Innovation
We should all be geeks
We have all heard this story over and over again. We need just need adjust ourselves to new inventions, like we had to do when the train was invented, when electricity was invented and when the smartphone was invented. That is completely true. The only way to keep going forward, is by invention. There is one big issue with this fact: Innovation is going way faster than it has ever gone before. Because the way and especially the speed in which innovation is taking place, we should change our attitude towards it, too.
Invention’s evolution
I currently own an iPhone 4S, which is considered as a pretty hightech phone at this moment. But according to the rumors, Apple is going to release a new iPhone at the end of this year. This will make my old phone obsolete. Five years ago, laptops were considered as stupid, large and heavy pieces of brick, ment for crazy people. Right now, everyone walks down the street with his superlight ultrabook or MacBook air. New products are becoming obsolete way faster than they ever did before.
Rumors told us that complete new inventions like the Google Glass and smartwatches are going to be released at the end of this year. Much people consider these techniques as pretty scary, but ‘geeks’ and ‘nerds’, as society calls them, consider these techniques as the future, months or years before society does so. These complete new products will replace the current smartphones for at least a large part. I expect that in the upcoming years, smartphones will be replaced by Glasses, holographic screens and smartwatches. This will mean that smartphones, more or less ten years after their introduction, will become obsolete.
The story that we have all heard over and over again would tell us that we need to change our lifestyle and society into a way in which we can cope with those new technologies, every time over and over again. This would have worked 200 years ago. This works pretty well, when everyone switches to a new technology straight away. That is not the case.
Ingredients for the perfect invention
New technologies, inventions, products are great, when everyone uses them. For example, the train. What if everyone would have used the train as the primary way of transport from its first day on? Because everyone would use the train, there would be train stations all over the country, and trains would run very often. These things would have made trains an even better invention, and this was made true because of the fact that everyone used them.
The same was for smartphones. Because more and more people started using them, the best developers and designers started making apps for them. This made the smartphone a way better invention, because many awesome apps popped up. Because a lot of people had those smartphones, phone carriers would optimize their networks and plans for these phones. These things made this invention even better.
This is the rule for every new technology; when lots of people start using it, it will get better and better. There are many great inventions that aren’t used that much right now, but would be very good when a lot of people would use them. Take the autonomous driving car as an example. In Silicon Valley, people actually already use these cars to be drived to their office, but because of our laws and the conservative mindset of a lot of us, it will take years, or even decenia to get these cars on the road. Why wouldn’t we start using them right now?
Of course, having many users is the goal of every invention. In order to reach a lot of users, the product or invention just needs to be really good, but we’re missing down on one point. Nearly our complete society has the mindset that they would only start using something new when it is really good and a lot of other people use it. But those other people think the same, they will start using it if a lot of other people would use it. Infinite loop. The same is for how ‘good’ the invention is. It will get way better when many people use it.
This is a huge problem, and a lot of inventions are not fully used because of this silly reason. The actual reason is that the most people start using something new after it became accepted by society and proved itself as something good. This is a complete wrong attitude. Why do young people use phones way more than old people? Because when these young people saw a phone for the first time, they didn’t knew about how communication over longer distances used to be. The only thing they cared of were the amazing opportunities of this invention. Old people would think of the way they lived for the past few years, and then conclude that this would be something new, also known as scary.
This is where things go wrong. Those old people hadn’t had an open attitude to smartphones. If they would have had an open attitude, they would have seen all the great advantages and new opportunities, instead of the scary change. In a world in which new inventions follow up on each other quicker every day, society can’t wait for itself to accept something before starting with using it, but it needs to be open towards every new invention, and start using it immediately if it is better than what we have and use at this moment. If it doesn’t do this, lots of very good inventions will go down the drain. Wake up society! You are the ones who are going to use all those new amazing inventions, don’t wait for those few geeks and unborn children to find out how amazing it is before using it. Change your mindset to a curious state, try to find out all the advantages and opportunities of new inventions, don’t try top stop the future from taking place!
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