Transcript The Myth of Accelerating Change

The Myth of Accelerating Change
Dr. Philip Goetz
[email protected]
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
• 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
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
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)
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
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
Measuring Change
Land speed record:
log(Power output (W)) vs. Year
Land speed record:
MPH vs. Year
• Progress that is exponential by one measure
may be linear by the measure that is really
of interest to us
Evidence of exponential progress
Moore’s Law
Railroad track vs. Year
% of US families with radio
• Moore’s Law shows stagnation, not
innovation, because we are still working on
improving a technology invented 58 years
ago.
Journals & Students vs. Year
Funding vs. Year
Scientists vs. Year
Doubling time: 15 years
ln(Scientists) vs. Year
Members of APS vs. Year
Evidence of linear progress
Timeline: Entries per year
Linear, or doubling time ~ 100 years
War inhibits technological progress (also see deSolla)
Timothy Ferris: Discoveries in
cosmology vs. Year
Why?
• Funding shifting from government to
industry
• Innovation negative feedback cycles
• Communication can reduce innovation
• Rescher’s law of logarithmic returns
% of R&D Sponsored by
Industry
Negative innovation
feedback cycles
• Social stability
innovation  lifestyle  conservatism 
innovation
• Economic instability
innovation  business process certainty 
time discounting  innovation
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
Rescher: Physics authors
Rescher: #important papers =
log(#papers) in symbolic logic
Rescher’s law of
logarithmic returns
• Information = c  log(data)
• It takes an exponentially increasing
investment of resources in science to keep
the output of results constant
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)
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)
End of Exponential Growth
Doubling times
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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
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
log(miles of track) vs. Year
log(families with radio) vs. Year