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          The Uncertainties of Technological Innovation

Even the greatest ideas and inventions

can flounder, whereas more modest steps

forward sometimes change the world

by John Rennie 

_T

he future is not what it used to be," wrote the poet Paul Valery decades ago, and it would not be hard to share in his disappointment today. As children, many of us were assured that we would one day live in a world of technological marvels. And so we do—but, by and large, not the ones foretold. Films, television, books and World's Fairs promised that the twilight of the 20th century and the dawn of the 21st would be an era of helpful robot servants, flying jet cars, moon colonies, easy space travel, undersea cities, wrist videophones, paper clothes, disease-free lives and, oh, yes, the 20-hour work week. What went wrong?

 Few of the promised technologies failed for lack of interest. Nor was it usually the case that they were based on erroneous principles, like the perpetual motion machines that vex patent offices. Quite often, these inventions seemed to work. So why do bad things happen to good technologies? Why do some innovations fall so far short of what is expected of them, whereas others succeed brilliantly?

 One recurring reason is that even the most knowledgeable forecasters are sometimes much too optimistic about the short-run prospects for success. Two decades ago, for example, building a self-contained artificial heart seemed like a reasonable, achievable early goal—not a simple chore, of course, but a straightforward one. The heart, after all, is just a four-chambered pump; surely our best biomedical engineers could build a pump! But constructing a pump compatible with the delicate tissues and subtle chemistry of the body has proved elusive. In many ways, surgeons have had far more luck with transplanting organs from one body to another and subduing (through the drug equivalent of brute force) the complex immunologic rejection reactions.

 Similarly, from the 1950s through the early 1970s, most artificial-intelligence researchers were smoothly confident of their ability to simulate another organ, the brain. They are more humble these days: although their work has given rise to some narrow successes, such as medical-diagnostic expert systems and electronic chess grandmasters, replicating anything like real human intelligence is now recognized as far more arduous.

 The more fundamental problem with most technology predictions, however, is that they are simplistic and, hence, unrealistic. A good technology must by definition be useful. It must be able to survive fierce buffeting by market forces, economic and social conditions, governmental policies, quirky timing, whims of fashion and all the vagaries of human nature and custom. What would-be Nostradamus is prepared to factor in that many contingencies?

Sadly, some inventions are immensely appealing in concept but just not very good in practice. The Buck Rogers-style jetpack is one. With the encouragement of the military, engineers designed and built prototypes during the 1960s. As scene-stealing props in movies such as Thunderbolt, jet-packs embodied tomorrow's soaring high-tech freedom: fly to work, fly to school, fly to the market-But practical considerations kept jetpacks grounded. The weight of the fuel almost literally sank the idea. The amount required to fly an appreciable distance rapidly became impractical to attach to a user's back. The packs also did not maneuver very well. Finally, the military could not define enough missions that called for launching infantry into the air (where they might be easy targets for snipers) to justify the expense of maintaining the program.

 To survive, a commercial technology must not only work well, it must compete in the marketplace. During the 1980s, many analysts thought industrial robotics would take off. Factory managers discovered, however, that roboticizing an assembly line meant more than wheeling the old machines out and the robots in. In many cases, turning to robots would involve completely rethinking (and redesigning) a manufacturing plant's operations. Robots were installed in many factories with good results, particularly in the automobile industry, but managers often found that it was more economical to upgrade with less versatile, less intelligent but more cost-effective conventional machines. (Fjqjerts still disagree about whether further advances in robotics will eventually tip this balance.)

 Many onlookers thought silicon-based semiconductors would be replaced by faster devices made of new materials, such as gallium arsenide, or with new architectures, such as superconducting Josephson junction switches. The huge R&D base associated with silicon, however, has continued to refine and improve the existing technology. Result: silicon will almost certainly remain the semiconductor of choice for most products for at least as long as the current chip-making technology survives. Its rivals are finding work, too, but in specialized niche applications.

One projected commercial payoff of the space program is supposed to be the development of orbiting manufacturing facilities. In theory, under weightless conditions, it should be possible to fabricate ball bearings, grow semiconductor crystals and purify Pharmaceuticals without imperfections caused by gravity. Yet the costs associated with spaceffight remain high, which means that building these factories in space and lofting raw materials to them would be neither easy nor inexpensive. Moreover, improvements in competing ground-based technologies are continuing to eat away at the justification for building the zero-gravity facilities.

In 1895 no one imagined

 that computers would become a key technology.

 Government policies and decisions can also influence the development of new technologies. Yawn-inducing federal decisions about standards for electronic devices and the availability of the broadcast spectrum for commercial use indirectly dictate the rate and results of electronic device development. International disputes about who owns the mineral rights to the seafloor sapped the incentive that many nations and corporations had to invest in undersea mining technologies. Competing industrial standards can also stymie progress-witness the wrangles that froze work on high-definition television.

 And sometimes the worth of one technology floes not really become dear until other small but crucial inventions and discoveries put them in perspective. Personal computers looked like mere curiosities for hobbyists for many years; not until Dan Briddin and Mitchell Ka-por invented the first spreadsheet programs did personal computers stand out as useful business tools. CD-ROMs did not start to become common accessories of PCs until the huge size of some programs, particularly reference works and interactive games, made the optical disks convenient alternatives to cheaper but less capacious floppies.

 In short, the abstract quality of an innovation matters not at all. Build a better mousetrap, and the world may beat a path to your door—if it doesn't build a better mouse instead, or tie up your gadget in environmental-impact and animal-cruelty regulations.

 Of course, many technologies do succeed wildly beyond anyone's dreams. Transistors, for instance, were at first seen merely as devices for amplifying radio signals and later as sturdier replacements for vacuum tubes. Ho-hum. Yet their solid-state nature also meant they could be mass-produced and miniaturized in ways that vacuum tubes could not, and their reliability meant that larger devices incorporating greater numbers of components would be feasible. (Building the equivalent of a modern computer with vacuum tube switches instead of transistors would be impossible. Not only would its size make it too slow, the tens of millions of tubes would break down so frequently that the machine would be permanently on the fritz.)

 Of those advantages, the microelectronic revolution was born. Similar Horatio Alger stories can be told for lasers, fiber optics, plastics, piezoelectric crystals and other linchpins of the modern world. In fact, it is tempting to think that most great innovations are unforeseen, if not unforeseeable. As computer scientists Whitfield Diffie and John McCarthy reminded panelists this past spring at a public discussion on the future hosted by scientific american, "A technology-of-the-20th-century symposium held in 1895 might not have mentioned airplanes, radio, antibiotics, nuclear energy, electronics, computers or space exploration."

 Given the pitfalls of prognostication, why would scientific american dare to venture an issue on key technologies of the 21st century? First, technology and the future have always been the province of this magazine. When scientific american was founded 150 years ago, the industrial revolution was literally still gathering steam. Those were the days before the birth of Edison, before Darwin's On the Origin of the Species, before the germ theory of disease, before the invention of cheap steel, before the discovery of x-rays, before Mendel's laws of genetics and Maxwell's equations of elec-tromagnetism. This magazine has had the privilege of reporting on all the major technological advances since that time (see pages 12-17 for examples). We could think of no more fitting way to celebrate our own birthday than by taking a peek ahead.

Second, to paraphrase Valery, the future is now not even when it used to be. The new century—make that the new millennium—begins in less than five years (six for the calendri-cal purists). The next few decades will be when the technologies that now exist and look most promising either flourish or wither on the vine.

 In selecting technologies to include in this issue, we decided to forsake the purely fabulous and concentrate on those that seemed most likely to have strong, steady, enduring effects on day-to-day life. What, some readers may exdaim, no faster-than-light star-ships? Immortality pills? U-Clone-'Em personal duplication kits? Sorry, but no, not here. In the words of that famous oracle and child's toy the Magic 8 Ball: "Reply hazy, try again." Naturally, this issue makes no pretense of being an exhaustive list of all the technologies that will contribute powerfully to the years ahead. Any attempt to make it one would have sacrificed useful detail for nominal thoroughness. Our more modest intention is only to convey the excitement and real rate of substantive progress in many pivotal fields.

 The truth is that as technologies pile on technologies at an uneven pace, it becomes impossible to predict precisely what patterns will emerge. Can anyone today truly foresee what the world will be like if, for example, genetic engineering matures rapidly to its full potential? If organisms can be tailored to serve any function (even becoming living spaceships, as Freeman J. Dyson seems to hint in his article), can anyone guess what a 21st-century factory will look like?

 New technologies also pose moral dilemmas, economic challenges, personal and social crises. For example, after the Human Genome Project is completed in a decade or so, the genetic foundations of any biological question will become transparent to investigation. The controversial genetic aspects of intelligence, violence and other complex traits will then be available for direct scrutiny—and, conceivably, manipulation. How much will that transform the basis and practice of medicine, law and government? So in addition to articles on the nuts and bolts of technological development, readers will find here more essayistic commentaries that meditate on the consequences (both good and bad) of the work in progress.

 Perceptive readers will also note that some of these authors implicitly or explicitly disagree with one another; they do not share a consensus on tomorrow. It is precisely out of the tensions between differing predictions that the real future will pull itself together. Check back with scientific american in a century or so to evaluate our technology scorecard. We fully intend to be here—and who is to say that you won't be, too?

JOHNRENNIE is editor in chief of Scientific American.