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California (pte038/04.07.2005/15:02) - In a study to be published in Technological Forecasting and Social Change http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00401625 , Jonathan Huebner, a physicist at the Pentagon's Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California http://www.nawcad.navy.mil/ , postulates that we may be entering an age of rapid technological decline.
It may seem as if we are experiencing a golden era of technology, which gives us web-surfing, internet phoning, iPod listening and much more, but Huebner maintains that technology is not growing exponentially or even keeping up with population growth. It is, he says, declining.
The physicist 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). He discovered that the period 1873 to 1915, which included Thomas Edison's patenting of more than 1000 inventions - among them the incandescent bulb, electricity generation and distribution grids, movie cameras and the phonograph - was the most innovative and technologically productive.
He also found that the global rate of innovation today, which runs at seven "important technological developments" per billion people per year, matches the rate in 1600. Huebner says that despite far higher standards of education and massive R&D funding, "it is more difficult now for people to develop new technology."
Using Huebner's global innovation curve and placing it two decades into the future, the innovation rate drops to those of medieval times. "We are approaching the 'dark ages point', when the rate of innovation is the same as it was during the Dark Ages," Huebner predicts. "We'll reach that in 2024."
However, several other scientists have something to say about this.
Artificial intelligence expert Ray Kurzweil thinks Huebner is wrong. "He uses an arbitrary list of about 7000 events that have no basis as a measure of innovation," says Kurzweil. "If one uses arbitrary measures, the results will not be meaningful."
Eric Drexler, a leading figure in nanotechnology http://www.foresight.org/FI/Drexler.html , agrees with Kurzweil. . "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," he says. "Some have followed exponential trends, some have not."
Drexler believes that nanoengineers will soon be able to make atom-by-atom desktop manufacturing possible, and nanotechnology will develop far beyond the boundaries that Huebner foresees. "Although this result will require many years of research and development, no physical or economic obstacle blocks its achievement," he says. "The resulting advances seem well above the curve that Dr Huebner projects."
Swiss physicist and futurologist, Ted Modis, agrees with Huebner that technological change will have its end. But he sees that innovation will decline slowly in a way that mirrors technology's development, rather than a sudden drop.
Who is to say who is right in their predictions? Whatever the outcome, there is no doubt that there will be a constant level of technological production in the next few decades.
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