MEGA-INNOVATIONS AND ECONOMIC PROGRESS
Some ten thousand years ago people very much like us lived in raw nature and fed themselves by hunting and gathering. We, their progeny many time removed, are now living at a level of comfort and material abundance totally beyond the comprehension of even our grandparents. The process that has brought about this remarkable economic metamorphosis is successive innovation. This assertion is almost by definition: progress implies change, and we have labeled the discrete steps of change as innovations: the inventions or ideas that when put into practice let us do completely new things or old things better.
There are a number of books that describe this history; a good one is The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress by Professor Joel Mokyr. He describes this sequence of technical innovations from antiquity through the Industrial Revolution. Here I am going to tell a much shorter story; I will tell the story of the three mega-innovations that have precipitated the big turns in our road from caves to modern times. I will then conjecture about a fourth.
The first mega-innovation was agriculture. Before agriculture—when our ancestors lived by hunting and gathering—big groups couldn’t feed themselves. Switching to agriculture produced a huge improvement in the productivity of land in food-production and thus much larger groups could be supported in one place. As farming spread, so did people reorganize the way they lived. A time-lapse movie would show many small bands of hunters and foragers coalescing very slowly into villages, and, over the next 5000 years, many of these matured into the planets first cities.
I nominate the city itself as the second mega-innovation. The city permitted convenient and routine trade among its inhabitants. Since people could trade, there was no need for anyone to support themselves entirely by their own efforts. Instead people could specialize and trade—much more efficient than if everybody had to be a jack-of-all-trades. The city meant is more goods and services for everyone.
The city also allowed people to learn from each other, to behave collectively on a large scale, and to share a much broader palette of knowledge and experience. As Matt Ridley put it, here ideas could have sex, producing new ideas. The city thus became the primary fount of innovation.
This metamorphosis from jungles to cities began at least ten thousand years ago, yet until perhaps the last three hundred there little real change in the lives of most people. In the century or two before the start of the Industrial Revolution a professional class was coming into being in Europe and a kind of middle class began to develop. But most peasant farmers—the vast majority of people—were out of luck; their lives were much the same as thousands of years earlier. Overall, improvement in overall labor productivity—the source of generally increasing wealth—was still very, very slow. Something new was badly needed.
What people can build is limited both by the materials available and the power they can harness. A pacing material throughout history has been metals. By roughly 300 years ago metals were good enough for the first commercially practical steam engine, built by Thomas Newcomen in 1729. Newcomen’s engines were used to pump water out of deep English coal mines. Each engine developed about the same power as could five horses.
No one looking at that large, awkward, inefficient contraption Mr. Newcomen built would ever have thought it would change the world, but it did. It took almost another 100 years for it to be improved into a device that could power a train or a ship; that was the real beginning of the Industrial Revolution. (The cylinders of these engines were bored using the experience gained from making cannons. This suggests a new version of beating swords into plowshares.)
Before the steam engine the only source of power on land was muscle—mostly that of horses—and sometimes supplemented by windmills and waterwheels. (And everywhere and always, human muscle.) The steam engine began to replace all three, but most important, the steam engine was the first practical device that demonstrated that power could be derived from heat. That was a very important discovery, and was to lead to our modern world via the internal combustion engine, the turbine, the jet engine, and ubiquitous electricity. The steam engine began the western world’s transition from power derived from grass, oats, and hay to power based on coal, oil, and nuclear fission.
I therefore nominate the steam engine as the third mega-innovation in the march of civilization.
All of these three giant steps, our mega-innovations, were unrecognized as game-changers at their birth; their importance was recognized only in hindsight. Possibly prematurely, I conjecture that the world’s fourth mega-innovation is the transistor and kindred solid-state devices. Not quite 70 years old, the transistor and a little later, the laser, are the key devices that has given us the digital computer, most of the marvelous communication capabilities that dazzle us all, and is at the heart of all the control elements of robotic devices.
We are already fully aware of the marvelous improvements these devices have enabled in the productivity of human labor. We will, however, face some kind of change in our economic behavior as further advances in both computers and robotics make more and more people redundant. I doubt that we can plan that change; it will happen as it always has: as circumstances change people will behave differently, and new institutions may be formed.
The entertainment industry has already been revolutionized. Add Facebook and its ilk to the mix, and profound changes to the culture and habits of our society are portended.
Already beginning to come into focus is a revolutionizing impact on education. I expect digital teaching tools delivered on-line will in time replace most human teachers, changing teachers’ role from the conveyors of information to guidance counselors and teaching tool developers. We can already see the leading edge of this trend in such endeavors as the the University of Phoenix, The Teaching Company, the Khan Academy, and Coursera.
To my knowledge, none of these digital teaching tools yet go much further than just recording and repeating classroom techniques. The field is wide open to bringing the skills and thinking of the entertainment industry into the field—consider the possibilities if the designers of Autotheft III were put into collaboration with good teachers: the lessons they produced should be both exciting and unforgettable.
This technological change will not only decrease the cost of education substantially, but will introduce a freedom in timing, location, and group size that is unprecedented. This will enable—actually, lowering its cost will virtually force—a complete restructuring of the educational industry around the new e-Cloud of digital teaching tools. For the first time in history we could have truly equal-opportunity education, and the prospect of national population in which everyone is well educated.
We live in interesting times.
There are a number of books that describe this history; a good one is The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress by Professor Joel Mokyr. He describes this sequence of technical innovations from antiquity through the Industrial Revolution. Here I am going to tell a much shorter story; I will tell the story of the three mega-innovations that have precipitated the big turns in our road from caves to modern times. I will then conjecture about a fourth.
The first mega-innovation was agriculture. Before agriculture—when our ancestors lived by hunting and gathering—big groups couldn’t feed themselves. Switching to agriculture produced a huge improvement in the productivity of land in food-production and thus much larger groups could be supported in one place. As farming spread, so did people reorganize the way they lived. A time-lapse movie would show many small bands of hunters and foragers coalescing very slowly into villages, and, over the next 5000 years, many of these matured into the planets first cities.
I nominate the city itself as the second mega-innovation. The city permitted convenient and routine trade among its inhabitants. Since people could trade, there was no need for anyone to support themselves entirely by their own efforts. Instead people could specialize and trade—much more efficient than if everybody had to be a jack-of-all-trades. The city meant is more goods and services for everyone.
The city also allowed people to learn from each other, to behave collectively on a large scale, and to share a much broader palette of knowledge and experience. As Matt Ridley put it, here ideas could have sex, producing new ideas. The city thus became the primary fount of innovation.
This metamorphosis from jungles to cities began at least ten thousand years ago, yet until perhaps the last three hundred there little real change in the lives of most people. In the century or two before the start of the Industrial Revolution a professional class was coming into being in Europe and a kind of middle class began to develop. But most peasant farmers—the vast majority of people—were out of luck; their lives were much the same as thousands of years earlier. Overall, improvement in overall labor productivity—the source of generally increasing wealth—was still very, very slow. Something new was badly needed.
What people can build is limited both by the materials available and the power they can harness. A pacing material throughout history has been metals. By roughly 300 years ago metals were good enough for the first commercially practical steam engine, built by Thomas Newcomen in 1729. Newcomen’s engines were used to pump water out of deep English coal mines. Each engine developed about the same power as could five horses.
No one looking at that large, awkward, inefficient contraption Mr. Newcomen built would ever have thought it would change the world, but it did. It took almost another 100 years for it to be improved into a device that could power a train or a ship; that was the real beginning of the Industrial Revolution. (The cylinders of these engines were bored using the experience gained from making cannons. This suggests a new version of beating swords into plowshares.)
Before the steam engine the only source of power on land was muscle—mostly that of horses—and sometimes supplemented by windmills and waterwheels. (And everywhere and always, human muscle.) The steam engine began to replace all three, but most important, the steam engine was the first practical device that demonstrated that power could be derived from heat. That was a very important discovery, and was to lead to our modern world via the internal combustion engine, the turbine, the jet engine, and ubiquitous electricity. The steam engine began the western world’s transition from power derived from grass, oats, and hay to power based on coal, oil, and nuclear fission.
I therefore nominate the steam engine as the third mega-innovation in the march of civilization.
All of these three giant steps, our mega-innovations, were unrecognized as game-changers at their birth; their importance was recognized only in hindsight. Possibly prematurely, I conjecture that the world’s fourth mega-innovation is the transistor and kindred solid-state devices. Not quite 70 years old, the transistor and a little later, the laser, are the key devices that has given us the digital computer, most of the marvelous communication capabilities that dazzle us all, and is at the heart of all the control elements of robotic devices.
We are already fully aware of the marvelous improvements these devices have enabled in the productivity of human labor. We will, however, face some kind of change in our economic behavior as further advances in both computers and robotics make more and more people redundant. I doubt that we can plan that change; it will happen as it always has: as circumstances change people will behave differently, and new institutions may be formed.
The entertainment industry has already been revolutionized. Add Facebook and its ilk to the mix, and profound changes to the culture and habits of our society are portended.
Already beginning to come into focus is a revolutionizing impact on education. I expect digital teaching tools delivered on-line will in time replace most human teachers, changing teachers’ role from the conveyors of information to guidance counselors and teaching tool developers. We can already see the leading edge of this trend in such endeavors as the the University of Phoenix, The Teaching Company, the Khan Academy, and Coursera.
To my knowledge, none of these digital teaching tools yet go much further than just recording and repeating classroom techniques. The field is wide open to bringing the skills and thinking of the entertainment industry into the field—consider the possibilities if the designers of Autotheft III were put into collaboration with good teachers: the lessons they produced should be both exciting and unforgettable.
This technological change will not only decrease the cost of education substantially, but will introduce a freedom in timing, location, and group size that is unprecedented. This will enable—actually, lowering its cost will virtually force—a complete restructuring of the educational industry around the new e-Cloud of digital teaching tools. For the first time in history we could have truly equal-opportunity education, and the prospect of national population in which everyone is well educated.
We live in interesting times.
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