It is interesting to look at one case where the techno-optimists are right and the stagnationists have explaining to do: the pace of software deployment remains high, and the pace of software advancement appears to be accelerating as products like AlphaFold and GPT-3 let computers do things that previously seemed either a) only possible with human input, or b) not possible at all… But some are still excited about software! Hobart is one of these: Many of the new techno-optimists are excited about biotechnologies or the return of energy technology. This year’s darkness may in fact mean that dawn is just over the horizon.Īlan Ohnsman: “Peter Thiel Says Covid Marks 21st Century’s True Start. He raw materials for a new productivity boom appear to be falling into place, in a way not seen for at least two decades. He boost to distance education and telemedicine delivered by the pandemic could help drive a period of growth in services trade, and the achievement of economies of scale in sectors which have long proved resistant to productivity-boosting measures… A survey of global firms conducted by the World Economic Forum this year found that more than 80% of employers intend to accelerate plans to digitise their processes and provide more opportunities for remote work, while 50% plan to accelerate automation of production tasks… Once they do, it’s off to the races, and productivity bounces back.Įarly evidence suggests that some transformations are very likely to stick, and that the pandemic quickened the pace of technology adoption.
#Techno optimism how to
initially cause a productivity slowdown, because people are taking time out from production to figure out how to use the new stuff. That paper argues that big inventions with wide-ranging applications - electricity, the internal combustion engine, computers, the internet, and maybe A.I. They cite Erik Brynjolfsson, Daniel Rock & Chad Syverson’s paper “The productivity J-curve: How intangibles complement general purpose technologies”. The Economist suggests - reasonably, in my opinion - that the technologies that boost productivity in the 2020s had their roots in earlier decades of research, and that it simply takes a long time for people to figure out how to use new inventions.
The Economist: “The pandemic could give way to an era of rapid productivity growth” The assurance that a market exists is a big stimulus to private investment, and when strong social consensus exists that innovation would be beneficial, we can get it done. Nuclear micro-reactors for use on military bases or as backup systems for hospitals. Or pre-commit to buying electric buses for schools and transit agencies. Say an electric car that meets such-and-such specifications would get guaranteed orders to serve as government fleet vehicles. a proof of concept for the kind of thing we could be doing in the clean energy space. Two decades’ worth of internet and mobile tech has proven its value, and more good things are to come if this period of experimentation ends up helping to accelerate the development of widely used remote work, telemedicine, and online education models… I think it’s clear that if we had to weather this pandemic with the tech of 20 years ago, we’d have had worse public health outcomes and worse economic outcomes. It was an inspiring moment.Īnd like many of us, Yglesias was inspired to think about more than just vaccines. Other positive trends like solar and batteries had been going on for years, but the big push of the vaccine effort - the unprecedented speed and effectiveness, the public-private cooperation, the use of a novel technology (mRNA vaccines) to beat a novel pandemic. I’m pretty sure that it was the COVID vaccine that got us all thinking along techno-optimist lines.
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