Someone on another site said that in the 90s and early 2000s, technology doubled every 6 months, but technological advances have slowed down in recent years.
Why did technology advance so rapidly in the 90s and early 2000s? And why have advances in technology slowed down?
For personal computing, that was an era of early diversification which lead to the current standards.
But I would ask to see what metrics the claim is based upon.
Mostly regarding computers. The claim is that PC power doubled every six months.
I don’t see any slowdown here. Perhaps you’re overlooking that most advances in processing speed are now in graphics chips?
Because physics. There is a limit to what matter can be made to do. When you first start playing with it, you are a usually a long way from that limit, and therefore have lots of improvements you can make. But after a while, you are getting close to as good as you can possibly make it. Limits on computer technology include the speed of light, the speed of electricity, the size of atoms, the laws of thermodynamics, and quantum tunneling. There is also the practical–when pushing for (say) 50% more processing power increases the cost by 500% and requires liquid nitrogen for cooling, the market for that chip is going to be very small.
Most if not all periods of technological advance graph something like this. The people who think that the steep rising slope for any trend will continue forever are known as “morons”. (Or, often, “investors”.)
Here is a good article from a few years back and another one from a few weeks back.
The period in question saw the widespread introduction of personal computers to homes, schools, and businesses; a huge expansion in mobile communications, the internet turning from an esoteric oddity into the information superhighway and the backbone of e-commerce and electronic communication.
Technology hasn’t slowed down since then, but those changes had a memorable impact on the way people live and work, so it’s easy to perceive that period as a time of rapid progress.
As a specific example, the smartphone I have in my pocket now is vastly more powerful than all of the computing and communication resources I had in total, at the turn of the century…
…but the transition from needing to stop and find a payphone to actually having a mobile phone in my pocket - when I got my first basic cell phone (Ericsson GH172) in the early 1990s, was an incredible moment for me. I remember that moment with great clarity - and as a result it feels like a bigger change than many of the things that have happened since
One factor could be the S curve
http://ideagenius.com/the-s-curve-pattern-of-innovation-a-full-analysis/
After you make sure the technology is possible and affordable, it undergoes a rapid growth phase for a while. But eventually that phase ends when the technology either can’t be pushed any further, or is replaced by a new technology, or the market is saturated.
So perhaps the 90s and early aughts were the vertical part of the S curve.
Also it depends on what field of technology you’re talking about. The 2010s seemed to be a pretty good decade for biotechnology research. Some fields of technology advance during different periods. We may enter the vertical part of the S curve with things like neuroscience research soon since multiple nations are all working on large scale neuroscience projects. So it depends on what kind of technology field you’re discussing.
More generally, I think that period is when things “went digital”, it’s a decade or which a lot of people remember “then” changing to “now”, so the rate of advance is perceived as greater even if that is not reality. A lot of the commonplace things we have now popped up then in their early iterations, just they were more expensive and not as powerful.
Go back further into the eighties and suddenly its a very different world. Eighties cellphones vs nineties cellphones were night and day different, as I recall. LPs, cassette and crazy expensive CDs became MP3s and bootleg CDs in every pub. Eighties there were plenty of computers but they were mostly odd and proprietary with limited connection possibilities for normal people, by the nineties there were affordable generic PCs everywhere and a torrent of “free internet” discs through every letterbox.
Specific electronic and biomedical advances ca. 1990-2000 are why myself and several around me survive and function. Laser surgeries; electrocardiac procedures; new diagnostics. Had we shown our conditions in 1985, we’d have been cooked by 1988.
