retrotalk2021 #2 - a cross-culture innovation drought?

From a few week ago, an Atlantic piece on an innovation drought in American culture, titled "America Is Running on Fumes". Derek Thompson focuses on the shortfall in three specific areas 

Film 

"Throughout the 20th century, Hollywood produced a healthy number of entirely new stories. The top movies of 1998—including Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, and There’s Something About Mary—were almost all based on original screenplays. But since then, the U.S. box office has been steadily overrun by numbers and superheroes: Iron Man 2, Jurassic Park 3, Toy Story 4, etc. Of the 10 top-grossing movies of 2019, nine were sequels or live-action remakes of animated Disney movies, with the one exception, Joker, being a gritty prequel of another superhero franchise....  Americans used to go to movie theaters to watch new characters in new stories. Now they go to movie theaters to re-submerge themselves in familiar story lines."

Science

and

Economy

“New ideas no longer fuel economic growth the way they once did,” the economists Jay Bhattacharya and Mikko Packalen wrote [in the 2020 paper Stagnation and Scientific Incentives]. In the past few decades, citations have become a key metric for evaluating scientific research, which has pushed scientists to write papers that they think will be popular with other scientists. This causes many of them to cluster around a small set of popular subjects rather than take a gamble that might open a new field of study. 

"In science, as in cinema, incrementalism is edging out exploration."

“Everywhere we look we find that ideas are getting harder to find,” a group of researchers from Stanford University and MIT concluded in a 2020 paper. Specifically, they concluded that research productivity has declined sharply in a number of industries, including software, agriculture, and medicine. 

".... Setting aside a spike during the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. business formation has been declining since the 1970s. 

".... Until about a century ago, the U.S. was building top-flight colleges and universities at a dazzling clip. But the U.S. hasn't built a new elite university in many decades.... 

"f you believe in the virtue of novelty, these are disturbing trends. Today’s scientists are less likely to publish truly new ideas, businesses are struggling to break into the market with new ideas....  we are less likely than previous generations to build institutions that advance new ideas.

“What about all the cool new stuff?” you might ask. What about the recent breakthroughs in mRNA technology? What about CRISPR, and AI, and solar energy, and battery technology, and electric vehicles, and (sure) crypto, and (yes!) smartphones? These are sensational accomplishments—or, in many cases, the promises of future accomplishments—punctuating a long era of broad technological stagnation. Productivity growth and average income growth have declined significantly from their mid-20th-century levels.

"New ideas simply don’t fuel growth the way they once did. 

".... This is not the first time that somebody has accused America’s invention engine of running on fumes in the 21st century. (Not even the idea that America is running out of ideas is a new idea.)

"In 2020, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published the instant-classic essay “It’s Time to Build,” which urged more innovation and entrepreneurship in public health, housing, education, and transportation. “The problem is inertia,” he wrote. “We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things.” The same year, Ross Douthat published The Decadent Society, which levied similar criticisms of languishing U.S. creativity. These works are partly descendants of Tyler Cowen’s books The Great Stagnation, which diagnosed a slowdown in America’s innovative mojo, and The Complacent Class, which observed that Americans are self-segregating into comfortable echo chambers rather than taking risks and challenging themselves."

Why is it happening, Thompson asks? 

"I don’t think there is an overarching reason for our novelty stagnation. But let me offer three theories that might collectively explain a good chunk of this complex phenomenon.

"1. The big marketplace of attention

Almost every smart cultural producer eventually learns the same lesson: Audiences don’t really like brand-new things. They prefer “familiar surprises”—sneakily novel twists on well-known fare....

"2. The creep of gerontocracy..."

"Across [politics]. business, science, and finance, power is similarly concentrated among the elderly...." 

3. The rise of “vetocracy”

"What if it’s not American creativity that’s suffering, but rather that modern institutions have found new successful ways to thwart and constrict creativity, so that new ideas are equally likely to be born, but less likely to grow?

"... They’ve become, in political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s term, “vetocracies,” in which too many actors have veto rights over what gets built. That’s true in the federal government. It’s true in state and local governments. It’s even true in the private sector.

"Last year, fewer bills were passed than in any year on record. 

"Vetocracy blocks new construction too, especially through endless environmental and safety-impact analyses that stop new projects before they can begin."

The author concedes that "the best objection to everything that I’ve written so far is that there exists a world where young people tend to be in control, where regulatory burdens aren’t blocking megaprojects, and where new ideas are generally cherished and even, perhaps, fetishized. It’s the internet—or, more specific, the software industry. If you are working on AI, or crypto, or virtual reality, you probably aren’t starved for new ideas. You very well may be drowning in them...."

So all the change is happening in this immaterial realm.. 

"... Patents today are more concentrated in a single industry, the software industry, than at any other time on record. We’ve funneled treasure and talent into the world of bits, as the world of flesh and steel has decayed around it....

"What I want is for the physical world to rediscover the virtue of experimentation. I want more new companies and entrepreneurs, which means I want more immigrants. I want more megaprojects in infrastructure and more moon-shot bets in energy and transportation....  finally, I’d like Hollywood to rediscover a passion for cinematic blockbusters that don’t have numbers in the title."

My own less informed thoughts on this deficit of big thinking and aiming high from a piece in Salon from 2007... 

Surprised to find one of those whatever-happened-to-the-future essays on Daily Kos of all places - by a dude called Mark Sumner

Who draws parallels with the curious fact about acceleration, that "as an object approaches the speed of light... you can throw more and more energy into accelerating that object" but  "it becomes increasingly reluctant to pick up speed. Instead, that energy gets added to the mass of the object, making it even harder to accelerate. Eventually, despite any effort you might make, the object just becomes more massive, stubbornly staying short of exceeding, or even completely reaching, the speed of light"

and limits-to-growth, innovation-gets-harder-and-more-expensive type ideas

  "As John Horgan pointed out in his book The End of Science the cost of making fundamental technological discoveries has been a steady march from basement tinkers to the Large Hadron Collider. Where we could once make fundamental leaps for the cost of some polished lenses and a few pounds of chemicals, it now takes massive international efforts to move the goal line an inch. To make the kind of breakthroughs required to reach the Singularity, or clear any of the hurdles standing in its way, an investment greater than anything we’ve seen before will be required."

as well as the mystery of why we haven't heard from alien civilisations yet, given that there's millions or even billions of solar systems that could have planets that might support life.

"Maybe civilizations just … run out of steam. Maybe instead of a never-ending climb, we’re doomed to just follow an arc of our own making, right back into the ground.....  perhaps the answer to “where are they” can be derived simply from the one intelligent civilization we know. Where are they? Nowhere. They didn’t spread to the stars. They didn’t reach a technical nirvana. Instead they just … failed.... They built systems in which technical progress was too closely allied with the profit motive, and as the scale of investment increased and the prospect of gain became both more long term and speculative, they simply stalled out. Like a rocket with insufficient velocity to achieve orbit, they surged up, up, up but eventually could not move any higher, or even maintain the peak of their flight. They fell back. They used up, wore down, wore out....

 "One day going to the moon was a dream. Then it was a fact. Then it was history. Then it was a myth"

This "Moon landing as myth' idea reminded me of two things -- Daft Punk's "Contact", which I talked about at the Tomorrow Never Knows Symposium as an elegy for Space and the Western Faustian drive of a "perpetual spiritual reaching out into boundless space" (Spengler) and then I quoted not the bit that DP  sampled from Eugene Cernan on "Contact" ("there's something out there" etc etc) but what he actually said, as the last man to stand on the Moon's surface, when he climbed up the ladder into the lunar module:


“As I take man's last step from the surface, back home for some time to come – but we believe not too long into the future – I'd like to just (say) what I believe history will record. That America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow.”

The other thing "then it was a myth" re. the Moon missions reminded me of was that when I did an interview with Salon.com about Retromania, and during the course of it mentioned the space race, some idiot in the typically-Salon.com rebarbative comments section made fun of that: "how dated, he's talking about the space race" . As if the idea of Humanity pushing beyond its terrestial confines was somehow camp - not an epic civilisational project or essential spiritual imperative - but more or less on the same level as the open-necked shirt and medallion-in-a-nest-of-chest-hair.  Something that went out of style in the Seventies.

Actually the analogy is more with something like Woodstock -- the Space Race, as a locus of excitement and expectation, now regarded, with the enormous condescension of posterity, as a form of generational over-estimation - something it's embarrassing when the old folks keep banging on and on about it....