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Technology is constantly evolving, disrupting the way we do things. From 3400 BC arrowheads to the mobile phone, the internal combustion engine and the iPhone, technology has been driving disruption throughout history. Dick Fosbury revolutionised the high jump with the Fosbury Flop, and Elon Musk and Steve Jobs have disrupted their respective industries. A team is looking to develop a comprehensive theory of technological disruption, to provide practical insight to decision makers. Learn more about the history of disruption and the patterns of technological change.
Brad Libby is a research fellow at Rethinkx with a Doctorate degree in Chemical Engineering. He works closely with Adam and is responsible for systems dynamics modeling. He has done extensive research since the Covid-19 pandemic began and is hoping to share a taste of the rich history of disruptions. Technology can change quickly, as seen with the introduction of mobile phones and the iPhone, which has replaced flip phones, digital cameras, and other forms of media. Systems thinking and simulation can be used to understand the cost, performance and capabilities of technology over time, which Rethink X has been using to analyse the impact of technology on society.
Technology is constantly evolving, disrupting the way we do things. An example of this is the car, which replaced horses for transportation and was made possible by steel, pneumatic tires, glass and the internal combustion engine. This engine was used to move cars and trucks, but also to generate electricity and make radio signals possible, leading to television, Wi-Fi, iPhones and digital cameras. This pattern of disruption is seen over and over again, with new technology becoming cheaper and more accessible with time. This follows a predictable pattern of becoming cheaper and more efficient over time, as seen in the Wright's Law, and is seen in solar panels, batteries, cars and military technology. This pattern has been seen throughout history, such as in the 100 Years War when cannons drastically reduced the length of sieges.
Arrowheads from 3400 BC have been studied, revealing two distinct styles. The older style is pinite or feather shaped, while the newer style is chisel shaped, causing a much larger wound and taking less time to make. In 2006, the US government made it harder to purchase pseudoephedrine, leading to Mexican gangs finding a new way to synthesize methamphetamine from household chemicals. This allowed them to make larger batches at a lower cost, resulting in a dramatic increase in the drug's availability, with the majority of confiscated meth now being synthesized from household chemicals.
The production of methamphetamine has increased due to laws making it harder to acquire the materials to make it, leading to the development of 12 major methods of synthesizing it, many of which involve large scale production. Investment in new production methods has been made due to an increase in the price of pseudoephedrine, creating a new industry. Technology has enabled people to access more cameras than ever before and has enabled new possibilities such as home security cameras and dash cams. Similarly, steam and coal-powered ships and jet engines have replaced sail and propeller planes, allowing faster and more efficient travel, allowing airlines to make a profit just by carrying passengers and their luggage.
Technology is rapidly changing the way we live, making energy, information, food, medicine, materials, and transportation cheaper and better. This process usually takes 15 years and increases the size of the market. Social organization, such as limited liability corporations and stocks, have been important to the first industrial revolution, as exemplified by Wright's Law. The speaker is looking for extreme examples of disruption, such as statistical abstracts of steel production, performance in sports over time, and Olympic records. An example of this is the high jump, which changed in 1968 when Dick Fosbury introduced a new technique. Data-driven examples are being used to understand the scope of technological disruption.
Dick Fosbury revolutionised the high jump with the Fosbury Flop, and this technique quickly replaced the old method. Other technologies, such as colour television and insulin, have also been quickly adopted. In recent decades, computer technology has advanced rapidly due to the production of printed circuit boards and plastic boxes. Innovations such as the iPhone have been created by outsiders, who are willing to think differently and challenge the status quo. Examples include Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, who have disrupted their respective industries and driven change.
Tesla disrupted the auto industry by creating a high-end, expensive sports car. As battery prices decreased, they were able to make more mainstream cars and become the biggest car manufacturer by market share. Disruptions can be driven by many factors, such as technology, the need for rapid rollouts, and economic factors that bring the right people together at the right time. Know-how is an important factor, but there must be something else at play for disruptions to occur.
Humans and animals alike demonstrate a pattern of disruption driven by economics. This is seen in the decreasing amount of time it takes to assemble an F-35 fighter jet as the cumulative number of jets ever built increase, and in the UK birds pecking through milk bottle lids to get cream. This pattern is also seen in ancient societies and in communist societies of the 1920s-50s. Examples of economics playing a role in production include the creation of alloys such as bronze, and the cost of drugs being largely due to the risk of handling an illegal product, rather than the material cost. This is an example of a hardwired mechanism that is driven by the benefit and cost of a particular technology or idea.
Technology is often disruptive, and there are patterns in how it replaces old technologies. Examples include the European railway system and length of canals, telephone wires and social revolutions. Data is collected from statistical abstracts such as copper production, road length and railroad length. Thomas Kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions is based on a new paradigm replacing an old one. Examples of technologies with economic and adoption data include red fabric dyes, alizarin dye and indigo, which have been 10 times cheaper and more disruptive than their predecessors. By seeing enough of these examples, it is possible to identify when a new technology is likely to be disruptive.
Adam, Brad, and Dan discussed the potential of technology disruption as a science, and the consequences of laws that make certain products more difficult to access. They discussed the distinguishing characteristics of phase transitions and the universality class of the phase transitions, as well as the inflection points in the data. They remain optimistic that there are enough differences to make it worthy of study, but acknowledge that it could be that it's not that different from other sigmoid curves and there won't be much else to find.
A team is looking to develop a comprehensive theory of technological disruption, drawing from existing theories such as those of Clayton Christensen and Everett Rogers. These theories compare fads to epidemics, adoption of new technology to infection with an idea, and the rate of adoption of a religion to an S-shaped curve. Rather than theoretical modeling, the team is focused on providing practical insight to decision makers. It is hoped that a consistent set of ideas exists to explain technology disruption.
Brad Libby is a research fellow at Rethinkx. He has a Doctorate degree in Chemical Engineering and has moved to Norway about 10 years ago. He has done various engineering jobs, including two years as an arctic researcher. He works closely with Adam and does the lion's share of the systems dynamics modeling that informs the models and analyses of Rethinkx. Brad has done extensive research since the Covid-19 pandemic began and is hoping to share a taste of the rich history of disruptions through his work. This content will be appearing in books and other media in the near future.
Technology can change quickly, as seen in the transition from horse-drawn wagons to cars in New York City in 1913. This has been witnessed in recent times with the introduction of mobile phones, smartphones and the iPhone, which has replaced flip phones, digital cameras and other forms of media. This demonstrates how quickly technologies can replace each other, and how much our lives have changed since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. Systems thinking and simulation, such as ordinary differential equations and lookup tables, can be used to understand the cost, performance and capabilities of technology over time. Rethink X has been using this to analyse the impact of technology on society.
Technology is constantly evolving and disrupting the way we do things. The car is a great example of this, as it replaced horses for transportation and had many other parts such as steel, pneumatic tires, glass, and the internal combustion engine. This engine was used to move cars and trucks, but also to generate electricity, creating a shift from candles and coal gas to electric lighting. It was also a key technology for making radio possible, allowing for signals to be sent across the world. This led to television, Wi-Fi, iPhones, digital cameras, and more. This pattern of disruption is seen over and over again, with new technology becoming cheaper and more accessible with time.
Technology follows a predictable pattern of becoming cheaper and more efficient over time, as seen in the Wright's Law which was discovered by looking at the cost of producing airplanes in the 1920s and 30s. This pattern is seen in solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, cars and military technology. As a new technology comes along and becomes more popular, the old one reaches a peak and then starts to collapse. This sigmoidal curve takes approximately 15 years to play out. This pattern has been seen throughout history, such as in the 100 Years War where the introduction of cannons drastically reduced the length of sieges.
Arrowheads from England dating back to 3400 BC have been studied, with two distinct styles being identified. The older style is pinite or feather shaped, with a sharp point and oval shape, while the newer style is chisel shaped, with the flat edge of a triangle facing the target. Experiments have been done with modern reconstructions of these two arrowhead styles, and the chisel shape has been found to cause a much larger wound and take less time to make. It is a cheaper, better technology that is more damaging to the target.
In 2006, the US government made it harder to purchase pseudoephedrine, a chemical used to make methamphetamine, which led to gangs in Mexico finding a new way to synthesize the drug from household chemicals such as nail polish remover and paint thinner. This allowed them to make larger batches of methamphetamine at a much lower cost, leading to a dramatic increase in the drug's availability. According to the Drug Enforcement Agency, samples of confiscated meth show that the majority are synthesized from household chemicals, rather than from natural plant sources. This shift in technology has caused a steep increase in meth use over the last 15 years.
Methamphetamine production has increased since laws were introduced to make it more difficult to acquire the materials to make it. There are now 12 major ways of synthesizing methamphetamine, and many of these involve large scale production using thousand litre stainless steel reactors located near shipping areas. In 2016 or 2017, 900 tons of methamphetamine worth two billion dollars was confiscated in Mexico, highlighting the new large scale production methods. Investment in new production methods has been made due to the increase in price of pseudoephedrine, creating a new industry.
Technology has enabled people to have access to more cameras than ever before. 20 years ago, only professional photographers carried multiple cameras, but now phones and laptops come with up to four cameras. This has enabled new possibilities such as home security cameras and dash cams. Similarly, steam and coal-powered ships and jet engines have replaced sail and propeller planes, enabling faster and more efficient travel. This has allowed airlines to make a profit just by carrying passengers and their luggage, whereas before they needed postal contracts to be profitable.
Technology is advancing rapidly and changing the way we live. Digital photos, for example, are now much cheaper, leading to the invention of dash cams. Cheap air travel has opened up the tourism industry, allowing more families to travel for leisure. Energy, information, food, medicine, materials, and transportation are all changing due to technology. These changes have made these areas of life cheaper and better, resulting in the replacement of old technologies with new ones. This process usually takes 15 years and increases the size of the market. Social organization, such as limited liability corporations and stocks, were important to the first industrial revolution. Wright's Law is an example of a technology that is difficult to define.
Technology, laws and government policies are all intertwined when looking at disruption, and the speaker is looking for extreme examples. To illustrate this, they have been looking at statistical abstracts of steel production, performance in sports over time, and Olympic records. An example of this is the high jump, which has changed since 1968 when Dick Fosbury introduced a new technique. The speaker is looking for data-driven examples to understand the scope of technological disruption.
In 1968, Dick Fosbury revolutionised the high jump by introducing the 'Fosbury Flop', a technique which required athletes to run up and turn at the last second, jumping backwards over the bar. This technique rapidly replaced the old method of jumping over the bar forwards, and within 15 years, the Fosbury Flop had become the standard for high jumpers. This rapid adoption of new technology is seen in other areas, such as the transition from black and white to colour television in the US, which took only 5 years, and the discovery of insulin, which was rapidly adopted and has allowed people with diabetes to manage their condition.
Computer technology has advanced rapidly in recent decades, with digital cameras, computers, and car components becoming more computerised. This is due to the speedy production of printed circuit boards and plastic boxes. Innovations such as the iPhone have been created by outsiders, who are willing to think differently and challenge the status quo. For example, Steve Jobs realised that phones didn't need number keys, as people only use them for calls 10% of the time. Elon Musk is another example of an outsider who has made a difference, having been a computer programmer and key employee at PayPal. This shows that it is often outsiders who create disruption and drive change.
Tesla was founded by an outsider to the auto industry who was willing to challenge traditional assumptions about car design. They initially created a high-end, expensive sports car and, as battery prices decreased, they were able to make more mainstream cars. The company is now the biggest car manufacturer by market share. It is unclear what social and psychological factors are involved in the disruption of the industry, but it is likely that these play a role in the timing of the disruption.
Technology is often defined as practical knowledge or know-how, which can be threatening and challenging to the status quo. Brad provided counter examples of disruptions that were driven by factors other than know-how, such as the need for insulin to be rolled out rapidly. The economy can also play a role in driving disruptions, and it is often faceless and large-scale. It can bring the right people together at the right time, such as when the iPhone appeared. While know-how is an important factor in disruptions, there must be something else going on for them to occur.
Bronze is an example of an alloy that is created when copper and tin are melted together. This is an example of how economics can play a role in the production of goods, even when money is not involved. For example, in the production of arrowheads, one type could take half the time or effort to make and be more likely to catch prey, making it more economically beneficial. Drugs are another example, as the cost of the product is largely due to the risk of handling an illegal product, rather than the material cost. In both of these cases, economics plays a role, but is not the only factor.
Humans and animals alike demonstrate a pattern of disruption driven by economics. In capitalism, this is seen in the decreasing amount of time it takes to assemble an F-35 fighter jet as the cumulative number of jets ever built increase. In the mid-1900s, birds in the UK discovered they could peck through milk bottle lids to get cream, and this idea spread quickly throughout England. This same pattern is seen in ancient societies from the Stone Age and Bronze Age, and in communist societies of the 1920s-50s. It is an example of a hardwired mechanism that is driven by the benefit and cost of a particular technology or idea.
Technology is rapidly adopted in a sigmoidal process, seen in epidemics, pandemics, bacterial growth and human behaviour. There is an analogy between technological disruption and the out competition of the Omicron variant, which spreads four times faster than the Delta variant. Examples are drawn from capitalist, communist and military societies. Data is collected from statistical abstracts such as copper production, road length and railroad length.
Technology is often disruptive, and the speaker has identified patterns in how it replaces old technologies. Examples include the European railway system, length of canals, telephone wires and social revolutions. Thomas Kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions is based on a new paradigm replacing an old one. The speaker has collected examples of technologies that have economic and adoption data, such as red fabric dyes, alizarin dye and indigo, which have been 10 times cheaper and more disruptive than their predecessors. The speaker suggests that by seeing enough of these examples, it is possible to identify when a new technology is likely to be disruptive.
Technology disruption can be seen as a science, but it is a general phenomenon that can be found in many different systems and non-linear dynamical systems. Examples of red and blue dyes were used to illustrate the potential consequences of laws like the one that made pseudoephedrine more difficult to access. This led to the production of methamphetamine through artificial synthesis, which is now a major problem. To distinguish between different types of disruptions, one must look at the universality class of the phase transitions, as well as the inflection points in the data.
Adam is interested in learning more about the distinguishing characteristics of phase transitions, which could help to disentangle them from generic ones. Brad and Dan agree that scientifically, the most interesting aspects are those that set this particular set of sigmoidal dynamics apart from other examples in nature. They both remain optimistic that there are enough differences to make it worthy of study, but they also acknowledge that it could be that it's not that different from other sigmoid curves and there won't be much else to find.
The speaker is concerned with compiling examples of a particular phenomenon, such as the rate of insulin adoption and the production of steel. There are theories behind this phenomenon, such as Everett Rogers' and George Bass' models of technology adoption, which involve non-adopters becoming adopters and people being recruited. These theories compare fads to epidemics, adoption of new technology to being infected with an idea, and the rate of adoption of a religion to an S-shaped curve. The speaker has been focused on collecting examples rather than theoretical modeling.
Technology disruption is a complex phenomenon that requires a theoretical framework to explain it. Tony Siba's theory is an amalgam of different pieces of theoretical work, drawing from Clayton Christensen, but it is limited and does not cover all types of technological disruption. This seminar aims to think more clearly about what a theory of technological disruption would look like and build on existing theories. The team is less academic, more practical, providing useful insight to decision makers. There is hope that a set of relatively consistent ideas exists to explain technology disruption.
um so let me go ahead and introduce uh uh brad very quickly um so uh or rather i should say i should let brad introduce himself but just as a preamble to that uh brad and i work very closely together at rethinkx um uh brad is uh does the the um overwhelming uh lion's share of the systems dynamics modeling that under that informs the um the the general behavior within our um models and our analyses so his work is crucial um we use the stella software environment and um uh brad can talk to you about his deep expertise and in stella and where that comes from and um [Music] what i'm hoping from this session is that brad will be able to give us um a a sense of taste of how rich and deep the history of disruptions runs it's it's really extraordinary and brad has done incredible um research over the last he's well he's basically done covet inspired and driven research during since the coven pandemic began that has um uh been amassing an extraordinary uh collection compendium of examples of discussion of disruption throughout history and i'm hoping that um that we'll get to hear about just a tiny little bit of a tiny little sampling of some of those um today but uh stay tuned because at some point in the not too distant future this will be appearing this content will be appearing fully formed in books and uh hopefully at some other media as well so it's an it this is you guys are getting a very tantalizing preview of some really fun stuff that's that's going to come um over the next year or so from for our organization so with that let me turn it over to brad and and thank him for joining us it's 2 a.m in norway where he is um so thanks for for making the time at this unpleasant hour brad um and uh please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background before you get into the the session if you would okay sure um my name is brad libby and uh i work with adam so i work i'm a research fellow at rethinkx um and if if anyone can't hear me or anything or if my voice is breaking up or something or something's confusing please just uh you know chime in and and let me know but um my my background is uh i have a doctorate degree in chemical engineering um i'm from the us originally but moved to norway about 10 years ago and had done you know a variety of sort of engineering type jobs i worked for a couple of years as an arctic researcher physically making equipment that we put onto ships that would go to the arctic so you know electric electronics with code running it
but i also have a background in you know computer simulation system dynamics systems thinking so basically you know ordinary differential equations and lookup tables essentially um for you know complex systems interaction economic sort of economics and social factors and technology um and i was doing that and uh saw the you know positions so the work that we think x was doing that that adam and er and tony seba and james arbor doing together and was really impressed by it um so i started with rethink x uh four years ago now so in november 2017. um so i do know the analysis rethink x's analysis is very much driven by uh the cost of technology the performance and capabilities of technology going up over time the cost coming down over time and that creating conditions where um you know one technology might quickly replace another one things that we're seeing now with things like solar panels and lithium-ion batteries um and uh uh so um um can can everybody hear me i don't know so i just heard some sort of i i barely ever use just this chord noise in the background when people join the channel or leave the channel so okay okay that's what i figured that was yeah but i can hear you perfectly yep okay so so if you've ever seen um any of the presentations by by tony seba you know he starts out some of them talking about the history of cars the history of transportation he shows off a photograph of new york city in the year 1900 and it's full of horse-drawn wagons it shows off a photograph the same day of the year it's easter easter day in 1913 so 13 years later and the street is just full of cars and there's one only one horse drawn wagon and a sea of cars he said this is how quickly technologies change and we've seen this in our own lives too so the the i the you know mobile phones came and and people stopped using landline phones and then the smartphone the you know the iphone came and people stopped using um uh stopped using their flip phones and it's not just they stop using their flip phones they also stop using their digital cameras because iphones have digital cameras on them um and you know the iphone came out 2007 so 14 years ago and it just seems like how did we do anything uh before that how did you know people used to drive around and get lost and didn't have access to driving directions or whatever now you can stream people used to have dvds and cds and cassette tapes and eight tracks and final um so these technologies come along and you know wipe each other out and it got me
thinking and this is just something i sort of worked on as a as a project inside hobby was uh for a while and now the last year or so so basically my covid project has been sort of really doing a deep dive into all of the technologies that i can think of um and how they uh sort of interact with each other so you know the car uh it was a disruption over a 13-year period or so 15-year period it replaced horses for transportation but the car has other parts to it you need steel there's pneumatic tires there's glass there's the internal combustion engine and each of those things have been sort of disruptive in their own rights so the internal combustion engine is used to move cars and trucks um but it's also used just to generate electricity a big you know big diesel generators are used to make electricity and that kicked off all sorts of other disruptive ways of changing technologies going from candles and coal gas to electric lighting the electric generator was also a key technology for making radio possible so if you can't generate a very large electric current you can make a radio signal and it's like a parlor trick you can make a bell ring on the other side of the room but if you have a really powerful radio transmitter you can send a signal across an ocean across the other side of the world and you can you know hear somebody's voice even if they're on the other side of the world um and you know radio waves become the basis of television radio waves are the basis of wi-fi so i'm using radio waves right now to communicate to send my voice uh to you on the other side of the world um so you know and and it got me thinking you know uh you know how how far back in history does this go how you know what kinds of uh conditions do we see um you know rapid changes occur like this and it seems like bro i've looked into it the more examples that i find and not just individually but like i said they're all interconnected of the internal combustion engine gives rise to the car but it also gives rise to radio transmissions which give rise to tv which gives rise to uh wi-fi which hull is a computer of your iphone which itself was you know disruptive to uh landline phones and and to digital cameras which and digital cameras were uh you know quickly replaced film cameras and we i see this same sort of pattern over and over again the sort of pattern of disruption where a new technology comes along it gets cheaper over time in a very predictable pattern a pattern called wright's law
which is essentially the cumulative number of objects you've ever made or units you've ever produced on a logarithmic scale on your x-axis and the cost on a logarithm the marginal cost on a logarithmic scale on the y-axis gives a straight line so there's a there's a predictable pattern we've seen it with solar panels have fallen at a steady uh steady rate um since the 1970s we've seen it with um lithium-ion batteries we saw it with the original model t cars that uh that henry ford produced we see it in wright's law was originally discovered by looking at how much it cost to produce airplanes in the 1920s and 30s but it still holds true for airplanes made today the f-35 fighter jet so we see it in military technology we see it in uh you know um just every sort of every every domain this pattern of a new technology coming along getting cheaper um but in this in this uh you know uh very predictable pattern um improving in performance reaching some point where it starts to replace an old technology and just as it's starting to when it's like three percent market share five percent market share the old system reaches a peak and then starts to collapse so netflix replaces the video store blockbuster video store in the u.s or you know the car starts to replace the horse the number of horses in the u.s peaked when the number of cars was only something like three to five percent of the number of horses um so the number of horses reaches its peak the number of cars is growing exponentially and then and then the two cross each other in this sort of x-shaped x-shaped pattern um and the whole thing plays out the new technology rises in an s-shaped you know sigmoidal curve that takes about 15 years or so um and and like i said we've seen i see it again and again and again um every time we have uh some new technology that's uh three or four or ten times cheaper faster better um so uh look back at the at the hundred years war starts out in uh you know battle of of agincourt 1415 in france the english have longbowmen um uh 30 years later the french are making cannons um and uh fighting battles that that uh you know it takes a day a c they're at the start of the war there are sieges that last for for six months um because we can't knock the english can't knock down the walls of french forts um by the end of the war sieges are lasting a day because the canon you know is much more powerful than uh than the trebuchet or than longbowman um and i you know so and that's uh you know
in the in the 1400s um we see uh arrowheads so i i found this really interesting study of uh arrowheads uh from england from uh roughly 5400 years ago so 3400 bc where we see uh certain kinds of arrowheads uh and and other kinds that are slightly older those made before 2004 i'm sorry 3400 bc and those made after and those two different styles are never found together in graves so it seems like you know there was a rapid transition from one to the other we stopped making them one way and started making them the other way and people have actually made re reconstructions of these fantastic ones yes can i just ask what could you describe maybe it's difficult but what are the differences between the two styles okay so the old style is what's called pinite or or feather shaped so it has a sharp point and kind of an oval shape but with a sharp sharp point and the other is called a chisel style so it's a a triangular shape um but instead of having the point of the triangle uh face toward your you know out of the arrow toward your prey um the the sharp tip is is buried into the shaft so that you have the flat edge of the triangle facing toward your prey so with one kind of arrow essentially just think of it as two triangles and in one case you're shooting the point of a triangle into your enemy and the other you're shooting this flat edge and arrows of course spin as they fly so if you shoot someone with a sharp tip you poke a hole in them basically um but you know the the wound can close around the shaft of the arrow um if you're shooting someone with the flat edge of a triangle you're essentially shooting them like with a razor blade but it's a razor blade that's spinning and they've actually done experiments with these two kinds of arrows made modern reconstructions and shot them into ballistics gel the kind of gel that the police use uh you know for for like testing what damage handguns might do or or any projectile and they've shot these arrows into put into ballistics gel and the wound made by uh by the uh the chisel shape so the the triangle where you're shooting the edge against your prey um is a much larger wound um and and not only that but the man who made these reconstruction uh arrows said that the the more damaging arrow took about half as much time to make that arrowhead it's just a simpler design and it's easier to make um so you know so so here we have a cheaper better technology it takes half as much uh effort to make um and it makes a much more damaging wound that is much more
open and therefore will bleed more so this is five thousand four hundred years ago uh so we see uh uh yeah so we see in in arrows uh you know five thousand four hundred years ago we see in uh cannons replacing trebuchets in firearms replacing um uh crossbows which themselves replaced bows and arrows um and not just military technology but everything we see it in uh you know cars replacing horses we see it in tractors on farms replacing horses we see it in um you know the same sort of pattern in in illegal activities um so one uh interesting example that i've looked into recently is in 2006 the united states government made it much more difficult to purchase pseudoephedrine which is a chemical it's a it's used as a in cough and cold medicines um but you can also cut it into methamphetamine um so people were making you know small batches breaking the breaking bad tv show it was based on a chemistry teacher um you know making crystal meth um and uh so the us government made it much more difficult to purchase pseudoephedrine in large quantities and pseudoephedrine comes from a plant called the ephedra plant um and when they when they banned uh the the production of uh large-scale uh purchasing of pseudoephedrine um gangs in mexico figured out ways to make meth you know other ways to synthesize it from the standard household chemicals so basically nail polish remover and paint thinner so chemicals called toluene and acetone so now instead of getting a chemical from a plant a natural source and then converting it into methamphetamine they were creating methamphetamine you know from from in any quantity they wanted because they were using household chemicals that you can buy in large quantities so the price of methamphetamine dropped they started making methamphetamine you know rather than small batches based on on cough syrup or purchase at a pharmacy they were making very large batches which brought the cost down dramatically and now meth is an even larger problem than it was 15 years ago and again so we can the drug enforcement agency in the united states tests samples of confiscated meth and has published statistics on what percentage are made from ephedra and pseudoephedrine so natural plant sources and what percentage are synthesized from household chemicals paint thinner and nail polish remover basically and again we see an s-shaped curve over a 15-year period where this new technology this new way of making the same product that's cheaper and faster and much more scalable
replaces the old one um and the result was you know we now have meth on the streets that's much cheaper than it was 15 years ago kind of an example of a government uh law uh backfiring um and when the you know the intention was to make it much more difficult to produce uh to get your hand to get your hands on the materials to make meth they wound up actually making it much easier um so i've just been you know was this production method known before those new laws came into effect and just it accelerated the adoption or did this actually lead to the production of new knowledge of how to make meth in this alternative way um there it turns out that there is something like a dozen major ways of synthesizing methamphetamine um and it seems that uh the uh banning of pseudoephedrine caused the price to go up enough that there was investment there's real investment there's uh you know there's there's a new industry created here that's large scale that uses large reactors these are thousand liter uh stainless steel reactors um located in warehouses that are near uh you know good shipping areas so a near a port or a train uh you know railroad station or location where large amounts of chemicals can be moved in um so uh you know some of these synthesis methods are new but also just you know logistics of this was also sort of new problems to be solved because nobody had ever been making methamphetamines in that scale before so um there was a raid and i believe 2016 or 17 in mexico where they confiscated something like 900 tons of methamphetamine which is about two billion dollars worth and they just said you know we it that's just physically impossible to produce that much product um uh you know when you're when you are getting your when you're getting your raw materials from a pharmacy or from plants so um just just the the scale here was also sort of a new new problem to be solved um um yeah so just i like i said i'm collecting these examples uh you know all throughout history of somebody coming up with a new way of doing things where you know uh and you see 900 tons of of a product and thousand liter reactors seems it seems crazy to have two billion dollars worth of a product all in one warehouse um but if you ask people you know 20 20 years ago if you told people um i took a hundred photos today um and they were all basically the same i i took some selfies and i and i threw 99 of them away um people would say oh you're crazy that must have cost a fortune or you know uh the idea here i have a laptop
with a with a webcam on it i have a phone with a camera on the front and one on the back um i might have uh i've got two on the back actually so i've got three cameras on my phone and one on my laptop so i have four cameras you know just uh right in arms reach of me now whereas 20 years ago if you told somebody i have four cameras that say wow you must be a real photography buff or whatever if i if i travel and i bring my laptop and my phone with me i'm bringing four cameras with me but nobody 20 years ago carried four cameras with them unless they were a professional photographer um so you know we with with new technologies we can uh produce you know larger volumes of things it's not just a uh we we've replaced um our old cameras with digital cameras or old ways of taking old numbers of photos with you know the same number just digital by making things much cheaper and easier and faster um we open up you know whole new possibilities people now have home security cameras that will record video you know essentially continuously people have cameras on the dashboard of their car uh so it's much easier to resolve um insurance claims um because now half the people have a you know a camera that's recording constantly so it's not just a matter of you know one use uh gets replaced one for one um but when you have a steam powered ship it will be five or ten times you know physically larger than the sail powered ship so products that were did not make sense to move um by ship uh when you had a sailing ship all of a sudden make sense uh because it's much cheaper when you have a coal-fired ship or a diesel-powered wand or whatever else um so uh you know propeller planes to jet engines where again over about a 15-year period a more powerful more efficient engine results in a complete you know not just replacement of propeller planes but um sort of rethinking of how of how airplane travel works so with planes that fly faster they also fly higher so they're more efficient so um now playing an airline can be profitable just carrying people in their luggage whereas with propeller planes um an airplane an airline really needed to have a postal contract of you know your government's uh contract to carry a certain amount of of cargo essentially uh to make the line profitable um but if you have um you know a a jet plane a jet can fly off to it rather than if you're if you're moving packages and letters you have to fly between major cities but now uh with uh planes that are profitable
just carrying passengers you can rewrite the whole the whole map of where planes fly you can fly off to some tourist destination uh just bringing families whereas with uh more expensive propeller planes you'd bring businessmen and celebrities people who could really afford and had a real need to travel um so you open up you know the tourism industry you open up you know families traveling on a holiday as opposed to just business people traveling between two large cities so you're not just changing you know the economics and and the volume but you're also changing you know which applications things are used for when you have um you know digital photos are much cheaper so you have the dash cam that you never had before um or flying it per per kilometer per person becomes much cheaper so you now have things like uh you know holiday travel flying somewhere for fun as opposed to flying somewhere for business so um so yeah that's what i've been uh doing i mean i can keep sort of rambling um and uh and uh giving examples but i like i said i'm finding these examples in uh four or five basic areas of life that i keep looking at energy information how we how we store and process information how we get energy and what we use it for food and medicine the materials that we use uh and and transportation how we move around and it's the same pattern over and over again predictably cheaper better uh prop performance over time resulting in uh s-shaped uh replacement of a old technology with a new one all playing out over a 15-year or so pattern a period of time and dramatically expanding the size of the market as the cost of you know moving people or goods or getting a certain amount of energy or processing a certain amount of information storing a certain amount of information changes um and then and then like i said the interconnections between these you can ask a question i'm sort of curious yes you talked about the uh the difference between propeller planes and jet engines and the the role of government contracts there i mean the postal system itself is a kind of social coordination technology i guess but i don't know exactly where to draw the line between i mean i think it's vertical certain forms of social organization say like the limited liability corporation or stocks or i mean these were very important parts of the first industrial revolution for example but i don't know whether they're technologies per se i don't know how to for example make sense of something like wright's law what the
axes would mean but clearly they're involved in this web of uh technologies as kind of enabling factors i mean for example you're in norway presumably you're doing remote work as am i these days remote work as a social form of coordination is only possible because of certain technological advances but it's clearly going to be a driving factor in the development of other ones so how does one separate out technological disruption from like other forms of improvement in organization or is that even necessary like how do you in your own mind draw the line like where to what is the proper scope for the kind of phenomena you're looking at well um so so far you know i've been collecting a lot of these examples and i want it to be as data driven as possible um so this involves looking through you know statistical abstracts that governments publish every year about how much steel was produced in the united states uh in one year by the electric arc furnace by the oxygen blastness or by the siemens process or something like that or by the bessemer process or or whatever um and uh uh and you know seeing the patterns over time um and that's technological but it's also you know there's much more to it than that there was of the numbers that resulted the amount of steel produced depended on laws that uh you know whatever the trade tariffs were or imports or things so you know i'm not really looking at pure sort of technological uh you know technological disruptions here but there's also um you know laws and government policies uh built into that um and uh so i'm i really haven't been uh kind of drawing the line i'm using the word technology kind of loosely i'm also you know talking about sort of social disruptions and um i'm trying to find kind of sort of extreme i'm looking at sort of what's the outer edges you know of any given uh technology or any sort of field of life um you know what's what's the sort of most extreme example of this so to give an example i've been looking at um performance in sports over time and you know you know what was the fastest uh uh just you know runner up in the olympics so looking through a lot of olympic records um and seeing how they have changed over time um because we've seen things um like in the high jump for instance uh so dick fosbury 1968 the standard way of jumping over a bar in the olympics the high jump is a bar and a soft place to land that's it there's really no other equipment um so you you run up to it and you jump over it and the typical
way was you you'd run toward the bar and you'd jump over it forwards so that the bar would pass you know your stomach would pass over the bar and you kick one leg up at the same time and in 1968 dick fosbury did it the way that we do it now which is run up and turn at the last second and go backwards over the bar um so that your stomach is you know pointing up toward the sky um and it's called the phosphory flop and literally over the next 10 or 15 years um everybody who did it the old way sort of aged out of the sport and everybody younger than than him started learning it the new way get this complete turnover and again a 10 or 15 year period uh where uh by night by 1990 or so everybody is going over the bar backwards um so uh again it's a replacement of an old way of doing things with a new way of doing things um um and it takes about 15 years or so so i started thinking you know what are what's the yeah what that's what is the simplest sorry sorry to interrupt you do you think do you think yeah we have a saying in science and i guess it's due to fermi uh is that like that people don't change their minds they just die roughly speaking yeah do you think the 15 years is kind of actually tied to like the length of an average career of a bureaucrat or a scientist or whatever i mean how important is is this observation about human nature that people get stuck in their ways and don't like to change their mind and you need young people to come along and do it differently in order to have change do you think that's a significant part of the shape of these disruptions um i don't know if um it's an excellent question i don't i don't know if um the the sort of 15-year time frame depend is related to the age of uh you know life span of a career for instance um because you know it's different for different technologies so things like the black and white television in the u.s went from uh less than 10 of households to more than 90 in about five years um insulin is one of the fastest technologies ever uh adopted um it was just a year or two when we discovered that you know you can take insulin from the pancreases of animals and give it to people and control diabetes um so this is obviously you know one of the greatest discoveries if you have diabetes this is the difference between death and a manageable condition um and uh so this that was very rapidly adopted um and then other ones you know are are much slower um so i think a lot of the you know what what's happening is over
the last decades a lot of things are computer are now computerized so um uh you know digital cameras and computers and uh you know computer computer chips that are in uh cars now cars are getting more electrified and uh you know so everything is becoming more like a computer so i think a lot of this has to do with just the fact that you know um things that used to be done mechanically like a slide rule um are now done with digitally um so it's sort of uh how quickly computer technology can be made how quickly uh printed circuit boards can be made into a plastic box and sold to people um so i don't really know uh you know if it's related to the the length of a career but one thing that we have noticed is it's very often an outsider who sort of starts the new disruption and uh so with um you know with the with the iphone um apple was a computer company the name of the company was apple computers they changed the name of the company to apple incorporated because of the success of products like the ipod and the iphone um where steve jobs realized you know this isn't uh we're not really a computer company anymore we're now a pho or also a phone company so a number of companies could have made a flat all glass no keyboard uh phone you know could have made the iphone um uh you know in 2007 motorola was making phones and blackberry and nokia um and they didn't you know they said a phone uh has ten you know the number buttons on it and people want a physical keyboard and it has to have this little stem sticking out to let people know it has a powerful antenna um and uh and you know it's an outsider who is willing to rethink what a phone is and one of steve jobs uh quotes he said you know if uh a phone doesn't need um number keys on it because people only use phones uh uh you know ten percent of the time for actually making a telephone call if you have a mobile phone you can just have um the numbers pop up whenever you want to dial and then disappear from the screen when you don't need them so you don't need you know people want to see photos they want to see video they want to see uh you know see see the person you're talking to through a video conference you don't want to see half your phone or more taken up by by physical buttons and it's very often outsiders you know people who are not part of the sort of mainstream industry so elon musk is a great example he was a computer programmer and was i think one of the founders of paypal or you know key employee at paypal um and
started and uh found other engineers who said you know we can make if a if a lithium-ion battery is powerful enough to power a laptop for five or ten hours then if we just strap a thousand of these things together we could move a car with it and it would cost a hundred thousand dollars because because of the cost of the batteries at the time so we'd have to make a sports car and that's what they did they made the tesla roadster and then as the price of the lithium-ion batteries came down they went to a sort of high-end sort of no compromise car the tesla model s that competes with uh mercedes or bmw um and then as the batteries got cheaper now they're making cars that are more sort of mainstream uh uh you know everybody the model three more people can own it and they're working apparently on cars they're even cheaper they want to make you know cars that are that are the cheapest ones on the market and and and perform better um so uh here's somebody who is clearly not a auto executive or auto industry insider had no real experience with car manufacturing and is now the number one car manufa tesla is the biggest by by market share um so yeah i don't know if it's always uh you know uh younger people necessarily but it is somebody from outside who is willing to sort of rethink basic rules and basic assumptions of what a phone is supposed to be or what a camera is supposed to do or what a car is supposed to be or how it's supposed to work um and we do see that pattern you know over and over again yeah it just sorry i was just going to add very quickly i i think it's in this dan it's certainly an astute observation and and as brad said it's it's an important question of what is this um what are the social and the psychological factors that are involved if any in in um the the disruption time uh uh uh time the timing of that so what is that what is the some sort there's some function presumably that determines the the you know the duration of disruption like how long it takes and presumably psychology at the individual and social level and and other social uh factors must play a role in that it's it's it's but it's an open question as to what those are how to like how could we operationalize those how would we could we is there a research approach that can identify meaningful you know parameters or variables there that we could then um you know try to try to try to analyze or you know even i mean it's it's a it's a it's a daunting challenge to try to figure out what the dynamics are that are really
driving that um and i think it's an important question but one one more quick thing that is the way the way that we describe the way the the one way that we define technology in in this loose and general term is is uh calling it practical knowledge or knowledge that has sort of some some some agency some causal power to it this a a simpler way of saying that is that it's know-how right but that that's a direct link from know-how to to uh people to people embodying that knowledge in practice right i mean if somebody has know-how they know how to do something well that's just how they do it and people get are you know they get quite fixed in their ways they get quite invested in how they're doing things and to to come along and change um know-how is is you can imagine that that is uh obviously threatening and his and is is um challenged his status quo in various different ways and and so i think that the uh there has to be some substantial rule that's going on there in many of these disruptions but brad did a great job of providing some counter examples too perhaps the though that factor is overwhelmed by other things like for example the need for the the medication in the case of insulin to be uh rolled out um extremely rapidly and i guess what i find the most interesting and i i suppose controversial about the point of view you guys are advancing is when we when we talk about the history of these technologies it's it's often it's from a thermodynamic point of view a kind of microscopic theory right it's kind of like this individual was an outsider and did this and this thing happened which caused this person to realize that whereas i mean if it's true that there's this kind of more macroscopic view that holds for many different disruptions those factors in a sense are uh i mean they're decreased in importance i mean they clearly have to be there but in some sense they're they're not that well i don't know how to put it exactly but there must be something else going on or in a sense those people if they weren't happening to be there at that moment for that particular discovery somebody else would have come along and done it now one question i have is you could clearly put the economy in in that role of the driving force right it's kind of faceless large scale distributed and could pop up the people at the right time and clearly that plays some role in for example the iphone appearing when it did i mean when technologies converge somebody's going to do it and maybe it
isn't the conservative mainstream people but somehow if the demand is late and somebody will find it but are there earlier examples i mean maybe the arrowhead one is such an example but it's hard to tell because we don't have economic data for five thousand years ago are there examples where maybe the economy doesn't play or isn't so obviously playing a role of of being the obvious explanation for why the individual sort of microscopic factors might not be the complete story like something large scale which you could point to and say yeah well it makes sense that things would take the course they did as a result of interacting with that system maybe it's not a clear question but yeah and just maybe just real quickly let me preface this and then turn it over to brad but um before we just before we got on the uh just before everybody else joined this session brad was telling me about um looking for examples and counter examples that um are not necessarily uh you know nested within the modern western uh capital uh they hesitate to use the word capitalism but but nested within our broad um uh uh uh structure of global economics and um uh and trade and uh there may be some very interesting examples outside of that paradigm that that differ or uh they have differences or similarities that are revealing and brad maybe you can mention a couple of those those are really interesting examples it might go a little bit the way towards answering um what dan is asking here um yeah so uh you know i think i think the um the drug example was a good one because the drug markups are so much that material cost um is only sort of a portion uh of the of the product cost a lot of the cost is just the risk of you know handling an illegal product um so in that one you know economics plays a role but it's not really the whole story and in things like the the arrow example you know there still is economics there's no money but it's time and effort so if one arrowhead takes half the time or the other and um is more likely to prey um then that one is economically better um and for some of these you know examples that i've looked at there isn't you know direct economics but again there's sort of this sort of implied economics here so um a mixture of of copper and tin will melt at a lower temperature than either copper or tin individually um so uh when you make bronze for instance so if you have copper tin in contact with each other and you start to heat them up they melt at the point where the two are touching each other
and that that becomes a liquid and and you can actually you know figure out how much energy it takes uh to melt um bronze a piece of bronze uh compared to copper um and and uh because you know the the amount of energy lost it goes up dramatically with the temperature um it's a it's a very significant difference i don't remember the figure at the top of my head but you know it it's it's economically much easier however much fuel it would take or energy it would take um so like i said we've seen this in uh outside of of capitalism um in the sort of modern uh modern capitalism because we've seen it in ancient examples from from the the stone age from the bronze age um we've seen it in examples from uh communist societies as well so in the 1920s 30s 40s 50s um communist countries were adopting the tractor just like uh just like western ones were um and we see similar behavior patterns so the soviets in the 1950s were building up the nuclear arsenal uh just like uh you know the western countries were um and we see the same sort of pattern of behavior we see in military technology as we see it in uh you know we see the like i said the the same sort of pattern of um number of hours it takes to assemble an f-35 fighter jet um going down as the as the cumulative number of jets ever built goes up um so it's a you know it's sort of a hardwired mechanism this sort of this disrupt this pattern of disruption is kind of hardwired into how not just uh people behave but we've seen it in in animals as well so in the 19 in the middle of the 1900s birds in the uk uh discovered that they could peck through the foil lids on top of milk bottles and drink the cream from the milk and this was first observed in one town in the uk and then it spread over about a 20-year period uh you know throughout all of england and maybe parts of scotland but at least throughout all of england um so birds you know learn from each other that hey you can get food just by pecking through this um and we got the same sort of growth in popularity over time um you know of this new technology this new idea that spread through this social network of birds you know watching each other and then flying somewhere else and teaching other birds uh you know either intentionally or just other birds watching them um teaching them so this is not a behavior pattern that's uh restricted to to uh even humans so it's it seems to be a you know a phenomenon of that's driven by um economics in terms of benefit and cost so obviously uh
pecking through a foil lid to get to cream on milk has a great benefit and little cost so this is something that is ripe to spread quickly um um and uh it it's not restricted to sort of high-tech silicon valley uh you know new technologies iphones and and tesla cars but it's also to you know military technologies it's to military technologies in history um it's to uh uh you know it's found in capitalist societies communist ones um and it seems to be the same sort of pattern over and over again new technology gets better in performance gets cheaper in this predictable pattern um reaches a crossing point and rapidly gets adopted um in a sigmoidal process we're seeing it in in the uh omicron variant where you know this rapid uptake of something that spreads four times faster uh than the the delta variant um all of a sudden is now taking over the the marketplace of um you know so we see in how epidemics pandemics we see it in bacterial growth and we see it in human human behavior as well would you how would you distinguish those examples uh i guess one concern i have about a potential theoretical explanation for these observations is if it if indeed these evolutionary processes are the same process then it's in some sense a very generic observation right so uh i i would see i would see the analogy between i mean i'm interested in you if you disagree but i would see the analogy between technological disruption and say the out competition of omicron of the delta variant is actually a little discouraging from the point of view of trying to use the ideas around technological disruption to predict anything or understand what is going on do you i mean do you agree or disagree that i mean would you really strongly say they're exactly the same kind of phenomena uh is that the scope at which you want to understand these patterns or is that just a kind of analogy um i think in that case it's an analogy so we see i'm not trying to claim that you know this is the one mechanism that governs all human behavior um but at the same time um i've collected enough examples now and maybe you know i'm cherry picking maybe i'm looking for examples that fit the pattern and you know i'm not really that interested in the ones that don't i'm also looking at ones where i can collect data so that means looking through like i said statistical abstracts to come up with the amount of copper produced by year or the the length of road to the u.s highway system or the number of you know the length of railroads and
the european uh uh railway system or length of canals before that or the length of uh uh you know uh telephone wires or things uh um so and but i i've seen enough of these um and they have so many similarities especially when it's one technology replacing another um and uh so i put less effort in some of the social ones of a you know uh a uh a uh democracy replacing uh authoritarianism or things um and how quickly that plays out and i know that there are social scientists who look at those how revolutions happen when you know tipping points are reached and a certain portion of the population uh supports a new idea this is thomas kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions was based on this idea of um you know of uh yeah a new paradigm um replacing an old one so i mean i'm not claiming that everything i'm doing is entirely unique i'm collecting examples and i'm particularly interested in the technological examples that have uh you know some economic and um uh you know adoption or production level uh data behind them that i can produce graphs over time and see enough of this this pattern uh that you know if you if you see a pattern not enough times then hopefully uh the idea is that when you see some new technology come along um you can identify that yes this feels like it's uh a uh you know it's like the technologies that we've seen before this is a technology that could be very disruptive because i've learned i've seen enough historical examples of this that this i'm seeing costs going down over time performance getting better a clearly you know disruptable uh uh some sort of 10x performance difference a you know a an old way of doing things that is right for disruption so i'm not trying to make some sort of you know formal uh scientific theory i'm collecting enough examples and it's been you know sort of uh eerie enough to see enough of these that have sort of the same story play out over time where you know red uh fabric dyes alizarin dye was made in the 1880s where we were able to synthesize uh dyes that we found in nature so we don't have to grow you know plants like the matter plant which contains rose matter the the red you know the red dye for for fabrics um and uh it gets cheaper you know it's it's 10 times cheaper it winds up replacing natural red dyes and then 10 years later the exact same story happens again with indigo where now we can synthesize blue dyes and it's baffling as to you know why didn't people see this happening well or maybe they did but
they couldn't do anything about it but um you know the dyes that we got from nature that were red in color we wound up synthesized same chemicals um so we were able to produce them in large volumes and then uh ten years later we are able to synthesize blue dyes that we got from nature and then 110 years later the us government passes a law that says uh you know let's make pseudoephedrine much more difficult to access and maybe maybe if lawmakers knew about these examples of red dyes and purple dyes they would have thought twice or done some sort of modeling or simulation or analysis driven by previous experience previous data driven by analogy driven by uh you know knowledge of previous examples that said if we if we pass this law we're creating a situation where someone will come along and artificially synthesize methamphetamines rather than making them from natural sources and could potentially make this situation ten times worse which is exactly the situation we're in now it's a i think it's a great uh i think it's a great in some sense a great problem to have so the beginning of this seminar series we sort of started out with this question um can can and should technology disruption be a science does it justify a you know its own sub discipline and in some ways um it would be like you said dan if i'm understanding you correctly there is a sense in which it might be discouraging to find out that there is the the the the the basis of the phenomena is simple enough that it doesn't really merit the status of of a a a domain a scientific domain of inquiry that it's just it's just there isn't enough there um to justify that but on the other hand let me clarify then so i think uh the examples brad presented and the other things you've told me about i mean it seems uh convincing that there is something there but there's i mean there's very general phenomena in systems and non-linear dynamical systems as both of you know very well phase transitions and critical points and all of that and no matter no doubt that all applies it's just a it's a question of like well what universality class are these phase transitions something like that so i'm not i'm not sort of saying that uh so once you accept that yes there's a broader setting in which both uh biological evolution and many other phenomena and technological disruptions sit that seems reasonable to me i'm asking a secondary question which is well how do you distinguish i mean things like these 15 years or the 75 percent inflection point on the
vertical axis that you've talked about adam these kinds of examples of distinguishing characteristics of these phase transitions are what seem interesting to me which i want to sort of hear more about maybe in future sessions uh those phenomena which help to disentangle these phase transitions from just i mean a generic one which uh i mean we know there's plenty of such phenomena in nature so observing that it's one of those phenomena is is interesting and already i think news to a lot of people including people with decision-making power but scientifically what i find particularly interesting is once you grant that well what further can be said specifically about this class of phase transitions does that make sense yeah that makes very good sense and i think you may be i mean it's possible you may be being generous and and making the assumption that there that there are a sufficient number of distinguishing features make this special uh this make this a special uh cla or case of uh more general phenomenon that is worthy of of um a fully scientific um level of inquiry as opposed to maybe something a little more practical like what we do at wreath x which is to take this this insight draw what we can from it and then try to make that information and and knowledge um useful that insight useful to to uh various um various actors and institutions around the world um and there's i think those are those are those projects dovetail but the i agree certainly and um i don't want speaking for you brad so i'm interested to hear what you say as well but um from my perspective i do agree dan that that scientifically the things that are most interesting are the things that set this particular um uh set of um sigmoidal dynamics apart from other examples of that that we see in nature and um i i remain optimistic that there are enough things about technology uh disruption that that do make it different and that would be worthy of of study but we could be wrong we have to we have to you know we have to going into this not assuming that there's that all of that detail is going to be interesting and and and it's worth worth taking the time to discover right it could be that it's all just not it's certainly possible it just could be just not that different from you know epidemiolog epidemiological uh sigmoid you know curves and it's just that we just we're just we're not going to find much else there that distinguishes it so it's it's possible both of those things are true i hope i hope that i'm wrong about
and that it's it's more exciting rather than um you know dismal but uh we should be open-minded and not um not presume i think that we're going to find something very very different and exciting in this particular case it could be that's just just just it's just another uh um species of of the larger um population of phenomena that are like this so dad you have any thoughts yeah i think um you know my my biggest my big concern over the past year or so here is just compiling examples because i'm interested in this uh phenomenon and uh if i um i haven't i've been uh sort of making graphs of uh you know what percentage of people got insulin and what the price was and how many uh um you know what percentage of steel was made by different processes um and i haven't been doing sort of the any sort of theoretical modeling behind it i know that there are plenty of cases that people have in the past of you know a to b to c transition uh you know so sort of an epidemiology there are the sir model susceptible infected and recovered um and a lot of you know those ideas have been applied um to uh to technology adoption diffusion of innovations for decades now so everett rogers you know back in the 60s and so was looking at you know and talking explicitly did george george bass's model of the the bass diffusion model it's called um where non-adopters of a technology become adopters and and they're sort of spontaneous uh conversions so some each time unit some fraction of the non-adopters become a doctors and then there's another that is uh people get recruited so that's a factor that depends on the number of um adopters multiplied by the number of non-adopters um so those two mechanisms you add them together and that's the rate of rate of adoption and then we try to use historical examples to gauge the the values of those parameters so there's you know there's enough of this work that's been done of you know comparing uh fads to epidemics or comparing adoption of a new technology to uh you know uh to and diffusion of an innovation to you know getting it sort of infected with an idea there are enough um cases where we've seen it in um you know in technologies we've seen it in political ideas we've seen it in religions of uh you know the rate at which adoption of a of a religion in a particular area follows kind of an s-shaped curve so i haven't really been uh very much focused on you know the the theory behind it or even any sort of attempted modeling what i've been doing so far is
just sort of more descriptive collecting the examples um and then seeing what you know what things they have in common what what what constitutes a pattern uh to to technological technological disruption as opposed to um sort of trying to explain uh explain the behaviors now i should add in here just for context that we do use a theoretical we use a theory a theoretical framework this is the one that tony siba developed um but it's not and and tony's is itself a sort of a meta theory it's it's it's well not a meta theory but it's an amalgam of um several other pieces of theoretical work um that were that have been done previously um uh it draws from clayton christensen for example and and it's that's explicit it's cited right on all of his um uh uh and all of the material um but this theory is very far from complete and i think one of the one of the the projects for the or one of one of the one of my hopes for this this project in this seminar is to is to think a little more clearly about that uh what would it what would a theory technological disruption look like and does it is it can we build on what we've got and we we are using a theory at the moment but it it is it has serious limitations and it's it's narrow it's focused only on on a certain type of technology disruption and um it wouldn't extend to for example to many of the historical uh instances that brad has talked about um because the pieces are not necessarily there so um this is this is part of the larger project here uh of of thinking you know is there is there a science to be had here and for any science at least to my king um you do need uh some sort of theory some sort of theoretical framework that that provides the basis for explanation and you need a body of empirical confidence um and i think we are seeing the beginnings of those things emerge the question is is there enough and is there enough consistency in the material that we have that it looks like there's there's something real interest here um so i guess that's that's that continues to be the open question uh that challenges us in this in this seminar and then to i suppose to some extent it's it factors into our work as well brad i mean it's part of part of what we think about a little bit on our on our team although we are do we're less less academic of course as you can imagine than we are um practical trying to provide useful insight to decision makers of various kinds but um uh but i i remain hopeful that there is a set of relatively