Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Recently – and not so recently- we’ve witnessed on this Forum some turbulent and contentious discussion about the role of technological advancement. Such advancement is supposed to obviate many jobs, reduce standard of living for the afflicted, and cause all sorts of unpleasant dislocations. Others say that on the contrary we’re on the threshold of a fabulous new prosperity, from advances in medicine, communications and so forth.
Thus regarding innovation. What about return on investment? There is ample evidence that return on investment isn’t going to be as sprightly as it’s been in the 20th century. We are cautioned to attenuate our expectations, saving more and spending less, on account of future returns being inferior to what we’ve come to expect from recent history. Dividends are much lower than the historical norm; but is there good evidence that dividends are lower merely because companies are reinvesting profits in their business?
I have posted frequently, about investment-performance being connected with productivity-growth. Speculation notwithstanding, stocks go up because companies can make more profit, and they make more profit – in the long run – not from screwing their employees or customers, but from extracting more units of lucre from the same units of labor. This is done through innovation – in technology, management practices or whatever else.
Thus, the question: do we believe that innovation is accelerating (or at least holding steady) relative to the heady pace of the late 19th century through the 20th… or, on the contrary, do we believe that our present (and future) age is more of derivative and desultory advances around the fringes?
As a scientist and someone who worked with automation, computers and technology, I have absolutely no doubts. Mans' knowledge has advanced beyond belief in my lifetime and the rate of advancement is accelerating. Most of what we know in the areas of science and technology have occurred within my lifetime. That is a staggering thought considering the previous centuries of thought and investigation.
People are worried about technology making most of us obsolete. I have no such concerns. Technology will continue to give us unimagined abilities to improve our lives. What is very clear is that a great many of our current jobs will vanish or become altered beyond recognition. That will have disruptive effects and we are seeing some of those trends now. The middle class seems to be splitting in two. Those with college or other skills are advancing. Over 60 million Americans live in households with 6 figure incomes and those numbers are growing rapidly. Unemployment for professions requiring college education has been under 3% for several years. The bottom of the middle class is not faring well. Those without strong skills are suffering due to globalization, robotics, automation, economies of scale and even competition from illegal aliens. Political rhetoric or a higher minimum wage are not going to fix the issues at the bottom. The jobs of the future are going to go to those will skills and education.
Our society provides free and mandatory education through high school but the results are horrendous. Americans completing high school are truly ignorant compared with almost any other country except the bottom 3rd world countries. We need to make some serious changes.
I guess I totally ignored part of your concern. I think companies will be like individuals. Some will advance. Others will stick with the old tired processes and will fail. We are seeing that happening now. Amazon is growing with internet sales. Sears abandoned the mail order business, never went into internet sales and continues to sink.
My perspective is that of an aeronautical engineer. In December, it will have been 114 years since the Wright Brothers’ celebrated first-flight at Kittyhawk. Let’s divide those 114 years in half: the first 57 years, and the second.
The conclusion of the first 57 years places us in 1960. Well, between 1903 and 1960, we went from wood-and-fabric airplanes modeled after a bridge, barely able to outrun a horse,… to supersonic jets. Impressive, no? Imagine being a teenager in 1903, and graduating from college in 1910, majoring in engineering. 50 years later, presumably some years after one has retired, but while one has still retained one’s mental faculties, it would be absolutely astonishing to behold what one has witnessed during one’s professional career.
Now let’s place zero-time in 1960, and examine the next 57 years, through the present. This is no longer a hypothetical thought-experiment, as I have workplace colleagues who were already practicing aeronautical engineers in the 1950s, and who are still professionally employed. What changes have they witnessed? We’ve gone from F-4s to F-35s; from the jet-age to the, uh, jet age. Today we have bewilderingly complex computational analysis of the physics, but the fundamental problems in aerodynamics were either already thoroughly solved by the 1960s, or remain pretty much intractable. And of course, 57 years ago, computers were incomparably less powerful – but they were still there, crunching if not the full Navier-Stokes equations, then at least potential-flow. The basic idea of what equations to solve, and how to solve them, was already robust.
Other fields of course have risen and burgeoned, while the former hot-fields have waned. I don’t mean to analyze all of technology based on just the fortunes of one particular field. But it seems to me that that this one field is not alone. Indeed, it is representative of much of the course of development in energy, transportation and the mechanical arts… and maybe representative of the psychology of innovation as a whole.
In sum, how do we recapture the wide-eyed zeal for technological progress of our grandparents’ generation? If we don’t, then it stands to reason, that long-term return on investment will also falter.
My view, therefore, is that while there's no impending doom or inevitable loss, we future rate-of-growth will be less, than it was in the past.
I understand what your are saying about aircraft technology. Cars are the same. Jet aircraft and cars have not really changed much in the last several decades. Other technologies have changed even less. Sewing machines, microwave ovens, toasters, lawn movers, and lots of other mechanical devices have hardly changed. The changes are elsewhere: computers, digital storage, electronics of all sorts including cameras lead the way in consumer products. Advances in medicine are amazing. My career was in medical laboratory testing. The changes in 50 years are staggering and the rate of change is still accelerating. Often the changes are not clear for a while. Products often lag. What is really changing is knowledge.
...The changes in 50 years are staggering and the rate of change is still accelerating. Often the changes are not clear for a while. Products often lag. What is really changing is knowledge.
Agreed, that changes are often subtle, and can be inscrutable to the layman.
There is the famous anecdote about the physicist Max Planck, who was counseled by his mentor, in the late 19th century, to eschew a career in physics, because "all of the crucial ideas in physics have already been formulated". The speaker was of course flagrantly wrong. But... what if we advance this scene from 1875 to say 1950? I am not a physicist, but former colleagues from the physics department in grad school would say that, indeed, the progress since 1950 - however spectacular in terms of spinoffs for applications - has not really been fundamental.
In the realm of aerospace, I have a great deal of admiration for what SpaceX has been doing. I think if you read some of the comments following one of their successful rocket landings (they landed two this past weekend), you might observe what some might call "wide-eyed zeal".
There have been some very fundamental advances in physics. I think part of the issue is they are so esoteric that we do not comprehend the importance. The understand of the significance of dark matter has grown very recently. Even more "fundamental" is the theoretical understanding that is emerging from string and superstring theories. This may be evolving into knowledge as significant as Einstein's relativity.
Recently – and not so recently- we’ve witnessed on this Forum some turbulent and contentious discussion about the role of technological advancement. Such advancement is supposed to obviate many jobs, reduce standard of living for the afflicted, and cause all sorts of unpleasant dislocations. Others say that on the contrary we’re on the threshold of a fabulous new prosperity, from advances in medicine, communications and so forth.
Thus regarding innovation. What about return on investment? There is ample evidence that return on investment isn’t going to be as sprightly as it’s been in the 20th century. We are cautioned to attenuate our expectations, saving more and spending less, on account of future returns being inferior to what we’ve come to expect from recent history. Dividends are much lower than the historical norm; but is there good evidence that dividends are lower merely because companies are reinvesting profits in their business?
I have posted frequently, about investment-performance being connected with productivity-growth. Speculation notwithstanding, stocks go up because companies can make more profit, and they make more profit – in the long run – not from screwing their employees or customers, but from extracting more units of lucre from the same units of labor. This is done through innovation – in technology, management practices or whatever else.
Thus, the question: do we believe that innovation is accelerating (or at least holding steady) relative to the heady pace of the late 19th century through the 20th… or, on the contrary, do we believe that our present (and future) age is more of derivative and desultory advances around the fringes?
There is an underlying assumption that technology's purpose is to increase economic wealth? IMHO, at some point technology may replace wealth. There seems to be a social shift away from wealth per se and more towards the benefit of humanity. There's tons of folks out there making tons of things and doing amazing progress with technology but not all of them seem to be in it for mere money. Which is a good thing.
And innovation is accelerating, but I think it's accelerating away from the standard business model. A lot of the new innovators are small business folks and they're never going to get as far as a publicly held company, nor do they particularly want to from what I can see. A lot of business is now peer-to-peer and that totally sidesteps the traditional markets.
One thing is stagnating... improvements in transistor technology. For decades we've been on a downward trend in cost per transistor, cost per unit of computing power, energy spent per unit of computing power, etc. This is all ending, and is arguably already finished from an economic point of view. Certainly innovation will continue, but the tailwind of cheaper and cheaper transistors will no longer be blowing into the sails of discovery.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
