Investor Peter Thiel famously wrote, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” The quote was the introduction to the controversial tech investors’ manifesto, What Happened to the Future, in which Thiel lamented the deceleration of technological innovation and the squandering of resources to advance civilization. Rather than focusing on curing cancer or traveling to Mars, “innovation” came in the form of quirky apps to help people pass time.
Now, that assessment may not be totally fair, but a reason why Thiel’s quip became so wildly popular is because it held a lot of truths. When it comes to innovation and disruption, there’s a constant struggle in identifying what’s genuinely revolutionary from what is simply evolutionary. Evolutionary innovation provides incremental benefits, improving upon the technology that came before it.
You could argue that evolutionary events could be deemed revolutionary within their own sphere, but relatively speaking, they’re still a natural progression from one phase to the next within the context of a larger cycle. Depending on who you ask, there have only been a handful or so of these events—among them, the Industrial Revolution (water and steam power), the Technological Revolution (electric power), and the Digital Revolution (computers and web connectivity).
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