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• 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 innovationfeedback cycles

• Social stabilityinnovation lifestyle conservatism

innovation

• Economic instabilityinnovation 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 oflogarithmic 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

• 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