Issue of the week: Has innovation dried up?

Welcome to “the end of the future,” said Peter Thiel in National Review. Outside of computers, the past few decades have produced no great technological innovations. Consider the glaring fact that we are quite literally “no longer moving faster.” For centuries we accelerated our travel speeds—from ships to ever-faster trains, cars, and planes. Not anymore, and we can chalk that failure up to a “much larger failure in energy innovation” that has left us relying on the same basic sources of fuel. Similarly, true breakthroughs in medicine and biotechnology have slowed, and a “technological famine” in agriculture over the past three decades may soon lead “to a real old-fashioned famine.”

“Where’s my ticket to Mars?” asked Neal Stephenson in World Policy Journal. When I was a kid, in the 1960s, it seemed possible I’d eventually get one. Scientists and engineers used to tackle big-ticket problems; in my grandparents’ lifetimes they created the automobile, the airplane, and nuclear energy. But today’s researchers concentrate on “narrowly focused topics.” They lack a shared sense of vision and imagination. And because we are unwilling to accept the risk of failure, we’re left tolerating stagnation and celebrating short-term gains.

We’re certainly in a trough, said David Brooks in The New York Times. “A person born in 1900 began with horse-drawn buggies and died with men walking on the moon.” We’ve seen nothing like that advance for the past several decades. You can see this stagnation reflected in science fiction. “The new work is dystopian, not inspiring.” We’ve lost the “utopian élan” that fed the notion that we possessed “the power to begin the world anew.” Yes, breakthroughs will come in genetics, energy, and cancer; they just won’t arrive “as soon as we thought.”

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“It’s not that the future never arrived,” said Kevin Drum in Mother Jones. “It’s that the future brought us different stuff than we thought we were going to get.” We don’t have flying cars, but that doesn’t mean we can’t innovate. We shouldn’t “discount current innovations just because they’ve happened behind the scenes or seem sort of prosaic.” We’re actually working on some “really hard problems” like artificial intelligence, a replacement for oil, and gene sequencing. These fields tend to demand entirely new solutions, not clever derivatives of old ones. So the lack of spectacular results doesn’t mean innovation is in decline. “It just means we’ve set our sights really high.”