WHAT'S NEXT?

Has all the important stuff already been invented? Have we left behind revolutionary change and exciting innovation and invention for an era of incremental upgrades?

Robert Gordon, a respected economist at Northwestern University in the US, argues this in a recent Wall Street Journal article (subscription required), where he says society's biggest technological breakthroughs - electricity, the telephone, antibiotics, the jet engine, cars, indoor plumbing and more - are all behind us, legacies of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The mobile phone, he says, is just a refinement of the telephone, while cars today are fundamentally no more powerful or spacious than they were 50 years ago.

Gordon and other economists cite stagnating global economies, growing income inequality and high debt as evidence of how the pace of technological innovation is no longer driving change and growth as it used to.

Is this true? Let's take a step back for a moment and go back to Moore's Law. Intel co-founder Gordon E Moore predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors in a chip - essentially processing power - would double roughly every two years. It's a prediction that has held true today and why we have gone from mainframe computers the size of fridges to smartphones with more computing power than your PC had just a few years ago.

But how much longer can Moore's Law continue and does it support or disprove the theory of economists such as Robert Gordon? Intel is about to release chips with transistors that are 14 nanometers (nm) wide (for scale, a human hair is about 80,000-100,000 nm wide) and says it is on its way to 10 nm.

Scientists disagree how much smaller these can go and some give Moore's Law no more than another five years.

While it’s certainly true that innovation in a specific set of circumstances will always – at some stage – get to a maximum point, the human capacity to innovate and invent means that there is always the possibility of that next paradigm shift. Just look at what’s going on elsewhere in nanocomputer technology, where a nanoFSM processor, tinier than a human nerve cell, has now been produced.

And if history has taught us anything, it's surely that there will always be big, new and unexpected breakthroughs - even if they perhaps don't happen at the pace of the 19th and 20th centuries – or necessarily in the same fields.

One exciting area, for example, is around new materials, such as graphene, which has already been touted as the "miracle material" of the 21st century. A potential replacement for silicon, graphene is the strongest material ever measured - 200 times stronger than structural steel - yet completely flexible and also the most conductive material known to man.

In technology, as the world of communications networks, devices, sensors and machines converges, the so-called Internet of Things offers the potential to transform our working and living environments - from smart city infrastructure and self-driving cars to remote health and fitness monitoring.

And, on a slightly less serious note, until we have the hoverboard, self-tying shoes and flying cars that the movie Back to the Future promised us by 2015, then all the important stuff certainly hasn't already been invented! What do you think?

 

 

Posted by:

Olaf S.