In Depth | 18 October 2012
The hidden rules that shape human progress
Our lives are governed by centuries of advances that haven’t been
random, as mathematician and network scientist Samuel Arbesman argues
there’s a pattern that reveals how our knowledge has changed over time.
I
had my first experience with the internet in the early 1990s. I
activated our 300-baud modem, allowed it to begin its R2-D2-like hissing
and whistling, and began to telnet. A window on our Macintosh’s screen
began filling with text and announced our connection to the computers at
the local university. After exploring a series of text menus, I began
my first download: a text document containing Plato’s The Republic, via
Project Gutenberg.
After what felt like a significant fraction of an hour, I was ecstatic.
I can distinctly remember jumping up and down, celebrating that I had
this entire book on our computer using nothing but phone lines and a lot
of atonal beeping.
It took me almost a decade to actually get
around to reading The Republic. By the time I did, the notion that I
expressed wonder at such a mundane activity as downloading a text
document seemed quaint. In 2012, people stream movies onto their
computers nightly without praising the modem gods. We have gone from the
days of early web pages, with their garish backgrounds and blinking
text, to slick interactive sites with enough bells and whistles to make
the entire experience smooth and multimedia based. No one thinks any
longer about modems or the details of bandwidth speeds. And certainly no
one uses the word baud anymore.
The changes haven’t ended there.
To store data, I have used floppy disks, diskettes, zip discs,
rewritable CDs, flash drives, burnable DVDs, even the
Commodore Datasette. Now, I save many of my documents to storage that’s available anytime I have access to the internet: the cloud.
The
technological revolution we’re currently experiencing is not a one-off,
technology has been changing over the centuries. But what’s surprising
is that if you look below the surface you discover that this progress is
not random or erratic, it almost always follows a pattern. And
understanding this pattern helps us to appreciate far more than faster
download speeds or improved data storage. It helps us to understand
something fundamental to our success as a species. It helps us to
understand how our knowledge changes and evolves.
Double up
In technology, the best-known example of this pattern is
Moore’s Law,
which states that the processing power of a single chip or circuit will
double every year. Gordon Moore, a retired chemist and physicist as
well as the co-creator of the Intel Corporation, wasn’t famous or
fabulously wealthy when he developed his law. In fact, he hadn’t even
founded Intel yet.
In 1965, Moore wrote a short paper, entitled
Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits,
where he predicted the number of possible components placed on a single
circuit for a fixed cost would double every year. He didn’t arrive at
this conclusion through exhaustive amounts of data gathering and
analysis; in fact, he based his law on only four data points.
The
incredible thing is that he was right. This law has held roughly true
since 1965; it has weathered the personal computer revolution, the march
of processors from 286 to 486 to Pentium, and the many advances since
then. While further data has shown that the period for doubling is
closer to eighteen months than a year, the principle stands. Processing
power grows every year at a constant rate rather than by a constant
amount. And according to the original formulation, the annual rate of
growth is about 200%.
But when processing power doubles rapidly it
allows much more to be possible, and therefore many other developments
occur as a result. For example, the number of pixels that
digital cameras can process
has increased directly due to the regularity of Moore’s Law. This
ongoing doubling of technological capabilities has even reached the
world of robots. Rodney Brooks, a professor at MIT and a pioneer in the
field, found that
how far and how fast a robot can move goes through a doubling about every two years: right on schedule and similar to Moore’s Law.
More: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20121018-hidden-rules-of-human-progress
