[IP] Not the future we expected
Delivered-To: dfarber+@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2004 14:38:53 -0300
From: Claudio Gutierrez <cgutierrez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Not the future we expected
To: Dave Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Not the future we expected
By John Kay
It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that we are living through a
period of technological change whose speed and impact are without
precedent. The effect is on our desks and in our pockets. We carry devices
whose processing capability would a generation ago have required a roomful
of computers and, a generation earlier, would have demanded an army of
clerks. Our personal lives are transformed by mobile phones and internet
access, our business activities galvanised by instantaneous data
transmission and computerised inventory management.
Yet there are dissenters. A recent article by Alexander Field, an economic
historian, concludes that the most rapid innovation in American history
occurred not in the booming 1990s, or even in the roaring twenties, but in
the period between the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the attack on Pearl
Harbor in 1941 - the period we still call the Great Depression.
Could Professor Field be right? I began to doubt the conventional wisdom
when I discovered a Hudson Institute report from the mid-1960s that
predicted technological changes from then till 2000. Its prognostications
about information technology were impressively accurate - it foresaw mobile
phones, fax machines and large-scale data processing.
But in other areas the Hudson Institute was wide of the mark. Where are the
personal flying platforms, the space colonies, the artificial moons to
light our cities, the drugs that make weight reduction a painless process?
Progress in IT has fully matched the expectations of three or four decades
ago. But advance in other areas has, by historic standards, been disappointing.
In the first half of the 20th century, the car revolutionised transport.
Civil airliners shrank the world. But we still drive cars, not personal
flying platforms, and our vehicles are still powered by internal combustion
engines. The 747 that was delivered to Pan American in 1969 would have been
beyond the imagination of an aviator from 1934; but 747s are still in
production 35 years later.
In the postwar decades new drugs virtually eliminated infectious disease as
a cause of death among otherwise healthy adults in developed countries.
Futurologists predicted that new discoveries would postpone heart disease
and conquer cancer. Instead we have Prozac and Viagra, pills that control
stress and capsules to reduce stomach acidity. These are significant and
profitable innovations but without the dramatic effect on productivity or
longevity of earlier discoveries.
Similar advances revolutionised industrial materials. Schoolboy aircraft
modellers learnt how plastics could be applied to all forms of
construction. In the 1960s you could make shirts of nylon and slacks of
polyester, although they were not nice or elegant to wear. And that is,
pretty much, where things remain today: our clothing is still largely
derived from the sheep and the cotton plant.
Economists such as Prof Field measure technical change by looking at
changes in total factor productivity - the part of output growth that is
unaccounted for after you have measured the effect of changing labour
inputs, increased skills and growing capital employed. By this measure the
final decades of the 20th century were unremarkable. Even the productivity
acceleration that some observers have seen in the US in the past five years
is no more than a return to growth rates that were once commonplace. Those
who believe the pace of change today is without precedent are either
ignorant of history or fixated on IT.
Business gurus, management consultants and journalists have a shared
interest in exaggerating the pace of change. The excitement they generate
makes their ideas sound more important, their services more urgently
required. These commentators tell us that lessons from the past are
irrelevant because the future will be so radically different. Old concepts
of valuation and financial control are redundant and the determinants of
business success have fundamentally changed. We should be wise to take all
these claims with a large pinch of salt.
http://www.johnkay.com/trends/318
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