Silicon Valley. I grew up dreaming about Livermore Labs, Xerox PARC, Hewlett Packard (in its day), Apple. Now everything is in the city, and each start up as vapid and pointless as the last.

That kind of innovation (a) is difficult and (b) requires precisely configured conditions. Unfortunately the lesson that corporations learned from the golden age of these labs was that though they produced amazing things, they didn't provide an adequate return on the investment. Now that everybody has learned that lesson, there are not many such labs left and the ones that are thriving operate much like either product incubators (Microsoft) or agencies (PARC).

Another problem is that there are not many properly educated people to establish and run labs like this thanks to our education system falling apart. But you won't hear anybody talking about that. Things will just get worse and worse.

If you want to change the world, change yourself. You should never rely on others to change in the ways you'd like them to.

You should definitely never rely on others to change, but you can engage in a dialogue with the public through writing and speaking, which has the potential to change others.