America tends to assume Silicon Valley-style innovators can drive quick and transformative changes, but even Silicon Valley's would-be masters of the universe have discovered that energy transitions are subject to time spans and technical constraints that defy their reach.
Interpretation
Innovation in technology does not guarantee immediate change due to various limitations.
This quote by Vaclav Smil highlights the misconception that tech innovators, especially from Silicon Valley, can easily enact rapid and transformative changes in energy transitions. It emphasizes the reality that such transformations are constrained by time and technical challenges that innovation alone cannot overcome, suggesting a more nuanced understanding of the complexities involved in energy change.
In practice
A business leader could use this quote to discuss the realistic challenges their tech company faces in innovating energy solutions.
I've read about 80 books a year for the past 50 years. I come from cultural breeding. I don't have a cellphone. When you spend all your time checking your cellphone messages, or updating your Facebook (of course I don't have a Facebook page) then you don't have any time for reading.
Most innovation is not done by research institutes and national laboratories. It comes from manufacturing - from companies that want to extend their product reach, improve their costs, increase their returns. What's very important is in-house research.
Everyone [in higher education] was what I call drillers of deeper wells. These academics sit at the bottom of a deep well and they look up and see a sliver of the sky. They know everything about that little sliver of sky and nothing else. I scan all my horizons.
Most scientific or engineering discoveries would never become successful products without contributions from other scientists or engineers. Every major invention is the child of far-flung parents who may never meet.
I'm old fashioned. I'm not one of these young guys who think they are so smart that they can prescribe what humanity ought to do. Humanity never learns any lessons. Prescriptions don't matter. We already know exactly what to do. We just don't do it.
Economic and technical imperatives - not any preconceived directives - will keep propelling the process of energy transition.
First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII β and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.
Developing fewer features allows you to conserve development resources and spend more time refining those features that users really need. Fewer features mean fewer things to confuse users, less risk of user errors, less description and documentation, and therefore simpler Help content. Removing any one feature automatically increases the usability of the remaining ones.
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Most people in AI, particularly the younger ones, now believe that if you want a system that has a lot of knowledge in, like an amount of knowledge that would take millions of bits to quantify, the only way to get a good system with all that knowledge in it is to make it learn it. You are not going to be able to put it in by hand.
Our values are that we do think that people have a right to privacy. And that our customers are not our products.
The Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see.
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