[untitled]
2 comments
Disagree. You are thinking small, all of those industries were created in the last 100-200 years.
What in your opinion are new products that are 100% original? I'm sure there might be a few, but probably very little.
Viable electric cars, light bulbs connected to wifi, Raspberry Pi, robots that run like cheetahs, quad copters, quantum computers...
But saying "I'm sure there might be a few but..." indicates your disposition will be critical of an objective response. You're probably going to argue that IoT light bulbs are just lightbulbs + wifi. But Edison didn't invent copper wire or glass, and nobody questions whether the lightbulb was an invention.
It's the same argument that no thoughts are unique, they are just derivative of prior thoughts. But the conclusion is hasty and incomplete. It's easy to deconstruct ideas (and inventions), a posteriori, into a collection of parts that existed prior. But the combination of those parts is what constitutes uniqueness.
But saying "I'm sure there might be a few but..." indicates your disposition will be critical of an objective response. You're probably going to argue that IoT light bulbs are just lightbulbs + wifi. But Edison didn't invent copper wire or glass, and nobody questions whether the lightbulb was an invention.
It's the same argument that no thoughts are unique, they are just derivative of prior thoughts. But the conclusion is hasty and incomplete. It's easy to deconstruct ideas (and inventions), a posteriori, into a collection of parts that existed prior. But the combination of those parts is what constitutes uniqueness.
What new products of the last 200 years have been 100% original? Vanishingly few, I'd wager. Almost every "invention" is an iteration.
With this line of thinking, nothing was ever an invention. The first tools were just an iteration over banging things with rocks.
A new product or service is significant when it creates new VALUE to humanity; be it time savings, cost savings, better modes of communication, better relationships, more enjoyment, less impact to the environment, etc. Whether this value is created out of whole cloth (which never happens) or incrementally is only a quibbling matter of degrees, and completely irrelevant.