TECHNOLOGY THEN AND NOW:

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• TECHNOLOGY THEN AND NOW
• WHY THE TECHNOPESSIMISTS ARE WRONG.
• Joel Mokyr
• Departments of Economics and History
• Northwestern University

Technopessimism
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A new wave of Technopessimism is upon us.

• They are, on the whole, serious scholars and
  sources
• Jan Vijg, a Dutch-born molecular biologist in his
  The American Technological Challenge Stagnation
  and Decline in the 21st Century
• Tyler Cowen in his The Great Stagnation
• My esteemed colleague Robert J. Gordon in his
  Is U.S. Economic Growth over? Faltering
  Innovation confronts the six Headwinds. NBER
  Working paper series, 18315 (Aug. 2012).
• The Economist (Jan. 12 issue).

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Innovation pessimismHas the ideas machine broken
down?
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There are three brands of techno-pessimism

• One school says, if not quite that everything
  that can be invented has been invented, but at
  least that the low-hanging fruits have been
  picked and the rest of the new inventions wont
  have nearly as radical a welfare effect.

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• Another school says that, au contraire, there are
  lots of things we still can invent, but we wont.
  
• This is because we are getting too risk-averse,
  too complacent, too regulated, and our
  institutions are turning anti-innovative and
  sclerotic.
• So, much like ancient Rome and Qing China, we are
  a once-dynamic world in decline.

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• And finally there are those who think that the
  new brave technology actually will come, but that
  it will eliminate our jobs and turn us into a
  Player Piano kind of dystopia in which all labor
  is replaced by machines and robots and humans
  will become marginalized.

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Let me first deal with the Gordon-Cowen argument

• They are NOT alone. Many feel disappointed. Peter
  Thiel has famously remarked we wanted flying
  cars, instead we got 140 characters.
• To which I would reply wait till you need a hip
  replacement, buddy.
• The Economist sided (cautiously) with the
  optimists, but it did so (mostly) for the wrong
  reasons.

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Is the world running out of ideas?

• Perhaps the low-hanging fruits have been picked
  running water, chlorination, electricity, etc?
• But science and technologys main function in
  history is to make taller and taller ladders to
  get to the higher-hanging fruits. They are just
  as juicy.
• Moreover, these trees keep sprouting new fruits,
  if only we give them proper care.

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• Economic Historians should not make predictions.
• That said, from a purely technological point of
  view, I would expect the rate of technological
  change to accelerate over the next decades, even
  if it would be foolhardy to be more specific than
  that.

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Why is this?

• Because of the particular dynamic of useful
  knowledge

Technopessimism
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Historians of technology have pointed out that
the two mutually affect one another in complex
ways.

• Derek Price and Nathan Rosenberg have noted that
  technology affects science as much as the other
  way around. It did so through what Price called
  artificial revelation.
• Science depends on technology no less than
  technology on science we were not hard-wired to
  see microbes, to watch the moons of Jupiter, to
  store terabytes of information in our brains and
  do 54 petaflops of calculations tools and
  machines we build do this for us.

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Throughout modern history, the tools and
instruments devised to do science have
determined how fast science would advance.

• The best-known examples are of course the
  telescope and microscope, but there are many
  others. Let me give you a few lesser-known
  examples from the era before and during the
  Industrial Revolution to drive the point home.

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Robert Boyles famous airpump, built in the late
1650s, which showed once and for all that contra
Aristotle, nature did not abhor a vacuum, and
thus paved the road for atmospheric (steam)
engines.
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Laplaces calorimeter
Calorimeter first used in the winter of 1782-83,
by Antoine Lavoisier and Pierre-Simon Laplace, to
determine the heat evolved in various chemical
changes calculations which were based on Joseph
Blacks prior discovery of latent heat.
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Another example Alessandro Volta, 1745-1827
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• Voltas pile (1800)

Voltas battery provided chemists with a new
tool, electrolysis, pioneered by Humphry Davy. He
and other chemists were able to isolate element
after element, and fill in much of the detail in
the maps whose rough contours had been sketched
by Lavoisier and Dalton.
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In our own age, technology has continued this
trend in spades.

• Scientists have arsenals of tools that we could
  not have dreamed of even a few decades ago,
  measuring, observing, calculating, modelling,
  creating laboratory experiments in physics,
  microbiology, and nanochemistry that nobody
  thought off a few decades ago, let alone in 1800.
• Here is one example that I just heard about this
  summer

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Adaptive optics
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1. These are two images of the planet Uranus, one
   using an ordinary telescope, the other one in
   which the blurring caused by atmospheric
   distortions are corrected.
2. Adaptive optics technology sharpens images by
   changing the shape of telescope mirrors up to
   1,000 times per second.
3. It is believed to have more potential than
   Hubbles telescope (and a lot less expensive).

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Another example how technology helps science
Automatic Gene sequencing machine, first
developed at CalTech in 1986 by Dr. Leroy Hoods
laboratory.
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A last example synchotron

• A synchrotron is a stadium-sized machine that
  produces many beams of bright X-ray light.
• Synchrotrons provide flexible, powerful methods
  for learning about the structure and behavior of
  matter at the molecular and atomic level.

Technopessimism
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The significance of ever-growing artificial
revelation

• The implication is simple if the positive
  feedback loop between technology and science is
  getting stronger all the time, science will
  continue to expand at ever faster rates, and it
  is plausible that technology itself will do the
  same, even if we cannot tell in which directions
  and how fast .
• It is hard to see this dynamic system ever
  settling down on an equilibrium.

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My second reason for being a techno-optimist is
similar but not quite the same

• Here is a simple argument
• What is the total social useful knowledge that an
  economy has access to?
• Answer it is the union of all individual sets of
  useful knowledge.
• Corollary some very important pieces of
  knowledge are only possessed by very few
  extraordinarily smart individuals (most of them
  at CalTech).

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This does not matter as long as those who need
this knowledge have access to it.

1. But access can be costly. What determines access
   costs?
2. Among many factors, clearly the cost of storing
   information and searching through it figure
   highly.
3. In the past, the most important advances in
   search-engine technology were these

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Paper
Chinese manufacturing of paper, woodcut from Ming
dynasty era (c 1400)
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Printing Press and moveable type, invented by Pi
Sheng ( 1st half,11th c.)
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• But knowledge needs to be organized if access is
  to be fast and cheap.

Technopessimism
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Encyclopedias and technical lexicons.
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If there is anything where we have made progress
in the past two decades, it is access technology.

• We no longer deal with data ? we have
  meta-data, amazing quantities of information
  that can only be accessed with sophisticated
  searchware. We can search for extremely small
  needles in gargantuan haystacks.
• This has political and commercial applications
  that have been discussed in recent weeks ad
  nauseam.
• But it has also enormous implications for further
  technological advances.

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Access matters

1. First, any inventor must be sure she is not
   re-inventing the wheel and that nobody else has
   already done this.
2. Second, many inventions are recombinations and
   analogues of existing technological components
   and devices. Again, finding out easily and
   cheaply what is out there makes the process
   easier.
3. Third, despite what some people believe, a lot of
   technological progress still depends on trying
   every bottle on the shelf. Modern storage and
   access creates very large shelves and many
   bottles (think petabottles).

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• Anyone engaged in research can access vast banks
  of knowledge and data. Cloud technology is just
  getting started. We measure storage now not in
  megabytes but Zettabytes (a million petabytes)
  and Yottabytes (1000 Zettabytes) (WHO makes up
  those terms? --- there is also Brontobytes).
• We can also consult experts half a globe away in
  the blink of an eye through email, facebook,
  skype and what not.
• So access costs have declined sharply for both
  codifiable and tacit knowledge.

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• Fourth, technology normally advances best if it
  can rely on the results of best-practice science,
  both to know what works and (equally importantly,
  what does not).

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So if everything is so good, why is everything
so bad?

• Answer it is not.
• Its just that in technology the results often
  are unexpected and take forms that are not easily
  measured by the criteria and measures of the
  technological ancient regime.
• Imagine an Englishman at a party celebrating the
  50th anniversary of the first steam engine.
• That would be in 1762.
• He would ask What has that machine done for us?
  Made a lot of noise, emitted a lot of smoke and
  stench, and pumped some water out of a few coal
  mines. Big Deal.

Technopessimism
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• We dont know what the adoption lags are today,
  probably less than then, but the really BIG
  results usually arrive toward the end when the
  technology is fully mature.
• Most of the disruptive and life-changing effects
  of digitalization have not been fully felt.
• The Digital Age will be to the Analog Age what
  the iron age was to the stone age.
• And we cant even imagine what the Post-digital
  Age will look like. No more than Archimedes could
  imagine CERN.

Technopessimism
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1. Today we measure progress by measures such as GDP
   and its derivative, TFP. These were designed for
   steel-and-wheat economies.
2. The digital age, largely based on a service
   economy, needs other measures, that are far more
   sensitive to the constant appearance of new goods
   and services, incessant improvement in their
   quality and capabilities.

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• But given the ever-more rapid development of
  access technology and better scientific
  instruments, it seems hard to somehow avoid the
  conclusion that we are in for an ever-lasting
  rate of technological progress.

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Is this the good news or the bad news?

• Here is Mokyrs theorem Technological progress
  is never Pareto superior. There are always
  losers. And we rarely compensate them.
• I am not the first to argue this Schumpeter
  spoke of creative destruction.
• So there will be losers. What we gain as
  consumers, viewers, patients, and citizens, we
  may lose as workers.

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What will the workplace of the future be like?

• Here are three things to keep in mind
• First, the factory, which arose in the
  Industrial Revolution is slowly being phased out.
  We will work, wherever, whenever it suits us.
  Workplace and commuting will slowly disappear.
  Three-dimensional printers will make whatever
  assembly line shopfloor workers were making.
• Well miss the water cooler human interaction,
  but there is always social networks.

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• Second, robotics will be everywhere. These Robots
  will not be anything like the iron humanoids that
  follow the Asimov rules of robotics. Most of them
  will be nothing more than little chips connected
  by A.I. to sensors. But they will drive our
  trucks, perform open-heart surgeries, pick our
  tomatoes, walk our dogs, and cook our meals.
• But only if we want them to. That, by
  definition, is a welfare improvement.

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So, what will WE do?

• Third, the post-digital age may be the Age of
  Leisure.
• Remember that practically the entire leisure
  industry, from videogames to spectator sports, to
  radio, tv, movies was a product of the twentieth
  century. Thats because the workweek (in Europe)
  fell from 3,000 hrs a year to 1,500 hrs.
• If robots do all the production, there will be
  far more leisure.
• Will we be bored and feel unproductive? Some
  will, some wont. Just like now

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But remember that historically we have always had
a leisured class

• Roman patricians, Chinese Mandarins, Medieval
  knights, Eighteenth-century Russian landlords.
• Its just that these were a small minority. They
  did things even if they did not have to.
• Just like tenured professors doing research. And
  their graduate students playing videogames.

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• Thank you

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