Technological progress has been accelerating since the Industrial Revolution. The increase in population has led to more inventors and more profitable inventions. Better tools lead to the creation of even better tools, and advanced technologies could lead to a future of very rapid progress.
It seems that technological progress has been accelerating for some time, especially after the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Consider some of the major milestones of technological progress throughout history:
Milestone
Reached at
Fire harnessing
1 million BC
The emergence of Homo sapiens
300,000 BC
Agriculture, first cities
8500 BC
Writing, Bronze Age Bronze
3500 BC
Iron Age
1000 BC
Scientific revolution
1600
Industrial Revolution
1800
Electricity, internal plumbing
1860
Mass extraction of oil
1870
Planes
1903
Synthetic fertilizer
1910
Nuclear energy
1942
Digital computing
1943
Lunar landing
1969
World Wide Web
1991
Clearly, something is wrong here: there has been more technological advancement lately. While the choice of milestones is semi-arbitrary, historians have compared different sets of “major milestones” defined by dozens of respected publications and found that the accelerating effect is present in each list.
One obvious reason for the acceleration of technological progress is that there are simply more people today. For most of human history, there were fewer than three million people on Earth. With the invention of agriculture in 8500 BC, there were about five million people. At the birth of Christ there were 200 million. In 1800 the world population was about one billion and in 2008 it is 6.6 billion. 10% of everyone who ever lived is alive today and we are more educated, interconnected, efficient and assisted by automation than ever before.
More people means more farmers, more workers, more businessmen, more scientists, inventors and geniuses of all kinds. The more people there are and the better technology they have, the more likely they are to invent new technologies and distribute them. It is a fundamental fact of the economy that new inventions are incredibly profitable. Once invented and deployed, they can permanently increase per capita output for billions of people. So there is a powerful economic incentive in capitalist societies to invent new technologies.
Technologies build upon themselves recursively: better tools can be used to build better and better tools at an accelerating rate. Futurists argue that advanced technologies that could be developed in the 21st century, such as molecular nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, will fuel the continuation of the technological acceleration effect, producing an era of very rapid progress. Where this future progress will take us nobody knows.
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