In previous eras, innovations came rarely, but when they did, they were big. The ability to create fire, the wheel, melting bronze... those innovations were massive and they changes things in ways we, in the modern era, have trouble imagining.
But in this era, changes come constantly. And each change is very small. There are 1,000,000 innovation-based changes happening right now! And the weight of those 1,000,000 innovations a second is a much bigger deal than anything that has happened preivously.
Remember that the last 100 years is the first time in the history of the earth, that life on earth has the ability to destroy all life on earth. That's a new innovation, and it's a pretty big deal if you ask me.
But a nuclear weapon is not 1 innovation. It lives on the backs of all the innovations that came before it (fire, the wheel, bronze). So in a way, innovation is a cumulative experience. And in that way, the question itself starts to lose meaning. The innovations of this era are just the next set of innovations in the discorvey of Life the Universe and Everything.
Discuss
Matt Jobson on May 19, 2008, 9:49 PM
The first part of this statement is completely off base, but in the second part it echo’s what really happens.
Fire, the wheel and melting bronze; didn’t just happen overnight. It was the culmination of years of observations and experiments by man until you could replicate the technology; much like the light bulb and everything else.
It’s the constant evolution of ideas, observations and experiments that brings about new technologies and change.
It’s also the motivating factors (war, depression, fuel prices) that drive more people to start thinking and experimenting to find better solutions to current systems. That is what drives the gigantic leaps in technology, which is contrary to the popular notion that money drives technology changes.
It’s not the money that you spend to pay for people to research new technologies that drives massive change, but the hope of saving or gaining large quantities of money/independence after the fact, not before.
The only difference now; is there are more of us doing it and we all have more access to the global resource of information than the people from the past.
The only problem is that it is more wild, more messy and requires more people to clean up and refine that mess before we can enjoy the fruits of our labor.
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