Disclaimer


The content on this blog is my personal opinion and does not reflect the views of the Department of Defense or the US Navy in any way.


Friday, June 15, 2018

Disruptive Innovation and Incremental Improvements

I'll go ahead and say it: I don't actually like Elon Musk very much.

Well, perhaps that's going a bit far. I give him a lot of credit for his willingness to move forward with bold projects and new ideas, even when it comes with a fair bit of personal expense or risk. I think some of his ideas are legitimately quite awesome and the sort of things we're going to need as we continue trying to make some of our science fiction into reality.

However, the confidence with which he tends to push everything he's involved in doesn't always mesh well with the reality that some experiments and innovation fail. That confidence becomes downright annoying when an would-be innovator tries to disrupt an existing field and force it to change for the sake of an idea that isn't going to work.

... And that brings me to Elon Musk and mass transit, whether it's his first Hyperloop concept or his most recent deal to build high-speed rail between Chicago O'Hare Airport and the city center.

Here's the problem: We know how to build a commercially viable train system. They're in operation in countless parts of the world. The fact that the US is not one of those places does theoretically argue that a more innovative idea would help... but before we try to totally reinvent mass transit, I'd argue that actually following some of the best practices the rest of the world uses might help. At least if we're going to propose more innovative ideas, we should probably try to avoid making them worse than what we already know how to do!

What really baffles me about the whole thing is that Elon Musk is clearly not stupid - otherwise he'd not have succeeded in so many different ways. And yet proposing something that has so much less carrying capacity than a typical subway and calling it "high capacity" seems like an obvious error, nor is it the only such problem with his mass transit ideas. That's probably the biggest reason why I have a more general dislike of Musk instead of stopping at just questioning how well things like this will work.

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