The per capita rate of innovation (2004)
brucegary.net
brucegary.net
Everything in this comparison relies on the quality of data. The "number of innovations" data comes exclusively from a book by Isaac Asimov with under 1500 entries. To make some sort of grand pronouncement about a date range for the end of humanity based on Asimov's very subjective and unscientific qualification of what makes an innovation is absurd.
It's interesting that we think incremental improvement matters less than a brand new idea. Even steel tools built upon prior knowledge, and took decades to get right. Machines were incremental improvements from manually powered systems, which gradually evolved into the complex machiens we have now.
Some of these changed may feel like evolutionary innovations rather than revolutionary ideas, but that's how technology develops. It's easy to look at past innovations from the Greeks, because we see how the technology went from 0 to amazing. But we do it in retrospect, and speaking in terms of centuries, which makes innovations appear to spring out of nowhere more than they actually did.
That being said, I agree that identifying something as an innovation is going to be heavily weighted to past accomplishments. At this point, innovations in theoretical physics are so complex that I can hardly begin to really grasp the importance of discoveries beyond my niche and I myself have a Ph.d. in physics.
Our power to destroy ourselves with weapons or accidents, or use biological and information technology to productively enhance or replace ourselves is growing at an exponential rate.
Any scenario where humanity reaches the year 3000 without either having destroyed ourselves, or enhanced ourselves beyond recognition, seems unlikely to the extreme. The only scenario I can imagine where radical technological change does not result in a radical change to the human condition is if a totalitarian government managed to enforce a no-progress civilization for hundreds of years.
I am marking the years 2140-2600 on my calendar so I can remember to look back and review the results of this prediction using my post-human thinking apparatus. Hopefully I didn't extinct myself.
Has anything actually been invented since 1970?
Relevant:
The WWW is actually a 1960s idea. Watch Engelbart's demo.
Sometimes I wonder if the problem is the massive growth of free market ideology (market fundamentalism) since 1970: Ayn Rand, the Reagan Revolution, libertarianism, etc. The free market is heavily biased toward extracting pre-existing value and things with short time horizons. It rarely spends money on very speculative R&D, and the culture that it begets is a hustler culture of quick-to-market, quick-to-exit, etc. Things like the Engelbart demo are the product of very smart people with very rough, flexible deadlines sitting around and thinking a lot. There's no way to monetize that. A related problem is that invention itself is hard to monetize except via patents... the innovator often loses in the market to fast followers.
In machine learning terminology we could say that the free market is a greedy hill climbing algorithm prone to converge on local maxima and unlikely to cross fitness valleys.
2) Breakthroughs are simply very impactful innovations -- of course earlier innovations are going to have an advantage: it's like saying "The total number of descendents per capta has been dwindling since the dawn of ages. We're doomed!". Claiming the rate of breakthroughs should remain constant is ridiculous.
3) Additionally, inventions are information. They're cumulative and knowledge instensive. We can't expect them to occur at a constant rate simply because it will get harder and harder to learn eveything required to invent some really new technology/scientific discovery. I like to think of human knowledge as a chunk of information that we compress and pass along. There's only so much we can compress, and our brain hasn't really changed significantly to accomodate and absorb more information faster. The result of course is specialization, and again specialized innovations by definition have limited scope.
4) To claim we had no specialized breakthroughs recently is even more ridiculous. Take the computing aspect of engineering alone (and math) and you probably get more small breakthroughs than there were inventions at all in the 18th century. Telecommunications also developed completely in the last few decades.
He paints an excessively pessimistic picture IMO.
Motivated, technically qualified individuals have always been "out there", but now they are lost in the wash with so many highly degreed average people dominating both institutional and venture efforts.
The traditional "great man" innovators are more out-of-place than ever in this landscape, where quantity of technical people is the limiting factor for shareholders requiring rapid growth.
If structures allow a return to having the quality of the innovators prevail over the quantity, more of the outstanding unrecognized individuals may be able to contribute again like what was seen 50 to 100years ago.
Some shareholders would not be able to accept the longer incubation periods and slower exponential growth necessary, but not all shareholders are the same. It could happen.
Ask yourself, if DaVinci, Newton, Edison, Einstein or somebody like that were unknowns but wanted to innovate for you, or wanted you to support their efforts (which might already be in progress), which of your exclusionary tactics would eliminate them in the first or second round?
I've said it before, technology has progressed but it's clear that PEOPLE used to be more advanced than they are now.