Has American innovation peaked?

*First appeared in the Oct. 24 edition of the Laurel Chronicle

A few weeks back, I received an email from the Atlanta Fed outlining several news articles and presentations that interest those of us who nerd out (yes, that’s the technical terminology) on economic trends. I don’t always read these emails, but one sentence caught my eye. At three words, it was a question highlighted in bold that asked, quite simply, “Has innovation peaked?”

I felt a slight panic but a greater curiosity. Has innovation reached its pinnacle? Is 2013 the year in which we just call it quits? Will we never have another Da Vinci? Is Apple the best it gets?

I opted to read further about this thought-provoking topic, which led me to a presentation by Joel Mokyr of Northwestern University’s Departments of Economics and History. The presentation, entitled “Technology Then and Now: Why the Technopessimists are Wrong,” provided some context for the question at hand.

(And, if the title is any indication, innovation isn’t dead. We’re obviously still making up words – “technopessimist” – much like Shakespeare and Mark Twain. Good job, humanity!)

The presentation begins grimly: “A new wave of technopessimism is upon us.” (It should be noted that Mokyr is talking specifically about American innovation in his presentation.) According to Mokyr, we’re seeing this technopessimism play out in three different schools of thoughts. There is one school that believes most of the low-hanging technological fruits have been picked and that future inventions won’t impact humanity in a significant way.

How depressing.

A second school believes that while there are many things we can invent, Americans simply won’t because we are getting “too risk-averse, too complacent, too regulated, and our institutions are turning anti-innovative and sclerotic.” Like ancient Rome; we are, according to this line of thinking, a once-dynamic world now in decline.

Yikes. This is even worse than the first point.

The third school of thought believes that brave new technology will come but at a price. That price is the elimination of our jobs and the marginalization of mankind. Essentially our technological innovation will pave the pathway to fulfilling the prophesized dystopia we read about in high school required reading.

But friends, fear not; for there is hope, according to Mokyr. From a technological point of view, the rate of change will accelerate – not decline – over the next decades due to the increase in “useful knowledge” and something called “artificial revelation” (observations through instruments that allow us to see things that would otherwise be invisible).

In a nutshell, Mokyr subscribes to the belief that science and technology are equally dependent on each other; that is, technology fills the elemental gaps in our understanding of the world. We are not “hard-wired to see microbes, to watch the moons of Jupiter, to store terabytes of information in our brains…tools and machines we build do this for us.”

The main implication, Mokyr contends, is that there is a positive feedback loop between technology and science, and it’s only getting stronger. Which means that science will “expand at ever faster rates” and that technology itself will likely do the same. For Mokyr, it is “hard to see this dynamic system ever settling down on an equilibrium.”

That’s great news, America. But it’s only part of the reason Mokyr thinks the best is yet to come.

Mokyr’s “techno-optimism” is based on the unprecedented access to useful knowledge. The people driving innovation – the inventor, the engineer, the chemist, the physician – need access to best practices and lessons learned about what can and cannot be done. Old school “search engines” included encyclopedias, followed by textbooks with indexes, and then libraries which developed cataloguing systems to make scientific information findable.

Compare these methods to today’s access: By virtue of technological innovations, particularly the World Wide Web, “copying, storing, transmitting, and searching vast amounts of information…is fast, easy, and practically free.” The issue of access is hugely important because, first and foremost, an inventor must be sure he or she is not reinventing the wheel – and thanks to today’s technology, that is an easy question to answer.

Given the rapid development of access to technology and better scientific instruments, it is hard to imagine a world that doesn’t include an ever-accelerating rate of technological progress. Alongside this progress, warns Mokyr, comes “creative destruction” in that what we gain as consumers or citizens, we may actually lose as workers.

The workforce will change, just as it always has. The factory setting is being phased out and replaced by a “work where it suits you” economy. Robotics will be everywhere, including taking jobs previously held by humans, but new technologies will also create demand for workers to perform new tasks created. So not all is lost.

While I’m not in complete agreement with some of Mokyr’s ideas, I do agree with his theory that technology drives science; science drives innovation; and, gosh darnit, the human spirit drives all these things. Innovation has not peaked; it is not to be a relic of the past, and of this I am quite sure.