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Re: How does this era in innovation measure up?
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Walt Mossberg
Uploaded on 11/18/2007

Description: Never have people had so much access to so much information.

Transcript: You know there is a conventional wisdom kind of idea that this is like the greatest period of technological change in history. And certainly by some measures, there have been immense changes that are hard to imagine having been matched in the past. As we said earlier in this interview, I don’t know that there’s been a period of time when people have so rapidly gained access to so much information. But there have been other big eras where technology changed very fast. The beginning of the last century when the automobile, the airplane, the telegraph . . . all these things came along very quickly. The telephone. Even further back in history, various developments in medicine, and sanitation, and other things that really had huge outcomes in the way people lived and worked. And what gets me up every morning is that I am living in one of those periods, even if it’s not . . . It doesn’t matter to me that it’s the biggest or the fastest or whatever. It’s one of those periods of amazing technological change.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

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Re: How does this era in innovation measure up?
Craig Scott Murray

In previous eras, innovations came rarely, but when they did, they were big.  The ability to create fire, the wheel, melting bronze... those innovations were massive and they changes things in ways we, in the modern era, have trouble imagining.

 But in this era, changes come constantly.  And each change is very small.  There are 1,000,000 innovation-based changes happening right now!  And the weight of those 1,000,000 innovations a second is a much bigger deal than anything that has happened preivously.

Remember that the last 100 years is the first time in the history of the earth, that life on earth has the ability to destroy all life on earth.  That's a new innovation, and it's a pretty big deal if you ask me. 

 But a nuclear weapon is not 1 innovation.  It lives on the backs of all the innovations that came before it (fire, the wheel, bronze).  So in a way, innovation is a cumulative experience.  And in that way, the question itself starts to lose meaning.  The innovations of this era are just the next set of innovations in the discorvey of Life the Universe and Everything.

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