I’ve been trying to understand the nature of human progress. What drives it? Where are we headed? Should we try on something else? It’s turned up some interesting stuff from a debate 5 years ago or so (See Bryan Appleyard ‘Waiting for the Lights to Go Out’ and Robert Adler ‘Entering a Dark Age of Innovation’) much of it prompted by a possibly dodgy but still thought-provoking study undertaken by Jonathan Heubner. I’m getting this second-hand, but apparently he compared the number of innovations catalogued each year in a standard reference work to population, calculating a rate of innovation over time. It turns out that the rate peaked in 1873 and has been declining steadily ever since. By 2024 the rate will be what it was in the Dark Ages.
Huebner offers two explanations for this. Either we’ve discovered most of the technologies that are economically viable or we already know most of what we can know. Human innovation is either limited by economics or something like brain bandwidth.
The latter is an intriguing possibility. I know that Colin McGinn argues that the answers to several philosophical problems are beyond us, but I wonder if something else might be true about philosophical innovation as such. Maybe we’ve gotten as far as our monkey minds can get us, technologically – Velcro and iPhones are, deep breath, among the final human technological achievements. Perhaps philosophy peaked in the 19th century too. It gets said a lot that we can’t really tell who the great philosophers of our generation are because we’re too close in time and thought to judge honestly. But what if there aren’t any? What if all the good ideas are taken? What if the best thinkers in the last 2,000 years grabbed all the low-hanging philosophical fruit and there’s just nothing good left to say?
I wonder what this article considers an invention? I mean now, rather than a completely new physical object, people are making brilliant software programs or improving existing inventions (cellphones -> smartphones -> iPhone/Nexus One). I think there’ll probably be a whole rash of new inventions and ideas when a replacement for silicon transistors gets developed or when nanomachines get cheaper just like transistors spawned lots of new inventions or when electricity made new things possible. I just hope we don’t kill ourselves with our technology.
After reading through that, I can’t help going back to the “much of it prompted by a possibly dodgy but still thought-provoking study undertaken by Jonathan Heubner” Part! I would be interested in reading the study so I could get an Idea of what is meant by innovations. Maybe my own “brain bandwidth” doesn’t allow me to understand such huge statements! Also, Statements like that always remind me of the statements that religions make of the unknowability of god. Our minds can not conceive of such things… Maybe that is because there is nothing there?
I’m with the above two people who commented. What’s considered an invention? Are we only talking about nuts and bolts type things or would genome discoveries be included? If the latter then I think there’s something faulty in the data.
In any case the data is a ratio of inventions per population. The only thing you’re sure of from this is the population is increasing faster than new inventions. I should think there are a lot of reasonable ways of interpreting this without resorting to the possibility that we’re headed for the dark ages again.
“By 2024 the rate will be what it was in the Dark Ages.”
Is that so? The rapid rate of technological inventions within the past ten years tend to convince me otherwise. Of course, there is the weird equivalence made between the invention of iPhones and philosophical problems—I am inclined to believe that we’ve been distracted by the almost incomprehensible rate of technological enhancement—or constant introduction of new crap, as I like to say—hopefully if we are indeed done with inventing more things we can do with the iPhone (turning your house lights off, anyone?) by 2024, maybe we will start showing more “philosophical advances”.
Of course, there were long stretches of time where nothing new was said (the Scholastic period might be arguable?), but that doesn’t mean we didn’t pick back up again. Philosophy has also been spawning new sciences as its result, like psychology—and the fact that since academic philosophy, the scope of a problem on which one chooses to focus has become much smaller, and probably as a result it seems like nothing big is really happening lately.
It seems sort of a mistake to hold philosophy to the objectives of scientific advancement—racking up tons of “discoveries”, just like we’ve racked up tons of new things to use iPhones for, doesn’t sound like a worthy attainment for philosophy.
Technological Innovation:
Well there are a hell of a lot of monkeys in the world today, compared with the days of the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution, the lap-top and internet are much better than typewriters, as long as we all keep bashing away, we’re bound to come up with something.
Plus there have been long periods of history in many parts of the world when things were pretty static - and then after a couple hundred years something arrived, and they weren’t static any more. Maybe that will happen again, it wouldn’t be surprising. Should we be worried? I suggest not too, as long as things don’t get worse.
Philosophical Innovation:
I defer to the better informed, but I have a sneaking feeling that the quality of philosophical thought depends on it’s relevance to the state of contemporary human life. Humans themselves stay much the same, but societies vary, and if the pace of change in society slows, then either:
1. it can be studied more intensively, becoming ever more insightful and refined, leading to a more perfect understanding of life.
2. it withers, because necessity is the mother of invention, and without the pressing need to deal with new problems caused by new states of society, the old “good-enough” answers remain unchanged and unchallenged as they did in the middle ages.
OK Pete here’s Huebner’s article:
http://accelerating.org/articles/InnovationHuebnerTFSC2005.pdf
I’ll have a look this afternoon. Aeiluindae and Ralph wonder what counts as an innovation. A quick scan tells me that ‘The number of technology events per year comes from a list of 8583 important events in the history of science and technology compiled by Bunch and Hellemans (B. Bunch, A. Hellemans, The History of Science and Technology, Houghton Mifflin Co., New York, 2004.)
Say what you think.
That’s a pretty weak article. All sorts of assumptions just taken for granted. Couldn’t get past the first two pages without rolling my eyes a half dozen times.
On the question of what constitutes invention, I have to say that I’ve taken the time to examine the standards for innovation in patent law and compare the European model to that of the U.S. There seems to be a lot of room for interpretation, and there is plenty of debate on the subject resulting from the recent growth of technology.
For this discussion, it may be more interesting to consider the historical ages of technology: stone age, bronze age, on up to information age. It seems that the duration of these ages grows shorter with time, but I suspect that this is more a matter of perspective, in that we see more detail for the times that are more recent.
Another interesting aspect is the way these technological developments make us more social. Notice that the technology that networks individuals, e.g. moving from snail mail to email and on to social networking, seems to be outpacing that of broadcast technology such as radio and television. I think the impact of this social shift is more dramatic then the amount of innovation that went into the technology itself. So, the amount of individual invention is small compared to the change in social behavior. I should wonder how this will affect philosophy in general.
Even for a philosopher this seems floridly, coat trailingly wrong. It’s like “It’s raining but I don’t believe it”. You don’t believe it really and much as I deplore America’s footprint in the world, generally on someone’s neck, there’s no doubt that right now as the end of oil approaches the money to develop something that looks like free energy to us will be found there. That or an Englishman in his garden shed. Fear not all will be well. May the force go with you.
[...] Talking Philosophy | The End of Invention [...]
The rate of inventions per head means nothing. It is like if you measured the sun radiation per capita, and complained that it has decreased enormously. Since inventions can be shared by an indeninite number of people, everyone benefits from the TOTAL number of inventions. This number is the only relevant one.
That the number of inventions per capita has decreased, just means that we live in a society that does not need so many inventors per 1,000,000 people to keep the number of inventions growing.
Jesús, I think there’s something to what you say, but I find it a bit discouraging. Where does our excess creativity go? Or is it, that we feel uninspired when so many of our needs are already provided for?
I guess the thing is, the word innovations. I would say that computers have millions of applications, from word processors to servers. And The iphone has loads too. Lots of these I would class as innovations. But the computer was invented only once! Is that it? is it a misunderstanding of the word innovation? Maybe its my misunderstanding, I dont know! I also think its odd how he came up with the limit of the human brain thing! Is this a common Idea? Ive never read such a thing outside religious books.
People seem to be missing the point of why the falling ratio is troublesome.
Yes, it’s consistent with a steady absolute rate, or even a rising absolute rate; but the population isn’t always going to continue increasing (we’d better hope it doesn’t!), and the ratio is even worse than raw population indicates: at what point in history was a larger fraction of the world population holders of PhDs, or working as scientists or engineers or researchers?
We have a skyrocketing intelligentsia, but it’s not paying off like it should. This suggests a bad case of diminishing returns. We should immediately wonder why. Is there rot in the system? (China comes to mind as a disquieting historical precedent.)
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That said, I don’t think philosophy will run out of topics. Technological & scientific development bring ever new questions and concerns. Look at how philosophy of mind has been tremendously invigorated by the development of computers. How could the work of Dennett, for example, have been done at the time of Plato?
Tesserid, there is no “creativity excess”: first, many things that are now invented are simply not patented (they are simply technological or entrepreneurial processes that are kept secret, or tacit, or they are other type of creations -science, art, sports, politics…). Second, as the complexity of technology grows, it is more likely that a “unit” of invention requires the work of more and more people; the times of the single inventor are passed away (it’s simply that most simpler inventions have been already invented).
And third, most people is simply benefiting from the inventions: they apply their capacities in the USE of the inventions (which is what inventions are for), not in the production of new inventions.
James,
This is an interesting topic, so much so that I broke down and looked at Huebener’s paper. A number of things about it put me off. To start with he talks about limits to technology, one of which he calls physical limits, i.e. due to physical laws and he gives as the example perpetual motion. This seems to me a miss-mash of terms. One uses physics to show that perpetual motion is impossible, not that p.m. is showing physics is in someway lacking. There are other places in which he is what I would call sloppy thinking, e.g. that perhaps our brains are reaching their limits. Too much data he suggests. I wasn’t aware that our brains had storage problems and/or limits to how much they can reason. Sure, there will always be problems that we’re incapable of answering but I don’t think they have to do with any limit on how much input our brains are able to handle. Anyway, if that were the case, what are computers for?
I’m still very uneasy about the unit he’s chosen to measure inventiveness, viz. inventions per population. I can see connections between the number of inventions produced as a function of the population, but I don’t believe it’s a simple one, certainly not linear and no where simple enough to use the way he’s using it. I would agree that the number of blockbuster technologies coming out will dwindle because of the low-fruit effect, but it seems the ones surfacing are of a nature to produce a multitude of offshoots. Nanotechnology appears just in the infant stage and can provide a wealth of opportunity for inventions etc. And
there are other comparable technologies in biology.
Alienation from the means of creativity. This paraphrase (however dubious) is one that comes to mind as I follow those that are in pursuit of maintaining their freedom to be creative. These are the people that are the back-yard hobbyists, the garage, basement, and garden-shed inventors. They take whatever they can purchase off-the-shelf and turn it into more than what was intended by the manufacturers of those off-the-shelf products. They deliberately void warranties to crack things open and get at their insides. Their curiosity is incessant and their creative drive seems unquenchable. And, they fear a corporate culture that they think is trying to corner the market on ideas and put a fence around all creativity. These hobbyists even work to counter the influence of corporate lobbyists.
Few if any of these people will join the ranks of those that we honor with notoriety in our history texts. Some, however, may go on to join important research projects or inspire others to do so. Some may find themselves in government or corporate funded projects. Some may be asked to sign non-disclosure agreements, while others may deliberately avoid that kind of secrecy.
I think that measuring the inventiveness of the present against the inventiveness of the past is extremely problematic–simply because the ideas of the future are built upon the ideas of the past. And, the rungs added to that ladder cannot be uniform copies of previous rungs. Each is different and not easily compared to the others. And, I suspect that the spacing of those rungs has more to do with public recognition than the motivation of those that would seek to be inventive.
Maybe it makes more sense to consider that period that we call the “Dark Ages”–a period characterized by a lack of growth. The beliefs of that period, along with the political control of those beliefs, discouraged the expression of new ideas. Still, there were those that, at least eventually, couldn’t restrain themselves from the pursuit of new ideas–even to the point of getting themselves into a lot of trouble.
So, I’m not convince that people are losing interest in the pursuit of new ideas, or that we are so far past the low-hanging fruit that there can be little, if any, progress. I’m more concerned with the recognition of those that do pursue new ideas and the issue of who will have the rights to future ideas.
To be honest, until you brought this up, I never would have thought our ideas to be “declining,” but rather the exact opposite.
I feel like the more technology we have, the EASIER it is to generate new ideas, as we have more and more tools at our disposal. We also have the ability for people to communicate much easier than they previously did, something that older generations lacked.
So is it really that we’re lacking innovation, or are people just getting lazy? Maybe it’s none of those; maybe we just need a redefinement of ‘innovation’ in the first place.
Travis, a priori, it is impossible to know if new (useful) ideas are unlimited or not; perhaps it depends on the fields. If they are limited, then, to say that more technology makes it easier to discover new ideas is as false as to say that more technology makes it easier to discover new continents… once you have discoverd ALL the continents, there is nothing else left to be discovered.
So, what I think is that in most fields there is something like a ‘diminishing marginal rate of innovation’: the easier and simpler discoveries made possible by a new technology are made soon, but new increments in the rate of innovation tnd to be more and more costly.
Jesús, your last point reminded me of this:
I know very well that we do not review all of history for each new invention, but the amount of history upon which we build does affect efforts to evaluate innovation.
I wonder what would happen if, through some catastrophe, all of our recorded knowledge, history and all, were to be suddenly destroyed. If everyone began recording all of the knowledge that we hold in our brains, how much of our history would be salvaged, and how many of the past inventions would still have to be re-invented to get back to where we are now?
I see no shortage of innovation or of ideas and philosophical thought. If anything we have to much information and to many ideas which leads to a kind of neo-scholasticism. It is impossible to judge truly lasting and great things without the prospective of time. If we use a simple volumetric calculation, let us say word count, today we produce many times more then the 19th century. How lasting any of it is will only be judged by our great grand children. I think it safe to say some will make it, most will not.
I did a kind of thought experiment and the research needed for young student (a character in a story I wrote) who in 1320 CE was struggling with the concept of zero. His comment was the ancients that lay the foundation for mathematics of he studied would be amazed at what we know today,i.e. in 1320.
If any of the great 19th century philosophers were to appear today, he too would be amazed at how much has been done with the ideas they struggled with. They would however point out that most of the questions they addressed were ancient and we are still addressing them.
We can communicate now better than we ever have, and that is improving exponentially. This is the key to our inventions.