Accelerating invention is one pillar of Motif’s mission (see also Empower Diversity).

On Technology

Technology is a tool, not inherently good or bad, that amplifies the human behaviour to which it’s applied. It is responsible for, well, most of the inhabited world.

On balance, the accumulation of technology is a good and necessary thing. Invention — the creation of new technology — is the engine that fuels the progress and flourishing of humanity. Without getting caught up in historical counterfactuals, it’s safe to say we’re going to need to keep inventing to address many of today’s problems.

Naturally some technologies, such as weapons and surveillance, appear particularly prone to misuse. However this concern is not addressed by the mere hope that the technology is not invented in the first place. Managing the application of technology is the role of regulation, and it must be managed seriously and competently for invention to remain a positive force.

Invention vs Innovation

What’s the difference? Both involve the creation of something new, which is the thing of primary interest. Wikipedia offers a simple (if not authoritative) difference: adoption.

An innovation is something that is new and better, and has been adopted and proven to create positive value.

An invention need not be used or even useful. So what makes inventions more interesting?

Everybody has bright ideas, but almost nobody is willing or able to shoulder the prohibitive effort and risk in driving an idea to adoption and societal impact. And that’s okay!

The people who are driven to build and spread their ideas will do so one way or another. But it’s a tragedy for an idea — potentially the kernel of a great innovation — to be lost altogether. Ideas should at least be allowed to fail; failure is a powerful creative force.

> Motif is the midwife to those ideas that would otherwise never be born. Creation should not be gated on quality; something is better than nothing.

Acceleration

Some fraction of inventions are worthy of further investment. Deciding which those are requires information about the inventors, the product, and its resonance with its audience. This is a hard problem.

Regardless, the first step must be the existence of the invention. Creating and testing more inventions more frequently will produce more successes and more technological progress.

Software is something of a unique technology. It is purely digital, ephemeral. It is “just” logic, a faculty available to everyone. Its real content is not the lines of code, but the shapes, patterns and flows of data. With the support of cloud computing, an enormous amount can be achieved with no fixed costs.

This makes software the perfect medium for realising ideas fast… given the right tools.

Today’s tools and techniques primarily help programmers write lines of code. But code is just that: and encoding of something more abstract, more fundamental, more meaningful — the idea itself. Writing code is a tax, and should not be necessary for expressing an idea as software.

> Motif is inventing a new language for invention. Creating working, testable software should be no harder or slower than expressing the idea behind it.