New Insights on U.S. Opinions on Science

New Pew Research Center surveys of citizens and a representative sample of scientists connected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) show powerful crosscurrents that both recognize the achievements of scientists and expose stark fissures between scientists and citizens on a range of science, engineering and technology issues. 

A new Pew Research Center report highlights these major findings from its surveys of Americans:

• 79% of adults say that science has made life easier for most people and a majority is positive about science’s impact on the quality of health care, food and the environment.
• 54% of adults consider U.S. scientific achievements to be either the best in the world (15%) or above average (39%) compared with other industrial countries.
• 92% of AAAS scientists say scientific achievements in the U.S. are the best in the world (45%) or above average (47%).
• About seven-in-ten adults say that government investments in engineering and technology (72%) and in basic scientific research (71%) usually pay off in the long run. Some 61% say that government investment is essential for scientific progress, while 34% say private investment is enough to ensure scientific progress is made.

However:

• Only 16% of AAAS scientists and 29% of the general public rank U.S. STEM education for grades K-12 as above average or the best in the world. Fully 46% of AAAS scientists and 29% of the public rank K-12 STEM as “below average.”
• 75% of AAAS scientists say too little STEM education for grades K-12 is a major factor in the public’s limited knowledge about science. An overwhelming majority of scientists see the public’s limited scientific knowledge as a problem for science.

The public's general support for science is reassuring, but the differences between public views and those of the scientific community (shown in the figure above) are sometimes of concern. 

• I have spent time looking at biotechnology, and I know from experience that the scientific community is very careful to assure the safety of foods that are produced from genetically modified crops. The public is I fear unaware of the dangers of traditional breeding, and too fearful of biotechnology. Of course, we need to continue to assure careful vetting of GM research and releases of GM crops, but the public fear is excessive.
• Similarly, while I worked for many years to assure that animals involve in the research programs I managed were treated ethically, I also recognize that their use was necessary. There is no question that ethical use of animals in research is justified by the benefits such research yields for mankind.
• Evolution is central to modern biological science, and the evidence for evolution is overwhelming. I don't mind what people believe, but I do mind when people insist that children's science classes not teach scientific consensus.
• The fear of vaccines is unjustified, and as the current measles epidemic shows, that fear leads to very serious consequences. While the  MMR vaccine is very safe and very effective, the most recent data from the World Health Organization indicated that there were 145,000 deaths from measles in 2013. While measles was eradicated from the USA years ago, if Americans don't immunize their children, the disease can be reintroduced from Africa and Asia, where it is endemic in many poor countries.
• Similarly, the vast majority of scientists are convinced that humans are driving global warming through activities that cause increase in the release of greenhouse gases. I fear that the public has bought a false story from those who profit from businesses releasing those greenhouse gases (and the folk that they fund). Prudence demands that we act globally and quickly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
• It is not having more people in the world that is a problem per se, it is that more people with higher expectations for their lives put more stress on the environment. That makes is harder and harder to feed the billions of people and provide them all with decent lives. Global warming, pollution of land, air and water, deforestation, desertification, loss of biodiversity are only the most worrisome of the problems likely to arrive with the population increases we still expect.

Experts too have difficulty predicting the future

Thanks to Gyan Parida, who collected these bits of wisdom from the past that had been previously posted on FB by Adam Roberts:

"There is no reason why anyone would want a computer in their home."— Ken Olsen, Founder Digital Equipment Corp.,1977 

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."— Thomas Watson, Chairman IBM, 1943 

"Automobiles are just a fad. They can never replace horses."— Chief of the Michigan Savings Bank advised the lawyer of Henry Ford, 1902 

"It is impossible to come up with a 32 bit operating system. We will never make a 32 bit operating system."— Bill Gates 

"Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax" — William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, British scientist, 1899 

"Nuclear energy will never be obtainable"— Albert Einstein
"A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere."— New York Times, 1936 

"There will never be a bigger plane built."— A Boeing engineer, after the first flight of the 247, a twin engine plane that holds ten people 

"Travelling through rail will never be possible."— Dionysius Lardner 

"Fooling around with alternating current is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever." — Thomas Edison 

"Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop"— TIME magazine, 1968 

"I predict the internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse."— Robert Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet,1995 

"There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No Chance."— Steve Ballmer, 2007 

"There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States."— T. Craven, FCC commissioner, 1961 

"While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility."— Lee DeForest 

"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year."— The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957.

Research on forecasting.

Tetlock also found that specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. Knowing a little might make someone a more reliable forecaster, but Tetlock found that knowing a lot can actually make a person less reliable. “We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,” he reports. “In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on—are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations.” And the more famous the forecaster the more overblown the forecasts. “Experts in demand,” Tetlock says, “were more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.”

The quotation is from a review of Philip Tetlock's book,  Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, from the New Yorker magazine.

Some years ago I compared the forecasts of GDP made by World Bank economists with simple linear extrapolations of GDP. On average, the linear extrapolations were slightly more accurate. Now economists realize that there is a great deal of inertia in national economic systems, so they tend to be relatively conservative in forecasting deviations from the trend. My data seemed to show that when they did forecast a significant change from the trend, they tended to overestimate the actual deviation. I have known and worked with several World Bank economists, and I have the greatest respect for their competence. I think my findings were consistent with Tetlock's view that experts are frequently not as good at forecasts as we might expect from their frequent appearances in televised news programs.

Another quote from the New Yorker:

Low scorers look like hedgehogs: thinkers who “know one big thing,” aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains, display bristly impatience with those who “do not get it,” and express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters, at least in the long term. High scorers look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things (tricks of their trade), are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises but rather as exercises in flexible “ad hocery” that require stitching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own forecasting prowess.

Foreign affairs are complicated. There seem to be high probabilities of making mistakes in predictions on what is going to happen in Ukraine, Syria, Iraq and other hot spots. Perhaps it is best to make small decisions and not work from a grand plan (one big thing) in foreign policy. Certainly it seems wise to look for the "black swan", the event or piece of information that doesn't fit with forecasts and assumptions.

Tetlock also has an unscientific point to make, which is that “we as a society would be better off if participants in policy debates stated their beliefs in testable forms”—that is, as probabilities—“monitored their forecasting performance, and honored their reputational bets.” He thinks that we’re suffering from our primitive attraction to deterministic, overconfident hedgehogs.

I wonder whether Tetlock is a hedgehog or a fox? How good is his intuition as to what would improve our society? 

Forecasting can be useful, but only if done well

An article in The Economist is partially based on a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by David Mandel and Alan Barnes. Those researchers

analysed more than 1,500 intelligence forecasts produced by a nameless (but presumably Canadian) agency, covering the period from March 2005 to December 2011. 

Their results suggest that the old joke about “military intelligence” being an oxymoron is unfair. When they compared what the analysts had said with what actually came to pass, they found that the predictions were right about three-quarters of the time. Cynics might wonder if the analysts merely restricted themselves to easy cases, but Dr Mandel and Dr Barnes also found they were good at calibrating their judgments. Events they deemed unlikely did not happen often, whereas those they thought likely occurred frequently. Indeed, if anything they were underselling themselves, tending to err more than necessary on the side of uncertainty. And there was evidence that their skills could be learnt—for more-experienced analysts tended to do better than their junior counterparts........

Unlike pundits, who can pontificate from the safety of their armchairs, analysts know that their advice is likely to have consequences in the real world. Drs Mandel and Barnes found that analysts’ inherent underconfidence became even more pronounced when confronting particularly important or difficult questions.

Analysts must also defend their claims to managers, who are trained to be sceptical, and to their political masters. Other studies have shown such accountability encourages careful thinking and reduces self-serving cognitive biases.

The Economist article contrasts this research with

a famous earlier finding. In 2005 Philip Tetlock, a management theorist at the University of Pennsylvania, announced the results of a 20-year study in which 284 experts—professors, journalists, civil servants and so forth—were invited to make more than 28,000 predictions. Their performance was abysmal: barely better than chance, and inferior even to simple computer algorithms......... Dr Tetlock found that the more famous his pundits were, the worse they did.

These data are worth keeping in mind. The talking heads one sees on television and the prognostications one reads in the media (or worse in blogs) are often wrong. Intelligence agencies often do a lot better! President Obama is probably working from much better forecasts than those that might be available to you. 

How will the world change in coming decades?

Some aspects of technological change may be relatively predictable. Transportation technology is relatively more mature than information and communication technologies, and so transportation systems are likely to improve more slowly than will information and communications systems. Still both will continue there penetration into currently unserved areas of Asia and Africa. 

We can also expect to see markets grow. I would expect to see more goods and services on the market. Of course transportation costs and losses and transaction costs increase with the distance goods travel, so that catchment areas for goods markets would tend to remain somewhat more local than those for services that could be handled by telecommunications.

For large countries with large populations, domestic markets will increase greatly.  I think the European Union, the North American Free Trade Agreement and similar multinational market areas will also grow in number and volume of trade. So too, I assume that there will be a general growth in international commerce. That will engender needs for improved international systems related to the governance of international commerce.

Automation will increase.

Changing technology, greater dissemination of technology, expanded infrastructures, and expanding markets will offer expanded economic opportunities. The economic growth which we have seen in Europe and Japan after World War II, in the various tigers, in China, India, Russia, Brazil and other countries more recently is a pattern of diffusion of economic modernization and competitiveness that is likely to continue.

I expect that there will be more schooling, especially in countries where rights to education have not yet been met. Thus work forces and citizenry will become more educated. That in turn will put pressure on societies to improve management and governance. The advances in neuroscience, cognitive science, and computer amplification of intelligence may  make people smarter or at least more effective in the use of knowledge.

Cultures will rub up against each other more and more. We will have to see a dialog among religions or we will see more religiously based conflict. We will have to see better ways to accommodate rising powers into regional and global systems or we run the risk of serious conflict.

Urbanization will increase, and we will see more large cities and some already large cities will get larger still. Worldwide farmers will have to feed more people on average than they do today. The increase in food and fiber per farmer will be bigger where it is now low than in more developed countries where each farmer is already feeding many people. Growing the food supply to meet the needs of the growing population will be a challenge. It may be that rather than trying to get everyone to eat the way people do now in rich countries (meat intensive diet) we will have to see development of cultural norms for healthier diets based more on plant foods.

The footprint of modern civilization is huge and continues growing. Environmental damage of major proportions will be inescapable if means are not found to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases and to reduce rates of loss of biodiversity, deforestation, desertification, depletion of fisheries, pollution of coastal zones, and loss of top soil. Of course, exhaustion of natural resources may accomplish some of these objectives for us, but at great cost.

It seems likely that population growth rates will continue to decline and that the production of goods and services worldwide will continue to increase more rapidly than the population.  I would expect extreme poverty to be reduced, but poverty to remain a problem. Populations will age, and life expectancy in poor countries should increase but I don't expect to see increases comparable to those in the 20th century. 

Will there be class war? It seems clear that the rich are acquiring more wealth faster than any other group, With that wealth comes power, and the power is used to protect and acquire wealth. Still, there are trends which would increase the power of the rest of us, and a recognition that there are dangers in the inequality of wealth, income and opportunity in the world.

In his book, The Age of Culture, Paul Schafer calls for a fundamental change in world culture, one in which people adopt a more artistic, creative and even spiritual approach to life, one less marked by greed for things and less destructive to the environment. I see this as related to Federico Mayor's emphasis on a culture of peace (not surprising since the former Director General of UNESCO wrote the introduction to Schafer's book).  I think the world needs such a transformation, but I am not sure that it will be achieved as soon as needed.

Let us hope we take charge of our country and this pessimism does not come true.

I see the point.

Economic forecasters exist to make astrologers look good.
Robert Reich

World Bank Regional Forecasts for 2014

Read the Bank's blog post supporting the figure.

Thinking about the future

In an interesting talk, historian Paul Sabin raised the issue of how we should best deal with our environmental future. He contrasted an approach typified by Paul Ehrlich in which population growth (and the growth of per capita consumption) seen as leading to more and more modification (some would say degradation) of the environment, with an approach typified by Julian Simon in which human society adapts to the changing environment (through technological and institutional innovations) to continue to improve human welfare. Sabin suggests that we should add a concern for values -- what kind of world do we want to live in? Are we willing to reduce human population or per capita consumption in order to retain some natural spaces and protect biodiversity? One problem with Sabin's approach is that our values today may be quite different from those of future people who will have to live with the results of our current policies.

I also found myself thinking of the guy who was heard falling past the 19th floor of a sky scraper, saying "so far, so good!" History is replete with societies that grew and progressed in wealth until they crashed. Simon's vision of permanent progress runs the terrible risk of being wrong.

Globalization is not only the process of increasingly global trade patterns, but also a process in which the human footprint is increasingly global. In the past, the crash of a culture in Greenland, or Mohenjo Daro, Rome or the Yucatan peninsula would leave most of the world's people untouched. The crash of a 22nd century civilization might be different in character because of its difference in magnitude.

Thinking about what might have been, and what might come to be.

We can't know what would have happened if what did happen hadn't happened.

The beginning of July will be the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. During the entire period, people have been playing the "what if" game, guessing what would have happened if this or that had happened differently at the battle. This may be a relatively benign pastime, but it is ultimately futile. We can't know what the alternate course of history would have been.

It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.

The Battle of Gettysburg was the high point of the Civil War effort by the Confederacy. It marked the furthest incursion into the north, and after the fall of Vicksburg and the loss at Gettysburg, the defeat of the Confederacy seemed to be inevitable. As far as I can see, the generals on each side, already tested in battle, did their best to assure that their sides would win the battle, but in the fog of battle unforeseen events intervened and their best laid plans went awry.

For us lesser mortals, it is well to remember that our forecasts are likely to be wrong, our plans to fail. At least we should have a plan B, and probably a C and D. It may also be better not to bet the house on any one prediction.

Will technological innovation continue? Will growth slow?

Paul Krugman wrote a piece in The New York Times recently noting that U.S. national economic forecasts usually are based on the assumptions that recent trends in productivity increases will continue and that recent trends in increasing inequality in the distribution of income will be ameliorated. "Yet this conventional wisdom is very likely to be wrong on one or both dimensions."

Recently, Robert Gordon of Northwestern University created a stir by arguing that economic growth is likely to slow sharply — indeed, that the age of growth that began in the 18th century may well be drawing to an end. 

Mr. Gordon points out that long-term economic growth hasn’t been a steady process; it has been driven by several discrete “industrial revolutions,” each based on a particular set of technologies. The first industrial revolution, based largely on the steam engine, drove growth in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. The second, made possible, in large part, by the application of science to technologies such as electrification, internal combustion and chemical engineering, began circa 1870 and drove growth into the 1960s. The third, centered around information technology, defines our current era. 

And, as Mr. Gordon correctly notes, the payoffs so far to the third industrial revolution, while real, have been far smaller than those to the second. Electrification, for example, was a much bigger deal than the Internet.

Gordon notes that his paper focuses on the United States. Clearly some regions of the world are a century or more behind the "technological curve", not having achieved electrification, indoor plumbing, nor even railroad or automobile transportation.  (Here is a link to the Robert Gordon paper.) 

It seems to me that the "industrial revolutions" have been driven by clusters of technological changes. 

• The original industrial revolution from 1750 to 1830 included the steam engine, its application to transportation in railroads and steam ships (and thus an expansion of markets), and the development of the American System of Manufacturing (interchangable parts) the mechanization of textile manufacturing, as well as a change from wood to coal as a fuel and increases in the mining and manufacturing of metals.
• The second industrial revolution from 1870 to 1930 saw electricity, internal combustion engine, running water, indoor toilets, communications, entertainment, chemicals and petroleum technologies combining to drive the economy.

We now seem to be in a third industrial revolution, sometimes called the Information Revolution, and I think we are far from seeing it end. It has already seen widespread economic application of advanced in semiconductor, computer, satellite and laser-fiber optics technologies.

I suspect that if other technologies are added to the mix they will come from the sciences. Some possibilities are:

• Biotechnology built around the application of modern genetics to agriculture, health and industry
• Materials technologies, especially nanotechnology
• Applications of neuro-science, in areas such as education and medicine
• Applications of cognitive science both in humans and machines.

The final paragraph of the summary of Gordon's paper is disturbing:

Even if innovation were to continue into the future at the rate of the two decades before 2007, the U.S. faces six headwinds that are in the process of dragging long-term growth to half or less of the 1.9 percent annual rate experienced between 1860 and 2007. These include demography, education, inequality, globalization, energy/environment, and the overhang of consumer and government debt. A provocative “exercise in subtraction” suggests that future growth in consumption per capita for the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution could fall below 0.5 percent per year for an extended period of decades.

Long Term Economic Forecasts

This long term forecast from the OECD must of course be taken with a grain of salt. It suggests that the countries which now compose the OECD (the rich countries) which now produce more then 3/5th of the world's goods and services, will see their product drop to about half the world total by 2030, and to just over 2/5th by 2060 -- of course due to assumed differences of the rates of growth of rich and less rich nations. (Of course, more countries may join the OECD in the interim.)

The projection suggests that Japan (JPN) will become less important in the world economy as compared with China (CHN) and India (IND). The United States, currently the world's largest economy, is projected to wind up smaller than that of the huge Asian nations. It is projected to remain producing a major portion of the OECD nations' goods and services.

There are of course a couple of inferences that can be drawn from even such a rough estimate. One is that it is important for the United States to follow pro-growth policies, for other countries will certainly try to do so. Another is that policies designed for the last half century should surely be rethought: people now alive will be around in 2060.

Lets invest in the future

We have to get over the current crises -- the legacy of the housing bubble and financial crisis of the Bush II administration and the Great Recession that they caused, the weakness of the euro, the debt crisis (federal, state and local government as well as private), and the political gridlock.

The economic health of the United States from 2035 to the end of the century must also be planned for and worked for now. The United States is in better shape for that future than are Europe and Japan because our population is not seeing the same changes. Those countries are seeing the percentages of their populations over retirement age increasing and a smaller percentage of the population newly entering the workforce.

The long term health of the American economy and indeed of those in the workforce now will depend on investments now -- roads, ICT infrastructure, energy infrastructure, science and technology.

It will also depend on human resources. Notably, we need to continue to attract immigrants, and ideally we should attract immigrants who contribute the most to our economy -- entrepreneurs, innovators and the like.

We also have to invest in the kids who are being born here. The kids who are being born now will be entering the work force around 2035. Just over half of the kids born in the last year are from minorities -- Hispanic, black, Asian, Native American, or other. Unfortunately, we are not investing enough in kids from minority ethnic groups and as a result they drop out of school earlier and are less successful in school. Unless that is corrected, the competitiveness of the United States in what is likely to be an increasingly global economy will be diminished. Life expectancy is now about 80 years. Thus almost everyone under the age of 60 in 2015 will be alive in 2035, and an increasing portion of them should be retired and depending on the new entrants to the workforce for the economic health of the United States and indeed for their income.

Lets invest in the kids.

Where is Bell Labs Now That We Need It?

Jon Gertner has an article in The New York Times based on his book, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. Bell labs personnel invented the transistor, fiber optics, the solar cell, and satellite communications among many other things. Gertner emphasizes the importance of well funded laboratories that put really good people together to work on ways to do useful things better or cheaper.

I had the opportunity in my first professional job as a research engineer to work in such a laboratory, and especially benefited from working directly under Pete Kelly, who later headed his own research lab. I also learned a lot from chances to ask questions of and interact with really senior scientists.

I was involved in a minor way in a study by the Office of Technology Assessment (killed by the Republicans) which led to a publication: Information Technology R&D: Trends and Issues. The study was occasioned by the breakup of Ma Bell, and the threat to Bell Labs which would no longer have the deep pockets of a national telephone monopoly to support it.

The National Institutes of Health represent the kind of facility that Gertner would like to see. The National Institute of Standards and Technology is another. I suspect that these days only a government can provide the kind of environment that Bell Labs once provided, but to do so it would have to have a strong commercial orientation, focusing on the development of "disruptive technologies".

Source of the image

A Day Made of Glass 2: Unpacked. The Story Behind Corning's Vision.

I am old enough to remember that we could not have envisioned the modern world's technology when I was young. This view of the technology of the future seems impossible, but is it?

The implications for educational opportunities are huge! Who will be smart enough to take advantage of them? Not the United States unless we work harder to get the brightest, most innovative people into education!

Thinking about knowledge intensive economic goods and services

From Science and Engineering Indicators Digest 2012:

D. HIGH-TECHNOLOGY MANUFACTURING
The United States, the EU, and China generate most of the value in the world’s high-technology manufacturing output. The worldwide recession changed trends in high-technology output growth around the world. U.S. growth nearly halted, and the EU, Japan, and Asia-8 experienced contraction in 2008 and 2009. Only China’s output continued to grow rapidly, albeit at a somewhat slower pace than its previous double-digit growth.
E. HIGH-TECHNOLOGY EXPORTS
Exports of high-technology manufactured goods (excluding intra-EU and China-Hong Kong trade) expanded from $761 billion in 1996 to $2.14 trillion in 2010, amid major shifts in countries’ export positions, including a 10% recession-induced drop in 2009. The 2010 recovery was 6% above 2008 peak levels. The combined China and Asia-8 exports amounted to half the world’s total, with Asia-8 exports including substantial intermediate goods trade with China and other Asian economies. The United States and EU each accounted for about 15% of world high-technology exports.

The Science and Engineering Indicators 2012 Report also includes a category for Commercial Knowledge Intensive Services, an area in which the United States appears to be doing better than in high technology manufacturing, not surprising since the U.S. economy is so service intensive.

It occurs to me that the meaning of "high" technology changes with time. Once steam engines and telegraph were high technology, perhaps 150 years ago, but no longer. When I was a young engineer 50 years ago, computers were high technology but a computer of comparable power to those of my youth, if still produced, would be a toy. Personal computers are now produced as commodities for a mass consumer market.

Of course this presents a problem for the National Science Foundation and other organizations seeking to record and present statistics describing the evolution of technology markets. It is important to use definitions that remain the same so that the data are comparable but as technology diffuses the very idea of "high technology" changes.

The introduction of computers, semiconductors, and integrated circuits has led to a massive increase in the manufacturing of information technology, and the introduction of lasers, fiber optics and satellite communications led to a massive increase in the manufacturing of communications technology. Over time there developed large consumer markets for ICT devices, while there also remains a market for high tech ICT devices such as super computers. The United States has depended on a leadership in knowledge intensive services and high technology for exports in increasingly globalized markets, and ICT exports have been an important part of that knowledge intensive production, but consumer ICT manufacturing and exports have largely moved to Asia.

The key competitive advantage for which the United States economy searches come from disruptive sources of innovations, such as those which led to the Information Revolution in the mid part of the 20th century (or steam engines and mechanical devices that led to the industrial revolution, or to electrical machinery and internal combustion engines that led to a second industrial revolution around the turn of the 20th century). Where are we to find those disruptive innovations?

Where will the next disruptive source of innovations arise? That question is important, because the answer suggests an area in which the Government should be focusing its support for fundamental research and development.

Perhaps that source is biotechnology, which should be leading to increasingly rapid rates of innovation in medical, agricultural and materials processing technologies. However, one questions whether those will be disruptive or merely incremental innovations.

Author of this graph was Wgsimon

Examining the graph of Moore's famous law on the transistor count per microprocessor (doubling every two years), one can see that the long term improvement of the technology was based on a large number of incremental innovations. It may well be that biotechnology will lead to many incremental innovations in crop cultivars, in treatments for medical problems and in industrial processes, rather than transformational innovations such as the first integrated microprocessor. Alternatively, it may lead to transformational innovations with respect to the treatment of individual diseases, but with limited economic importance if those diseases are of relatively low incidence.

Many nations are investing in fundamental research and development on nanotechnology, not only in the production of smaller and smaller semiconductor devices, but also in the production of other applications of materials produced on the nano scale. It seems likely that this is an area that will be increasingly important economically, but we will have to wait to see just how important.

My bet is that we will see disruptive technologies coming out of cognitive science and neurobiology. Some of them will be medical, allowing better diagnosis and treatment of mental diseases and problems. Some will be educational, leading to improved learning. Some may be simply improving the intellectual performance of people. Recall that the Flynn Effect has been known for many years (according to one study, U.S. average IQ scores increased by 20 points from 1932 to 1997). The products of such innovations may not be financial, but they would be hugely important. However, a smarter work force might also be a powerful element in global competition.

Will we find other disruptive social technologies derived from knowledge obtained from the social sciences? Perhaps! I would love to see political institutions work better than they are in the United States, not to mention may other countries. Perhaps those political institutions could come up with better approaches to avoiding the periodic recessions and depressions that afflict the economy. Perhaps they could lead to a society with more opportunity and less prejudice.

The changing patterns of home use of computers

Alladi Venkatesh, Debora E. Dunkle and Amanda Wortman have published a new report from The Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations at UTI titled "Evolving Patterns of Household Computer Use: 1999-2010". Here is one of the tables from that report:

It seems that the penetration of the Internet into American households has been progressing quickly and thoroughly.

I suspect that we will see further development of computer based entertainment. I also predict that we will see more home management, with people emailing home appliances with instructions, with home appliances informing home owners and service people of their situation, and with computer based operations such as changing energy use according to energy prices at different times.

But I have been often wrong in the past as to the places to look for new killer apps!

Economic forecast from The Economist

Source: The Economist

"The IMF has cut its forecasts for economic growth in its twice-yearly World Economic Outlook. It expects world GDP to increase by 4% in 2011 and 2012, some 0.3 and 0.5 percentage points lower than previously expected in its June interim forecast. Divergence in growth between the rich and developing economies is expected to become increasingly marked. The predicted output for the 34 advanced economies that account for 52% of the world’s GDP was reduced by 0.6 percentage points to 1.6% for 2011 and by 0.7 points to 1.9% in 2012. Meanwhile, the fund expects the 150 emerging and developing economies to grow by 6.4% in 2011 and by 6.1% in 2012, just 0.2 and 0.3 points lower than in its June forecast."

Economists forecasting models tend to be for "white swans" and the economists tend to be surprised by "black swans", as are all but good statisticians and pessimists. 


If the forecasts are nearly right, next year might be remarked as the time when the 34 advanced economies no longer produced more than half of the world goods and services. Of course, since these countries have far less than half the world's population, their people will generally have more than people in the rest of the world.

A Really Bad Prediction

I quote from "The Internet? Bah!" by Clifford Stoll, first published in Newsweek in February 1995:

Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. 

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

This is one of many examples of smart people making mistakes in prognostication of the impact of a new technology by assuming that the technology will not become better with time and effort, that the technological system will not spawn flocks of killer apps, and that the technology and its social construction will not evolve to produce something more useful and more used that what exists at the time of the forecast.

On the other hand, I think it useful to consider the dark side of the force. Are there things to worry about with respect to the growth of the Internet? Sure! We have become very dependent on the Internet, and so exposed to threats of cyber war, cyber terrorism, and cyber crime. The Internet is full of threats to public morality, and many of the ways that culture can evolve in the Internet era will be less than optimum. We are seeing systems of curation (e.g. librarians and expert booksellers providing advice), news gathering and the editing of news deteriorating as their old financial models are undermined by the Internet.

The question is how to worry about the realistic threats from the dark side without worrying unduly about  current failures in the technology that will likely be corrected in time by the normal processes of cultural and technological evolution.

Positive Trends on a Global Level

My friend Julianne alerted me to the 2011 edition of The State of the Future by Jerome Glenn and his team. We were struck by the number of encouraging trends that the report notes, since we so often focus on the challenges still before us. Here is a summary chart of those successes: