Covid-19 dispels Silicon Valley’s innovation myth
According to David Rothman of MS TECH, the pandemic shows that the United States is no longer able to develop technologies that meet our basic needs.
The inability to prepare and competently respond to the coronavirus pandemic is palpable, and its diagnosis is adamant: “failure in action and, in particular, our widespread inability to“ build ”. Why do not we have vaccines and medicines, or even masks and fans?
As George Packer wrote in the Atlantic, the coronavirus pandemic has discovered much of what is broken and destroyed in American politics and society. Our inability to produce medicines and the things we desperately need, such as personal protective equipment and basic necessities, is a terrifying example.
Silicon Valley and large technologies, in general, have ceased to respond quickly to the crisis. Of course, they gave us Zoom so that we could do what we were interested in, work, and Netflix to keep us sane; The Amazon rescues those who avoid shopping; iPads are in high demand, and Instacart helps feed many self-insulating people. But the pandemic also revealed the limitations and powerlessness of the richest companies in the world (and, as we were told, the most innovative place on earth) in the face of a public health crisis.
Big technology doesn’t build anything. This is unlikely to give us vaccines or diagnostic tests. It seems we don’t even know how to make a cotton swab. Those who hope that the US will turn its dominant technology industry into a dynamic of innovation against a pandemic will be disappointed.
This is not new. Ten years ago, after what we once called the “great recession,” Andrew Grove, a giant of the Silicon Valley of an earlier era, wrote an article in Bloomberg BusinessWeek condemning America’s loss of manufacturing prowess. He described how Silicon Valley was built by engineers seeking to expand their inventions; “The mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology moves from prototype to mass production.” Grove said those who claimed that we should let the “exhausted old companies that produce goods die” were wrong: increasing production and mass production means building factories and hiring thousands of workers.
But Grove was not just worried about lost jobs, as the production of iPhones and microchips went abroad. He wrote: “Losing the ability to scale will ultimately undermine our ability to innovate.”
The pandemic has clarified this growing problem: the United States is no longer able to put forward new ideas and technologies that meet our basic needs. We perfectly develop brilliant, mainly program-oriented, which makes our life more convenient in many ways. But we are much less successful in rethinking healthcare, rethinking education, making food production and distribution more efficient, and generally getting rid of our technical know-how in major sectors of the economy.
David Rothman of MS TECH