*The Chocolate Factory is the last Silicon Valley enterprise still aiming for insane greatness.
*The implications of this manifesto are plenty weird. Basically, it's stating that it's easier to use Google-style resources to disrupt and up-end entire industries than it is to get a ten percent improvement through incremental every day business-process improvements. This means that, technologically speaking, both government and capitalism simply get in the way – they don't get us what we want and need to survive and thrive as human beings in the world, they are structural impediments. So much so that we could do better by a factory of ten if we all lived on GoogleX Island, an imaginary technosocial clean slate where business and government didn't exist.
*This may be true, but if it is, everything previously written about technology, governance and society should be wadded up and thrown out the window. Maybe Google will be gracious enough to scan that stuff before it's all rendered irrelevant.
https://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/02/moonshots-matter-heres-how-to-make-them-happen/
(...)
"When I talk to people about it, everyone thinks moonshot thinking isn’t for them. We relegate the big thinking to someone else or some other organization instead, playing a weird kind of “not it” game. The small companies and startups think moonshots are a big-company thing because it takes a ton of money and resources, which they don’t have. The big companies think it’s a small-company behavior because it takes a ton of risk tolerance, which they think they can’t afford. Government organizations are under pressure to show immediate results on pressing, “popular” problems, so the longer term visions are hard to justify funding. And while academics love expansive, long-term thinking, their job is to publish the ideas and spread them, but not to do the system building itself. They can describe moonshots, but they don’t think it’s their job to take them on.
"Not all moonshots have to be about technology. Gandhi’s Salt March or the struggle for civil rights in the United States are examples of social moonshots. But since I know technology best, I’ll argue here for moonshots that use technology to solve problems, particularly where social or policy solutions have been hard to come by. Here’s how.
"Moonshot thinking starts with picking a big problem: something huge, long existing, or on a global scale. Next it involves articulating a radical solution — one that would actually solve the problem if it existed: a product or service that sounds like it’s directly out of a sci-fi story. Finally there needs to be some kind of concrete evidence that the proposed solution is not quite as crazy as it at first seems; something that justifies at least a close look at whether such a solution could be brought into being if enough creativity, passion, and persistence were brought to bear on it. This evidence could be some breakthrough in science, technology, or engineering that could actually make the solution possible within the next decade or so.
"There needs to be concrete evidence that the proposed solution is not quite as crazy as it at first seems.
Without all three of these things, you may have a sci-fi story or a crazy idea — but you don’t have a moonshot. Not one that can aim for new heights and address a big challenge in a maybe-not-totally-crazy kind of way.
"Consider just one example. We need to feed the world, and ideally without the immense resources, environmental impact, or moral issues some associate with raising (and killing) animals. So imagine creating meat that you can eat and skin you can wear … but that doesn’t come from an animal. “Food-grade animal protein,” in industry parlance, would help solve a seemingly impossible problem. And we have tangible proof that this is indeed possible: Last year, Modern Meadow co-founder Gabor Forgacs ate a pork chop that had been bio-printed with a special 3-D printer designed for tissue engineering. So that’s a credible first step toward the moonshot goal. Now, the question is how long it takes to get the price of that pork chop down below the ones you can find at your local grocery store. Moonshot...."
