(a bit from my book)
After almost a century of research into the nature electricity, the 1870s would be the decade when the cluster of innovations that made the new electricity infrastructure emerged -- alternators, dynamos, generators, transformers, switch gear, and power distribution systems.
As broad implementation plans were being planned in the 1870s, smaller scale electrification projects began to slowly revolutionize industry after industry. Low cost, high quality steel was one of the first products cheap electricity made possible. Radical process innovations such as Bessemer and Siemens steel processes used inexpensive electricity to manufacture low cost steel on a mass scale.
Steel and electricity changed society, reshaping how humans lived in close urban quarters. Until the 1880s few buildings were ever built more than five stories tall, but with the emergence of abundant and strong steel, skyscrapers were born. In 1883 the first building to employ steel skeleton construction was Home Insurance Building in Chicago, reaching an amazing 25 stories. The subsequent erection in Chicago of a number of similar buildings made it the center of the early skyscraper architecture. By 1913, New York began to edge out Chicago in the race for dominance with the construction of the Woolworth Building that reached an incredible 60 stories.
It wasn’t just steel frame construction that made skyscrapers possible. The “electric lift”, invented in 1886, was also needed to replace hydraulic lifts that could not go higher than five stories. At the same time, the telephone supported the skyscraper economy by making it possible for people to communicate among the new high rises. From 1890 to 1900, the number of telephones in use surged in the United States from 200,000 to over 1.5 million, most of which were deployed in newly constructed skyscrapers.
As cities built upwards, they also extended downwards. Taking advantage of the growing electrical network, urban electric railroads and underground railroads emerged. From 1887 to 1900, London built a massive urban underground electric railway system whose highly engineered cars were built from inexpensive steel and moved through concrete ‘tubes.’ Across the Atlantic, the United States also leveraged the developing electricity infrastructure. Over a fifteen-year period from 1890 to 1905, city transit lines powered by electricity grew from 15 percent to over 90 percent.
With the invention of the electric light bulb in 1878 and further refinements including the carbon filament lamp, electric power stations found entirely new markets in public and domestic household illumination, replacing toxic and inefficient the gas lanterns that had to be constantly refilled. The diffusion of electric lighting across cities and towns for use in stadiums, factories, offices, and along walkways forever changed public and private lives.
Before I take a few weeks to focus on my book, I'm posting a paper I wrote that was recently accepted by the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. I, like James Canton's paper on human performance enhancement, wrote the piece as part of the NBIC conference which I blogged extensively. It is a short two-page paper that sits at the core of my book and the Brain Waves blog.
The nascent neurotechnology wave (2010-2060) is being accelerated by the development of biochips and brain imaging technologies that make biological analysis inexpensive and pervasive. Biochips that can perform the basic bio-analysis functions (genomic, proteomic, biosimulation, and microfluidics) at a low cost will transform biological analysis and production in a very similar fashion as the microprocessor did for data. Nano-imaging techniques will also play a vital role in making the analysis of neuro-molecular level events possible. When data from advanced biochips and brain imaging are combined they will accelerate the development of neurotechnology, the set of tools that can influence the human central nervous system, especially the brain. Neurotechnology will be used for therapeutic ends and to enhance human emotional, cognitive and sensory system performance. (check out the rest in the PDF)
I'll be discussing the topic in more detail at the Bay Area Futurist Salon on August 15th. Until then, enjoy the upcoming guest bloggers.
May's Harvard Business Review article, "IT Doesn't Matter," argues that information technology is inevitably headed in the same direction as the railroads, the telegraph, electricity and the internal combustion engine. From a long-term standpoint (10-25 years) I tend to agree, but at its core this article's argument is too simplistic to be useful in the near-term.
Most importantly there is no mention of what form competitive advantage might take next, a discussion that is a primary focus of my forthcoming book, Brain Wave.
"All of these industrial technologies aged from their boom-time youth to become, in economic terms, ordinary factors of production, or "commodity inputs," the article noted. "From a strategic standpoint, they became invisible; they no longer mattered," wrote Nicholas G. Carr, editor at large of The Harvard Business Review. "That is exactly what is happening to information technology today."
IT will always matter, just as the wheel, railroads and electricity remain critical infrastructures underpinning the functioning of today's global economy. When a train brakes down it shuts down just-in-time supply chains. When a black out occurs entire cities stop dead in their tracks.
In fact, slight gradations in infrastructure stability will continue to drive the regional comparative advantage that companies rely on to stay on the cutting edge of competitive advantage. Just look at Singapore's meteoric rise over the past two decades and the competitive advantage companies accrued as a result of its heavy IT investment.
Using the history of techno-economic waves as his guide, Economist Brain Arthur suggests that the next 10-15 years will in fact witness a massive built out of the global IT infrastructure, albeit as Brad Delong notes, at lower profit margins. During this time new forms of IT competitive advantage will continue to emerge as IT adapts to humans rather than us having to adapt to it.
For instance, For example, decreasing innovation cycle times in the pharmaceutical industry by 10% could slash years off product research, development and approval processes. When translated into revenue and market capitalization impacts, intelligent adoption of social software could significantly disrupt the balance of power in this multi-billion dollar industry. Who says IT competitive advantage is dead? More importantly, increasing IT efficiency remains critically important if the supporting infrastructure for the next form of competitive advantage is to arise. As Charles Delisi mentioned at a Santa Fe Institute meeting, "there is no way the past ten years of advances in genomics would have been possible without the computational capabilities brought forth by the microchip." Imagine if electricity efficiency remained at 1920's levels, would microchips; cell phones or the Internet even be possible? Just as electricity efficiency still matters, so too will IT for some time to come. So the real question still remains...what will be the next form of competitive advantage? Stay tuned.
Bill McKibben's brave new book, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age explores (excerpt) how human genetic technologies will soon give scientists the ability to re-engineer our children, undermining our common humanity, and leading to a 'posthuman' future.
The human germ-line engineering debate continues to capture the popular imagination, sitting at the core of bioethics debates, while neurotechnology quickly slips into existence.
It is my firm belief that neurotechnology's ability to provide tools that can temporarily influence human emotional, cognitive and sensory states via neuroceuticals will have more profound implications for humanity, in a much nearer time frame, than genetic engineering for several reasons:
Humans will perform germ-line engineering on other organisms on vast scale, but human germ-line engineering won't become widely accepted until significant experimentation with less permanent tools helps people learn exactly what traits they would want their progeny to exhibit.
Moreover, as neurotechnology becomes more precise and flexible, it may indeed turn out that humans will choose neurotechnology over genetic engineering to enhance themselves and their offspring. Instead of debating the bioethics of germ-line engineering, we really should be focusing on the neuroethics of neurotechnology.
By viewing history as a series of techno-economic waves with accompanying socio-political responses it is possible to begin to understand how new technologies impact society.
Techno-economic waves are driven by the development of a new low-cost input like the microchip. A single new low cost product with a continuously declining price and wide availability can ignite entirely new industries, solving what previously were believed to be intractable problems. Moreover, the new technological systems built upon the new inputs shift competitive behavior across the economy, as older sectors reinterpret how they create value.
New low cost inputs become driving sectors in their own right (e.g. canals, coal, electricity, oil, microchips). When combined with complementary technologies, each new low cost input also stimulates the development of new sectors (e.g. cotton textiles, railroads, electric products, automobiles, computers). Technological waves, because they embody a major jump up in productivity, open up an unusually wide range of investment and profit opportunities, leading to sustained rates of economic growth.
So how might neurotechnology fit in this picture?
Neurotechnology is the set of tools that influence the human central nervous system, especially the brain, to achieve a desired effect. The Economist defines neurotechnology as any "technology that makes it possible to manipulate the brain."
Instruments and techniques that are used to in developing neurotechnology include -- brain imaging systems (fMRI, PET, EEG), biochips (DNA microarrays, protein chips, RNA chips), genetic engineering techniques, cellular implantation, electronic stimulation
Products of neurotechnology include -- pharmaceuticals (psychopharmaceuticals), psychological conditioning, neurofeedback, magnetic stimulation
Technological trends making neurotechnology possible -- nanotechnology, information technology, biotechnology, neuroscience