TECHNO OPTIMISM HOW TO

Two of these are well known but the third is not. Within three months in the year 1879 three of the most fundamental 'general purpose technologies' were invented that spun off scores of inventions that changed the world. This is an important distinction, because Gordon touts the second industrial revolution as a bringer of 'general purpose technologies,' that is, technologies that had an economy-wide impact.

TECHNO OPTIMISM HOW TO

This shows quite unequivocally that Moore's Law has its limits, or at the minimum, that we haven't figured out how to benefit from it more. The internet has only boosted productivity temporarily, mainly through a boost of ICT investment. This dot.com party didn't last long though. That short burst was driven by:Īn unprecedented and never-repeated rate of decline in the price of computer speed and memory.Ī never-since-matched surge in the share of GDP devoted to information and communication technology (ICT) investment. Productivity growth clearly slowed down considerably after 1972, with the exception of the dot.com years (1996-2004). In the eight decades before 1972 labor productivity grew at an average rate 0.8 percent per year faster than in the four decades since 1972. There is no need to forecast any slowdown in the pace of future innovation for this gloomy forecast to come true, because that slowdown already occurred four decades ago. The slowing pace of innovation has already happened, according to Gordon: We'll leave the income conclusions for what they are but zoom in on the technology, but not after remarking that Gordon sees other headwinds causing this decline like demographics, educational attainment, and inequality. Future growth will be 1.3 percent per annum for labor productivity in the total economy, 0.9 percent for output per capita, 0.4 percent for real income per capita of the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution, and 0.2 percent for the real disposable income of that group. This paper predicts that growth in the 25 to 40 years after 2007 will be much slower, particularly for the great majority of the population. The United States achieved a 2.0 percent average annual growth rate of real GDP per capita between 18.

There are technology pessimists like Robert Gordon, from the paper that is a response to an earlier one and contains answers to his critics which he describes as the 'techno optimists' ( NBER): This is only an example but one we happen to be familiar with (unfortunately, VisualMed lost its way a bit, which is really unfortunate as its medical database is top notch). We're pretty sure the ICT infrastructure is now vastly more friendly to implementing systems like the VisualMed one, and the benefits of doing so will be very large, both in terms of money saved and, more importantly, in terms of lives saved. This was in the early 2000s, way before iPads, the cloud and at a time when electronic patient dossiers were a fairly distant dream. Several hospitals actually implemented the system, or parts of it.

There were many other great features (we could go on and on), but you get the picture. It allowed large-scale data collection, which provided insights into the effectiveness of treatments and doctors alike. When doctors prescribed drugs, it automatically sent out orders to a pharmacist, updating records and checking doses and whether it interfered with any other drug that the patient took.

It was based on electronic patient records, combining all relevant medical data from patients, including scans, doctor notes, and the like. We had witnessed a two-hour live demonstration and were blown away. We were once interested in a company called VisualMed ( OTC:VSMD), which had developed a system that automated much of the paper trail in healthcare, greatly reducing medical errors and duplications.

Techno optimism