More life-changing tech innovations needed – II

Yes, for a technology to qualify as being revolutionary, its deprivation must lead to some real experience of pain. Ask me to walk from Abuja to Kaduna, and my legs will probably sore. Keep me in a one-hundred degrees Centigrade room temperature with high humidity, and my system will begin to malfunction. Deprive me of […]

Yes, for a technology to qualify as being revolutionary, its deprivation must lead to some real experience of pain. Ask me to walk from Abuja to Kaduna, and my legs will probably sore. Keep me in a one-hundred degrees Centigrade room temperature with high humidity, and my system will begin to malfunction. Deprive me of the ability to call my family and friends on the phone, and I may get depressed. Deprive me of food, and I will take ill or even die. Deprive me of access to a digital word processing program, and my professional life will take a hit. Deprive me of the ability to access Facebook, and I will thank you for making more time available for me to study and better my lot in life. I am sure you get my drift here.
As pointed out last week, the telltale of the level of a technology is the amount of effort that goes into creating it. That is, building something truly revolutionary usually requires a lot of sweat, and there is simply no way around that. If you are lazy or lack persistence, you will not accomplish much, no matter how intelligent you may be! Moreover, technologies that require a lot to develop are also more difficult to copy, yielding you some real differentiation – in economic terms, that is.
Obviously, I am not the only one that is disgruntled with the dearth of hardcore technologies and the proliferation of junk. In the words of Ashlee Vance, in his biography of Elon Musk, our modern-day great inventor, “the goal went from taking huge risks to create new industries and grand new ideas, to chasing easier money by entertaining consumers and pumping out simple apps and advertisements.”
The sentiment is that Facebook and Twitter do not look like their predecessors in Silicon Valley – Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Sun Microsystems, etc.
Jaff Hammerbacher is quoted by Ashlee: “The basic minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” That is, rather than developing real technologies. Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, has also expressed his frustration regarding the dearth of real innovations: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” In an essay he wrote with others, “What happened to the future,” Thiel described how Twitter, its 140-character messages, and similar inventions have let the public down.
All is not lost, however, as some breath of freshness is slowly emerging. At the forefront of the technology radicalization are Internet-companies turned traditional (mechanical/aerospace, electrical/electronic) engineering companies; viz, Alphabet (the parent company of Google) and the various companies that have been created by Elon Musk, the South-African born U.S. citizen. Google is of course known for its development of self-driving cars, giga-Ethernet technologies, robotics, artificial intelligence-based products, and even aerospace. These are certainly more impressive than Google Search, which hitherto had been the bread and butter of Google, Inc.
Elon Musk is truly a phenomenon. Selling off his PayPal online payment system to eBay for $1.2 billion, Musk abandoned his Internet technology portfolio, leaving Silicon Valley and moving down south to Los Angeles, to focus on real innovations. His first is the founding of Space-X, the rocket-building company. This guy is single-handedly taking on the established NASA and U.S. military prime contractors – Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop-Grumman, etc., taking away huge sums of U.S. government funding from these primes. Musk also founded Tesla Motors, an all-electric car company, as opposed to the electric-fossil fuel hybrid technologies that are more common. In doing this, he is taking the shine away from more established auto companies, who, I must say, seem to be struggling in coming up with acceptable green cars. Another first for Musk in the auto business is the elimination of the middle man: he does not sell his cars through dealerships. The third concern of Musk is SolarCity, through which Musk has funded the largest installer of solar panels for consumers and businesses alike. SolarCity has undercut many utility businesses to become a huge utility company itself. Tesla and SolarCity are obviously green technologies, and although clean-technology companies routinely go bankrupt, Musk’s two seem to be holding up.
What does it take to develop something that is truly innovative? First of all, you have to think big – that is, have big ideas that scare even you! You’ve got to be cheeky to fend off naysayers. Also, you have to have diligence to develop great plans, the discipline to follow through with your plans religiously, and the persistence to stick it out even when things get very difficult for you and you encounter failures. Extraordinary innovations require extraordinary people. So, like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, you’ll probably not be an angel as you pursue the next world’s greatest idea.