The Age of Stagnation

I've had vague concerns that we are living in an era where America's dominance and position are slipping in the world. I've often pointed to the current administration's unfriendly stance toward science - but it's a lot more complicated that that.

The old model that America drove to prominence saw its heyday in the 1880's - The Age of Invention. Anybody with a good idea was developing it, patenting it, manufacturing it and making a fortune off of it. Most of the ideas that made people rich also benefited society. Think of Thomas Edison's light bulb and telephone.

One thing that is often true of innovation is that it displaces something that came before it. Many times the success of a new product meant the death of an old one. The maturation and solidification of our technologies into tried and true solutions is, in itself, a way to stifle innovation. Often those who have maneuvered themselves into a position to benefit from the way things are done now find it in their own selfish interest to suppress anything that threatens their dominance and source of income.

Many people have speculated that auto and oil companies conspired to keep fuel efficient engine designs off the market by buying ideas and sitting on them. I've never seen any proof for this, but it has been true that auto companies have resisted fuel standards for years. If it was a conspiracy - it was a suicidal conspiracy of fools. Ask your local car dealer how business is right now.

That's not exactly what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how someone without, someone in want, someone that lacks - will naturally strive much harder than someone that has all of their basic needs met.

I fear that in the environment we've built up in this country, using good ideas is more like playing musical chairs. When the music stops, you have to be sitting in a chair so someone else will be left out. Today's capitalists believe that you're not going to be rewarded for making the most out of any invention or development, but that the key is to get a patent for an idea or process and sit on it. Milking the most wealth possible out of an idea has become such an American past time that we graduate lawyers from universities just to specialize in patent law. The problem with this way of thinking is that ideas don't work best by bottling them up and placing them on a shelf, ideas work best in action. Ideas in action will necessarily be challenged and displaced by other ideas and forced to compete for prominence. These same capitalists that always trot out the excuse that "market forces" have to dominate any situation don't have the same standard when it comes to their ideas compete on an even footing. The desire to stifle other's ideas is not new. Even back during the Age of Invention, Edison tried to stop one of his brightest proteges, Nicolai Tesla, from developing an idea that would have displaced one of his biggest inventions, alternating current. And the Wright brothers tried to get a patent on flight and stifle all others that tried to make inventions or modifications to the airplane. Fortunately, they lost their battle with Curtis, and we now use flaps on wings instead of having large wings that warp and flex like a bird's wing - a construction that would have been extremely impractical on scale-up.

In the manufacturer's representative business - you always know who are the "mature" salesmen. Someone that has been successful for many years has usually gotten fat and lazy. They already have enough money. They don't want or need to work hard any more - but they still expect to be handsomely rewarded by virtue of their position. This is what I fear the capitalistic class in this country have become.

One thing is certain, expecting to continue to do things the way we have always is a formula for being left behind. In the Age of Invention, the first invention brought in money to fuel the development of the next thing. In our Age of Stagnation, coming up with a good idea once, or having the keys to the castle that contains the thing everyone wants is all it takes to be entitled to an uninterrupted stream of wealth. If that sounds like a fairy tale, it is.

Intellectual Property

I think a lot about what sounds like such a dry subject.

Who owns information?

Can you own information?

Benjamin Franklin, America's first great inventor, believed that no one should own an idea. He thought that inventions should be introduced, and others should be free to take your idea and make immediate improvements on it. This way, society as a whole would get the maximum benefit from innovations.

The "American" Dream (as well as that of many others around the world) is to come up with some creation and get rich quick. It's an attractive dream, and not one to toss aside lightly. It goes against the grain of many to give up individual rights, freedoms, privileges, or prerogatives in order to provide possible benefits to society at large. Some would say that to take away intellectual property protections would kill initiative and take away America's advantage as a technological innovator.

Let's look at another aspect of intellectual property. The first thing that comes to my mind when I hear that phrase is patented inventions. Copyrighted material is also intellectual property. Literature, movies, and songs are copyrighted in order for their creators to make money off of them. We get upset when someone in China makes a copy of a movie and sells it without giving someone in Hollywood any royalty payments. Many people did not get upset when millions of people copied musical tracks and shared them on the internet without compensating the music industry or the performers.

I was looking on YouTube at some outtakes from The Office, one of my favorite shows. Several people had taken their favorite moments and made little highlight films of the series. When looked it up again later, to show my wife, there was a message that said that the content was protected and had been removed from the site. It actually wasn't, I got around the warning and the videos I had watched earlier were still there. It occurred to me that they should want and appreciate that these little videos were being put together. The YouTube people aren't trying to pass off the work as their own, in fact, they are paying tribute to it. NBC probably couldn't sell little highlight films, so it's not like they are taking away from NBC revenue. You could argue that they are adding to it. The more people talk about the show, the more viewers they might get. You could say the same thing about most literature and music, the creators, in their fondest dreams, envision that their work will be enjoyed by the masses, widespread and popular. They also hope to get rich off of it, or at least that someone else won't get rich while they make nothing (ask Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes if he gets any money off all the window stickers of Calvin peeing on something).

So I have very mixed feelings about this. I don't like paying $20 for a music CD, but I don't think musicians should give away their craft for free. I would love to invent something someday and make a fortune off of it. On the other hand, if someone could invent the 100 mile per gallon engine and someone else could buy the patent and sit on it, depriving me of this useful invention, I would not be pleased. And I find it incredibly stupid that people are applying for patents for genes that the find in some organism, as if they invented it themselves. That's crazy - am I supposed to pay a royalty every time my pancreas secretes an enzyme just because some geneticist found it in the lab? More likely, the geneticist would work for some megacorp with a battalion of lawyers that is quickly applying for patents for everything the poor underpaid geek in the lab sees through his spectrograph.

When the U.S. went to war in WWII, they were hailed as out producing their enemies and supplying their allies to such a degree that we overpowered them and won the war. What a lot of people don't understand is that the government adjusted the rules of intellectual property during the course of the war for the good of the country (and world) as a whole. Aircraft designs, particularly engine designs, were freely copied between the various aircraft manufacturers. They were more than willing to do this at the time because there was more than enough work and profits to go along, as well as the fact that they wanted to win the war. This special circumstance would be worth studying to see if any of the lessons might be applicable to the broader issue of intellectual property.

Sometimes government and universities come up with knowledge that is then made available to the general public. Sometimes this is simply because they do not have an immediate commercial application for the new knowledge, but other times it is because the person making the discovery is not a financial person, but a scientific one. There will always be those that love to figure things out, just as there will always be those obsessed with how to make a buck off of it. Scientists tend to publish their discoveries in journals, such as Science and Nature, where the ideas are peer reviewed for validity, but also widespread to like minded individuals. On the world's stage, this has led to an ever widening sphere of shared knowledge that accelerates technology, innovation, and future discoveries.

I love this pure exchange of ideas, the innovation incubator that our universities have become. We have to somehow find a way to make ideas available widespread without having these commercial and financial concerns stifle development.