I'm sure Steve Blank has his own hypothesis about what could possibly shake things up and restart the cycle of innovation in SV, would love to hear it. (that's the question he poses at the end of the lecture).
My mind wondered towards the influence of open source software, and open solutions, across all that is tech today (ok fine, all software at least). Technologies developed in secret were thoroughly featured in the history covered, but today for example we have the linux kernel, an open collaborative effort, underpinning most of what's being built for profit in the valley.
Can open source type efforts (maker movement/oss and other nicknames) change the pace of innovation? i.e. restart the valley's cycle of innovation? Is the valley not are the forefront any more? Is innovation in the valley being stifled by attempts to control IP? [0]
"Is the valley not are the forefront any more? Is innovation in the valley being stifled by attempts to control IP? "
No, I don't think SV is "The forefront", but it remains one of the forefronts, simply because of the remnant culture and money flow. That being said, I do think it has stagnated mostly do to your rightly referenced attempts to control IP.
What I am seeing is that many of the companies the best poised for the future are those that are fully embracing FOSS but have learned how to adapt a business model to still profit while supporting that FOSS. Otherwise you end up with a company trying to go Apple and fork something open and then shove the user into a prison.
My observation is that businesses have only put up with this because the companies that did it tended to offer support as a prereq for prison sentencing, and companies love support as a backup. As more FOSS friendly companies move away from user-prisons and towards user-freedom but pay us for support if you are a business model, I think more and more the old guards in the industry are headed for a shake up.
I don't work in SV but I have friends who do, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
Regarding the origins of SV, the talks he gives are very interesting variations on the war refinement produces enhancements in tech line of thinking, which I think will continue to be relatively true. Follow the war money to find out where innovation is going on.
For example, the last time I talked to Mudge he was really stoked about all the stuff DARPA was doing, and with programs like cyber-fast track, I think less and less of that money is geographically limited to a single center of innovation like SV.
This is one of my favorite (if not my absolute favorite) computer history lectures. It's pretty ironic watching all the anti-government comments on this site while most people here are ignorant about where Silicon Valley came from. See, for example, the comments on this thread currently on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8978922 or this out-of-context rando: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8980306
Know your history! Check out more videos like this at the Computer History Museum. If you're looking for a great followup, check out this Q&A with Dan Kaufman of DARPA that talks about some of their current technology investments (kind of a "where are they now" compared to Steve Blank's lecture):
"Know your history" is a very high handed phrase. History is very complex and subjective, so implying that people who disagree with you are simply ignorant of some facts is almost never justified. And in general one should be as specific as possible when arguing a point, rather than saying "you're ignorant and need to educate yourself". Marxists in particular get away with a lot more than they should simply because they use this tactic and no one can be bothered to read Das Kapital.
If I could summarize your point in a more even handed way, it would be that the view that government is a slow moving, inefficient behemoth, is disproved by its role in stimulating progress in Silicon Valley.
My response would be that, like NASA, the military are very good at developing the technology that they care about, and this can have spinoff benefits, but that as the world of technology has become larger and more specialized, they have lost their advantage in most areas of technology.
Looking at the second video you posted, I didn't see anything amazing. It looked like a bunch of specific technologies with very obvious military applications (I only skimmed it so please point out something specific I might have missed).
> If I could summarize your point in a more even handed way, it would be that the view that government is a slow moving, inefficient behemoth, is disproved by its role in stimulating progress in Silicon Valley.
I'll take it!
> Looking at the second video you posted ... It looked like a bunch of specific technologies with very obvious military applications
This is similar to the government's needs / investments in Silicon Valley that Steve Blank profiled. At the time, it's clear what they are needed for (missiles, planes, radar, etc). Later though...
The current batch of government sponsored technology seems different to me. With radar and transistor technology they were doing something that was fundamental (perhaps some hindsight bias here, but that's my opinion anyway). The new technologies are just putting together existing technologies. The fundamental research is things like the work on neural networks being done at Google, Baidu etc.
For all we know the NSA may have made some interesting advances in computing or mathematics, and the CIA have probably advanced optics and image processing by a few generations. Unfortunately for us, neither of them are sharing.
"government is a slow moving, inefficient behemoth"
It most certainly is, but that's not relevant.
The important thing here is that so far only governments have had the capacity to make investments that are both of:
- High risk / high payoff
- Long term payoff / broad payoff
The second part is the catch. Private funding mechanisms can make investments that are high risk / high payoff as long as they are both short term enough to fit within private investment vehicle life cycles and narrow enough to allow value created to be monetized -- captured, in other words.
Things like basic research and fundamental invention are long term and broad -- they add value across wide swaths of society and across generational time scales. As such they really can't be monetized using any known financial construct. Private funding vehicles simply cannot invest in such things as there is no potential for private return.
Governments can make these kinds of investments because they are likely to be around long enough to see the return and because they can capture the return by taxing the entire economy -- in other words, they capture return by long-term economic growth and national strength/prestige.
Until or unless someone invents a private investment vehicle that can do this, we are stuck with government as the sole practical financier of the first steps in the technology chain. It is indeed inefficient, but an inefficient financier and generator of invention is superior to none.
Lately I've been leaning toward the view that "market fundamentalism" is partly responsible for the collapse of deep revolutionary invention after around 1970 or so. The timing is certainly right and the causal mechanism seems to be there. The symbolic point would be the cancellation of the Apollo program. By contrast anti-market fundamentalism is probably why the USSR invented a lot but never followed through on most of it. The ideal is to combine the systems. Fundamentalist dogmas are idiotic.
Edit:
Governments probably aren't that good at invention either. They just look great when compared against nothing.
That being said, governments are terrible at every step after fundamental invention. That's why Engelbart/SRI had to be followed by PARC and Apple and such, otherwise what they invented would still be a lab curiosity. They just don't have the mechanisms or institutional culture to "ship" or innovate.
Invention and innovation are not the same thing. Saying they are is arguing that all combinatorial fitness landscapes are smooth and "well behaved," and if that were the case machine learning would be a lot easier. Examples:
Invention: discovery and harnessing of radio waves, an absolutely unprecedented step change in technology. First we had no ability to communicate both wirelessly and invisibly over great distances, and then we did. Inventions are qualitative changes that open vast new regions of the combinatorial space -- they're analogous in evolutionary learning theory terms to journeys across physical space to land on a new planet.
Innovation: morse code radio -> voice -> high quality / FM voice -> television -> digital -> spread spectrum / TDMA digital -> ... Innovations are quantitative changes that are more akin to gradient descent in learning theory terms.
The evolutionary analogy extends both ways. There are inventions in biology too, like the appearance of photosynthesis or eukaryotic cell structures. These are unlikely events and therefore do not occur very often in the fossil record. Innovation occurs constantly.
Biology could invent more if there were a god who intentionally biased the system in ways that facilitated it, but as far as we know no such thing exists. But for cultural evolution -- the evolution of extended phenotype -- we are the gods and can indeed do that.
Edit #2:
I'm sure people will cite cases where independents or small academic teams operating on only small amounts of funding have invented world-changing things. Two things about that. One is that it was more common back when science was in its earlier stages -- as science has developed we have kept raising the bar in terms of how much capital is required to keep going. Today the capital and labor requirements to make fundamental inventions are (in most fields) far outside the reach of small funding vehicles or individuals. Second is that this is just plain uncommon. Even back then most of these folks had deep pocketed benefactors or were themselves wealthy. There are always exceptions but you shouldn't base policy on exceptions.
>Lately I've been leaning toward the view that "market fundamentalism" is partly responsible for the collapse of deep revolutionary invention after around 1970 or so. The timing is certainly right and the causal mechanism seems to be there. The symbolic point would be the cancellation of the Apollo program.
One of the most elegant critiques of neoliberalism I've ever heard is but a few words: "the cancellation of the long term".
Markets are great aggregators of localized information, localized in space, social networks, and time. The downside is that this means they get stuck in local optima and don't really use long-term information very well. They're really just massively parallel, distributed hill-climbing algorithms for economic production and allocation.
So when you're looking to move from one hill to an entirely different hill, you need something less like a combinatorial hill-climber and more like an intelligent agent that enacts coherent long-term plans. That's where the state comes in, and in fact, where it never left, since states enforce the property, debt, and contract laws that keep markets functioning in the first place.
The counterpoint is that companies like Google (Google X and the like) or individuals like Thiel and Musk have managed to show that once you get sufficiently rich mega-rich people, who are completely secure in their wealth, they can afford to make long-term plans that might temporarily spite the market (like starting Calico instead of buying an Instagram competitor). The problem is both that the public then has no control over the process, and that there's no particular reason for the mega-rich to make these long-term plans other than as personal hobby-horses: these guys are techno-futurist nerds, nobody made them pour their money into radical life extension, space exploration, or artificial intelligence.
Right. The beautiful thing about these days, if anything, is that we have a group of people in their 40s with access to incredible amounts of capital and are still able to dream big. I don't think this has ever happened before in history; most resource controllers in the past were dead-set in what made them rich (financial engineering, railroads, industry) and simply stayed there until they died. We finally have a combination of wealth and radical transformative vision in several individuals. Good times.
> if anything, is that we have a group of people in their 40s with access to incredible amounts of capital and are still able to dream big. I don't think this has ever happened before in history
Vanderbilt. Rockefeller. Morgan. All of them took amazingly large risks with massive amounts of capital in pursuit of visions well into the latter halves of their lives.
Most of the early automobile pioneers? Westinghouse? Alfred Lee Loomis? Henry Flagler?
I think it's easy to assume that people who are known for massive success in a single industry were only involved in that. If you dig into a lot of their lives you see that they had many other ventures, some which were successful (Miami) others were not (Fordlandia). However their primary/initial success is what gets all the historical coverage.
Also as time goes on and the engineering achievements are seen as more routine, they become less and less notable when not put into the context of the times. At one point the transcontinental railroad was seen just as crazy as the Hyperloop.
But the market funded companies like Google and Tesla, and continues to have faith in the profitability of both companies. Google's price earnings ratio is 25, Tesla's is 1207.
You are trying to force a round into a square hole, by trying to make Google and Tesla fit your narrative of visionary individuals with the resources to ignore the market.
Except that if you notice which ventures I'm praising, it's their unprofitable, no-expected-time-to-market radical R&D initiatives. Calico and SpaceX are what I'm praising far more than just Google and Tesla.
I don't think you can ignore revolutionary breakthroughs by non-government entities - airplanes, jet engines, liquid rocket engines, telephones, transistors, assembly line, mass production of steel, sewing machine, typewriter, relativity, nylon, human genome sequencing, electric power utility, it just goes on and on.
It also took Xerox 20 years of R&D to make the copier work - and that was a heluva breakthrough.
> Private funding vehicles simply cannot invest in such things as there is no potential for private return.
Private universities have endowments for research that come from contributions by private individuals and companies.
Wasn't relativity and the transistor both mainly driven by government funding and contracts? The transistor was originally developed and sold to the government, who wanted them for ICBM's. They exploded with time, but the seed venture as I understand was built on that contract.
Right, Shockley wasn't bootstrapped by the government, but my memory is that the government & their ICBM's were the first actual customer for the transistor and that contract was both how and why it went from cat's whiskers on germanium to the planar silicon process.
You're right though, I was probably wrong about relativity.
Where did parent say they got a subsidy? AT&T was certainly insulated from normal market forces which had a lot to do with their ability to fund Bell Labs to work on a lot more fundamental research than is the norm just about anywhere else. Google is the outlier today--at least until such time as their search money press slows down.
Yes, pressure can speed up government work. Typically only war or the threat of war does that, since fundamentally governments exist to monopolize force. As a result, all government culture is essentially military -- even the civilian government has a military feel and is often staffed by ex-military.
Universities were originally an outgrowth of the Catholic Church. It's often still reflected in their names[1]. Yet you hear anti-religious comments from academics all the time.
It's pretty common. Do you feel like you owe any particular loyalty to Edison or Borlaug? Or the people who financed their work whose names I don't even know?
"It's pretty ironic watching all the anti-government comments on this site while most people here are ignorant about where Silicon Valley came from."
The fact that one of the biggest investment of resources of all time created silicon valley, or the nuclear bomb, does not mean that if a similar amount of resources have been spent privately a bigger advance could be made.
In fact, the fact that the nuclear research was directed to the creation of a bomb, and not towards energy creation, is a huge problem today, when alternative fuel research that did not created plutonium were severed.
The creation of Silicon Valley has more to do with the emergency of the situation that with being public or private.
In peace it is very difficult both for public or private institutions to agree on a single place to centralize everything.
Only China have done it, in Shenzhen, because it is a dictatorship, but when Germany wants to do it in Berlin, France wants to do it in Paris, and UK in London. They could not agree on a single place to centralize everything for all Europe. The same happens in South America with Chile, Brasil, Argentina, Ecuador, they all going on their own makes them weak.
I think the difference between private and public capital is that 1) public capital is far larger and 2) private capital needs quick turn around. I can't see private industry inventing the nuclear bomb. Any time you conceive of a start up, the mantra is always MVP, fastest time to positive ROI. It's hard to do research like that.
I think I could accept that you could have motivated a sufficient number of brilliant people to work on nuclear energy instead of the bomb, but the economics are still suspicious. There are a few fusion startups in the valley, but the common question is why they think they can create something salable in a reasonable amount of time, which I assume in turn injures the amount of talent they can pull.
On strict economic terms, all nuclear research beyond perhaps medical applications was wasteful. Nuclear power is not competitive with coal, and there's still plenty of coal. Solar and large-scale wind generation research is also similarly contrary to market economics, as neither is competitive with the cheapest available fossil fuels.
A pure market would likely follow the "olduvai theory" scenario exactly:
By the time fossil fuels became too expensive, there would be no capital available to invest in alternatives as fossil depletion would slow growth and cause investment capital to evaporate. Thermodynamically this is a manifestation of the energy trap:
Avoiding these scenarios requires planning rooted in conceptual thought. Markets "think" through price signaling. I see little evidence that markets as a whole can incorporate long-term conceptual thinking into price signals, which means that markets basically can't think conceptually. In fact, price signals on the run-up side of a bubble are deceptive. This is why so many people lose money in them.
As the first article says -- many of these peak-ist predictions have not materialized. The reason is probably that we don't have a pure market, and thus we "irrationally" invested in things like nuclear, wind, solar, efficiency, and even enhanced oil/gas recovery that wasn't economic when we funded it. Imagine our energy picture right now with no nuclear, wind, or solar on the table. It remains to be seen whether what we've done is too little too late or not.
This might be a failure of imagination on my part, but I'd love to know how you think private enterprise would have been able to find a way to spend the money to accomplish the same things. Say the US government didn't fund these things. How would private enterprise have done it? Write me the alternate history.
The fantastic book Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy [1] digs a lot into the roles of the market, the government, and the financial industry in the western economy. It's a challenging read, but a fantastic book if you can make it through.
Agreed, I left a _lot_ of interesting stuff out for the sake of a narrative that could fit into an hour. Reading through the bibliography covers much of what I left on the floor.
ooh will have to have a look - some of the declassified CIA docs on the U2 and a12 make fascinating reading.
Though I suppose growing up in spook county in the UK made those of us going into tech aware of some of what went before 1/2 of my college course peers where RAE or ARA - though I am sad I never got to go round Cranfield Universitys black museum of tech
I don't think any of those anti-government types (conservatives, libertarians) are really against defense spending. Those on the left (big government types) are another story.
My mind wondered towards the influence of open source software, and open solutions, across all that is tech today (ok fine, all software at least). Technologies developed in secret were thoroughly featured in the history covered, but today for example we have the linux kernel, an open collaborative effort, underpinning most of what's being built for profit in the valley.
Can open source type efforts (maker movement/oss and other nicknames) change the pace of innovation? i.e. restart the valley's cycle of innovation? Is the valley not are the forefront any more? Is innovation in the valley being stifled by attempts to control IP? [0]
What will shake things up?
[0] http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297