In 2005, Pentagon physicist Jonathan Huebner published a study in which he said “the rate of technological innovation reached a peak a century ago and has been declining ever since,” according to Robert Adler of New Scientist.
Traditionally, according to Adler, futurologists believe technology is developing exponentially. But, by plotting the 7,200 key innovations listed in “The History of Science and Technology” compared to world population, Huebner found that major innovations and scientific advancements peaked in 1873 and have been declining ever since.
Huebner also plotted the number of U.S. patents granted from 1790 to the present. When he divided the number of U.S. patents per decade by the country’s population, the graph peaked in 1915.
His results indicated that “the global rate of innovation today, which is running at seven ‘important technological developments’ per billion people per year, matches the rate in 1600.”
As Adler said, this was “an unfashionable view.”
Indeed, artificial intelligence expert Ray Kurzweil, nanotechnology expert Eric Drexler and the Acceleration Studies Foundation’s John Smart all agreed that Huebner was studying the wrong information.
“He uses an arbitrary list of about 7,000 events that have no basis as a measure of innovation,” Kurzweil said.
“A more direct and detailed way to quantify technology history is to track various capabilities, such as speed of transport, data-channel bandwidth, cost of computation,” Drexler said.
And Smart told Adler that innovations may seem to be slowing even as it accelerates because it’s hard to see.
“Think of the amount of computation – design, supply chain and process automation – that went into building (the modern car),” Smart said. “Computations have become so incremental and abstract that we no longer see them as innovations.”
Yet, in this week’s BusinessWeek, the magazine’s Chief Economist, Michael Mandel, wrote a piece essentially concurring with Huebner’s study.
“‘We live in an era of rapid innovation.’ I’m sure you’re hear that phrase or some variant over and over again,” Mandel said. “The evidence appears to be all around us: Google, Facebook, Twitter, smartphones, flat-screen televisions, the Internet itself.
“But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong?”
Join me tomorrow for more about Mandel’s challenge to our “era of rapid innovation.”
– Kathie
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