WICI Seminar: Laws of Technological Progress with J. Doyne Farmer

One thing that we can usually count on to get better with time is technology. But is the rate of technological improvement predictable? The problem of global warming makes this a pressing question: Over the coming years we are likely to invest trillions of dollars on green energy technologies. Understanding the rate of improvement of different technologies could potentially allow us to invest more wisely, save vast sums of money, and achieve a carbon neutral world more quickly. I will compare several different hypotheses for technological improvement on different examples of technologies, ranging from computers to energy, and show that it is indeed possible to make useful forecasts of technological progress. I will also review ideas for why such laws exist, and discuss how one can use this to address problems like global warming.

Speaker Profile

J. Doyne Farmer is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute He has broad interests in complex systems, and has done research in dynamical systems theory, time series analysis and theoretical biology. At present his main interest is in developing quantitative theories for social evolution, in particular for financial markets (which provide an accurate record of decision making in a complex environment) and the evolution of technologies (whose performance through time provides a quantitative record of one component of progress).He was a founder of Prediction Company, a quantitative trading firm that was recently sold to the United Bank of Switzerland, and was their chief scientist from 1991 - 1999 During the eighties he worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he was an Oppenheimer Fellow, founding the Complex Systems Group in the theoretical division He began his career as part of the U.C. Santa Cruz Dynamical Systems Collective, a group of physics graduate students who did early research in what later came to be called "chaos theory". In his spare time during graduate school he led a group that designed and built the first wearable digital computers (which were used to beat the game of roulette).For popular press see The Newtonian Casino by Thomas Bass, Chaos by Jim Gleick, Complexity by Mitch Waldrup, and The Predictors by Thomas Bass.