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Output grew 100x in 200 years
Two centuries of growth
For the first 1,800 years on a graph of world output, human life barely changed. Then steam engines and railroads taught people to build and produce things at scale, and within about five decades electricity was spreading everywhere. Cars followed, powered by a vast supply of oil, and computing arrived within a few decades after that. An ordinary calculator today has more power than the computer on the Apollo 11 mission in the 1960s.
Each layer feeds the next
The internet arrived in 1995, and AI is the frontier now underway. The gaps between these breakthroughs keep shrinking, because each one feeds the next. Computing needed electricity, the internet needed computing and electricity, and AI needed the internet, computing, and electricity.
Every new layer sits on top of the ones before it, so the line on the graph keeps getting steeper. Several new frontiers are now opening at the same time, each catalyzed by the ones that came earlier.
Why did world output stay flat for so long?
Before the Industrial Revolution, economies ran on muscle, wood, and farmland, so output was capped by how much land could be worked. Economic historian Angus Maddison's estimates show world income per person rising very slowly for centuries. When harvests improved, population grew to match, and the extra people ate up the gains. Coal and the steam engine broke that limit by supplying power that did not depend on farmland, and the first widely used steam engines pumped water out of British coal mines.
Why did factories gain so little from early electricity?
Early factories ran on a single steam engine that turned a long overhead shaft, with belts carrying power to every machine. When electric motors arrived, many owners simply swapped the engine for a motor and kept the same layout. Economist Paul David argued in a 1990 paper on the dynamo that the big productivity gains came only after factories gave each machine its own motor and rearranged the floor. Edison's Pearl Street Station in New York began supplying electricity in 1882.
Why does each breakthrough need the one before?
Economists Timothy Bresnahan and Manuel Trajtenberg described steam, electricity, and computers as general purpose technologies, meaning tools that spread through nearly every industry and make new inventions possible. Each one supplies a missing ingredient to the next, which is why a power grid had to exist before computers could run on it. ENIAC, one of the first electronic computers, was unveiled in 1946, filled a large room, and drew about 150 kilowatts of power.
How little computing power did Apollo 11 have?
The Apollo Guidance Computer had about 4 kilobytes of working memory and 72 kilobytes of fixed storage. Its programs lived in core rope memory, where wires were threaded by hand through or around tiny magnetic rings to encode each bit. Workers at Raytheon did the weaving. The computer guided the Apollo 11 lunar module to its landing in July 1969.
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