The Price of Innovation
“Fusion energy will be commercial in the year 2000”
“All cars will be self-driving in 2020”
“Humans will land on mars in 2024”
“Artificial general intelligence will arrive in in 2030”
What do these claims have in common?
For one, they’re bold. But more importantly, they were all made under the assumption innovation will take place. Innovation is the only thing that can solve the fundamental challenges that limit each field. Fusion energy, self-driving cars, interplanetary flight, and artificial intelligence are still held back by problems humanity is yet to solve. What are these problems?Fusion
- Plasma confinement
- Energy balance
- Tritium breeding
Self-driving cars
- Edge cases
- Sensor technology
Interplanetary flight
- Propulsion technology
- Radiation protection
- Life support systems
Artificial general Intelligence
- Compute inefficiency
- World modelling vs language modelling
- Offline learning
The question now shifts to: How can we guarantee innovation? The short answer: You can’t. From my experience, the best way to promote it is purpose. A researcher who is respected, believes their work will be celebrated, useful, beneficial is more likely to innovate than one that is trying to meet deadlines, caught up in the smaller picture, suffocated and is made to feel like a cog in the machine.
I have worked in both environments and one thing I've noticed is that I've never innovated at my desk. I have always been in nature, at a pub, at home in contemplation or deep in engaging conversation. This is why I worry when I read headlines like “OpenAI is shutting down next week to give their employees a break from 80-hour weeks” or “Meta’s has a culture of fear in their AI division” (I have personally had a friend leave Meta because of this). Simply throwing money at a problem will not promote innovation. If that was the case, science would have been solved already. So as the problems get harder and the pressure intensifies, where does that leave us? My best guess is the figure above.
18 August 2025
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