One of the symptoms of an absence of innovation is the fact that you lose your jobs. Everyone else catches up with you. They can do what you do better than you or cheaper than you. And in a multinational corporate-free market enterprise, it is the company's obligation to take the factory to a place where they can make it more cheaply.
Interpretation
Innovation is critical for job security, as competition can easily outpace uncreative businesses.
In this quote, Neil Degrasse Tyson emphasizes the importance of innovation in sustaining jobs and maintaining competitiveness in the market. He suggests that without constant innovation, companies risk losing their workforce to competitors who can perform tasks more efficiently or affordably, highlighting a fundamental obligation of businesses to adapt and evolve to thrive in a dynamic economic landscape.
In practice
This quote can be used in a business seminar to encourage companies to prioritize innovation.
The problem is that many people operate on the assumption that NASA should go to Congress every year with hat in hand and justify it every year. Well, I see it as the greatest economic driver that there ever was. Economic drivers don't need justification.
The press still thinks [global warming] is controversial. So they find the 1% of the scientists and put them up as if they're 50% of the research results. You in the public would have no idea that this is basically a done deal and that we're on to other problems, because the journalists are trying to give it a 50/50 story. It's not a 50/50 story. It's not. Period.
As a scientist, I want to go to Mars and back to asteroids and the Moon because I'm a scientist. But I can tell you, I'm not so naive a scientist to think that the nation might not have geopolitical reasons for going into space.
In just one year, the expenditure of of the U.S.'s military budget is equivalent to the entire 50-year running budget of NASA combined.
One of my great laments is that education today seems to have... be less about passion and more about process, more about tactic or technique.
Lots of people think, well, we're humans; we're the most intelligent and accomplished species; we're in charge. Bacteria may have a different outlook: more bacteria live and work in one linear centimeter of your lower colon than all the humans who have ever lived. That's what's going on in your digestive tract right now. Are we in charge, or are we simply hosts for bacteria? It all depends on your outlook.
There was a failure to recognize the deep problems in AI; for instance, those captured in Blocks World. The people building physical robots learned nothing.
Nobody wants to buy a $60,000 electric Civic. But people will pay $90,000 for an electric sports car.
People thought I was crazy thinking about a phone you can just put in your pocket.
Technology innovation is starting to explode and having open-source material out there really helps this explosion. You get students and researchers involved and you get people coming through and building start ups based on open source products.
It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.
You need to invent things and you need to get them to people. You need to commercialize those inventions. Obviously, the best way we've come up with doing that is through companies.
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