Jonathan Huebner

Jonathan Huebner is a physicist working at the Pentagon's Naval Air Warfare Center, in China Lake, California.

Views on innovation

He argues on the basis of both U.S. patents and world technological breakthroughs, per population, that the rate of human technological innovation peaked in 1873 and has been slowing ever since. According to his projections we are heading towards a "new Dark Age" of very low innovation rates by sometime around 2024.

There have been several different responses to his claim:

• Because his calculations are based on "innovations per person", population growth could offset the decline in per capita innovation, preventing such a collapse. Some argue that even the current global population is not sustainable.
• He does not take into account the innovation happening in the combining and refining of technologies already discovered. A slowing of innovation rates by 2024, if it happens, will offer us the ability to explore the full range of the incremental applications and combinations of our technological innovations to give us greater capabilities, which Huebner's definition excludes.
• Ray Kurzweil criticizes Huebner's methodology, pointing to the arbitrary selection of innovations.
• Kurzweil also claims that the phrase "new Dark Age" is misleading, since Huebner has not ruled out such a technologically-stalled "Dark Age" being also a "New Renaissance" in which creativity flourishes as people move their skills to other areas of human culture such as the arts and cultural creativity.
• Joel Mokyr argues that the relatively free market in knowledge assures that humanity will still be able to quickly develop new innovations for new problems, even if Huebner's 2024 prediction comes true.
• Mokyr also points to the reform of large institutions and organisational approaches as being just as much a contribution to human progress as technological innovation.
• Even if human-powered innovation declines, it may be sufficient to reach the Singularity threshold, after which models based on human behavior by definition do not apply.

References

• Huebner, Jonathon (2005) A Possible Declining Trend for Worldwide Innovation, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, October 2005, pp980–6 (followed by 12 pages of discussion and response - journal not available online without a password)
• Adler, Robert, (2005) "Are we on our way back to the Dark Ages?" New Scientist (no.2506 2 July 2005 pp. 26–27) web page

External links

• "A Possible Declining Trend for Worldwide Innovation" Jonathan Huebner's paper
• Review of "A Possible Declining Trend for Worldwide Innovation" John Smart's critique of Huebner's paper