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Innovation Getting Slower?
Daniel Dvorkin writes "A New Scientist article details the claims of Jonathan Huebner, a Naval Air Warfare Center physicist, that the rate of technological innovation is actually decreasing, not increasing exponentially as some people believe. Huebner says that there are now fewer 'important technological developments per billion people' than at any time since the 17th century! I'm far from convinced, but it's an interesting and thought-provoking article." From the article: "He says the rate of technological innovation reached a peak a century ago and has been declining ever since. And like the lookout on the Titanic who spotted the fateful iceberg, Huebner sees the end of innovation looming dead ahead."
I wonder by how many billion the population has grown since the 17th century? Does the article account for the exponential population increase mondially?
Considering that there were fewer than 600 million people in the world in 1600, I'd assume fewer "developments per billion" today.
Sorry, I just don't see anything to be concerned about. The per capita rate of development may have gone down in the last 200 years, but the numbers have gone way up.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
Eh... no.
How about this: the ratio of revolutionary innovation to evolutionary innovation is decreasing.
Yeah, but you also have to admit that the more we discover, the harder it is to discover more. Remember, a couple centuries ago, Franklin was inventing hundreds of things. Well, yeah, because it was easy to invent - say - water flippers or a snorkel back then. I mean, how hard is it to say "hey, if I had a straw in my mouth pointing up, I could breathe underwater"?
But today, the easy inventions are over with. The majority of the things some general jack-of-all-trades in his garage could invent have been invented. Even the personal computer, invented in a garage, has already been invented.
If you want to make some great discovery today, you're not going ot be doing it in your garage or while going about your business. You're going to be doing it in relation to funded research, government grants, a decade in college and many degrees into it. So, yes, of course innovation is "slowing down". Because you spend so much of your life just "catching up" to the knowledge that is now needed that you're a geezer by the time you've got enough behind you to start "inventing" or "discovering". Discoveries aren't cheap. You can't just stare at the sky a few minutes every night to sketch solar flares in your log book to document the behavior of the sun. You're going to need a billion dollar facility with computers, staff, and a big ass telescope.
So yes, perhaps innovation seems to be stagnating in general - but that's largely because the entry-point for great discoveries and innovation is so high now.
Did Alexander Graham Bell get a broadcasting licence from the CRTC?
Did Mme Currie have a permit to work with radionuclides
Did Captian Cook put up with this crap when he commissioned his vessels?
I think that- any innovation that works inside a computer, he'll just call it a "minor innovation."
So, if we write code that can quickly automatically reconstruct 3D models from video footage, and put it into every computer, it'll be "just another computer program."
If we write really smart translation systems, and hook it up to speech-to-text and text-to-speech, it'll be "just another computer program."
Make any machine, but make it run inside a computer, and it'll be "just another computer program."
Just a minor innovation.
But I don't think we can afford to think of things that way.
These are really big innovations. Just taking an existing innovation, and just putting it into everybody's hands: should count for something.
But I think people are fooled, because they just see a geek and a computer. "Oh, nothing new. He's still sitting in his chair at his computer."
Anyone who thinks that all innovation is captured in patents is clearly not involved in the design process. I've got a bunch of patents but the coolest ideas we NEVER commit to a patent unless there is an overriding strategic/competitive reason. Innovation is best kept secret and imbedded. Most innovation is invisible to the user and it simply does not pay in most cases to reveal an underlying technique to the whole world who can then modify the process in some small way and gain 90% of the benefit of the patent. And there is no patent police- you have to find a clear violation. All this and you get a whole 20 years from time of filing- and you have to pay to maintain the thing too. Most innovation has a lifetime that is only a few years at most- so really you get maybe 10 years max of real utility before you are overcome by events. This report is pure crap and is based on an incredibly blinkered perspective. Innovation- and by that I mean real workable ideas that can be used in the marketplace and have been debugged- is exploding. The changes in materials alone will swamp you. It is barely possible to stay current in say polymers and metals and their associated processing techniques- throw in optical materials and its all she wrote.
Pick up a textbook about digital signal processing or communication theory. The concepts are straightforward to understand because they involve linear systems. When systems are not linear, we try to linearize them because linear systems are more easily grasped by the human mind than non-linear systems.
We have already picked off all the fruits of linear systems. The next step, nonlinear systems, is a tad more difficult. So, innovation will slow.
I presume that other endeavors outside of signal processing face a similar situation.
As a last example, consider physics. Newtonian physics was the low-hanging fruit. We can see its application in almost everything from cars to buildings to aeroplanes. Beyond Newtonian physics is a very difficult, non-intuitive step: quantum physics.
As integrated circuits become so small that quantum effects appear, humankind will face a brick wall, and innovation will slow to a crawl. Of course, there will be bright ideas. Science-fiction writers also have brilliant ideas, but implementing them will not be feasible.
In order for technology to be developed efficiently, it must be framed in a way that is intuitive to the mind. This intuition gives brilliant people a way to reason about a problem and to find a neat solution. Linear systems and newtonian physics are intuitive and fit well within the mental framework of the human mind. Nonlinear systems and quantum physics are quite the opposite.
Everything that is new these days is are minor extensions of the old
Anti-retroviral medication, designer drugs, endovascular stents, non invasive diagnostic imaging... Some fields are exploding exponentially. 20 years ago we had a very hazy idea of how virii worked. Thanks to HIV, not only do we know how they work but we've taken great steps towards creating drugs that block its replication - and these drugs can even be applied to other virii (Hepatitis B and lamivudine, for example).
This is something completely new - the ability to create drugs based solely on our knowledge of a biochemical pathway. Used to be trial and error - for some reason people who take "x" develop this, this and this, lets find out how "x" works, and try to apply it to some disease. Now it's the other way around - this disease is caused by "y", lets find or build a drug that binds to some receptor and prevents that.
Or how about me being able to use a spiral CT scanner and software to build a 3-D image of your entire digestive system and take a "virtual" tour of your intestine, to find that tumor? This is amazing and also completely new. Before, you got the knife. Now you just lie still on a table for 20 mins. I can inject you with some radioactive material and get a dynamic, moving image of your beating heart - in 3D, and SEE where all the blood is going (and where it's not). Wow.
I could go on and on, and this is just in ONE field. My point is, there ARE some pretty new and radical things out there, you just have to look in the right places.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
From the f*ing article....
"In an effort to find out, he plotted major innovations and scientific advances over time compared to world population, using the 7200 key innovations listed in a recently published book, The History of Science and Technology (Houghton Mifflin, 2004). The results surprised him."
Um..... let me just interject my interpretation: That book won't likely have the key innovation for the last, say decade or so, because they aren't widely known yet until they impact us. For instance, Einstein's first theories weren't widely considered important/innovative until years AFTER he developed them and us dumblings could finally tune into his wavelength and say "AHA! They are useful."
Or like Arpanet might have been viewed as a cute military playtoy in the 70's...... until it evolved into the internet.
"Rather than growing exponentially, or even keeping pace with population growth, they peaked in 1873 and have been declining ever since (see Graphs). Next, he examined the number of patents granted in the US from 1790 to the present. When he plotted the number of US patents granted per decade divided by the country's population, he found the graph peaked in 1915.
The period between 1873 and 1915 was certainly an innovative one. For instance, it included the major patent-producing years of America's greatest inventor, Thomas Edison (1847-1931). Edison patented more than 1000 inventions, including the incandescent bulb, electricity generation and distribution grids, movie cameras and the phonograph."
Do we really have to get into a discussion of why Patents are not the best measurement of progress?
There is the story that a US Patent Office official said in 1843, "The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." Well, it's a story.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Patents you say? Is every country in the world hobbled by a patent system similar to the US? If there is demand for a product, patent or not it will be filled. Whether homegrown (in my case US) or imported from some country where the patent law does not care as much. Patents do have their problems, but stifling innovation IMO is not one of them. In fact by reading the patent you know what the other person did. Now you can even work with the patented info and make your own enhancements.
The hard problems are not being cracked.
that'a fair argument. the cost of innovation now vs. the "sweet spot" period in the article.
Edison innovated in his shed out back. The cost might have been significant in his day, but not prohibitive.
Some might argue that the cost of innovation now is prohibitive. The fair assessment of this article might be that all the "easy" innovations, or all the "cheap" innovations have already been discovered.
The other thing is this. There are a lot of books circulating about criticality. A big idea in criticality is complexity arising from very simple origins (Gutenberg-Richter Law). So there is the idea that the TREES of our major technologies going forward have already been discovered. The branches are being fleshed out now, but the trunks are all there in plain view. If that is the case, then innovation isn't slowing because of societal reasons, but is slowing because there's less new shit to discover, lending credence to a simple universe.
un burrito me trampeó.