MIT AI predicting technology improvement rates

By Ian Page

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733321000950

The paper has a good summary 

"Highlights

  • A comprehensive granular account of the rate of technological change.
  • Predicted improvement rates for 1757 domains containing 97.2% of US patent system.
  • Improvement rates are not uniformly distributed across and within categories.
  • Fastest improving domains are predominantly software-related.
  • Online system for searching domains and improvement rates based on keywords."

My main concern was that it's measuring technology improvement rates, presumably some measure of performance, rather than some measure of impact.

My thought was that making excel go 200% faster, has little impact on the world while improving the extraction rate of copper from ores from 0.3% to 0.33% increases the amount of the critical material copper by 10% and has major impacts on the market price and usage.

This leads to concluding  that patents in software (where it's easy but may well be less impactful ) are the place to put your effort.

This reinforces the US/China distinction where china seems to be  focussed on the basic components of the supply chain of real products, and the US is focussed on services and virtual products.

Improving supply chains is really hard but has long term strategic advantages as its hard to copy, involving huge investment and a lot of craft (non-patent) innovation. Software is surprisingly easy to copy in many cases since everything about it, is there in the code.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pulsing industrial chemical reactions

By Ian Page From Nature 605 19 May 22 470. Chemical reactions are often a mixture of potential parallel reactions, and potential serial reactions. Chemists play with temperature, flow rate, pressure, proportions etc. to persuade just the one reaction they want to happen.
Read more

REN: Reperceiving the Grid Part 1

Image
2021.06.30 – Ian Page The grid is normally described as a cloud that delivers electricity as needed to a wide array of sinks/applications/users at an averaged price in control and buys services such as generation and storage from a variety of external suppliers. It has a very difficult job balancing the variable supply and variable demand with congestion on lines and keeping alternative lines to handle outages. Supply and demand are being balanced by market systems such as day ahead bidding for 15-minute periods as well as using inertia and battery systems to balance the system within the 15-minute periods. It's worth comparing this with the internet. The internet also has the need to maintain an instantaneous balance between packets coming onto the system and going out, packets cannot pile up.  Congestion appears as delays to streaming rather than brownouts or overvoltage. The internet also has sources that can deliver huge quantities of packets unpredictably and sinks that can de...
Read more

Serious Plan to Convert Australia's Largest Fertilizer Plant to Green Hydrogen to Save Money

By Ian Page – 2021.12.31 https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/30/high-gas-prices-lead-to-conversion-of-ammonia-plant-to-green-hydrogen/ I’ve written before that the high price of gas means that it's now cheaper to make hydrogen by electrolysis than from natural gas in Europe. This is the first actual plan I've seen and by a big industrial group. I hope it goes forward. Also:  Hyundai has given up on hydrogen powered cars citing technical issues, and lack of marketability after spending a fortune over many years. With Toyotas ambivalence and deal with a Chinese EV car firm to make rebrand-able EVs, hydrogen powered cars are effectively dead. This is good news because energetically it's a lousy idea, and batteries have gotten good enough to eat into the potential market. However, there is still potential for long distance lorries, although we are already seeing in Germany container lorries doing repeated medium distance trips from port to warehouse, trying pantographs on parts o...
Read more