Throughout history, new ideas and new technologies have been the motor of progress, yet we understand too little about how new inventions or concepts develop, or how a new idea replaces an old one...
About the Book
'The Pattern of Progress: How Radically Cheaper, Easier, Faster, Better Technologies and Ideas Rapidly Change the World’, by Bradd Libby, Ph.D.
Throughout history, new ideas and new technologies have been the motor of progress, yet we understand too little about how new inventions or concepts develop, or how a new idea replaces an old one.
Why was Caesar Augustus able on his deathbed to say that he “found Rome a city of brick, and left it a city of marble”? Being a charismatic leader who defeated his enemies, ushering in the Pax Romana helped. But so did having recently-developed, water-powered stone cutting machines that could slice through marble twelve times faster than human muscle alone could do.
Why did child labor in factories come to an end in the early 1900s? Rising prosperity and political activism played their roles. But so did powerful electric motors that could do far more work, faster and cheaper than children. Why did famines largely come to an end in the 1970s? Perhaps the shipping container had a hand in that.
We have seen this pattern again and again: when a technology is developed that is ten times better than the next best alternative, it will be adopted rapidly, transforming an entire industry, sector of the economy, or society as a whole.
‘The Pattern of Progress: How Radically Cheaper, Easier, Faster, Better Technologies and Ideas Rapidly Change the World’ is a grand tour of human history covering all of the fundamental sectors of the economy - energy, transportation, food and agriculture, materials, labor, health care and more - from digital cameras replacing film cameras, nylon replacing silk, and the car replacing the horse, as far back as pottery, stone tools, fire, and walking.
But the pattern of progress continues to unfold to this day. Precision fermentation, which had been used for decades to make human insulin, is now being used to make cow’s milk without cows, to make proteins thousands of times sweeter than sugar, and to resurrect the aromas of extinct flowers.
It sounds like science fiction, but these products are available for sale now.
Solar photovoltaics, wind power, and lithium-ion batteries, all of which are much cheaper than they were just a couple of decades ago, are shaping up to provide superabundant, clean power for our homes and even for autonomous electric vehicles and humanoid robots that promise to reshape society every bit as much as the biggest inventions we have ever seen.
Reading the book ‘The Pattern of Progress’ should be interesting for engineers, historians, and anyone else interested in learning more about the technologies that got us to where we are today. But understanding and harnessing the pattern by which innovative new technologies and ideas are adopted and how they impact our society should be useful to business people, entrepreneurs, investors, policy makers and anyone else who wishes to help humanity shape its future.
