Can anyone prove/disprove this statement: Any method or process that hasn't been improved in the past 50 years will never be improved. What about if we change the years to 25? 100? 10? I'm interested in the pace and extent of innovation and development of technology. I believe most of the really dramatic innovations occurred in the last 150 years; perhaps even the last 50 years, while innovations prior that were incremental. The theory is: Anything that can be improved has already been improved in the last x years, and anything that has escaped this burst of innovation will never be improved upon. A corollary question is: Has there been anything, in fact, that has escaped improvement? Any thoughts, anyone? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I was a little reticent, but I answered, B, simply because even the most simple machines are improved by the better materials we now have access to. There is an opinion that some people have that we are now in an era of slowed technological/innovative growth. These people will concede that cell phones are smaller and will continue to get smaller, but that overall progress in computers is really just insignificant and incremental. It is true that computer innovation is incremental, but let's not make it a trifling matter. The truth is, computer innovation is happening so quickly and on such a small time scale that we haven't had any time to process what any of the change means. People seem to forget how quickly technological change is actually happening. It's occurring at a blistering rate. It's my guess that we're going to experience more change in the next ten years than most people expect and are ready for. Yes, technology is incremental, but it's also getting closer to us. We're getting more intimate with technology and it will soon become highly integrated with our bodies-likely sometime within the next ten years. It's going to happen before we're even aware of it.
