Lack of imagination can stifle progress

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), June, 1995

Those who believe they know how the information highway or other new technologies will shape the future should review a little history, maintains Nathan Rosenberg, an economist of technological change at Stanford University. Those who witnessed the birth of the telephone, radio, laser, computer, steam engine, VCR, and countless other inventions didn't always imagine their social and economic impacts accurately, he points out. In hindsight, the future was "obviously not obvious" to contemporaries of most major 20th-century inventions, he says. Consider these failures to anticipate the future uses and markets for innovations:

* Western Union turned down the chance to buy Alexander Graham Bell's patent for a mere $100,000. The lack of enthusiasm that greeted the telephone most likely was rooted in the failure of the human mind to imagine a long-distance communications device that served more social purposes than those already served by the telegram.

* The jet engine, in 1940, looked like a dud to a committee of the National Academy of Sciences because it would have to weigh 15 pounds for each horsepower delivered, compared to slightly more than a pound each for internal combustion engines. "Within a year, the British were operating a gas turbine that weighed a mere four-tenths of a pound per horsepower."

* Electricity and lasers took decades to find major uses because both were newly discovered phenomena that did not represent an obvious substitute for anything that already existed.

* Ten to 15 orders was all IBM envisioned for the computer in 1949. Even by 1956, a Harvard University physicist involved in developing the machine for solving differential equations said he would be surprised if the billing departments of department stores ever could make use of such a number cruncher. The fact that early machines relied on 18,000 vacuum tubes and that the semiconductor had yet to be invented probably limited everyone's imagination.

* The future prospects for communication satellites looked bright in the early 1970s, but declined quite unexpectedly in the 1980s with the introduction of fiber optics cable. Fiber optics, meanwhile, has lost its lead in medical diagnostics, as newer visualization technology such as magnetic resonance imaging takes hold. These examples illustrate that "one of the greatest uncertainties controlling new technologies is the invention of yet newer ones," Rosenberg says.

The difficulties of applying technology help explain why approximately 80 cents of every dollar spent on research and development goes toward "improving the performance of technologies that have been inherited from the past," rather than to the invention of new products. The above examples also should lead to some skepticism, he maintains, about the ability of the U.S. government or private investors to pick winners reliably among new technologies. The uncertainty of predicting their potential is one reason venture capitalists scatter investments.

History indicates at least five constraints on human ability to predict the value of new technological developments: the initial primitive understanding of innovations; the specialized use to which many initially are applied; the complementary and competitive relationships among technologies; humans' limited capacity to envision entirely new technological systems, rather than simply improvements to existing ones; and the need for technologies to pass economic as well as technological tests of their value.

New technologies "come into the world in a very primitive condition," Rosenberg indicates, with not all of their "properties and characteristics" understood. The laser, for instance, "represents at one level simply a light beam formed by the excitation of atoms at high energy levels, but it has turned out that laser action can occur with a wide range of materials, including gases, liquids, and solids. The uses to which this capability has been put have been growing for 30 years" and likely will continue to do so.

Medicines are another example. Aspirin has been around for nearly a century, "but only in the last couple years has its efficacy been established for reducing the incidence of heart attacks as a consequence of its blood-thinning properties."

In telecommunications, "every major transmission system - a pair of wires, coaxial cables, microwaves, satellites, fiber optics - has been subject to extensive later improvements in message-carrying capabilities, often with only relatively minor modification of the existing transmission technology." The improvements in the old transmission technology frequently led to postponing the introduction of a new system.

Complementary new technologies suddenly can breathe new life into old ideas as well. "The telephone has been around for more than 100 years, but only recently has its performance been significantly enhanced by facsimile transmission, voice mail, conference calls, and 800 numbers. The need to develop complementary technologies may have a great deal to do in the last couple of decades with the apparent failure of computer technology to raise the level of productivity growth in the U.S. above its rather dismal recent levels." If that is so, the economic payoff from the computer still may lie ahead.