I have often wondered about the speed of innovation these days. Is it the same as compared to say 100 years ago? Are we innovating at about the same rate as earlier, or much slower, or much faster? Electricity, Industrial Revolution, Automobiles, Airplanes, Computers… or Internet, Telecom, Smart Phones, SaaS, Cloud Computing, Social Media, Artificial Intelligence… or IoT, Virtual Reality, Space Travel, Driver-less Cars, Robotics and other upcoming innovation. What is/was happening faster?
While getting an exact answer to this question is hard and requires lots of research, I discussed and got some very interesting perspective from few other people, which I wanted to share (through a story).
You may have heard the old Indian story of ‘wheat grains and chess board’. A person was granted a wish by a King and he asked for some wheat grains based on chess-board squares. He asked for a grain of wheat for the first square of a chess-board, two grains of wheat for the second square, four grains of wheat for the third, eight grains of wheat for the fourth, and so on until the sixty-fourth square was reached. The King, assuming this man to be a fool, readily asked his people to provide the wheat. But as they went about calculating the amount of wheat to be given, very soon they realized that there won’t be enough wheat in the whole kingdom to satisfy this request. As a matter of fact there won’t be enough wheat on the entire earth to satisfy that request. Below is a chart I drew in Excel that demonstrates this –
(x-axis: square number; y-axis: number of wheat grains)
Those who remember Geometric Progression from the school days will recall that the total number of wheat grains required would be (264 – 1). Put any reasonable number for the weight of one wheat grain, and you can find out that the entire world doesn’t produce that much wheat, much less a kingdom. The interesting thing however is that nobody saw that coming starting with just a single grain of wheat. In fact till 32 squares (half way through), it is still hard to understand the extent of what is happening. It is almost towards the end, that the power of doubling shows its true strength and grows the numbers like crazy.
The question then is, is it the same with technology? Is the Technological Innovation also happening in a similar fashion without us realizing?
Let’s look at some examples from the last 10-15 years –
- In the year 2000, 1.4 MB capacity floppy drives were still in use. Today the phones in our pockets have 16 GB of memory.
- Cloud Computing as we know today became popular only after 2006-2007.
- In 2003 Wikipedia had 100,000 articles. Today it has 35+ Million.
- 10 years ago there was no iPhone, no Twitter and Facebook was in its infancy.
- And the list goes on…
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If you look at any of these or other similar innovations in more detail, you will notice that each of these were built upon a number of prior technological advances in that field. For example, before the iPhone was built, Phone, Walkman (or iPod for that matter), Touchscreen technology, PDA etc., all have been present. So could it be, that the Technological Innovation also grows like wheat in the Chess-board story? With every passing year the innovation doubling in speed & strength only to suddenly shoot up like crazy? And remember, till more than half-way through we will not even realize.
To understand the concept more, let’s take another example from a different field – Genetic Engineering. The human Genome was sequenced for the very first time in 2003 after many years of efforts in a massive collaborative project. Today there are companies which are offering personalized genome sequencing in hours, with the use of Big Data and Cloud Computing. The cost to do the same came down from tens of millions to a couple of thousand dollars in the same period.
One of my acquaintances (acknowledged below) shared this correlation (the story and the speed of innovation) to me and it did strike me, that yeah, that could be totally true! May be we are about to witness a sudden surge in the Technological innovation in the next 5-10-15 years where unimaginable things (science fiction) will become possible. May be we are just not aware of the speed of the changes yet.
Think about it… A vision of ‘All people of the world connected’, ‘All devices connected’, ‘Robots taking over routine jobs’, ‘Driver-less cars’, ‘Space Travel’ are all already in the realm of possibility and does not surprise anymore. So as time passes by and the multiplier effect kicks in and the technologies are applied across domains (such as in the Genome sequencing example), what will be possible is only left to imagination.
The future might really be arriving faster than we think. What do you say?
[Acknowledgment: ‘Santanu Bhattacharya’ suggested this correlation of the Chess story and modern Innovation.]
