought of. There are probably plenty more that we havent thought of, that people will innovate once we develop new technologies.
The distinction between demand-side and supply-side arguments for the supposed lack of innovation is interesting. However, I don’t agree that we have “exhausted the low-hanging fruits in our desires”. I think that our lives have been transformed only the last few years by the spread of smartphones (certainly my own life has). I did want to have constant internet access, to be able to chat with my friends whenever I wanted, etc, and now these desires are satisfied. I expect there to be many many more desires that will be satisfied by information technology and other advances in the coming years.
In short, I don’t think our desires are anywhere near being satisfied, but that plenty of them will be satisfied in the coming decades.
What’s a low-hanging fruit in a world where ladders grow on trees?
Here’s a recent idea I had: A tattoo that responds to blood alcohol content over a certain level (e.g. causing an itchy sensation in the skin, or releasing a small amount of something that causes nausea), making it difficult / anti-habit-forming to get drunk. I’m thinking this could solve the alcoholism problem, comprehensively, without discouraging moderate drinking or relying on willpower.
Another variant would rely on social pressure. Although that is less reliable, it could be safer or easier to implement than one that creates a physiological reaction. For this version, one would have a tattoo that is usually invisible, but becomes visible in the presence of high alcohol level. It could e.g. spell “drunk” across the person’s forehead.
Of course, such an invention is not quite on par with flush toilets. Not everyone gets drunk, and it is not infectious. Alcohol is not necessary for civilization. However, comprehensively eliminating alcohol overconsumption would be pretty darned helpful and would eliminate a lot of spillover costs of alcohol consumption, like drunk driving, spousal abuse, and so forth. Moreover, ethanol in excessive doses damages the liver, heart, and skin over time.
In addition to helping people who are alcoholics or at-risk directly, a side effect of such an invention is that people who do not drink due to perceived risk of alcoholism (or reluctance to expose oneself to such a risk) would be able to start drinking. This would probably have benefits that go beyond the extra hedons. Assuming it functions as a nootropic for social characteristics, it could lead to more people being better connected socially (i.e. having more close friends).
Incidentally, I don’t see a reason something along these lines could not have been developed 50+ years ago.
Reminds me an episode of radiolab you could be interested in :
from what I remember, they talked about a pill that was implanted into the patient and would dissolve and release its content in presence of alcohol in the blood. The chemical reaction would cause incredibly bad pain. The patients were given a foretest of the reaction pill and were told that the real reaction with the entire pill would be X times more painful and they might not survive.
can’t find the episode, but found an article which talks about it. Didn’t read it but it mentions the episode
http://somatosphere.net/2011/give-me-fear.html/
Blood alcohol content, heck — how about blood sugar, or stress and fatigue hormones?
“You are too stressed to drive safely; it says so right on your wrist.”
I’d go for a tattoo in a discreet place that could tell me these things, if there were a bit of granularity to it—knowing how stressed you are us useful for learning how to be less stressed, and in general it’d be nice to have some diagnostics about my body easily at hand like that.
As to using them to stop people from doing things… on the one hand I see your point, on the other hand it seems like it’d be a big violation of privacy to require tattoos of that sort, especially if they were in an obvious location.
Well, sure, but that’s one of those cases where the difference between utopia and dystopia is consent.
“I’m too stressed to drive safely; my wrist is itching too much.”
Of course, we should let the example be something that it’s not crazy to let humans do at that tech level, instead of driving.
The link to Tyler’s interview should point here.
I remember being surprised when hearing someone talk about Reagan’s tax cuts- their basic argument was that because Reagan had cut taxes by over half, there was no possible tax decrease that would have as much impact as the Reagan tax cuts, which seemed sensible. And I do think that this argument does apply to many situations- when it comes to sanitation, I do think the problem is over half fixed (counting toilets and refrigeration here as part of ‘sanitation’), and I think that minor routine improvements are much better than rare flashy improvements (as the saying goes, refrigeration has saved more lives than surgery).
But it seems likely that there are many areas where life could get significantly better, and I don’t think I would class them all as “medical.” C4 rice, for example, seems like it could be a second green revolution, dramatically increasing living standards and the number of humans we can support on Earth- but while it uses biology, it’s not really medicine. Raising the ‘sanity waterline,’ as the saying goes, might also have tremendous benefits, and several innovations could contribute to that. (Here I’m mostly thinking of positive psychology and related things, perhaps taught widely in schools.)
I notice that at least two and arguably three of Tyler’s examples are medical (sanitation is mainly about public health), which seems to break some of the symmetry in his argument.