Neal Stephenson: evaluation

Transcript context

…It seems we’ve entered an age of permanent secular innovation starvation. Why did that happen? I think there are a lot of institutional barriers that have arisen. A lot of it, I think, seems to be well intentioned, but somebody was pointing out to me a little while back that the Golden Gate Bridge was built in a shockingly brief period of time compared to almost anything that we try to build today. Another good example would be the Hoover Dam, which went up in no time. It also killed a lot of people, so as we become more cautious about not killing people, let’s say, during a given project, and not creating other bad side effects, that slows things down pretty radically. There are institutional systems in place now — most places — to limit those kinds of bad side effects, so it’s kind of a mixed bag. If someone says, “Well, tying everyone together with smartphones that you can Google to any piece of information within seconds, that that was a big project. It’s quite new. We succeeded at it rather spectacularly. There’s not actually innovation starvation.” What’s your response?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.