A Theory of Lossless Innovation

AI has exploded into the world at gobsmacking speed. With OpenAI's release of GPT3 in 2022, by 2025, 1/4th of all funded startups claim to be an AI startup.
A select few technology startups seem to grow at exceptional speed with very little capital expenditure beyond hiring rooms full of smart twenty somethings. Of course,  they must be pampered with ping pong tables and free lunch. Onlookers often have trouble making sense of why and how these organizations grow at this kind of speed with so few employees.
So, for larger organizations, knowing many amazing tools exist is not enough. Promoting individuals that moonlight to figure out how to use AI to amplify their productivity does not meet broader challenges of management and leadership.
Organizations need an overarching strategy that can guide smaller decisions — to adopt or avoid, guidelines on how to use new tools, and animating goals that align everyone involved.
And above all that, organizations need a unifying motive and story. Providing tactical improvements is more valuable as part of a larger strategy, and any strategy is more valuable as part of a larger set of beliefs. To have beliefs that will endure beyond the day to day dynamics, organizations need to embrace a common theory.
We propose A Theory of Lossless Innovation. What do we mean? Well, let us ground it in a story, one that is a parable for the next century.

A Parable of Directionality

On June 2, 1875, Alexander Graham Bell heard the voice of his colleague, Thomas Watson, from an unfinished contraption on his desk. Watson had been tinkering with his end of the same contraption, built as yet another one of their attempts at creating an "acoustic telegraph". Bell was barely able to make out a human voice. The sound was filled with static, barely audible, but Bell instantly recognized this was the breakthrough they were seeking. This moment sparked a full century of innovation, research, engineering, capital investments, wealth creation, and public policy. Bell and Watson would have no way to understand the spark they had lit. Nine months of tinkering later, on March 10, 1876, Bell placed the first intentional call to Watson, in another room. "Mr. Watson, come here – I want to see you."
What goes in one end should come out the other.
From a certain vantage point and with a wide but focused lens, the arc of the history from 1875 on can be fit into a story about the relentless, collective, global pursuit of Lossless Communication.
Developing Bell's invention into something that could deliver audible, clear calls, reliably and over any distance would take a century. The endeavor involved an astounding number of people, and countless inventions and technologies that had direct application to the goal at hand. From Information Theory to Cryptography, from copper wires to fiber optic cables, from switchboards to transistors, the animating story that united a vast network of institutions, companies, scientists, engineers, banks, stock markets, shareholders, etc ad museum. No matter what their day to day, or their year to year, or this organization or that, they were all engaged in one pursuit:
What goes in one end should come out the other.
Even more worth understanding is that the countless inventions and technologies that had no direct, immediate commercial application would go on to reinvent the whole world. Bell Labs, which housed the research and development arm of the near monopoly that was AT&T at its zenith, would also spin out
  • the foundations of computer-based cryptography.
  • the photovoltaic cell, the pixel of solar energy.
  • charge-coupled devices, the base of digital photography and radio astronomy
  • the C programming language, still in use today for any software that needs fast-execution systems programs.
  • operating systems, the software that manages computers. UNIX, developed at Bell Labs, heavily influenced MacOS and Linux.
  • cellular networks for mobile device calls and data
  • lasers, which are now the primary instrument in lithography to make chips, fiber optic data transmission, realtime computer vision, untold military applications in precision weapons, and various medical procedures.
From the animating, common goal of Lossless Communication, we have most technologies that define life in the 21st Century.

Lossless as Analogy

What goes in one end should come out the other.
The term Lossless has become technical, referring to algorithmic methods that reduce then reconstruct data with perfect fidelity, I posit that applying it as an analogy to almost any human pursuit will loosely predict the emergence and distribution of invention, technology, and commerce.

Communication

Bell Labs was likely the epicenter of invention in the 20th Century. An eager read of it's hagiography, The Idea Factory, or even just a perusal of it's Wikipedia page, inspires awe. Work at Bell Labs led to eleven Nobel Prizes and five Turing Awards. Their inventions defined most of the modern era. The Transistor, the Laser, photovoltaic cells, charge-coupled devices. The Unix operating system, the C, C++, and AWK programming languages. The field of Information Theory was birthed at MIT, but Claude Shannon, the creator, worked at Bell Labs for much of his life.

Imagery

The first color photograph is attributed to James Clerk Maxwell, the image taken in 1861.
Kodak and Xerox were also pursuing Lossless goals, pursuing the goal of making images better and better, and more and more widely accessible.
At age 24, George Eastman was planning a trip to the Caribbean for the summer of of 1878. He wanted to keep his memories. Hauling around a wet plate camera, taking pictures, and developing photos was still an unwieldy process. 2 years later, Eastman received a patent from the US Patent Office, patent 226,503, for a "Method and Apparatus for Coating Plates for Use in Photography." [1]
After selling the first roll-film and hand camera in 1888, George Eastman founded Eastman Kodak and was granted the patent. Kodak went on to become the market leader in photography. It's no wonder then, a spin out service provider Xerox became the market leader in photocopying.
Steve Sasson was an engineer at Kodak when he invented the world's first digital camera in 1975. Willis Adcock was working with Texas Instruments when he filed a patent for a digital camera in 1977. [2]
Xerox developed PARC in 1970 as it pursued Lossless image duplication. PARC follows Bell Labs closely in the sheer number of inventions that have managed to reinvent our world. Wikipedia lists major inventions as: the Personal Computer, the Graphical User Interface, the Ethernet, Object-Oriented Programming, the Mouse, and the VSLI design for semiconductors.

Sound

On the success of AT&T, many brilliant were searching for a wireless method of transmitting data. Guglielmo Marconi was the first to crack it, sending a transmission 1.5 miles, 2.4km in 1895. By 1897, he was sending signals 34 miles, 55km, within England. By 1899, he sent signals across the English Channel. December 23 1900, and file for patent, renaming his corporate entity as Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company. In 1908, Marconi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Data

DARPA did not have a vision for the Internet. As America entered the Nuclear Age, the American Defense establishment became paranoid that a single bomb could wipe out all of their data. DARPA published its usual challenge to the public: invent a way to network computers so we could make data redundant.

Memories

Facebook and LinkedIn could be thought of as networks of humans trying to keep (not lose) their relationships or their memories. For a long time, Facebook was just a way to share photos and "tag" the people featured in the photos.

Human Nature

Similar to Mimetic Theory, to pursue Lossless goals is part of human nature itself. Decades of research in Behavioral Economics have demonstrated that Loss Aversion is one of the most powerful of human motives.

Footnotes