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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."
Microsoft
Personally, I blame slashdot. I could be inventing some crazy shit if I didn't have to check this site every 5 minutes.
The death of innovation is due to apathy.
I was going to invent a solution to the problem, but who cares?
Innovation has been patented.
It's a good thing the world sucks or we'd all fall off.
So who says innovations per billion people is a legitimate measure of the rate? Innovations per year seems to be the only measure that matters. And maybe the rate appears to be slowing because all of the totally common sense innovations have already been done. The stuff that is left requires a huge knowledge base and a large effort on the part of hundreds to achieve. Maybe innovation rates should be correlated to complexity of the innovation. Bet it's increasing if you do it that way. Statistics can always say whatever your thesis needs em to say. Bah!
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
I wonder by how many billion the population has grown since the 17th century? Does the article account for the exponential population increase mondially?
But WHY is a different question. Maybe we're just dreaming about harder stuff. Nanotechnology, space elevators, quantum computing, and curing cancer through understanding of genetics might just be a *wee bit* harder than figuring out the thermodynamics of a new steam engine design.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I think the more we discover the more we realize we don't know yet. So I'dhave to say I disagree with your comment.
I blame patents.
Patents pretty much hobble innovation. They work when you have a relatively small population base, but not when the population is in the billions. (And not when patents keep getting extended to longer and longer periods of time.)
During the 1800s there were no improvements to the pistol for about 20 years due to patent restrictions. Patents are supposed to promote science and industry, but often have the opposite effect.
There is a large amount of huberis involved with the patent process that says "no one is as smart as me, so anyone who has a similar idea to mine must be stealing it". The problem is that when you have large numbers of people working on the same problems, you are going to encounter the same solutions over and over again.
If we continue to have a "first one to patent wins" on a global scale, we will have crippled ourselves to the fastest filers, not the fastest thinkers.
We no longer stand on the shoulers of giants because we are crippled by midgets.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
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.
Though it's interesting, this guy has some serious flaws in his thinking. First off, measuring innovation per billions of people isn't very reliable, as a population can rapidly increase or decrease and this doesn't take into account the education level of the population. The list of innovations he plotted is also debateable. I consider the development of Javascript a major innovation, but is that on the list? Think about the thousands and thousands software and hardware innovation that have been made. I don't think it's because they're "insignificant". If it may appear as though there are fewer innovations, that may be because you're looking in the wrong place. Many, many innovations are taking place as we speak, it's just highly specialized. This guy is saying that we'll pretty soon invent everything and be done. This reminds me of a quote by the head of the USPO back in the turn of the century (wish I could find a link). He said that everything that could possibly be invented has been invented. This is obviously way, way off target. Huebner is on the same train of thought.
And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be bannana-shaped.
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.
Unfortunately the modern beauracracy and political structure just doesn't value innovation. Patents, grants and research facilities are becoming harder and harder to access. On top of that, multinational corporations are pushing the little guy and his innovative ideas out of the market, so that the only innovation that remains is profit-driven and commercial, which more often than not locks us into the age old cycle of repainting the tiger's stripes and selling him as a new animal because anything too radically new 'wouldn't grab the market'. And government institutions are consistently failing to innovate because their focus is not development, but rather generation of jobs = votes, and any new innovations might risk public sector jobs (NASA, anyone??)
All the great innovations of the past took enormous risks, and sometimes they failed. It's great to see some private companies with the financial backing there taking those risks (Armadillo Aerospace, Scaled Composites...etc) but it's a pity that government makes it so difficult.
Who knows how many brilliant innovations have gone unnoticed because the inventor didn't have the money to run R&D privately and couldn't be bothered with the government red tape...I think that we should be encouraging private innovation because you never know where the Next Big Thing is going to come from!
As far as the number of patents declining I'd have to say that this isn't the greatest metric for measuring technological innovation. From the number of crap patents out there (Amazon One-Click, NTPs patents, etc, etc, etc) I'd have to say that just because lots of patents are being generated doesn't mean that innovation is thriving or perishing (In fact I'd fear that too many patents would stifle innovation by preventing people from experimenting with new technologies).
The reason I have such a problem with Huebner's analysis can be summed up by this one quote from TFA:
Huebner disagrees. "It doesn't matter if it is humans or machines that are the source of innovation. If it isn't noticeable to the people who chronicle technological history then it is probably a minor event."
So, if something passes under the radar of those stalwarts who have charged themselves with chronicling technological history then it really doesn't matter. By this logic a technological historian of the early 1970s would probably have been writing volumes about the space program and nuclear research while ignoring things such as the nascent revolution in semi-conductors that was being created by the folks at Intel and other engineers in Silicon Valley, which by any measure has affected our daily lives as much, if not more than the space program or nuclear research. By admitting this Huebner is, at least to me, showing that his analyses are totally arbitrary and therefore valueless.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
We have acheived a level of comfort that people are happy with, and more convienience is now seen as extravagance.
The big innovations, the ones that change our culture fundamentally are going to come at a cost that most people are afraid to pay. Namely religous beliefs.
Stem Cells, Cloning, Space Exploration, Quantam Computing, all these courses of study have the ability to alter views on creation itself.
And most people are not willing to pay that price.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
I like this guy! From a larger viewpoint, I have always thought that we are not progressing faster than prior generations. Electricity, Lightbulb, Radio, Car, Plane, (the list goes on)...These are MAJOR innovations compared with the relatively minor ones of a P4 processor, the iPod, etc...Think of things in categories. Everything that is new these days is are minor extensions of the old (the computer, or the transmission of data over some kind of wire...) I vote that things are stale and getting staler. However, this view need not carry negative connotations (except maybe for a /. crowd)...After all, don't we have enough already?
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."
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.
I doubt the US is spending even close to that on alternative energy research. Not to diminish the problems of those with erectile dysfunction but a cure for cancer or free energy would probably do a lot more people a lot more good for the money.
The problem is a large proportion of research energy is focused on what will return the most in the marketplace instead of what will return the most to mankind. People lose sight of the big picture in their sprint to make the most money they can and people suffer because of it.
There has to be a balance between altruism and greed and we aren't anywhere close to the middle right now.
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?
I agree. Innovation is getting slower not because people are getting dumber but because deviation from red tape results in prosecution or censure.
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.
Exponential advancement was always as unfounded an assumption as the assumption of linear advancement that it replaced. While the death of science has been proclaimed many times before, always extremely prematurely in retrospect, I believe that there is only so much nature is prepared to give us, and as we approach this natural limit we're making fewer and fewer revolutionary discoveries and doing more and more refinement, and as the refinement progresses, as with any refinement process, apparent progress slows as you near an ideal state.
Simple example: there is a really, really good chance that space travel will always be slower than light with no cheats like wormholes ever found, no matter how much we advance, even if we became infinitely advanced, because the laws of physics probably do not permit FTL travel and apparent loopholes may prove completely unusable for anything above the subatomic particle scale.
I am deeply, deeply skeptical of the promise of nanotech. Our capacity to engineer de novo really interesting and effective enzymes (i.e., examples of real nanomachines) is dismal, we're still working on understanding how natural ones work and making our first crude protein designs, and "nanotech" as we usually think of it, little molecule scale versions of machines we're more familiar with, is IMO somewhat chemically ludicrous. Although some enzymes like ATPase actually look and act soemthing like those kinds of ideas and are super nifty. Still, when we get good at real nanotech, I think the reality is going to cut our fantasies down to scale despite being wicked cool.
I recall from reading Analog magazines in the 80s :) that it once seemed very fashionable to assume an exponential rate of growth in human technological enlightenment. Authors and commentators self-conciously talked about the previous assumption of linear progress (which you can see in older science fiction in which centuries are posited for what in hindsight are laughably modest achievements). This led to some predictions for our own time which have not been borne out - where is my flying car, godammit? :)
I thought about it a bit and came up with the hypothesis of an S-shaped curve as the function of human progress, and I believe observation has borne and will bear it out. I was inspired by titrations, which I think progress most resembles. At early stages of the curve, of course, advance is very slow because you need technological advances to make technological advances, it's self-promoting. At some point as you come close to an equivalence point, advance is extremely rapid. But at that point you start to rapidly reach the limits imposed by nature and progress levels off into more and more trivial refinement, but never entirely disappears. It's not exactly analogous but I think the resemblance will prove striking.
Progress looked linear from the point of view of the first plateau, just like the increase in pH before the equivalence point might seem linear in a base titration. Progress of course looks exponential when you are closely approaching the equivalence point. This is still an illusion.
Certain technologies, if they are truly available and do not turn out to be beyond the realm of technical possibility, like uploading ourselves into computers (I think this is easier said than done, because I think the human self only possesses the illusion of cohesiveness to itself, but is not actually unitary or cohesive - I wonder if a human mind is really readable to anything but itself), or immortality, could radically transform our very nature and hence change everything. But barring that, I think the highest goal of our species should be to get through the equivalence point to the new plateau alive and basically ourselves, and we need to hope to hell that that plateau includes, for example, truly sustainable sources of energy.
So, um, summary of long winded spiel, exponential progress = bullshit. No doubt in my mind that there is a limit to what technolog
Not necessarily. This kind of thinking assumes that there is a fixed pool of things just waiting to be discovered, and it is getting closer to being exhausted. I believe quite the contrary; there's a nice quote by someone I forgot, that "the greater the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder". For example, the invention of the transistor opened up possibilities for a whole industry of new inventions.
As a scientist, I believe there will always be new discoveries in science, that the supposed pool of knowledge is infinite. Therefore there's an infinity of possibilities for practical inventions as well, especially when we consider that the science in a certain field usually precedes engineering.
In fact, I think the rate of innovation is getting higher, but there's so much of it going on that it's impossible to pinpoint single, major inventions like it was a hundred years ago. Also, many significant inventions are results of many people with many smaller inventions working together, such as the Internet. In those cases it's hard to pin down even what the invention actually is.
Inventions and discoveries are becoming an increasingly important part of our lives, since we are past the struggles of basic survival. Thus it's naturally less noticeable.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Shakespear wrote, "There are more things in heaven and earth...", and information theory gave his intuition a rigourous proof. So why do people still write (let alone publish) this kind of crap? Do they know nothing of art and science or is it a combination of a little knowlage and a lot of arrogance?
Whenever I hear someone talking about the death or decay of technological advancement, "evidence" is presented that the really important stuff happened X yrs ago (where X >= 50). A trully revolutionary discovery is rarely seen for what it is until years later when people have had time to investigate and digest the implications. Even when it is immediately acknowlaged, (eg: Watson & Crick), it takes decades/centuries, to work out the full implications and utility of such a discovery. Maxwell's equations were not particularly "useful" until ~80yrs later when Edison created his Electiric light company and begrudgingly hired a mathemetitian or two. My generation (baby boomer's) were the first to really feel the importance of Darwin on our society and it may yet take another 150yrs to be fully absorbed into our collective phyche.
There are also alot of people in this thread complaining that IP laws are killing innovation. IP laws are killing the profit to be made by a "small shop" creating innovative gadgets. IP laws cannot stop people such as Eienstien, Maxwell, Turing, etc, finding fundemental insights that in turn drive the technological innovations that corporations so desperately want to profit from. There is however a good argument that when IP laws adversely affect communication between individuals and groups then technological progress will naturally slow down.
Einstien's equations have been tested to death but yet there is still something "wrong" with our understanding of gravity (on a large scale, "it just don't add up!"). I don't have a crystal ball but I assume in another 50-100 yrs, something like string theory, (at the moment only "useful" as a head scratching excersice), will be seen as having a profound influence. It will be used as evidence by unimaginitive writters to show that physics is dead, they will be sure to point to Godel, Turing and [insert your favorite genius here] as proof that most of the really important stuff has already been discovered.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
America (and other countries) almost need a revolution.
Almost, you say? With all this ridiculous patent crap, intellectual property, citizens suing each other or big corps for the slightest mistake, or trying to forsake all the responsibility for bad things that happen to them (McDonalds suers? Tobbaco Co. suers?) At least people still have freedom of speech, but how long will that last? How long till they sue you because some dipshit patented the metaphor you are using, or your accent (patent number 131313: Method for expressing irony using certain combinations of words), or some other such irrelevant thing? Damnit, they are patenting clicks these days! When will the people rebel? When it is too friggin late?
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
No, those are perfect examples. Pushing boundaries implies and *requires* risk that unpleasant things might happen as a result. If you try to make everything completely safe and prevent any mistakes nothing innovative will ever happen. Bureaucracies don't innovate. Committees don't innovate.
In each of those examples the good far outweighed the bad. It's a shame that Curie and Cook had to make those sacrifices. But just like many other explorers and boundary-pushers they contributed huge amounts to humanity. And at the time, Bell's monopoly probably did far more good for the communications infrastructure in this country than it did harm.
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.
we may be getting fewer innovations, but the quality of them is clearly on the rise