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."

Comments

Re:Diminishing Returns

[bersl2]

Eh... no.

How about this: the ratio of revolutionary innovation to evolutionary innovation is decreasing.

Re:Diminishing Returns

[Seumas]

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.

Re:I Blame regulators

[adoll]

Did Darwin get a business visa to conduct his studies in the Galapagos?

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?

No More Low Hanging Fruit

[reporter]

Technology is analogous to the fruit on a tree. Humankind has already picked off most of the low-hanging fruit. It is the stuff that is readily comprehended or computed.

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.

There's a real problem here

[Animats]

Note some key, well-identified problems that haven't been solved.

• Energy production. None of the great ideas of the last fifty years have panned out. Fission is more dangerous than expected. Fusion gets further away every year. Solar cells still cost too much and have lousy efficiency. Oil shale remains marginal and messy. And we're running out of oil. That's the biggest problem out there, and there's nothing in the pipeline that looks really promising.
• Space travel Space flight with chemical rockets just barely works. So much weight reduction is necessary that rockets are too fragile to be reliable. Chemical fuels just don't have the energy density to make it really work. This was known in 1950, yet we still don't have nuclear rockets that work.
• Artificial intelligence We're stuck. Nobody has a clue how to do it, really. Half a century of banging on the problem, and we basically have the ideas of the 1960s with more CPU power behind them. We have enough CPU power now that we should be able to do a low-end mammal brain, at least. And we can't. It's embarassing.

The hard problems are not being cracked.