What’s a (metaphorical) moonshot? [TALENT SEARCH]

On the webpage where the Mercatus Center announced the Emergent Ventures program, we find this paragraph:

“Throughout the past year, Mercatus scholars have explored their personal and policy moonshots; Emergent Ventures is a step to making those moonshots a reality,” said Tyler Cowen, faculty director of the Mercatus Center. “By finding and taking chances on risk-taking, talented people with bold ideas, I believe we can reinvent the capacity for an intellectually-oriented philanthropy to improve the world.”

Why this talk of moonshots? It seems to be a popular term at Mercatus. A search of their site for “moonshot” turned up 77 hits (today, November 21, 2018 at 11:39 AM; it produced 92 hits when I searched it last night).

The term is being used metaphorically, of course, where America’s Project Apollo is the vehicle, to use a term of art, that conveys the intended meaning about some tenor, another term of art, some other project or venture. What meaning is supposed to be conveyed?

Let's list some moonshots

In an article, Deep Technologies & Moonshots: Should We Dare to Dream?, posted on September 18, 2018, Senior Research Fellow Adam Thierer, observes:

Don Boudreaux defines moonshots as, “radical but feasible solutions to important problems” and Mike Cushing has referred to them as “innovation that achieves the previously unthinkable.” “Deep technology” is another buzzword being used to describe such revolutionary and important innovations. Swati Chaturvedi of investment firm Propel[x] says deep technologies are innovations that are “built on tangible scientific discoveries or engineering innovations” and “are trying to solve big issues that really affect the world around them.”

A bit later:

More concretely, when people use these terms in reference to existing technologies, or ones currently on the drawing board, they often mention innovations like:

• Artificial intelligence / machine learning / robotics
• 3D printing / additive manufacturing
• Self-repairing / self-building objects
• Driverless cars / flying cars (VTOL), supersonic transport
• Private space travel / lunar mining
• Clean power / alternative energy production
• Genetic editing & life extension technologies
• Implantable tech / human augmentation
• Hyper-connected devices / wearable fitness / sensor tech / IoT
• Precision medicine
• Neural networks
• Quantum computing
• Nanotechnology / synthetic biology
• Immersive technology (AT & VR)

This is just a partial list of the type of technologies that experts mention when discussing “moonshots,” deep tech,” and other “disruptive” or “transformative innovations.” What unifies them more than anything else is the potential for major improvements in human well-being. Significant advancements in these areas could lead to substantial jumps in human welfare, health, and longevity.

The question I’m thinking about is whether or not Project Apollo was a moonshot in this sense.

In what sense did it “lead to substantial jumps in human welfare, health, and longevity”? Oh, yes, there were side effects aplenty, from Tang to computers to propulsion systems and who knows what else, but what benefits have accrued from actually landing human beings on the moon?

So far the only benefits that I can see have been largely symbolic: We did it! We actually set foot on the moon. But how has that lead to benefits in human welfare?

Or, going back to his earlier paragraph, in what sense was landing on the moon a solution to an important problem? The problem it solved, if that’s how you want to put it, was boosting national morale in a technological race with the Soviet Union. And even at that Congressional funding was a bit iffy.

Crapshoots and sure things

Over two years ago Robert Graboyes and Thomas Stossel argued Curing Cancer Is Not a Moonshot (January 15, 2016). They set things up with this observation:

When President John F. Kennedy articulated his moonshot project in May 1961, it was a narrowly focused, clearly defined engineering problem. While costs and timelines were somewhat uncertain, tried-and-true principles of physics informed the engineers and made a successful lunar landing highly likely.

That is to say, landing humans on the moon was a difficult, but not particularly uncertain technological problem. It was expensive and so required substantial commitment, but it was not a long shot. The major risk was born by the astronauts themselves. Three died in a prelaunch test prior to Apollo 1 and Apollo 13 suffered an accident on route that made a lunar landing impossible, but the crew returned safely to Earth.

Graboyes and Stossel go on to observe:

Cancer, in contrast, is many different diseases demanding diverse treatments. Compared with the high-precision physical sciences that reliably guided NASA to the moon, the principles of biology are obscure and agonizingly unpredictable.

They then go on to argue curing cancer is not the sort of thing to be tackled by a large centrally controlled government organization. Rather, the private sector, with its entrepreneurial skills and drive is better suited to this mission. They may well be correct in that, but that’s secondary to my argument. Their contrast between the two projects, landing a man on the moon, curing cancer, is not. The second is still pretty much of a crapshoot, but the first was not.

A mixed bag of moonshots

Let’s take that distinction and applying to Thierer’s list. Here’s how I call them, where 1=crapshoot, 2=surefire engineering, 3=substantially mixed:

• 1 -Artificial intelligence / machine learning / robotics
• 2 -3D printing / additive manufacturing
• 1 -Self-repairing / self-building objects
• 3 -Driverless cars / flying cars (VTOL), supersonic transport
• 1 -Private space travel / lunar mining
• 2 -Clean power / alternative energy production
• 1 -Genetic editing & life extension technologies
• 3 -Implantable tech / human augmentation
• 2 -Hyper-connected devices / wearable fitness / sensor tech / IoT
• 2 -Precision medicine
• 1 -Neural networks
• 1 -Quantum computing
• 1 -Nanotechnology / synthetic biology
• 2 -Immersive technology (AT & VR)

Thus I score it 7 crapshoots, 5 sure things, and 2 mixed. You might disagree with some of my calls; for that matter, more than likely I’ll disagree with some of them later today or tomorrow. But I don’t think the overall picture will change. It’s a mixed bag this collection of “moonshots”.

Cowen's moonshot

My suspicion, however, is that whatever Cowen has in mind in his use of the metaphor, it’s not surefire engineering tech. After all, in a podcast about Emergent Ventures he has said they expect a high rate of failure. In fact, he’s said they’d be doing something wrong if they didn’t get a high rate of failure. Of course, failure need not mean technical failure. If the grant is for a project intended to produce a useful product or service, the project might well succeed in that but then fair to turn that into a successful business. After all, if the objective of Project Apollo had been to produce a new business – Acme Moon Transport, Inc. – then the program was a massive failure and a waste of resources.

What then is a moonshot? It seems clear that what Cowen is shooting for are high-risk projects which, if successful, with be of social benefit. Project Apollo was neither high risk, in a technical engineering sense, though not in human lives, nor of clear and obvious social benefit. But the symbolic value? That’s a different story.

Is that what this is about, in the end, symbolism? The term “moonshot” has become all but divorced from the concrete conditions of Project Apollo. That’s how symbols are born. Given that we are creatures of symbols, that might well be everything. No?