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How do you know when you hit the peak, though? I remember thinking we'd hit peak mobile phone with Nokia and Motorola putting out slightly-smaller devices each

How do you know when you hit the peak, though? I remember thinking we'd hit peak mobile phone with Nokia and Motorola putting out slightly-smaller devices each year. Then the iPhone came along.

maxxxxx 9y ago
There often is no peak, just plateaus from which to get to the next plateau gets often more and more difficult.
dredmorbius 9y ago
Much depends on the specific domain and application. Areas in which there is physical transformation, movement, or transfer tend to hit theoretical limits far more rapidly than in informational contexts. But if you look at information, the end-results enabled by information tend to plateau fairly quickly. A few examples come to mind. There is the field of prime movers and combustion engines. Efficiencies are set by the Carnot and Rankine cycles, and are constrained by the hot/cold side ratios. For most fuel-based engines, the maximum attainable efficiency is on the order of 50%, and in practice, an ICE (Otto-cycle, Diesel, or turbine engine) tends to hit about 30% efficiency in actually use. (Ironically, it's coal-fired power plants, with predictable power curves and high furnace temps, which reach some of the highest Carnot efficiencies, though marine powerplants, often two-cycle Diesel engines, come quite close.) You're simply not going to get better. Even electric motors where they rely on thermal electricity generation are faced with similar limitations, despite the electric motor's ~85% - 95% efficiency in converting electricity to motive force. It's the decoupling of motive force from energy origin which is a primary advantage. If you look at the field of lighting, changes in fundamental techniques have resulted in a tremendous increase in lumens per unit of input energy. Open fires, torches, and oil lamps relied on blackbody emissions (mostly from soot in the flame and air) for light, as did incandescent electric lamps, through from a heated filament. Fluorescent bulbs rely on specific chemical properties and emission, and LEDs on quantum effects. It's hard to imagine much of an increase beyond this, though there might be possible avenues. If you look at automobiles and aircraft, initial innovation as measured by patent filings peaked in the 1920s, only a couple of decades after initial mass-market offerings. Much of what followed were changes in fuels (from NGLs to petrol/gasoline, the disaster that was leaded fuel), standardisation (placement of controls, signalling lights, wipers, components), safety, handling and controls, emissions controls, and other dialing in of performance, reliability, etc. Rober J. Gordon in The Rise and Fall of American Growth makes the case that the DC-3, still in active commercial use was the pinnacle of aircraft perfection, attained in 1937, only 24 years after the Wright's first powered flight. Principle changes have been jet aircraft (after 1945), the jet widebody (707, 1958), and in the past decade or so, materials developments finally moving on, slightly, from the airframe designs of the 1950s. Consider that the U.S. heavy bomber fleet of B-52 aircraft will be flying not only the same design as first flew in 1952, but the same aircraft, last manufactured in 1962, through at least 2040, some 88 years after first manufacture, and meaning that the aircraft will be at least 78 years old. There's some room for improvement of the aircraft, but often the benefits simply aren't worth the price. That was the case for an engine retrofit programme explored in the 1970s, which determined that the fuel savings would not be cost-effective. (It's possible that subsequent petroleum economics have invalidated that assessment, though I'm not sure.) There's also a role played by materials and the properties they provide: organics, stone, ceramics, metals, fibres, synthetics, composites, and more. There is an opportunity frontier of properties, side effects to consider, abundance and cost, and generally constraints on what can be provided. You'll see this in vehicles (engines, frames), devices, energy storage (especially batteries), fabrics and clothing (much of the "look" of 20th century decades is dependent on what new fabrics became available), etc. In the information field, you have a fundamentally different dynamic in that capabilities scale superlinearly with chip density. That is, as you pack components ever close, the cost (and energy) fall by factors of two, about every 18 - 24 months according to Moore's Law. What ends up happening is that whilst, yes, former levels of capability are now exceedingly cheap to provide, additional, previously unattainable levels of capability are also possible. So that where Nokai had perfected the "deliver voice and SMS in my pocket" capability, the iPhone and Android upped the ante with music, Web, email, expanded messaging capabilities, and apps. And surveillance, privacy invasion, attention erosion, exploding batteries, and other negative affordances. There's a curious point that in technology the market seems to be far less about "how much would you pay for X" and far more about "How much X can you give me for Y dollars?". That is, price points seem fairly constant whilst capabilities expand. It suggests we have a budget for capabilities, and that manufacturers aren't interested in investing in providing abundant, but low-priced devices (at least not in advanced markets). Summary: If it moves, delivers material or energy, or otherwise interacts with its environment, expect a fairly early plateau. If the device is informational you can see much longer periods of evolution, but also some constancy to other elements of the technology, particularly around cost. The Jevons Paradox means that as costs of providing capabilities falls, induced demand increases (especially in transport, comms, information, data). (A Gresham's Law dynamic also means that simpler / more common uses dominate as markets grow.) Physical limits still constrain, but may be expressed in unintuitive ways.

How do you know when you hit the peak, though? I remember thinking we'd hit peak mobile phone with Nokia and Motorola putting out slightly-smaller devices each year. Then the iPhone came along.

maxxxxx 9y ago

There often is no peak, just plateaus from which to get to the next plateau gets often more and more difficult.

dredmorbius 9y ago

Much depends on the specific domain and application. Areas in which there is physical transformation, movement, or transfer tend to hit theoretical limits far more rapidly than in informational contexts. But if you look at information, the end-results enabled by information tend to plateau fairly quickly. A few examples come to mind. There is the field of prime movers and combustion engines. Efficiencies are set by the Carnot and Rankine cycles, and are constrained by the hot/cold side ratios. For most fuel-based engines, the maximum attainable efficiency is on the order of 50%, and in practice, an ICE (Otto-cycle, Diesel, or turbine engine) tends to hit about 30% efficiency in actually use. (Ironically, it's coal-fired power plants, with predictable power curves and high furnace temps, which reach some of the highest Carnot efficiencies, though marine powerplants, often two-cycle Diesel engines, come quite close.) You're simply not going to get better. Even electric motors where they rely on thermal electricity generation are faced with similar limitations, despite the electric motor's ~85% - 95% efficiency in converting electricity to motive force. It's the decoupling of motive force from energy origin which is a primary advantage. If you look at the field of lighting, changes in fundamental techniques have resulted in a tremendous increase in lumens per unit of input energy. Open fires, torches, and oil lamps relied on blackbody emissions (mostly from soot in the flame and air) for light, as did incandescent electric lamps, through from a heated filament. Fluorescent bulbs rely on specific chemical properties and emission, and LEDs on quantum effects. It's hard to imagine much of an increase beyond this, though there might be possible avenues. If you look at automobiles and aircraft, initial innovation as measured by patent filings peaked in the 1920s, only a couple of decades after initial mass-market offerings. Much of what followed were changes in fuels (from NGLs to petrol/gasoline, the disaster that was leaded fuel), standardisation (placement of controls, signalling lights, wipers, components), safety, handling and controls, emissions controls, and other dialing in of performance, reliability, etc. Rober J. Gordon in The Rise and Fall of American Growth makes the case that the DC-3, still in active commercial use was the pinnacle of aircraft perfection, attained in 1937, only 24 years after the Wright's first powered flight. Principle changes have been jet aircraft (after 1945), the jet widebody (707, 1958), and in the past decade or so, materials developments finally moving on, slightly, from the airframe designs of the 1950s. Consider that the U.S. heavy bomber fleet of B-52 aircraft will be flying not only the same design as first flew in 1952, but the same aircraft, last manufactured in 1962, through at least 2040, some 88 years after first manufacture, and meaning that the aircraft will be at least 78 years old. There's some room for improvement of the aircraft, but often the benefits simply aren't worth the price. That was the case for an engine retrofit programme explored in the 1970s, which determined that the fuel savings would not be cost-effective. (It's possible that subsequent petroleum economics have invalidated that assessment, though I'm not sure.) There's also a role played by materials and the properties they provide: organics, stone, ceramics, metals, fibres, synthetics, composites, and more. There is an opportunity frontier of properties, side effects to consider, abundance and cost, and generally constraints on what can be provided. You'll see this in vehicles (engines, frames), devices, energy storage (especially batteries), fabrics and clothing (much of the "look" of 20th century decades is dependent on what new fabrics became available), etc. In the information field, you have a fundamentally different dynamic in that capabilities scale superlinearly with chip density. That is, as you pack components ever close, the cost (and energy) fall by factors of two, about every 18 - 24 months according to Moore's Law. What ends up happening is that whilst, yes, former levels of capability are now exceedingly cheap to provide, additional, previously unattainable levels of capability are also possible. So that where Nokai had perfected the "deliver voice and SMS in my pocket" capability, the iPhone and Android upped the ante with music, Web, email, expanded messaging capabilities, and apps. And surveillance, privacy invasion, attention erosion, exploding batteries, and other negative affordances. There's a curious point that in technology the market seems to be far less about "how much would you pay for X" and far more about "How much X can you give me for Y dollars?". That is, price points seem fairly constant whilst capabilities expand. It suggests we have a budget for capabilities, and that manufacturers aren't interested in investing in providing abundant, but low-priced devices (at least not in advanced markets). Summary: If it moves, delivers material or energy, or otherwise interacts with its environment, expect a fairly early plateau. If the device is informational you can see much longer periods of evolution, but also some constancy to other elements of the technology, particularly around cost. The Jevons Paradox means that as costs of providing capabilities falls, induced demand increases (especially in transport, comms, information, data). (A Gresham's Law dynamic also means that simpler / more common uses dominate as markets grow.) Physical limits still constrain, but may be expressed in unintuitive ways.