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The Myth of Accelerating Change

The Myth of Accelerating Change. Dr. Philip Goetz philgoetz@yahoo.com TransVision, August 8 2004. Moore’s Law. Traditional first slide for talks at TransVision: Number of transistors on Intel’s newest CPU, by year. Changes 1974-2003. Transportation: airline deregulation, Space Shuttle

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The Myth of Accelerating Change

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  1. The Myth of Accelerating Change Dr. Philip Goetz philgoetz@yahoo.com TransVision, August 8 2004

  2. Moore’s Law Traditional first slide for talks at TransVision: Number of transistors on Intel’s newest CPU, by year.

  3. Changes 1974-2003 • Transportation: airline deregulation, Space Shuttle • Medicine: PCR, human genome sequenced, gene therapy, Prozac, Viagra, MRI imaging, functional brain imaging, cochlear implant, other brain implants, Lasix, cosmetic surgery • Theory: nanotechnology, global warming • Discovered: Great Wall, ozone hole, planets around other stars, life on Mars?, Yucatan crater • Invented: high-temperature superconductors, smart materials, quantum wells • Adopted: personal computers, VCRs, digital media, fiber optics, communications satellites, cell phones, Internet, video games, PDAs, artificial sweeteners • Society: Iraq wars, Watergate, gay rights, end of cold war, globalization, AIDS

  4. Changes 1944-1973 (1) • Transportation: highways, affordable air travel, supersonic flight, Mount Everest climbed, moon landing • Medicine: DNA, polio vaccine, birth control, medicines for mental illness, dialysis, open-heart surgery, cloning, protein structures, ultrasound, heart transplant, angioplasty, designer bacteria, telomeres, Ritalin, CAT scans • Theory: behaviorism, cognitivism, chaos theory, sociobiology, Big Bang, violation of CP, punctuated equilibrium

  5. Changes 1944-1973 (2) • Tech: atomic bomb, laser, transistor, TV, microwave ovens, LP records, transistor radios, carbon dating, holography, QED, Xerox machine, H-bomb, weather satellites, IC, CPU, AI begun, fiber optics • Society: fast food, civil rights amendment, environmentalism, Korean war, McCarthyism, cold war, Vietnam war, rock and roll, suburbs, sexual revolution, feminism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, Dead Sea Scrolls, Turing test, australopithecines, consumer protection, Koko & Washoe (“speaking” non-humans)

  6. Changes 1914-1943 • Transportation: cars adopted, Panama canal • Medicine: sulfa drugs, penicillin, neuron theory, respirator, defibrillator, IV anaesthetic, insulin, X-ray imaging • Discovered: general relativity, quantum theory, game theory, expanding universe, Gödel’s theory, neutron, Turing machine • Invented: electronic computer, electron microscope, X-ray crystallography, heterodyne, AM, FM, fission, plastic, zipper, sliced bread, radar • Society: World War I, communism, women’s vote, prohibition, repeal of prohibition, Great Depression, World War II, jazz, modernism, relativism, talking color movies, air conditioning, indoor plumbing, electricity, telephone, radio, King Tut, welfare, social security, income tax, labor unions, 1939 World’s Fair

  7. Changes 1884-1913 • Transportation: airplane invented, oil wells, North Pole reached, streetcars popular • Medicine: bacteria staining, chromosomes • Tech: fingerprinting, transformer, alternating current, cloud chamber, vacuum tubes • Discovered: special relativity, X-rays, radioactivity, electron, Planck’s law, Markov chains, superconductivity, atomic structure, continental drift • Adopted: Kodak camera, street lights • Society: Spanish-American war, skyscrapers, movies, Freud, tractors, population moves from country to cities, assembly line, anarchism

  8. Measuring Change

  9. Land speed record:log(Power output (W)) vs. Year

  10. Land speed record:MPH vs. Year

  11. Progress that is exponential by one measure may be linear by the measure that is really of interest to us

  12. Evidence of exponential progress

  13. Moore’s Law

  14. Railroad track vs. Year

  15. % of US families with radio

  16. Moore’s Law shows stagnation, not innovation, because we are still working on improving a technology invented 58 years ago.

  17. Journals & Students vs. Year

  18. Funding vs. Year

  19. Scientists vs. Year Doubling time: 15 years

  20. ln(Scientists) vs. Year

  21. Members of APS vs. Year

  22. Evidence of linear progress

  23. Timeline: Entries per year Linear, or doubling time ~ 100 years War inhibits technological progress (also see deSolla)

  24. Timothy Ferris: Discoveries in cosmology vs. Year

  25. Why? • Funding shifting from government to industry • Innovation negative feedback cycles • Communication can reduce innovation • Rescher’s law of logarithmic returns

  26. % of R&D Sponsored by Industry

  27. Negative innovationfeedback cycles • Social stability innovation lifestyle  conservatism  innovation • Economic instability innovation  business process certainty  time discounting  innovation

  28. Communication inhibits innovation • Genetic algorithms: Score increases more slowly if all organisms can mate with all other organisms. Partial isolation increases rate of development. • Island theory of biogeography: • # species = C  areaz, .18 < z < .35 • z=.25: An area can support 4.8 times as many species if it is subdivided into 8 isolated areas

  29. Rescher: Physics authors

  30. Rescher: #important papers = log(#papers) in symbolic logic

  31. Rescher’s law oflogarithmic returns • Information = c  log(data) • It takes an exponentially increasing investment of resources in science to keep the output of results constant

  32. Rescher: “Proof” of law of logarithmic returns • Assumption: The significance of a mass of new data is proportional to the amount of new data relative to the amount of previously-existing information: I = D / D • dD/D = ln(D) + C1 = C2ln(D)

  33. Rescher: 20 questions • Data is the number of objects we have to consider • Information is knowing what questions to ask to categorize the data • # of yes/no questions needed  lg(data)

  34. End of Exponential Growth

  35. Doubling times • Number of PhD students: 10 years • Number of papers: 10 years • Number of journals: 15 years • Number of scientists: 15 years • Funding: 15 years • Important discoveries: 20 years • GDP: 20 years

  36. Conclusions • Rate of change is not increasing • We are transitioning from a world in which change is limited by the human capacity for change, to one in which change is limited by money and people • “Singularity” technologies may be necessary to sustain our present rate of change • The posthuman era: Capacity for change presumably increases with technology, making accelerating progress possible

  37. log(miles of track) vs. Year

  38. log(families with radio) vs. Year

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