Solving Tomorrow’s Better Problems

Johnny HopkinsTechnology and InnovationLeave a Comment

During their recent episode, Taylor, Carlisle, and Jim O’Shaughnessy discussed Solving Tomorrow’s Better Problems. Here’s an excerpt from the episode:

Tobias: Well, I think Moore’s Law is kind of interesting because every time we– Not that long ago, Moore’s Law seems to be, which is the shorthand for computing power, basically we find a new technology and then we make that technology better and better and better, we kind of exploit that. And then, it gets to this point where the gains aren’t quite following Moore’s Law. And then somebody finds a new technology.

Jake: That’s cost instead though. Like, that’s what I found interesting is they made it as a cost as well as part of it to kind of keep it on the curve.

Tobias: But I think we’ve sort of– we have managed to find that new technology every single time. And I think that maybe quantum computing is that new technology, I’m not sure. Keep us on Moore’s Law for a very long time into the future. Maybe we go faster than Moore’s Law.

Jim: I think that if you look at the time it took knowledge to double historically, there was a guy, an economist, who did an analysis of this, and he started in 1 A.D., and then he computed how long it took. And I’m sure there are a lot of footnotes that we’d have to look at. But just to give you the general theme, he wanted to see how long does it take knowledge to double. And so, the first one from 1 A.D. took like thousands of years for knowledge to double. And then, far from being linear, it goes exponential. And it’s not just this type of knowledge. It’s all types of knowledge. And the fact that his forecast, and he wrote this, I don’t know, maybe 20 years ago, his forecast is eerily accurate. I’ll have to look for the title, so you can take a look at his work. But we are speeding up exponentially.

And again, I’m a rational optimist, but I’m not Panglossian. I, don’t think that “No. There’s not going to be any trouble ever again.” In fact, quite the opposite. I think that we will continue to face really difficult problems. I just think that there are going to better problems, and they’ll never go away. As we learn more, we’ll learn more about, “Ooh, that’s a problem I didn’t even think about.”

Bucky Fuller used to say that you shouldn’t get mad at people for saying, “I don’t know anything about that,” and he said because they weren’t tuned into it. And he uses, as an example, the guy who invented the microscope. Prior to the invention of the microscope, nobody was tuned in to the microscopic world. We didn’t know about it. We had no way to know about it. But the minute he peered through that little thing, a new big bang and humans were like, “Well, that’s certainly interesting.”

And so, I think we’re going to see similar things happening on this curve as well. We’re going to get tuned in through the ongoing innovation, but with that comes not only benefits, but problems. But they’re going to better problems. And so, it’s one of the reasons I worry a lot about the idea of the so-called precautionary principle. We of course should take precautions. We of course should have plans for if things go wrong, but we should never build them into a place where we actively try to discourage new knowledge, innovation, etc., which leads to, say, stasis. And stasis is death, movement is life.

And so, we definitely will have a bunch of new problems, but there’ll better problems. We’ll solve those, creating even better problems and more intractable-type problems. But you don’t ever want to be Pollyannish about this and just say, “Oh, it’s like everything’s going to be great and we have nothing to worry about.” Not true.

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