Solving All the Wrong Problems


Allison Arieff for the New York Times:

We are overloaded daily with new discoveries, patents and inventions all promising a better life, but that better life has not been forthcoming for most. In fact, the bulk of the above list targets a very specific (and tiny!) slice of the population. As one colleague in tech explained it to me recently, for most people working on such projects, the goal is basically to provide for themselves everything that their mothers no longer do.

He was joking -- sort of -- but his comment made me think hard about who is served by this stuff. I'm concerned that such a focus on comfort and instant gratification will reduce us all to those characters in "Wall-E," bound to their recliners, Big Gulps in hand, interacting with the world exclusively through their remotes.

Mixed thoughts on this column since I think it illustrates that a lot of innovation seems to be missing an authentic why. There's seems to be a surplus of venture capital out there for tech startups. If you can, why not dream up an idea just to get funded? Probably beats a 9-5 job.

At the same time though, this seems a lot of complaining for what's being developed isn't novel enough to be useful for tech writers. I get that, but what gets clicks isn't really a good metric for innovation. What may seem frivolous may develop into something great, what seems great may flop. In two decades writing about stuff I've seen a lot of stuff I thought was great that didn't have a chance, and others that I thought was silly or derivative become great. Commercial success doesn't necessarily validate innovation, which by nature simply has a high failure rate.