The Nature and Acceleration of Technology Waves and Proliferation

Key Insight

Technology inherently follows a trajectory of mass diffusion, manifesting in 'great roiling waves' where scientific discoveries are applied to create cheaper food, better goods, and more efficient transport, driving demand, competition, and continuous improvement. This process, characterized by falling costs and rising capabilities, represents the 'inescapable evolutionary nature' of technology, which grows, improves, and adapts over time. At the core of human history are these waves, defined as sets of technologies converging, powered by one or more 'general-purpose technologies' (GPTs) that enable profound societal shifts and seismic advancements in human capabilities. Early examples of proto-GPTs include stone tools, which date back three million years and allowed for efficient killing, butchering, and later enabled sewing, painting, carving, and cooking, and fire, wielded by Homo erectus, which provided light, warmth, safety, influenced evolution by cooking food to enlarge the brain, and established community hubs.

Human history can be traced through these symbiotic technology waves, illustrating how our species, inherently technological, evolved in conjunction with the tools we create, becoming, for better or worse, the planet's dominant force. General-purpose technologies, once pervasive, often become invisible and taken for granted, as seen with early waves such as language, agriculture, and writing, which formed the foundation of civilization. Historically, only about 24 GPTs have emerged, including farming, the factory system, materials like iron and bronze, printing presses, electricity, and the internet, fundamentally altering eras and linking population size with innovation levels. The Agricultural Revolution (9000 to 7500 BCE), a significant wave driven by the domestication of plants and animals and new tools like hoes and plows, fostered a four-hundred-fold global population increase from 2.4 million to nearly 1 billion by the Industrial Revolution, demonstrating how more tools enable more capabilities and lead to new inventions.

Beginning around the 1770s, the Industrial Revolution accelerated this dynamic, with the First Wave combining steam power, mechanized looms, the factory system, and canals, followed by the age of railways, telegraphs, steamships, steel, and machine tools in the 1840s. The Second Industrial Revolution emerged just decades later, featuring the internal combustion engine, chemical engineering, powered flight, and electricity, illustrating how immense change began to be measured in decades rather than centuries or millennia. This proliferation is not orderly but erratically intersects and intensifies, with the number of GPTs accelerating from seven over 10000 years up to 1000 BCE, to six over two centuries (1700-1900), and then seven in the last century alone. Proliferation, described as technology's historical default, is catalyzed by boundless demand and consequent cost decreases, which in turn drive technologies to become even better and cheaper, forming a continuous chain of insights, breakthroughs, and tools that build and reinforce, with copying and economies of scale further fueling this relentless and accelerating spread.