The Incremental Bumps that Make Up Large Scale Technological Leaps
In the effort to track large-scale technology advances and the impact on society, it is easy to overlook the fact that behind these trends are a countless series of incremental improvements. Individually, these changes can make us more efficient, cut down on the amount of help we need, and much more.
When you take individual technologies on aggregate, and factor in the connected nature of them the compounded effects give us the exponentially advancing world we have before us.
Furthermore, while we tend to focus in on the breakthrough level scientific advances and next-generation technology, much of the progress around us is made up of gradual improvements on existing systems. This progress is not limited to releases of products, like the next iPhone, or Android smartphone, but can be further broken down into the features that make up technological products.
Consider a car today versus one from thirty years ago. Advanced features like cruise control, parking assistance, rear cameras and voice-controlled infotainment systems are now almost universally included as standard features. Or in contemporary word processors, spell checking, advanced formatting and mail merge features are part of the out-of-the-box experience.
The research and development efforts behind each of the small technology changes around us are the product of a nearly incalculable number of factors, from the educational and research institutions that may have hosted the root of an idea; the business organizations and teams within businesses responsible for advancing the idea into an experience or product that requires additional investment, time, materials and effort to realize; the marketers and advertisers who bring the product or service to the world at large; the consumer culture who determines the success or failure of the idea, and the further progress on an idea to make it even better by a business competitor, or by the company that brought the development to market initially.
We cannot grasp the full potential of technology until we explore the connectedness of it
Once out in 'the wild,' ideas can morph and evolve and lead to countless other incarnations. James Burke masterfully tracks the connectedness of ideas in his television series and further work on the knowledge web or, as he calls it the K-Web. On the K-Web, for instance you can see how Nicholas Copernicus is connected though his influence of Issac Newton, whose work was translated by Emily Du Chatalet, whose lover was the philosopher Voltaire, who was admired by William Godwin, a reformer who influenced industrialist Robert Owen, who met Santa Anna, and therefore introduced chewing gum to North America. As Burke's example illustrates, the advent of event the most minor, advances can have very connected pasts.
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The impact is further amplified when technologies coalesce into new platforms and ecosystems. These reduce the investment and lead time required to drive the next wave of innovation into markets by enabling people and technologies to rapidly build on previous waves of innovation.
This type of incremental progress is so ubiquitous around us that it is almost imperceptible to us at the macro scale. Incremental innovation most often moves along the established innovation framework for businesses and organizations. Some, like start-ups can break these conventions, but in many cases, the business will have an established pipeline that evaluates new concepts and ideas that can move through the service or product innovation process within a defined level of risk.
These incremental improvements can provide advantage to existing industries as they capitalize on existing knowledge, resources, and processes. This type of innovation can also reconfigure current capabilities to serve a new use or need.
With the use of digital technology, the connectedness of ideas has taken on unheard of advances. As the rate of improvement accelerates, we are experiencing rapid advances in the innovations built on top of these core technologies.
The cost-performance of three core digital technology elements, computing power, storage, and bandwidth has been improving at an exponential rate for decades. The factors enabling exponential innovation from each individual increment will continue to exert themselves in both expected and unexpected ways for the foreseeable future.
As much as we try to predict the future of today's technologies, like Blockchain, virtual reality or CRISPR, only history will reveal how each small change mattered to the bigger picture.
The concept of exponential technologies has been popularized by organizations like Singularity University, which defines it as technologies where the power and/or speed doubles each year, and/or the cost drops by half.
As more innovators and organizations experiment with emerging technology through digital or traditional means, the pace of innovation and disruption increases across all industries. Any given disruption may look like mere surface turbulence or yet another market adjustment, but each example is actually a symptom of how technology’s accelerating cost-performance improvement is rewiring the nature of collaboration and innovation.
These incremental improvements can provide advantage to existing industries as they capitalize on existing knowledge, resources, and processes. This type of innovation can also reconfigure current capabilities to serve a new use or need.
With the use of digital technology, the connectedness of ideas has taken on unheard of advances. As the rate of improvement accelerates, we are experiencing rapid advances in the innovations built on top of these core technologies.
The cost-performance of three core digital technology elements, computing power, storage, and bandwidth has been improving at an exponential rate for decades. The factors enabling exponential innovation from each individual increment will continue to exert themselves in both expected and unexpected ways for the foreseeable future.
As much as we try to predict the future of today's technologies, like Blockchain, virtual reality or CRISPR, only history will reveal how each small change mattered to the bigger picture.
The concept of exponential technologies has been popularized by organizations like Singularity University, which defines it as technologies where the power and/or speed doubles each year, and/or the cost drops by half.
As more innovators and organizations experiment with emerging technology through digital or traditional means, the pace of innovation and disruption increases across all industries. Any given disruption may look like mere surface turbulence or yet another market adjustment, but each example is actually a symptom of how technology’s accelerating cost-performance improvement is rewiring the nature of collaboration and innovation.
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