More on the slowdown in science and technology

The number of transistors you can pack onto a chip has been roughly doubling every two years, and that was coined as Moore’s Law and has held constant for 50 years, but we’ve been pouring more scientists into that. The estimates from the 1970s is that we have 18x more scientists being put into that just to hold it constant. In that sense, if you’re putting in a lot more scientists to generate the same increase in compute power you’d say that progress is slowing down. Now, obviously each field is slowing down, but the question is, are there enough new fields coming into being that can offset that. It appears that since the 1950s in the US, the answer is no. There are new fields coming on board but not fast enough to offset the decline.

That was Nicholas Bloom on Conversations with Tyler. Tyler and Nicholas discussed whether the decline in the share of public funding to total R&D contributed to the slowdown of progress because government tends to fund more open-ended research than the private sector, which focuses on development. I don’t know if I agree. Government program formulation and proposal evaluation requires a process of articulation and prediction that doesn’t do well for creating new fields of technology.

Here’s another interesting part:

… A second story I’ve heard is, research is getting more complicated. I remember I sat down with a former CEO of SRI, Stanford Research Institute, which is a big research lab out here that’s done many things. For example, Siri came out of SRI. He said, “Increasingly it’s interdisciplinary teams now.” It used to be you’d have one or two scientists could come up with great ideas. Now, you’re having to combine a couple. I can’t remember if he said for Siri, but he said there are three or four different research groups in SRI that were being pulled together to do that. That of course makes it more expensive.

I don’t think this is too much different than what existed in the 1960s. As Elting Morison wrote in Men, Machines, and Modern Times (1966):

We have pretty well left the point where the most interesting work can be done by single men working all alone… which is one way of saying that the virtuosity of the inventor has on the whole given way to systematic research and development.