What Barry Levinson's Envy Has to Teach Us About Technology

Back in the mid-'00s the "Frat Pack" were the kings of Hollywood comedy, with hits like Old School (the film that gave them their name), Dodgeball, Anchorman and Wedding Crashers. However, alongside these hits there were quite a few less successful films, among them the Barry Levinson-directed Envy, which costarred Ben Stiller and Jack Black.

The film's story revolves around the Jack Black character's making a fortune with a (let us be decorous here) spray that simplifies the task of cleaning up after one's pet. Early in the film, before Black's character got rich, he was endlessly talking about his "inventions"--which did not actually exist, even in blueprint form--as that spray did not when he was talking about it. As Stiller's character explained to him what he was talking about was "not an invention" but rather "an idea."

It's a short, simple exchange--but not meaningless, the distinction Stiller's character makes quite important. An idea has not necessarily been proven--one reason why one cannot patent an idea--only an invention, which is a far more developed thing. Alas, tech journalism too little recognizes the distinction--telling us about technologies that may not have moved past the idea stage as if they were already realities, and doing even worse with technologies only scarcely more advanced. To cite but one example, not long ago a scientist put forth a concept for an unprecedentedly swift space vehicle, which was all well and good. What many of those journalists failed to understand, or at least properly acknowledge, was that the whole thing was premised on its being equipped with a TOKAMAK FUSION REACTOR--a technology at best far away from being developed to the point where we can fit one delivering the required performance in such a spacecraft. But they wrote about the thing as if this fusion-powered spacecraft were already being trucked out to the launch pad for its first flight.

Of course, that does not obviate the importance of ideas. The process of invention has to start somewhere, after all--and considering the matter I find myself recalling how inventor Hugo Gernsback was so much a believer in the value of ideas in themselves here that he saw in it one of the great uses of science fiction when he launched the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, way back in 1926. But all the same, the distinction is an important one, especially when hopes and money start getting involved. And a century after Gernsback made his case it seems to me that we are far less short on ideas for solutions to the world's problems than on the actual inventions that will do the job.