Morgan Housel is very optimistic about the future for what strikes me as a rather perverse reason: necessity is the mother of invention. He thinks the present panic will give rise to splendid innovations:
But think of what’s happening in biotech right now. Many have pessimistically noted that the fastest a vaccine has ever been created is four years. But we’ve also never had a new virus genome sequenced and published online within days of discovering it, like we did with Covid-19. We’ve never built seven vaccine manufacturing plants when we know six of them won’t be needed, because we want to make sure one of them can be operational as soon as possible for whatever kind of vaccine we happen to discover. We’ve never had so many biotech companies drop everything to find a solution to one virus. It’s as close to a Manhattan Project as we’ve seen since the 1940s.
And what could come from that besides a Covid vaccine?
New medical discoveries? New manufacturing and distribution methods? Newfound respect for science and medicine?
I don’t want to be a crêpe hanger but I think he’s misinterpreting recent events. A half century of enormous subsidization of health care has resulted in a lot of capacity in biotechnology. We’d have even more if we hadn’t been outsourcing our productive capacity to China for the last three decades.
The great technological developments of the 19th and early 20th century happened because there was space in which they could happen. That space doesn’t exist any more either in knowledge or in industry. We’ve picked the low-hanging fruit. Basic innovations were happening regularly a century ago. But those days have been gone for decades. What look like innovations today are actually just elaborations on old technology made possible by cheaper hardware. But Moore’s Law has run out of steam. The elaborations powered by cheap hardware will become much fewer and farther between.
AT&T, General Electric, Ford, General Motors. U. S. Steel, and the other massive industrial companies grew in the empty economic space of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. That space has long been filled. We aren’t seeing small companies sprout up to make use of the opportunities (such as they are) provided by COVID-19. We’re seeing the existing giants stepping up to fill the new needs.
I don’t know what the future will bring. But I don’t believe we’re on the cusp of a technological or economic renaissance.
I’m skeptical too.
The social upheaval and late 1960’s epidemic didn’t make the 70’s a decade to remember.
Oil embargo, stagflation, malaise, and the worst of them all: disco.
And don’t get me started on dashikis, Nehru jackets, and hot pants. Or, later on, leisure suits.
In contrast my mode of dress is essentially the same as it was 60 years ago. A bit more casual with the times. But classics are classics. I’m never in fashion but I’m never out of fashion, either. I have never owned a leisure suit. I will never own a leisure suit.
There is innovation and new ideas coming along.
The pandemic has sped up adoption of virtual meetings, online delivery, telemedicine and associated logistics by a decade or more.
Even in culture; the shutdown in sports and movies has led to adoption of streaming and e-sports.
Lot’s of expectations surrounding 5G, with my limited understanding it is primarily an explosive increase of available bandwidth and so far, fairly pedestrian ideas about how to use it. Set your thermostat from anywhere on earth, keep tabs on your refrigerator settings, start the coffee, check your pulse.
It may turn out to be more useful in totalitarian China than in this country.
The biggest thing I’ve noticed is how the speed of information distribution has increased in my lifetime by several orders of magnitude. This has had both good and bad effects, since our ability to absorb and comprehend the data hasn’t changed. But we went from a still operational telegraph system to Zoom conferences in sixty years. The young people can’t comprehend what the speed of information was like in the olden days, much less what life was like.
Medical treatment has also experienced incredible leaps during my lifetime. Heart surgery has gone from being only practiced on billionaires to something approaching outpatient work. Chronic diseases went from death sentences to manageable illnesses, HIV and some cancers being among them. These are but a few of many changes for the better.
Agriculture. We went from Ehrlich’s pronouncements that hundreds of millions would die from famine in the 1970’s to having the lowest percentage of hungry people the world has ever seen. And on less ground. New breeding techniques, new crops, better use of technology. Incremental improvements mostly, but it all adds up.
A lot of innovations have crept into daily life unnoticed, and it takes some doing to stand back and look at what happened to really appreciate them.
The one thing that has NOT improved over the years is understanding how human societies work (or don’t work). In fact IMO we have gone backwards. The richer we have become, the more ignorant (or willfully ignorant) our rulers have become, promoting crackpot and/or confiscatory policies purportedly designed to ‘fix’ problems but instead exacerbating them while enriching the promoters. And then they call us bigoted when it’s pointed out that they’re unfair or damaging.
I think we understand just fine. The problem is that many people just don’t like how they work or don’t work.
Oddly, to me it looks as though the spread of information had actually started to decline (signal to noise). Maybe it seems that way to me because I have been exposed to large company-wide networks for 35 years—when the Internet was still largely something connecting universities and government sites. And, yes, I have used archie, jughead, and veronica.
Tars, yet another thought-provoking commentary. I was especially on board with your last paragraph.
Only one addition I might make is how difficult it is to offer predictions about a future in which we have no crystal ball road map. New innovations are often just a lucky sleigh of hand, rather than designed by a “plan.†Men/women, armed with curious, intrepid open minds, are capable of accomplishing almost magical feats. I also believe the future, under discussion, will be wedded to outer space exploration, settlements, new technology and ways to communicate, mind-blowing advancements in medical treatments, etc. A brave new world future is probably on the way!
About the only major innovation I see is a shift to additional monthly fees to unlock the the advanced features (e.g. a never burn setting) of your IOT toaster, esoteric financial investments that no one really understands and other ways to nickle and dime everybody.
A revolution in robotics.
Self driving trucks and delivery vehicles. No touch robotic food preparation. Automated no contact medical examination and treatment. A shift to online higher education. Remote no contact policing and video investigation. A cashless economy that will make it very difficult to live off the cuff, or by criminal activity. Apps for contact tracing will find other uses and become as hard to avoid as the phones themselves.