Innovation is iterative

Video: The Objects of Our Life

Early morning and I’m watching Steve Jobs’ talk at the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen titled “The Objects of Our Life”.

From 13:29 to 14:25, one would think he was describing Google Maps, but he wasn’t. Instead, in this scenario, he was describing the Aspen Movie Map.

The Aspen Movie Map was a hypermedia system developed at MIT that enabled the user to take a virtual tour through the city of Aspen, Colorado. It was developed by a team working with Andrew Lippman in 1978 with funding from ARPA.

At 14:26, he delivers a very profound anecdote in regard to innovation:

It’s really amazing. That’s not incredibly useful but it points to some of the interactive nature of new medium …

I have been thinking about the last sentence in regard to the latest development in AI (NLP, LLMs, tokenization, blah blah blah).

And now, more than ever, my cemented belief is that innovation is iterative.

The first version of an idea does not necessarily have to be useful. Sometimes, it only needs to demonstrate what is possible.

The Aspen Movie Map wasn’t Google Maps. It wasn’t a product that solved the problem we now associate with digital maps. But it demonstrated an interaction that would eventually become incredibly familiar: navigating a representation of the real world through a digital interface.

The same thing is happening with AI.

A lot of what we are seeing today will probably look primitive in hindsight. Chatting with a language model, generating images, writing code, or interacting with computers through natural language may not be the final form of these technologies.

But that doesn’t make them insignificant.

They are demonstrations of what is possible.

The interesting part of innovation is that you often don’t know what the final product looks like when you’re building the first version. You build something, people interact with it, you learn from that interaction, and then you build the next thing.

Technology compounds in this way.

One innovation makes another possible. The second makes the third obvious. Eventually, something that once looked like a useless demonstration becomes an ordinary part of everyday life.

This is why I don’t think innovation is about predicting the future perfectly.

It’s about building things that move us closer to it.

Innovate iteratively.