Why Does Technology Develop So Fast?

Technologies go through periods of exponential growth but this is not always sustained.

Although all technological growth will never be exponential, there’s a number of emerging technologies that are showcasing such an accelerated rate of change.

It’s difficult for most of us to spot such accelerated change and to make sense of it all. Think about integrated circuits. There’s been a 10 billion-fold (!) improvement over the last 60 years, but the first years things seemed to move extremely slowly (e.g. 1958: 2 transistors, 1959: 4 transistors, 1960: 8, etc.).

Similarly, the cost of sequencing a human genome cost $10,000,000 in 2007 (and even closer to a billion in the early 2000s!). Today this is around $100.

You notice the same rapid cost decrease for 3D printing, drones, industrial robots, solar power, LiDAR systems for autonomous vehicles, … This demonetization, as well as the digitization & democratization of technology is further accelerating its growth and impact.

Peter Diamandis has a great set of graphs showcasing such accelerated progress in plural fields. His ‘evidence of abundance’ shows the world is in a much better place than many believe for it to be (due to an often dystopian view of the media). A problem we continuously face in business (and life) is that we have a tendency to think linearly. We see the world moving at this steady, set pace - while much of the world (and especially technology) is moving at an accelerated and sometimes exponential rate. This is what will mean the downfall of many organizations - e.g. every two weeks one of the S&P 500 companies is being replaced. Their average tenure of 33 years in 1964 has already decreased to about 17 today.

The visual below shows this difference between our human linear thinking (i.e. where we think we’ll end up) vs. the exponential growth of emerging technology (i.e. where we’ll actually end up). The difference between these two speeds is causing a lot of the stress we see in business today.

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?Farshid Hesami