Doomsayers are doomed to fail about the end of innovation

There has been an interesting if pessimistic international discussion under way over the past few months about whether innovation – and therefore continued economic growth – has run aground. It holds that the rapid growth that followed a series of industrial revolutions, including our current electronics-driven third revolution, is finally coming to an and. Growth will decline and there will be no fourth industrial revolution to rescue us.

The discussion was sparked by a US National Bureau of Economic Research paper, Is US Economic Growth Over? It was written by economist Robert J Gordon from Northwestern University in the US and provides a thoroughly negative view of our collective economic futures.

He argues that innovation has run into the sand, that there hasn’t been any really new and groundbreaking innovation for the past few decades and so the associated economic growth will relentlessly drift slowly down the graph.

He uses a wonderfully understandable analogy to describe the heights of what innovation can deliver . . . the indoor toilet. There is almost nothing to equal the impact of what this simple innovation delivered in terms of human health, along with its associated sewerage systems and the running water that makes it work. He tested its importance in an equally beguiling way, giving people a choice between two options.

You can either have an old tech computer from a decade ago along with the rudimentary internet of the time, plus indoor plumbing and a toilet in the house, or you can have the latest computer with wireless access and the fastest of internet services to support social media, but no indoor plumbing and only an outdoor loo. No prizes for guessing which option won. The thought of outdoor visits on a frosty morning takes the gloss off fast wifi.

End of the line

The future of innovation as predicted by Gordon is a deadly serious matter, assuming his prognosis is correct. His view holds we have hit the end of the line with innovation, there will be no more game changing developments like the steam engine or the introduction of electricity. As a result, year-on-year growth over the coming decades won’t pass half a per cent a year, suggesting “the rapid progress made over the past 250 years could well turn out to be a unique episode in human history”, he writes.

I can’t comment on his growth calculations but as someone who reports on the conduct and progress of scientific research, then the notion that we have run out of groundbreaking innovation is anathema. The next life-altering innovation may already be here but we have yet to learn about it.

Take electricity as an example. Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus tinkered with it in 600 BC and Benjamin Franklin spent a fortune in the 1700s to study it. Michael Faraday developed electromagnetic induction in 1831 as a way to generate electricity but it would take another half a century before it began to come into use in London as a source of light. None of the earlier experimenters could have known how electricity would eventually be used. It is also probably safe to assume a scientist or inventor somewhere around the world could already have discovered the next big thing that will become important when its time comes.

Game changers

Any technology that can deliver large amounts of clean, cheap, reliable energy without pollution would certainly be a game changer and trigger economic growth arising from a fourth industrial revolution. Discoveries in the medical field could also launch a kind of revolution, prolonging life and overcoming formerly intractable diseases. But applying Gordon’s logic it is also easy to see how extending life could be as much a problem in economic terms as a benefit for the person who gets to live longer than they might have. This kind of change does not support growth unless it comes in the form of a pill that half the world must take to stay healthy. In that case it would be transformational innovation capable of driving growth.

As to running out of ideas, that is an old idea already discarded. David Lindley tried it in 1994 with his book, The End of Physics: The Myth of a Unified Theory, which attacks the theory of everything sought by particle physicists. The last piece to this theory was likely discovered at the Cern research centre last year. We await final confirmation of the missing Higgs boson in 2013, but there is a great deal more to come from physics.

Then there was The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age by John Horgan, published in 1997. If we had hit a wall then the 15 years or so since should have provided plenty of time for all the scientists to go away. For some reason they haven’t, probably because they haven’t run out of reasonable questions in science that still need to be answered.