What is familiar in the present can have revolutionary consequences for the future. Finding out how innovation will affect the world is difficult. But you can predict.
When Peter Drucker first met IBM CEO Thomas Watson, he was somewhat taken aback. “He started talking about some kind of data processing,” Drucker recalls. “I didn't understand anything about it at all. Then I told my editor about the conversation. He called Watson nuts and dropped the interview."
This was in the early 1930s, when "computers" were women performing mechanical calculations. The idea that data can be a valuable commodity was still out of the question. And the coming decades simply would not have met: this required not only technological progress, but also changes in work practices.
The 20th century saw two important eras of innovation. The first began to gain traction in the 1920s, and the second, the most influential, in the 1990s. We are now on the cusp of yet another innovative era. Its impact is likely to have widespread consequences. But we, like Drucker in the 1930s, are still unable to grasp what lies ahead.
First wave - internal combustion and electricity
The first era of innovation in the twentieth century, in fact, began in 1880: with the invention of the internal combustion engine in Germany and the opening of the first power plant in America - Pearl Street by Edison. All this can be compared to the usual curiosity that high-tech gadgets evoke, and these people were their first followers.
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What will truly change the world will be outside the contexts of the current time
In the following decades, innovation began to gain momentum. Hundreds of automobile firms have grown, including the first failed attempts of Henry Ford, as well as his successful Ford Motor Company, which pioneered the direction. Then the "war of currents" began between Edison and Westinghouse, thanks to which the production of electricity increased and its price decreased.
However, until the 1920s, all of the above had little or no impact on society. The cars needed infrastructure: roads, gas stations. Electricity provided light, but for it to help improve productivity, factories had to be redesigned and the workflow redefined.
And then things went uphill. Cars changed logistics: factories moved from the urban north to the rural east, corner shops were replaced by supermarkets, followed by shopping centers and retail chains. New electrical appliances - refrigerators, air conditioners and radios - have revolutionized everyday life. Nothing was the same.
Second Wave - Microbe, Atom and Particle
The second wave of innovation began around the 1950s. But its preconditions were formed long before this period. In 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. Einstein's theories led physicists to develop the first principles of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, and the problems of David Hilbert's formalism inspired Turing to create a model of a universal computer in 1935.
And yet, like the internal combustion engine and electricity, the real impact of these innovations lay ahead. Fleming's penicillin was not yet therapeutic: further development was needed. And only in 1945 it appeared on the market. Quantum mechanics and the Turing machine were nothing more than theoretical constructs.
Then changes began to gain momentum. The first commercial computer UNIVAC entered people's lives during the 1952 elections, when its predictions bypassed human experts. In the same decade, the first nuclear power plants appeared, and radiation medicine began to grow. Further research on antibiotics led to a "golden age in the 60s and 70s."
Now these early revolutions have gone far beyond their borders. The Standard Model of Physics has been largely completed since the 1960s. Since 1987, only one new class of antibiotics has been invented, teixobactin. And Moore's law of continuous doubling of classical computing power began to slow down and approach its physical limit.
A new era of innovation - genomics, nanotechnology and robotics
Today we are entering a new era of innovation. As in the previous ones, we cannot know exactly what changes it will bring. We now resemble people a century ago. They could enjoy electric lights or Sunday car rides, but they had no idea about things like modern retail, home appliances, or social revolutions.
As far as I can tell, genomics, nanotechnology and robotics will be the main technologies in this new era. They will fundamentally change the way we treat disease, create new products, and strengthen the economy. It is much more difficult to say where these changes will lead. The only thing that can be said for sure is that they will be just as significant as in previous times.
Just as the digital age was built on the fruits of the electricity era, the new era of innovation will be built on computing. New computer chips specialized in artificial intelligence, as well as entirely new computer architectures such as neuromorphic and quantum computing, will impact genetic engineering and other compounds at the atomic and molecular levels. But how exactly this will happen is not yet clear.
This all leaves us in some kind of technological confinement. Our productivity is deteriorating - what has come to be called the Great Stagnation. These new technologies offer us a better future. But we cannot be sure how much and in what exactly it will be better. The first era of innovation led to 50 years of productivity growth from 1920 to 1970. The second is to improve labor productivity in the period from 1995 to 2005.
What will the future bring us?
The future may be hazy. Quantum computing could potentially be thousands, if not millions, times more powerful than today's computers provide. So it's not just that old work gets done faster. Jobs will be created that we have no idea about.
In the case of quantum computing, we need to model quantum systems such as atoms and molecules that can help us transform drug development, materials science and manufacturing. Unfortunately, scientists don't yet know what to do with the data that a quantum computer produces: no one has come across anything like this before.
Over time, they will learn to do this. This, in turn, will entail the creation of new products by engineers and new business models by entrepreneurs. What exactly will they be? Building causal chains based on modern experience, we can only talk about guesses. But the potential is truly mind-boggling.
The truth is, true innovation and the innovation of the future are unlike anything we know in the present. What will actually change the world is always outside the contexts of the modern. For a simple reason - the world has not yet changed to understand this. It is necessary to build ecosystems and identify important problems that need to be addressed in order to clarify something. It takes time.
Meanwhile, we can only observe and wonder. Even those who are actively involved in creating this new future see only a small part of it. But what we can do must be open to and connected to the future. Peter Drucker may have thought Thomas Watson was quirky, but continued to communicate with him. Both are considered seers today.
Greg Satell