Thanks, Klaus. Truly appreciate your thoughts around this.
Two possible reasons we've been "squandering our potential on nonsense"?
1. Maybe part of the problem is our tendency to follow the herd?
In turn, maybe that's because, as Keynes wrote, "it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally"? Or also that, due to our needs for social interaction, we often want to go where others are, whether physically or virtually? Perhaps also due to challenges with imagination: more people get excited by seeing what others are doing, while fewer are either capable of or comfortable with "dreaming things that never were and asking why not" (to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw's quote).
Soon after rapid meal delivery companies became a Thing, we had not only DoorDash and Grubhub but a slew of others in that space. Same for "urban mobility" options like rental bikes and scooters, with Bird, Lime, Jump and their like proliferating like mad for a time.
Historically, too: a Wikipedia article claims that "starting with Duryea in 1895, at least 1900 different [automobile] companies were formed," before WWI and the Great Depression led to many business failures and consolidations.
It's been similar for financial trends and/or fads. Like SPACs, which multiplied like bunnies during a short span. And cryptocurrencies, which saw another 18,000+ "coins" released after Litecoin followed in Bitcoin's footsteps in 2011.
In contrast to the vast number of entrants in these other spaces, here are two examples of real-life problems that have seen far too little attention for decades.
There has long been a vast and unmet need for fish passage systems, allowing fish to migrate around dams in rivers and streams. (Many dams don't have them at all; others offer traditional fish ladders – basically a set of concrete steps over which some of the dam's water must continually flow – which can tire and confuse fish.) Despite this, very few companies have attempted to address that problem; Whooshh Innovations in Seattle is one of the few that has. (Disclaimer: I'm one of their small investors in a recent crowdfunding round.)
As well, with drought leading to desertification and wildfires, land disturbances, and other human activities degrading or eroding land, we've needed ways of restoring those lands en masse: to grow grasses that bind the soil and retain moisture, and to create conditions in which brush, trees, and a vast ecosystem of animals can thrive. Starting around 1980, Bob Dixon down in Arizona came up with a "land imprinter" – a tractor-hauled roller with angular patterns that create small, funnel-shaped holes, where seeds and seedlings can be fed by rainwater and runoff, and in which natural mulch can gather, to protect and nurture them. Yet despite this need, and many successful examples of restoration using these devices, they haven't yet caught on. Recently, I came across just a couple of companies, including Western Ecology LLC in New Mexico, that still make and sell similar devices.
The contrasts between the energy and funding that's gone into all those aforementioned 'fad' sectors in recent years, versus the modest amount of focus and support for addressing even just these two real-world problems – is stark. And endlessly frustrating.
Many more tangible problems like these two undoubtedly exist, and are equally languishing for lack of resources: imagination, skilled and energetic people, and funding. While Jucero, Quibi, and their like proliferate, along with all of the "what problem is this actually solving?" software companies that you've referred to in your post, Klaus.
2. And certainly, another part of the problem are those "excessive and expensive regulatory hurdles" you noted.
These seriously hamper our ability to build tangible things – like housing, power plants to generate electricity (including using renewable sources), oil refineries, mines to extract needed minerals, and public transit corridors for subways and trains – as contrasted with, say, software.
Here's just one example of onerous permitting restrictions leading to delays of up to 7 to 10 years when building new geothermal energy projects:
There's now a broad "pro-building" movement coalescing around the need for removing or reducing those hurdles, so we can build more of the tangible products and services our society requires. (Sometimes people in that movement also use terms like "supply" or "abundance," alongside "building.")
This movement also spans the political and ideological spectrum, with some left-leaning and left-center folks increasingly joining in, alongside the set of mostly traditional conservatives and libertarians who've long chafed at regulatory delays and obstacles. A couple of pertinent tweets/threads, among many:
You've beautifully articulated a thing I've only until now felt as a sort of distorting background noise: what the hell are we doing here? I'm cool with capitalism but one of its shortcomings is often the accrual of wealth is treated with more urgency than using our intellectual capital for more useful or interesting projects.
This was a fantastic and thoughtful-provoking article. Along with Kim Stanley Robinson, I keep hoping that climate change will motivate us to create technology that is actually useful to people’s lives, similar to the mRNA vaccines you cite.
I think another problem is that many people just really like tech, think it’s cool, and want to impose tech as an intermediary obstacle between humans who could perfectly well handle something on their own. Your example of fast-food ordering is great and reminds me of when I was a high school teacher in the late 90s. Our headmistress imposed a laptop program on everyone: All students were required to bring laptops to school every day, and we teachers were required to rejigger our lessons to include the laptops. Why?!?! (In retrospect I have realized that she was probably chasing grant money.) We were doing perfectly fine with the human voice, whiteboards, paper, and desktop computers when needed. Back then, laptops were 3” thick and weighed about 8lbs, plus there was no wifi, so the first 10 minutes of every 50-minute class was spent unpacking laptops and plugging wires into a central hub, so the laptops hurt rather than helped learning.
Now, of course, laptops are infinitely better, and they have their role. (My son, for example, has dysgraphia, and his accommodation in high school and college was that he did everything--including exams and standardized tests--on a laptop.) But for most kids, having their phones and laptops in class is a distraction that takes away from rather than adding to their focus in class.
I’m also reminded of a Freakonomics podcast about maintenance. Everyone wants to be an innovator, when what we really need is maintenance, unglamorous though it may be. Similarly, as you argue, we need investment in humans solving problems that affect humans, unprofitable though it may be.
Thanks for writing such a terrific piece. As a side note, I am relieved to see the context for the phrase “furry animals with breasts” you mentioned a few days ago!
Deindustrialization is a big problem, but not much to do with “tech”. At current levels of automation sophistication most manufacturing is still very labor intensive, and American labor is comparatively expensive, and American management is extremely short-sighted, so as soon as the low-margin stuff could be offshored, it was.
Software on the other hand… I don’t know exactly where you’re coming from, I don’t mean to sound too definitive, but FWIW I’m a software engineer of 25 years, at one of them big tech firms you’ve heard of, and it’s really only been in contact with those very big systems that the reason why there are a kajillion engineers even for relatively simple functionality has become apparent. It’s really more about maintenance and scaling and internationalization and compliance and testing and a bunch of other stuff that isn’t quite bullshit but definitely isn’t implementing basic features. So like, I could build a crappy Twitter clone in a day. And if it had ten users I’d be fine. But once it has a million users I have a problem. These days the technical scaling is easier, though still nontrivial. But now I need customer support and anti-abuse and the FEC wants to talk to me, and because of the scale of even a million users, I can’t answer any of those things with people, or at least without a lot of new custom software in between. It’s not just about being too cheap to hire enough people, I mean it is a bit, but even if you have tons of people with eyeballs on stuff you need all this software to divide up the stuff between the people.
And then all of the software is being continuously rewritten to update all the integrations and platform movement. And it’s definitely true that involves too much work, but it’s not really avoidable.
Compounding that though for all the smaller companies is that really good engineers are heavily concentrated at these big companies, I’m not talking about myself here, but where twenty years ago some real software whiz might have been 10xing the TPS reports at a small company, more importantly really they would be 3xing their decent-but-not-stellar coworkers, now they are much more likely to know they could be raking in low-mid-5-figures at a big tech company. And so a lot of places are making do with decent-but-not-stellar engineers, and (see healthcare.gov and many other institutional sites and apps), their productivity is low, so you need more, and then productivity scales poorly so you need even more. I’ve worked in those places at various times, and the people aren’t bad, but without a leavening of a little more pure talent they tend to be stuck in ruts.
Meanwhile the pure talent is doing compliance work. Whether that’s overall socially beneficial is hard to say I guess, but software’s incredibly low price I think tends to make people overlook the benefit. I can poop on Facebook, but Messenger keeps me in touch with my faraway family members on a daily basis, and it’s free. I used to have to pay long distance and international call rates, now I could video chat all day for nothing. Or a miillion other zero- or negative-GDP benefits. Software is so cheap per user that we forget (I forget) that Netflix with a few thousand engineers is doing what took hundreds of thousands of people to do for TV and movie theaters.
But I would like it if we were still doing manufacturing innovation too. Or at least doing it with friendly nations like we used to. You know, Germany and Japan. Well, recently friendly.
Thanks, Klaus. Truly appreciate your thoughts around this.
Two possible reasons we've been "squandering our potential on nonsense"?
1. Maybe part of the problem is our tendency to follow the herd?
In turn, maybe that's because, as Keynes wrote, "it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally"? Or also that, due to our needs for social interaction, we often want to go where others are, whether physically or virtually? Perhaps also due to challenges with imagination: more people get excited by seeing what others are doing, while fewer are either capable of or comfortable with "dreaming things that never were and asking why not" (to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw's quote).
Soon after rapid meal delivery companies became a Thing, we had not only DoorDash and Grubhub but a slew of others in that space. Same for "urban mobility" options like rental bikes and scooters, with Bird, Lime, Jump and their like proliferating like mad for a time.
Historically, too: a Wikipedia article claims that "starting with Duryea in 1895, at least 1900 different [automobile] companies were formed," before WWI and the Great Depression led to many business failures and consolidations.
It's been similar for financial trends and/or fads. Like SPACs, which multiplied like bunnies during a short span. And cryptocurrencies, which saw another 18,000+ "coins" released after Litecoin followed in Bitcoin's footsteps in 2011.
In contrast to the vast number of entrants in these other spaces, here are two examples of real-life problems that have seen far too little attention for decades.
There has long been a vast and unmet need for fish passage systems, allowing fish to migrate around dams in rivers and streams. (Many dams don't have them at all; others offer traditional fish ladders – basically a set of concrete steps over which some of the dam's water must continually flow – which can tire and confuse fish.) Despite this, very few companies have attempted to address that problem; Whooshh Innovations in Seattle is one of the few that has. (Disclaimer: I'm one of their small investors in a recent crowdfunding round.)
As well, with drought leading to desertification and wildfires, land disturbances, and other human activities degrading or eroding land, we've needed ways of restoring those lands en masse: to grow grasses that bind the soil and retain moisture, and to create conditions in which brush, trees, and a vast ecosystem of animals can thrive. Starting around 1980, Bob Dixon down in Arizona came up with a "land imprinter" – a tractor-hauled roller with angular patterns that create small, funnel-shaped holes, where seeds and seedlings can be fed by rainwater and runoff, and in which natural mulch can gather, to protect and nurture them. Yet despite this need, and many successful examples of restoration using these devices, they haven't yet caught on. Recently, I came across just a couple of companies, including Western Ecology LLC in New Mexico, that still make and sell similar devices.
The contrasts between the energy and funding that's gone into all those aforementioned 'fad' sectors in recent years, versus the modest amount of focus and support for addressing even just these two real-world problems – is stark. And endlessly frustrating.
Many more tangible problems like these two undoubtedly exist, and are equally languishing for lack of resources: imagination, skilled and energetic people, and funding. While Jucero, Quibi, and their like proliferate, along with all of the "what problem is this actually solving?" software companies that you've referred to in your post, Klaus.
2. And certainly, another part of the problem are those "excessive and expensive regulatory hurdles" you noted.
These seriously hamper our ability to build tangible things – like housing, power plants to generate electricity (including using renewable sources), oil refineries, mines to extract needed minerals, and public transit corridors for subways and trains – as contrasted with, say, software.
Here's just one example of onerous permitting restrictions leading to delays of up to 7 to 10 years when building new geothermal energy projects:
https://twitter.com/TimMLatimer/status/1517244510698455041
There's now a broad "pro-building" movement coalescing around the need for removing or reducing those hurdles, so we can build more of the tangible products and services our society requires. (Sometimes people in that movement also use terms like "supply" or "abundance," alongside "building.")
This movement also spans the political and ideological spectrum, with some left-leaning and left-center folks increasingly joining in, alongside the set of mostly traditional conservatives and libertarians who've long chafed at regulatory delays and obstacles. A couple of pertinent tweets/threads, among many:
https://twitter.com/mishachellam/status/1528771901664792577
https://twitter.com/aronro/status/1526082262797672448
You've beautifully articulated a thing I've only until now felt as a sort of distorting background noise: what the hell are we doing here? I'm cool with capitalism but one of its shortcomings is often the accrual of wealth is treated with more urgency than using our intellectual capital for more useful or interesting projects.
This was a fantastic and thoughtful-provoking article. Along with Kim Stanley Robinson, I keep hoping that climate change will motivate us to create technology that is actually useful to people’s lives, similar to the mRNA vaccines you cite.
I think another problem is that many people just really like tech, think it’s cool, and want to impose tech as an intermediary obstacle between humans who could perfectly well handle something on their own. Your example of fast-food ordering is great and reminds me of when I was a high school teacher in the late 90s. Our headmistress imposed a laptop program on everyone: All students were required to bring laptops to school every day, and we teachers were required to rejigger our lessons to include the laptops. Why?!?! (In retrospect I have realized that she was probably chasing grant money.) We were doing perfectly fine with the human voice, whiteboards, paper, and desktop computers when needed. Back then, laptops were 3” thick and weighed about 8lbs, plus there was no wifi, so the first 10 minutes of every 50-minute class was spent unpacking laptops and plugging wires into a central hub, so the laptops hurt rather than helped learning.
Now, of course, laptops are infinitely better, and they have their role. (My son, for example, has dysgraphia, and his accommodation in high school and college was that he did everything--including exams and standardized tests--on a laptop.) But for most kids, having their phones and laptops in class is a distraction that takes away from rather than adding to their focus in class.
I’m also reminded of a Freakonomics podcast about maintenance. Everyone wants to be an innovator, when what we really need is maintenance, unglamorous though it may be. Similarly, as you argue, we need investment in humans solving problems that affect humans, unprofitable though it may be.
Thanks for writing such a terrific piece. As a side note, I am relieved to see the context for the phrase “furry animals with breasts” you mentioned a few days ago!
Seconding Erin - this gets right to the heart of something really hard to articulate.
Ugh. I would comment on this further but I need to rewrite five articles I already had done. I mean that as a massive compliment.
Deindustrialization is a big problem, but not much to do with “tech”. At current levels of automation sophistication most manufacturing is still very labor intensive, and American labor is comparatively expensive, and American management is extremely short-sighted, so as soon as the low-margin stuff could be offshored, it was.
Software on the other hand… I don’t know exactly where you’re coming from, I don’t mean to sound too definitive, but FWIW I’m a software engineer of 25 years, at one of them big tech firms you’ve heard of, and it’s really only been in contact with those very big systems that the reason why there are a kajillion engineers even for relatively simple functionality has become apparent. It’s really more about maintenance and scaling and internationalization and compliance and testing and a bunch of other stuff that isn’t quite bullshit but definitely isn’t implementing basic features. So like, I could build a crappy Twitter clone in a day. And if it had ten users I’d be fine. But once it has a million users I have a problem. These days the technical scaling is easier, though still nontrivial. But now I need customer support and anti-abuse and the FEC wants to talk to me, and because of the scale of even a million users, I can’t answer any of those things with people, or at least without a lot of new custom software in between. It’s not just about being too cheap to hire enough people, I mean it is a bit, but even if you have tons of people with eyeballs on stuff you need all this software to divide up the stuff between the people.
And then all of the software is being continuously rewritten to update all the integrations and platform movement. And it’s definitely true that involves too much work, but it’s not really avoidable.
Compounding that though for all the smaller companies is that really good engineers are heavily concentrated at these big companies, I’m not talking about myself here, but where twenty years ago some real software whiz might have been 10xing the TPS reports at a small company, more importantly really they would be 3xing their decent-but-not-stellar coworkers, now they are much more likely to know they could be raking in low-mid-5-figures at a big tech company. And so a lot of places are making do with decent-but-not-stellar engineers, and (see healthcare.gov and many other institutional sites and apps), their productivity is low, so you need more, and then productivity scales poorly so you need even more. I’ve worked in those places at various times, and the people aren’t bad, but without a leavening of a little more pure talent they tend to be stuck in ruts.
Meanwhile the pure talent is doing compliance work. Whether that’s overall socially beneficial is hard to say I guess, but software’s incredibly low price I think tends to make people overlook the benefit. I can poop on Facebook, but Messenger keeps me in touch with my faraway family members on a daily basis, and it’s free. I used to have to pay long distance and international call rates, now I could video chat all day for nothing. Or a miillion other zero- or negative-GDP benefits. Software is so cheap per user that we forget (I forget) that Netflix with a few thousand engineers is doing what took hundreds of thousands of people to do for TV and movie theaters.
But I would like it if we were still doing manufacturing innovation too. Or at least doing it with friendly nations like we used to. You know, Germany and Japan. Well, recently friendly.