Social Ingenuity ALWAYS Lags Technological Ingenuity: The Biggest Challenge Facing Society & Startups

When I was investing professionally , I used to see this at a micro level. You would meet a founder who created this amazing technology. But then you’d ask the question: who would use this? And how would this be used? Crickets…….timing matters. As the old investor wag goes, “Being early is the same as being wrong.”

But the point of this, is even if the technology is very useful, the use case almost always takes time to figure out. Basically humans naturally have a hard time adopting new technology due to deeply ingrained habits and literal “human nature” that is resistant to any major change. In fact, there is probably an extensive customer education process needed. Or for the new technology to really work well, there has to be some other corresponding technological developments that just are not there yet. Coupled with clear UX/UI (User Experience/User Interface) problems common to new technology, it is no surprise adoption will be low. 

It just takes a long time for people to catch up. There is this thing called “Productivity J-Curve”

Quoting Noah Smith’s recap Erik Brynjolfsson, Daniel Rock & Chad Syverson’s paper: 

“The productivity J-curve: How intangibles complement general purpose technologies”. That paper argues that big inventions with wide-ranging applications — electricity, the internal combustion engine, computers, the internet, and maybe A.I. — initially cause a productivity slowdown, because people are taking time out from production to figure out how to use the new stuff. Once they do, it’s off to the races, and productivity bounces back.”

At societal and macro-level, this is an immense challenge we have globally. This happened with the changes from Agrarian to Industrial age. And now from the Industrial age to Technology/Knowledge age.

We’re in for a ride going into the Roaring 20s as our societies try to cope with the deluge of technological innovations coming to the fore in robotics, AI, biotech among other things. This is the reason we should be optimistic about our future.

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