Texas highways have new speed limit

About 500 miles of west Texas highway have a new speed limit -- 80 miles per hour, the highest in the country. Some observers are concerned about reduced safety, and some are concerned about reduced mileage.

I see something else. I see an example of a technology that didn’t increase exponentially.

With all the excitement about Moore’s Law and the exponential rise of computing power, we are sometimes told that exponential growth is just something that technology does. Futurist Ray Kurzweil argues that “We’re actually doubling ... the rate of technical progress, every decade.”

But let’s look at cars for a counterexample. Even before Henry Ford’s 1908 Model T, the number of cars was growing exponentially. The period of exponential growth lasted for some decades, but that time is long past. Speed limits also increased, but they too have been fairly stable for decades. In recent years, we have returned to speed limits that were standard 30 years ago.

Lots of technologies have experienced an exponential growth period, but this lasts only a few decades. And while an individual technology can grow exponentially, this is never true for technology in general.

American population reaches 300,000,000

Did you feel it? The great American population odometer rolled over to 300,000,000 on October 17. (It was at 7:46am EDT, if you’re keeping track.)

Three hundred million is a big milestone for us, but China estimates that its one-child policy has reduced its population by roughly the same amount. In other words, in 25 years, China has not produced as many people as the US only now has.

This reminds me of a fascinating update of an ancient list. The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (how many can you list before you look it up?) was written more than 2000 years ago. What’s interesting is that they’re all primarily buildings -- a pyramid, a lighthouse, a couple of statues, and so on.

The Economist magazine attempted an updated list in 1993 (“The Age of the Thing,” 12/25/93). But their list of modern wonders didn’t have a single building -- not a skyscraper, not a monument, and not enormous buildings like NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral (big enough to hold an entire Saturn 5 rocket) or Boeing’s airplane construction building in Everett, WA (the world’s biggest building). The closest it comes is with one entry, the offshore oil platform.

Other entries are the expected gems of our modern high tech world: the microprocessor, the telephone network, the jumbo jet, the hydrogen bomb, and the moon landing.

The last one may not come to mind as readily: the birth control pill, invented in 1963. This, plus the modern latex condom developed about 30 years earlier, gave us the convenient, reliable, and inexpensive birth control that has helped keep the world population (6.5 billion and rising) somewhat under control. Sometimes the important technologies aren’t the most glamorous.

Amazon sells ebook readers for less than $200

Amazon sells ebook readers for less than $200. More than 50,000 titles are available at online retailers. Are ebooks finally here?

Let’s pause to remember some of the missteps in this field. In 1999, Microsoft predicted the end of printed books, magazines, and newspapers within 20 years. According to their timeline, by now we should have seen one billion electronic ebook titles and by 2008 we were to expect ebook titles to outsell print titles.

It didn’t quite work that way. But new technologies are often overhyped and fail to meet expectations. Some of them do eventually deliver on their promises. CD drives in PCs and high definition TV (HDTV) were embarrassing failures in the 1990s, but CD drives are now standard equipment and HDTV looks like it just might make it this time.

So let’s reconsider ebooks. They’re much denser than a book, and a single ebook might hold a thousand text-only books. They can be downloaded within seconds. You can search them to find every instance of a particular phrase. Though the ebook equivalents of new books cost almost as much as the books themselves, the cost of goods is negligible.

On the other hand, you can mark up books and articles printed on paper. I can give you a book to read and not worry about whether you have a compatible reader. With much greater text quality and more words visible at a glance, paper is much easier to read. And if you lose a book or article, it’s not as great a loss as an expensive ebook reader would be.

So -- are ebooks finally here? I imagine that they will continue their slow inroads, perhaps on the backs of other successful devices such as iPods. They clearly have some advantages, but with this example we see a common trait with every revolutionary new technology: new products are never better than what they replace on every point.