Enjoy those gadgets while you still can

Did you get a new gadget for Christmas? Chances are you’re curled up with the turkey leftovers enjoying your Airpods Pro while the kids are outside terrorising the neighbourhood on their electric skateboards. Or maybe you’re gaming with those new augmented reality goggles while telling Alexa to dim the lights thanks to your smart electric plugs.

We like to think we live in an age of unprecedented technological innovation and variety. The consumer tech revolution is just the tip of the iceberg; the processing of data and information has been transforming business and finance for decades in ways we don’t always see but surely feel.

Along with the prosperity and the promise comes the peril. Automation and robotics have been eliminating millions of traditional jobs. The new technologies are likely to make hundreds of millions redundant, evoking fears for the future of work and income security.

And yet, dream or dystopia, our assumptions about the unrelenting pace of innovation might be seriously misplaced. In fact, one of the most striking features of the decade about to end is the relative dearth of innovation.

Of course the 2010s have produced astonishing advances in technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality and facial recognition. Biomedical research and development is improving the detection and treatment of disease. Green technology is advancing rapidly, offering the hope of keeping the lights on even as we reduce carbon emissions. On the consumer level, improved experiences in watching television or listening to music and talk are part of the enhanced enjoyment of everyday life.

But the number of genuinely groundbreaking new products and services has been relatively small in the past 10 years, continuing a trend of innovation slowdown under way for many decades.

Many of the consumer technologies we use today are rooted in innovations that are, in tech years, almost archaic. The smartphone is almost 15 years old. The iphone was launched in 2007 and is fundamentally unchanged. Neither of Apple’s genuinely new products of the past decade, the ipad and the Apple watch, represents a leap in tech evolution.

There have, of course, been some new devices introduced in the past 10 years that have improved our lives or saved some of our labour: voiceactivated home assistants, ubiquitous wireless products, new bells and whistles to enhance our driving experience or improve its safety. But none competes with the smartphone for impact and in most cases they represent discrete advances rather than revolutionary leaps.

For all the resources spent on finance, innovation in that field has also been slow. It’s true that payment systems have become more efficient and the growth of cryptocurrencies and blockchain has accelerated but these are, in scientific terms, relatively old technologies.

One indication that innovation is getting scarcer is the stock market and the largest companies listed on it. Most of the corporations and the technology that helped put them there arrived in earlier decades: Facebook in the 2000s, Google and Amazon in the 1990s, Microsoft and Apple before that.

Some recent economic research has documented just how much the progress has slowed. Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University led a team investigating data on research and development activity. They found that the productivity of science and discovery has been falling for decades.

One aspect of this phenomenon is that it appears to take many more researchers and scientists to produce the same amount of productivity gains as it did in the last century. More than 20 times as many Americans are engaged in R&D today as there were in the 1930s but their average productivity has declined by a factor of 40.

Ideas are getting harder to find as the low-hanging fruit that comes with waves of industrial revolutions has already been picked. ‘‘The US must double the amount of research effort every 13 years to offset the increased difficulty of finding new ideas,’’ Bloom and his colleagues write.

As we ponder the fruits of our modern technological revolution we might be inclined to think that declining innovation is not such a bad thing.

The damage wrought by social media, concerns about the exploitation of privacy, mental health issues associated with device addiction and the sheer dominance of technology companies in our lives have turned the Googles and Facebooks of the world into latter-day tech tyrants. And yet without sustained innovative development, the resources we need to continue advancing prosperity, health and welfare won’t be available.

In the meantime, enjoy those gadgets this Christmas. You might not be getting much that’s new in future years. – The Times