A New "Gray" Age?

[TerrysID]

Ran across this link that might create debate: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7616. My gut feeling that it is true, but teachers I know say that a world view may show otherwise. Anyway an interesting link.

[Mokele]

I agree with those in the article who state that his metrics of "innovation" are flawed, but would also argue that as technology becomes more sophisticated, it takes longer to develop. If two devices have 100 and 10,000 moving parts, respectively, guess which is gonna take longer to get working and get the bugs sorted out for.

 

The tree analogy is flawed, because a tiny twig can become a huge branch, possibly even bigger than the parent branch. There was a time when Quantum was just some obscure, pointless research, and now look.

 

Mokele

[Kygron]

If two devices have 100 and 10,000 moving parts, respectively, guess which is gonna take longer to get working and get the bugs sorted out for.

 

The 100 part item. No one would dare make the 10,000 one until some work had been done first. And it's still tough. Then they use those principles to make 'em into 1000 each. Then when they put 10 of them together to make the 10,000 there's very few bugs left to shake out

 

My personal idea is that the technological "culture shock" is what slowed things down a bit. The pace of significant change suddenly gets its cycles in within a generation or two. Innovators weren't prepared for it. But now that each generation will teach the next that major changes happen within lifetimes, people will settle back into a stable rate of growth (whatever that may be).

 

Like Mokele, I don't like the tree analogy, but if you're gunna use it, remember that sometimes you find a seed at the end of one of those twigs, and it grows into a whole new tree!

[swansont]

Pick the metric that supports your argument, and make the argument. Way too subjective. Why use the 7200 key innovations from some book? Recent innovations haven't had the time to be properly assessed to see if they are "significant." What constitutes "significant," anyway? Why normalize the number of patents with the population? Why only look at US patents? Why look at patents, anyway? The earliest patents were, in some sense, the easy ones. I think it's erroneous to equate a patent with a unit of innovation. The light bulb was patented ~100 years ago, but the light bulbs of today are not the same as the one Edison patented - there certainly has been innovation that was probably not counted as "significant."

[TerrysID]

It seems there are indeed many innovations in the works. (Just peruse MIT's Technology magazine, for example.) However some of these new technologys require more and more people to bring to the commercial front. This requirement of more manhours to push an innovation to completion might create an illusion of a slowdown. As my father and grandfather used to hollar at me (to impel me to work harder): "Faster-- The world's going to hell in a handbasket!" That old admonition is also a subjective comment -- too many variables to really know for sure if there's any truth to it, except, perhaps, within the walls/confines of a company or small region. . . . Time will tell.

[TerrysID]

I hated to see this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/29/opinion/29herbert.html?th&emc=th.