Inventor

Invention as a profession is dead.  It should not be.

Long ago, when someone decided to become an inventor, they committed to it.  Invention was a risky profession, but it also had the potential for great payoffs.  Most inventions were unsuccessful.  Failure was far more common than success.  Some inventors had to do work on the side to fund their profession, and others had to beg family or friends for funding.  The life of an inventor was filled with disappointments marked with occasional success.  Inventing was not an easy life, but we are very lucky that there were people willing to do it.  All of our modern technology is based on technologies and inventions created by these inventors.  Sadly, modern economics and politics have killed this noble profession.

In the early U.S., inventors were willing to deal with constant failure.  They would test absurd ideas, even though the chances of success were low.  Economically, this was often very hard on inventors.  When the occasional absurd idea was successful though, the benefits to the inventor and to society were often very large.  Also, regular failure taught the inventors more about how things worked, which has benefitted society to an even larger degree.  Modern science rides on the discoveries made from failed ideas.

Maybe it seems like the most successful inventors had fewer failures.  This is not true.  According to Edison, he tried 999 filament materials for the light bulb before he tried the carbonized bamboo that lasted long enough to be practical (it is probable that he tried even more than that).  That is a success rate of 0.1%.  Successful inventors have usually failed more times, but only because they have tried more things.

Modern economics have destroyed the profession of inventor, because it expects quick returns.  Modern economics suggests that ideas that do not have almost guaranteed returns are not worth pursuing.  It also suggests that ideas that will not turn profits in less than a few years are not profitable at all (though this does not apply to the pharmaceutical or tech industries).  Politics have made the situation even worse, by allowing companies to hoard patents they never intend on using.  Inventors now would have to navigate a legal minefield of patent trolls, a task which takes a degree in patent law to execute successfully.  Our current legal and economic habitat is hostile to inventors.

Now, I can hear some people saying that invention is not a dead profession, but rather it has evolved.  Not so!  Invention is the creation of new things.  Inventors create new things from new ideas.  Not just this, but inventors do this as their profession.  What I mean by this is, they do not occasionally invent new things when their job requires it.  Inventors spend most of their working time creating or testing new ideas.  When a guy at a semiconductor company comes up with a new communication technology, he is inventing, but that does not make him a professional inventor.  He may spend most of his time piecing together smaller components to make a larger component that does something that has already been done.  In fact, a large part of computer science and electrical engineering is not inventing, but just creating mundane solutions from existing technology.  Maybe a company will create a faster microprocessor using a new manufacturing technology.  The new technology is a new invention.  The work going into adapting old processor technology to the new manufacturing technology is mostly just adaptation, not invention.  Invention involves the creation of substantially new things.  Minor improvements to a product is hardly serious inventing.  Also, the number of patents a person has does not determine whether that person is an inventor or not.  The guy who patented "exercising a cat" with a laser pointer is certainly no inventor.  In part, because a single invention does not make a person an inventor, in part because a serious inventor may never patent anything (and inventor who always fails may still be an inventor), and in part because that particular activity was common knowledge, and thus does not even qualify as an invention.  Some engineers hold thousands of patents or more, but this still does not make them inventors.  Are the patents for real innovations, or are they for processes or products that are less than novel ways of doing things that are only marginally different from existing ideas?  Microsoft holds (or held, last I heard) a patent for a progress bar on mobile platforms.  This is hardly novel, and in fact, even in the infancy of computing, a graphical progress bar was not novel.  Such constructs have been used in writing for tracking time passed for centuries (tally marks are a form of visual progress indicator, very similar to the progress bar).  Serious inventors do not just take existing ideas and make minor improvements or alterations.  Serious inventors invent completely new things.  The first music player was a serious invention.  The MP3 player was a less serious invention, because it was just a more compact and convenient music player.  It did not really do anything that had not been done before.  It just did the same things a little differently (how it does it is different; what it does is not).  The first blue MP3 player created was not really an invention at all, because it did exactly the same thing as other MP3 players, but with a blue color.  It did nothing differently; it only looked slightly different.  Professional inventors do not just change the color or make trivial changes.  In fact, people who make trivial changes to improve a product are often referred to as "hackers."  Hackers make small improvements to existing technologies or products.  Inventors create entirely new technologies or products.

Why should the profession of invention not be dead?  Inventing improves technology, science, and society faster than the incremental innovation that is common now.  Modern companies invent only so much as is necessary to keep an edge over competitors, and they invent in as small of steps as possible to minimize risk of failure.  This is a very slow way of advancing technology.  It also minimizes the chances of discovering wildly new technologies that could revolutionize civilization.  It prevents or delays the successes that could be the most beneficial to society, civilization, and technology.  It retards technological advancement.

Can invention as a profession be revived?  I believe it can.  In fact, I believe it has almost everything going for it.  Back in the day of Edison, obtaining materials for inventing could be expensive and difficult.  I have been told that he once tried a special grass from Africa (I think), as a filament for the light bulb.  The first shipment rotted in transit, so he paid for a second one.  If he had not already gotten fairly wealthy from some of his other inventions, he would never have been able to try this (and, he would not have been able to afford the bamboo fiber that he finally settled on).  Now, almost anything can be obtained fairly cheaply on Amazon or EBay.  Most of the highly specialized inventing tools of the past can be obtained for free as software if you have a computer.  Math that was extremely advanced can now be abstracted away with free simulation software.  Prototyping has become very cheap with the wide availability of 3D printing.  In fact, a cheap 3D printer can be constructed for home use for only a few hundred dollars.  Perhaps the most dramatic improvement is welfare.  Back in the early U.S., inventors often risked their own welfare as well as that of their family.  Too many failed inventions could result in starvation or loss of property.  The economics of inventing could be like some sort of tightrope act.  Too much money spent on inventing could result in starvation, but too little could limit the potential for success, also ending in starvation.  Now, we have a half decent government welfare system that can function as a safety net.  The modern inventor no longer has to worry so much about starvation and homelessness.  Failure will still occur, but that will never change.  The true secret to success is to fail often, because failure teaches, and the more often you try, the higher your chances of success over time.  The inventor who tries 10 things a month has far fewer chances to succeed than the inventor who tries 100 things a month.

This situation can and should be improved further.  Unemployment is still very high.  The problem is no longer so much lack of jobs as it is lack of work.  We can produce everything we need and much of what we want with much less labor than is available.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, if we can find a beneficial way to use the excess labor.  There are several ways to do this.  The first is crowdfunding.  Kickstarter provides a very good service for helping to fund projects that are very well thought out and planned.  It does not do so well for larger, longer term research projects.  Invention often involves trying many ideas without a good idea of what will be the most likely road to success.  Kickstarter projects must have some kind of schedule (at least a tentative one), with a well defined definition of success.  Serious invention projects do not always have schedules, because there is not enough data to estimate how long things will take.  I imagine Edison expected to find an acceptable filament material for his light bulb in only a few hundred tries.  Instead it took at least 1,000 tries.  By Kickstarter standards, this would be a failure, but in reality, it was a very significant success.  Now, I am not trying to bash Kickstarter.  I think it is great, and the limitations are useful in defining and limiting the risk.  I do, however, think we need more crowdfunding systems for more risky projects.  Kickstarter is great because it only offers projects that are lower risk and that guarantee some kind of return.  This attracts a certain kind of investor.  More serious invention projects would likely attract fewer investors, and they would be funded less often.  There might be little guarantee of return, but investors will be aware of this up front.  One great idea I would like to see is an open source crowdfunding operation where the main requirement is that all research notes and discoveries be released under open source hardware or software licences.  One of the best things about this kind of system is that the researchers would get paid reasonably for their work, and the results become available to the investors with no strings attached (even if they fail).

Another option is government incentives.  Government incentives might include stipends for people who can prove they are spending significant time inventing or learning things useful for inventing.  Inventors might also get tax credits for money spent on tools and resources used for inventing.  People who spend more than 10 hours a week inventing might even be able to request invention grants, to help pay for more expensive tools or resources.  This would help reduce the unemployment problem and for those who are worried about anyone getting a free lunch, there could be some kind of requirement that the results of any useful inventions become public domain in a shorter time than the normal patent term.  Not only would this help alleviate unemployment by consuming excess labor, it would also give unemployed people more useful things to do than searching for jobs that do not exist, and it would help improve the rate of technology progression in the U.S. (which we sorely need).  Also, it would further reduce the risk of inventing.

High risk inventing is what drives serious technological advancement.  There is evidence of this in the fact that Japan used to be technologically very inferior to the U.S., but is now rather far ahead.  China is beginning to catch up as well.  People in Japan and China fear failure less than people in the U.S.  Japan has had many failed inventions, but there are some that have been successful against all odds.  There are some pretty absurd inventions that have been successful in Japan (for instance, a bidet with a massaging sprayer like those found in many shower heads).  China is catching up, because many Chinese people have less to lose, so they are willing to take larger risks (it also helps that labor is cheaper than is ethical there; note that I am not endorsing this).  In the U.S., we do not see absurd inventions, because no one bothers even trying to invent something that sounds absurd, because we fear failure.  We have a safety net, so we have no excuse anymore.  If an American tries to invent something and fails, or if it takes longer than expected, there is a welfare system to make up the slack.  Yes, it should be even better than this, but we have it far better than those early Americans who took great risks in inventing the technology that has brought us so far.  It would be a shame to abandon the profession that got us to where we are now, just because we are afraid we might fail.