We wanted flying cars, but all we got was 140 characters. Is
technology accelerating?
If you ask 10 people, probably 9 people will answer - yes, of course it is accelerating!
Today's iPhone is 100 times faster than the first generation ten years ago; 20 years ago, the computer's memory was 128M, and today the most common cheap mobile phone has at least 2G of memory...
However, this answer is not accurate !
progress is actually just an illusion . The rapid progress of technology is limited to the IT and Internet fields. In other words, these advances belong to the progress of the bit world; and in addition to the bit world, our lives also have an atomic world that is closely related to everyone. , observers have discovered that the irrefutable reality is that the
atomic world is, quite literally, standing still.
- There is no essential difference between our cars and the cars of decades ago;
- Our current mainstream aircraft, the Boeing 747, was invented in 1965;
- After 1972, we have never been to the moon again, and we have never been able to build another A rocket like the Saturn 5.
- Our kitchens are almost the same as they were 30 or 50 years ago;
- We still haven’t conquered AIDS, cancer, colds, oh, and rhinitis (it’s time for me to get sprayed);
- Oil prices are still $62 a barrel , the new energy revolution is just a bubble;
- The widespread application of nanomaterials is still a thing of the past, and plastics are still polluting our planet...
Today's young people will be excited and cheering for the dazzling new consumer electronics products every year, and they will I lament the rapid development of the Internet and mobile Internet.
However, the real prosperity of the world is not today, but the 19th and 20th centuries. We invented steam engines, trains, airplanes, automobiles, electric lights, telephones, televisions, refrigerators, atomic bombs, periodic tables of elements, vaccines, penicillin, Condoms...
It is those overwhelming great inventions that have truly changed the overall outlook of mankind and almost define our entire modern life today.
However, today, our atomic world has stagnated, and progress is limited to the bit world of information technology . As Peter Thiel, the author of "From 0 to 1" said - "We want flying cars, but we All you get is 140 characters".
Economic data may illustrate another problem. According to World Bank statistics, if 10 is used as a dimension for statistics, the world's GDP growth rate has been declining since the 1960s.
The growth rate in the 160s was 5.32%. In the 1970s, it was 3.77%, in the 1980s, it was 3.16%, in the 1990s, it was 2.81%, in the 2000s, it was 2.59%, and in the 10s, it was 2.45%. Unfortunately, the computers and the Internet, which our generation is proud of, have not grown as GDP has grown. The contribution is far from being as great as imagined.
The above facts may not be consistent with what we usually think, so they also lead us to think about three important questions:
- First, what is the essential reason for the silence and stagnation of the atomic world that has lasted for more than half a century?
- Second, why do we think that the contribution of computers and the Internet, which have had a revolutionary impact on mankind, to GDP is insignificant?
- Third, will the acceleration of technology after mankind still only occur in the world of bits rather than the world of atoms?
Let’s have an in-depth chat with you about these three issues today -
1. What is the reason for the silence and stagnation of the atomic world that has lasted for more than half a century?
Why did the atomic world stand still? There are many explanations for this problem, the first of which is - the war is over!
Indeed, while the war brings pain to mankind, it also objectively promotes the rapid advancement of technology.
War has extremely huge mobilization capabilities, which is reflected in the huge liberation of productivity. During World War II, the United States produced 262,524 aircraft and 82,514 tanks. Such huge production needs cannot be achieved in peacetime. It is possible to obtain, which also laid the foundation of American industrial industry in a sense. Of course, the war not only produced weapons, but also promoted the development of penicillin, medical treatment, and telecommunications industries...
You may say, why did the war end in 1945? After that, will there continue to be breakthroughs in the atomic world?
The reason is Although World War II ended, the world has a new war - the Cold War . The impact of the Cold War on science and technology is also unimaginable in peacetime - the Apollo program concentrated more than 200 universities and more than 80 research institutions in the United States. A total of 300,000 people participated, with a total cost of 25.5 billion US dollars. The entire United States was mobilized. If it hadn't actually happened in the United States, you might have thought that only socialist countries could launch such a huge project.
Another explanation for the stagnation of the atomic world is:
Our attitude towards risk has changed. In peacetime, people themselves become more important, which means that sacrifice does not have meaning, so we pay more attention to life, Soviet style. Rocket experiments that risk life no longer happen;
- The average time for a new drug to be approved for marketing was 8 years in the 1950s and 13 years by the end of the 20th century;
- After the nuclear leakage, we paid more attention to the risks of nuclear energy rather than the benefits. We have begun to be wary of the negative effects of technology - restrictions on artificial intelligence; restrictions on gene editing; restrictions on monopolies; these have indeed limited the progress of the atomic world, and economic growth has also slowed down. Of course, this starts from the perspective of humanism Perspectives are indeed an improvement for all mankind.
The above two explanations are logical, but in my opinion, they are not the whole answer. I propose the third factor, which is the change in corporate orientation. The logic behind this change is -
was invented in computers and the Internet After that, market entities "enterprises" who were born to pursue maximizing profits found an industry that generated profits more efficiently - information technology (you can also add modern finance) , which dwarfed the atomic industry that slowly accumulated wealth.
Why is it easier to accumulate wealth in the bit world than in the atomic world?
is because it has two characteristics: has extremely low copying costs and extremely fast propagation speed.
It only requires sand (silicon) and brains. The growth of the atomic world is linear growth. It requires costs, thus fundamentally limiting the possibility of exponential growth. Due to Moore's theorem, the speed of the bit world is exponential.
The industrial changes in the atomic world are indeed magnificent, but the speed pales in comparison with the information industry in today's bit world:
- A new product went from zero to 50 million people, the radio in the atomic world took 38 years, and the TV took 13 years , while Bit World Internet took 4 years, Weibo took 14 months, WeChat took 10 months, and Douyin took less than 5 months.
- From the establishment of a new company to its listing, it took Ford 37 years in the atomic world, 18 years for Boeing, and 13 years for General Motors. However, it only took 11 years for , Microsoft , and Google in the bit world. After 6 years, Qutoutiao only took 26 months.
The idols of the first half of the 20th century were physicists and inventors, including Einstein, Bell, Edison, and Ford. In the information age, the idols became Bill Gates, Zhao Kerberg and Jack Ma.
There are many talented and ambitious young people in every era. They are eager to prove themselves and change the world. In the past, they devoted themselves to physics, Bell Labs, and NASA; today, they have graduated from Harvard and Stanford. Silicon Valley (and Wall Street).
Because the Bit World can realize their ideal of changing the world faster, and from the perspective of corporate profit-seeking, the Bit World creates wealth much faster than the Atomic World.
Wealth and smart minds will always flow to those industries that grow faster. At this time, the advantages of the bit world over the atomic world are undoubtedly revealed. Some people will say that what you said seems wrong. You see, the main investment is IT and information. The overall scale of industry venture capital investment in the United States and China is only tens of billions of dollars a year. This number is actually very small, and it does not prove that all capital has flowed to the Bit world. However, is this really the case?
This logic ignores the fact that venture capital is only a part of the capital market, as well as private equity funds and the stock market. We can see this trend more clearly just by looking at the list of the world's largest companies by market capitalization today—— Seven out of ten companies belong to Bit World.
In this sense, Musk, who chooses to continue fighting in the atomic world, is indeed rare in this era.
2. Why is the Internet not so obvious in promoting economic growth?
There is no doubt that computers and the Internet are one of the greatest inventions of mankind. They have improved the efficiency of many industries and promoted the progress of civilization. But a strange question is - why does the Internet have a negative impact on GDP growth and other data indicators? The role of the economy is not obvious?
There are many explanations for this problem:
- The first explanation is that the penetration rate of the Internet into the real economy is not enough . For example, the business models of Facebook and Google are advertising. Advertising expenditures in the United States from the 1920s to today account for The proportion of GDP has been hovering between 2% and 3%, which is a small proportion; e-commerce is undoubtedly the Internet that has the greatest impact on the real economy, but the scale of e-commerce transactions in China only accounts for 19.6% of the national retail sales, while in the United States Even smaller is 12%.
- The second explanation is that the role of the Internet is still difficult to reflect in the short term . It takes time for it to work. For example, Gutenberg invented printing. In a sense, it also fundamentally changed the way human information is transmitted, promoting However, in the 15th century, its economic role was not immediately apparent.
However, in my opinion, the above two explanations are not sufficient. The Internet has indeed improved efficiency and transformed many industries, but sometimes this transformation of the Internet cannot be directly reflected in GDP data.
I proposed a model called "book-e-book" to explain why the Internet improves efficiency but is not necessarily directly reflected in economic data . This model simplifies the book market. We assume that the traditional book market is like this -
Each book sells for 10 yuan, and the entire market can sell 10 books per year. At this time, the entire market size is 100 yuan, so how is the GDP of 100 yuan distributed? According to the distribution rules of the book industry - Author Taking away 10% of the royalties is 10 yuan, 20% of the cost of the printing plant is 20 yuan, distributors and bookstores at all levels take away 40%, and the final publishing house of takes 30%, which is 30 yuan; at this time, the GDP created by the industry is 100 yuan.
If the Internet comes at this time, books become e-books, and publishing houses become Internet companies, the price of books will drop. If it drops by half to 5 yuan, then the price will drop and the sales of books will increase due to the accurate recommendations of Internet companies. , because the effective demand for books is limited, so the price elasticity will make the increase in book sales smaller than the decrease in price.
If the current sales volume is 16 copies, each copy is 5 yuan, and the entire market size is 80 yuan, then how will the 80 yuan be distributed at this time? Since the e-book does not have printing publishers and distributors, the only person it needs to distribute is the author. , smart Internet companies will increase the royalties to 25%, that is, 20 yuan will be distributed to the author, and will exclusively enjoy 75% of the income - 60 yuan. At this time, the GDP created by the industry is 80 yuan.
Ok, through this case we will see how the Internet affects various roles in the economic market.
Let’s first talk about the beneficiary of - the first beneficiary is consumers. The books purchased by each person are half cheaper, and the process of buying books is simplified. At the same time, more people will buy books, and consumer welfare will increase.
Next is the author. The author’s original income has increased from 10 yuan to 20 yuan, and the number of readers has increased from 10 to 16. His influence has become greater, his income has also increased, and he has more motivation to write more excellent works. .
The third beneficiary is the Internet company, which has gained extremely high profits from this business, making twice as much money as traditional publishing houses.
Next, let’s look at who’s interests have been damaged by - first of all, printing plants and dealers, they have been completely replaced, because the cost of printing and distribution on the Internet is almost 0, and new technologies make it unnecessary to exist. , followed by traditional publishers, which could not control its costs, and its book prices could not compete with Internet companies, so they were completely replaced.
At this time, we will be surprised to find that when consumer income and Internet company income are both increasing, if the GDP calculation method of the book market drops from 100 yuan to 80 yuan, the GDP actually declines. Of course Government tax revenue will also fall, and unemployment will increase, because the number of new employees created by Internet companies will certainly be less than the number of employees laid off by printers, distributors, and publishing houses.
Luddites who were “layoffs” from textile machines
“Book-E-book” is a simple model, but the truth it reveals is profound. It almost summarizes the entire process of transformation of traditional enterprises by computers and the Internet ——
Why did Uber trigger a global taxi strike? Why does Google have such a high market value but only so many people? Why is Amazon so successful that its century-old store Sears department store will go bankrupt? Why are the current incomes of Internet celebrities, anchors and paid knowledge authors getting higher and higher? Is the EU’s antitrust fine against Google justified? Why does Wu Jun teacher say that only 2% of people will benefit from the smart era in the future?
carefully analyzed that the answers to these questions can actually be found in the "book-e-book" model.
It must be pointed out that the "book-e-book" model is just one example of the impact of the Internet on the market. In some industries where the Internet has entered, price drops will generate more demand, so it is possible to sell 30 copies of a book. , then GDP will not decline.
The reason why I use the model is to illustrate the phenomenon that efficiency increases while GDP decreases in the Internet field.
3. Will the technological acceleration of mankind in the future still only occur in the world of bits rather than the world of atoms?
Many people say - you see, even masters like Yang Zhenning are saying: The feast of physics is over. Does this mean that there may not be more changes in the atomic world?
However, if we look back, we will find that the statement of is very similar to the statement of the physics master Kelvin in 1900 that "the building of physics has been built". In fact, only 5 years after Kelvin's statement, Einstein He published the "Special Theory of Relativity".
From the general premise, the scientific and technological progress of the entire human race is accelerating. It took thousands of years from the birth of civilization to the industrial revolution , but from the first industrial revolution to the second industrial revolution , it was shortened to 100 years, and from the second industrial revolution to the third, it became decades.
But it should be noted that this kind of progress does not accelerate according to a strict exponential, but a leaping, discontinuous process. Each gradual change is to prepare for the next mutation, and steam engines, electricity, computers and the Internet are among them. mutation.
In the past few decades, what we have observed is the wildly racing bit world and the almost stagnant atomic world. Now it is time for the bit world to feed back the atomic world.
In the past, we always transformed the atomic world into the bit world - the Walkman became iTunes; books became kindle; optical cameras became digital cameras; pens became keyboards; paper became Word; money It has become the password in Alipay and WeChat; the history of the development of information technology is the history of the bitization of the atomic world.
But today, the process of bitization has reached a point where marginal benefits are declining, that is, the atomic world that is easy to bitize has been bitified, and some humans who are not easy to bitify need to pay more costs, and the atomic world of bits has been bitified. It has become a new important direction, that is, turning virtual things into real things - typically 3D printing technology and robotics technology.
3D printing is extremely important for the production of small batch products. Although this industry is currently relatively small due to other reasons such as materials, it is growing at a rate of nearly 50% every year.
According to IDC predictions: the global 3D printing output value will reach 28.9 billion US dollars in 2020, and the robot industry has also developed extremely rapidly after entering the intelligent era. The robots of Boston Dynamics and other companies are already amazing. What it needs to solve is Issues of cost and practicality.
It can be expected that the development of this field will be very rapid, because we already know the direction of its development - these are important cases of the transformation of the bit world into the atomic world.
Another direction is not the direct transformation of the bit world and the atomic world, but a more efficient combination of the two, such as IoT, autonomous driving, wearable devices...
The Internet of Things under 5G will make our living room unchanged for decades. , kitchens and bathrooms have begun to change; electrification and autonomous driving have also made a leap forward in our automobile industry, which has not changed fundamentally for hundreds of years; wearable devices will make people's bodies always online.
Why did Google split into Alphabet and be led by Larry Page to develop new businesses such as autonomous driving?
is because there is already a certain ceiling for running wildly in the bit world - Google and Facebook account for more than 60% of digital advertising combined, plus Amazon, which has always been eyeing digital advertising, if they want to continue to grow at a high rate The marginal difficulty has suddenly increased, so it needs to find other ways to transcend the bit world...
For the same reason, Tencent is embracing the industrial Internet, Alibaba is promoting new retail, and even Douyin has begun to open offline pop-up stores.
Teacher Wu Jun has a theory - old industry + new technology = new industry. The three industrial revolutions are actually based on this formula.
In the past, this new technology was steam engines, electricity and the Internet. Today, this new technology will be AI. As the latest engine of the bit world, AI’s empowerment of the atomic world will inevitably transform the atomic world to a considerable extent.
In this sense, the future is already here!
#Columnist#
Wei Xi, WeChat public account: Wei Xi Zhibei (ID: weixizhibei), everyone is a product manager columnist. An advertising product manager with a wide range of interests, dedicated to in-depth analysis of Internet-related logic using simple language.
This article was originally published by @伟西 on Everyone is a Product Manager. Reprinting without permission is prohibited.
title picture comes from Unsplash, based on CC0 protocol
