This post was inspired by the most recent post in Jason Crawford’s The Roots of Progress: The Spirit We Lost, Part 1. Crawford paints a rosy picture of how the general public used to react with wonder at technological innovations in the bygone past. As examples, he noted vividly how hundreds of thousands of people came to the shores of NYC to celebrate the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, and the national acclaim received by inventors like Salk upon his discovery of the polio vaccine. Perhaps intentionally, Crawford left out mentioning similar moments since the Internet era (since 1980). The implication being clear: where has the public spirit of wonder for progress gone?
The opinion of the public is important for innovation
Some might argue that the public’s sense of wonder in response to scientific progress is trivial and unimportant. I disagree. For one, per Adam Smith, public acclaim (e.g. vanity) can be seen as a means of aligning the interests of selfish capital holders to work on projects for broader public benefit.
Additionally, as social beings, people are constrained by an Overton window of imagined possibility, which influences what they choose to work on in their (relatively) short careers. The public’s response to each innovation is critical for creating a paradigm shift as described by Kuhn, which realigns the public’s attention and capital toward a new and promising direction. This paradigm shift is in part what inspires young people to become inventors, scientists, and astronauts, creating the human capital necessary for the inventions of tomorrow.
Does less innovation happen today?
Next, it’s worth contesting whether the public’s wonder towards progress has truly disappeared. As counterexamples, I tried to come up with major innovations in our current era that earned the public’s attention. Many examples exist, including but not limited to the internet itself, the first iPhone in 2007, the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012, the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in 2021, the rise of quantum computing, and the development of Transformer architecture of neural networks leading to the current wave of LLMs. All of these innovations have been accompanied by very real buzz and outward signs of acclaim: the first images of the JWST were publicized on major news networks, several of the aforementioned key individuals (e.g. Higgs) won Nobel Prizes for their contributions, and several others (e.g. Steve Jobs) were featured in lists like the Time 100.
I don’t believe that the quantity or quality of innovation has waned. Instead, it might be the nature and magnitude of the public’s response that has. I believe a few factors have contributed to this decrease in public appreciation for the fruits of science: (1) innovations are becoming increasingly incremental, (2) the internet has made our celebrations more transient, (3) venture capital and the privatization of innovation routinely overpromises and undelivers.
(Reported) innovation is more incremental
Breakthroughs in the past that captured media attention were often monumental firsts of their kind, offering tangible benefits to everyone. The Brooklyn Bridge was an engineering marvel and the longest suspension bridge in the world at the time it was built. While the first iPhone is comparable and generated awe; the iPhone 17 is not.
Like many others, I’m bombarded each morning with a relentless deluge of incremental updates, in the form of Github digests, aggregators like Techmeme, and email newsletters. Adages abound articulating why this information overload happens: in academia, you hear “publish or perish”; in tech, “ship early, ship often”. This is perhaps a consequence of our media’s constant content churn, which has only gotten faster with the rise of the internet and social media.
One implication of this constant churn is that the signal of a transformative v1 creation may be buried in the noise of a thousand incremental patches — even for experts, it’s a genuine challenge to distinguish seismic impacts from mundane updates. One way to cope with this challenge is to stop paying attention to updates, in a sort of hedonic adaptation.
We celebrate online and more briefly
Our crowds for celebration have moved online. The most recent SpaceX launch was viewed by millions, but individually, on YouTube streams and social media feeds. While the scale of this meme-like digital engagement is immense, it also happens to be far more transient.
In line with my previous point, the 24/7 media cycle demands a stream of constant new content. The stunning first images from the James Webb Telescope dominated our attention for a day or two before the world moved on. The fire of collective wonder burns brighter than ever, but it also burns out faster, leaving little time for a lingering, unified public conversation.
Venture capital has rewired public expectations
In part due to the failure of public funding to retain talent and communicate its work to the public, the modern narrative of innovation is increasingly dominated by venture capital, which has overshadowed the slow, academically-funded research that underpins most fundamental breakthroughs. Part of this is due to explosive growth of venture capital and private investments in startups relative to academia. The allure of capital has also led to a shunt of talent from public research into private startups, in fields like AI and others.
While I believe the venture capital ecosystem is highly beneficial for accelerating adoption of new technologies (e.g. scaling a proven model for building suspension bridges to each city), I don’t think it’s the best vehicle for the initial long-term and uncompensated risks that truly underpin transformative progress. I also think the demands of PR and raising capital associated with venture funding has misaligned public expectations around the risks associated with innovation.
I believe that true innovation requires a period of “deep work” (as described by Cal Newport, or alternatively as a “sowing phase” by Alexander Grothendieck) — an iterative, failure-ridden process that often spans years of concentrated work. Historically, innovators like Marie Curie engaged in years of concentrated work, with financial compensation and acclaim a byproduct (the “harvest phase”) that was only seen in their later years. This order of events is reversed in the venture economy: the goal is often to achieve acclaim first by promising a vision and raising capital on the vision – and only afterward attempting to build something of substance to justify it. Therefore, the venture economy selects for compelling narratives over proven execution. In a pre-product, pre-revenue state, a charismatic storyteller is the best investment because narrative is the only signal.
This can be damaging because it prioritizes the performance of progress without the actual substance. As a natural result of the power-law distribution of VC returns, the actual probability of success among the startups funded is extremely low. The resulting graveyard of startups corresponds to a graveyard of promised visions, including outright failures like Theranos, where the work to achieve the promises made was never done. A consequence of this cycle of underdelivered hype is an erosion in the public’s trust that progress is achievable.
Crafting a return of wonder
Fixing the above is admittedly a hard task. I believe creating time-based incentives for the venture capital-backed startups to do better on delivering their promises will help. I imagine most private investors dislike the fact that early-stage founders are rarely held accountable to their promises after the check is written — in truth, I think our “round” based funding system might be replaced with long-term funding deals with future amounts tied to achievement of specific deliverables. I also believe in creating better sources of “patient capital”: public and private funds with longer term lengths, but these are still marked by the challenges of due-diligence around long-term capital commitments, personnel retention, and measurable surrogates for outcomes in the absence of short-term financial returns.