Hey Google, What's a Moonshot?: How Silicon Valley Mocks Apollo | Hacker News Reader

Hey Google, What's a Moonshot?: How Silicon Valley Mocks Apollo

cacm.acm.org

5 pointstaeric5 comments

Hoping to hear a lot of others thoughts on this article. Had fun reading it last weekend. I think the standout, to me can be seen in this excerpt.

    One cannot plan out a schedule that depends on 
    fundamental scientific breakthroughs, since those 
    do not occur on a fixed timescale. A project of 
    that kind is about spending money to mitigate risk,
    by pushing existing technologies to levels of 
    performance, reliability, or miniaturization that 
    would not otherwise be economically practical. 
    Given a choice of two technologically workable 
    ways to do something, NASA would take the 
    better-proven and more expensive way.

That last point, in particular, is one I have trouble with time and again. Picking tried frameworks seems to be something our industry is allergic to. But I cannot seem to understand why.

I get it at the hobbyist level. Playing with new things is awesome. There is also at the "failure is an option" level. If you are just going to go swing as hard as you can, then by all means pick the latest in the hope it lets you knock it out of the park.

If you need to know that what you are going to do will work, though, pick a framework with known qualities and spend the money necessary to mitigate the known failure points.

The author paints a picture of a world of absolutes, of only black and white. I tend to see from experience that a vast grey area exists in the definition of what it means to “innovate”.

Instead of putting down and sneering at Alphabet’s attempt to build and create, why not try to offer some constructive feedback instead if you believe what they’re doing really is so flawed. This pessimism and cynicism that seems to emanate towards those who attempt to take risks and try new things always has greatly perplexed me.

I think the suggestions were essentially not to conflate "moonshots" with innovations. If you are planning big things, you can't do that around scientific innovation. Those don't happen on schedule. Instead, big things are done by pushing the limits of what you know. Some innovations may come out of them, but they were not accounted for in the planning.

That is, it wasn't sneering at the attempt to build and create, per se. But it was saying that this is not at all the same as what the Apollo missions were. There are some hints at similarities, but by and large, they did go against much of the idea of incremental innovations.

So, are they impressive? Yes. Absolutely. Fun even. But if you are going to set your sights on something big, you will have to spend an absurd amount of money. Near bankrupting levels of it, for most people.

Similarly, if you want to succeed, you can't bank on innovations. Eventually, you'll fail to hit an innovation and will be in trouble. Instead, spend the effort to mitigate known failures and build towards milestones.

Serious question how many other corporations spent billions of dollars for over a decade on a technology that people still aren't very confident will work like Google has been doing with self driving cars? I know utilities and aircraft manufacturers have made bigger investments but with much surer returns.

Has Google spent billions on self driving cars? And, car manufacturers are still spending a ton of money into the same problem space.

Google does have R&D. It is just amusing to see that they made a division that they tried to give a new name to, that isn't living up to what they named it after. (At least, that is the point I got from the article.)

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