Exponential innovation:

imagining the present.

Curated by Rimadesio

“I have the feeling that the world outside

is calling me. Whispering that there is

something more”, confides Dolores Aber-

nathy, the caring, archetypal rancher’s

daughter in the American Wild west of the

19th century. Dolores is also a 3D printed

android and equipped with artificial intelli-

gence. She and her colleagues have become

the “unwitting” attractions of Westworld

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,

an amusement park where nothing is

off-limits in keeping with the spirit of an

authentic western experience. “We are

already experiencing a situation of artificial

intelligence” reflects Lisa Joy, co-creator

of the television series Westworld (2016)

“it is just that we don’t see robots, we see

smartphones. We think ‘well, that is a

small step’. But if we look at it as a whole,

we realize we are moving towards a world

in which our lives and our thoughts are

loaded onto the web. We are already living

and experiencing artificial intelligence”.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and artificial

consciousness (AC), additive manufactur-

ing (AM), the internet of things (IoT) and

the internet of everything (IoE), are just

some of the technological frontiers that the

television series enacts, combining them in

a present time frame. The technologies of

the original film, annus domini 1973, seem

to belong to another era. It was written and

directed by Michael Crichton and showed

humanoid robots, similar to D-3BO in Star

Wars, in 1977 or to Terminator, in 1984,

in the near future (1983).

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cience fiction came about as a literary

genre in England in the 19th century,

where the technological development that

was driving the rampant industrial revolu-

tion triggered a series of profound social

transformations, arousing feelings of both

hope and fear, a rich imagination was brought

to life, focussing on the possible outcomes

of scientific discoveries and technological

applications. In the first science fiction

novel, written by the eighteen year old Mary

Shelley in 1816, the main character is a

young medical student who, traumatized

by his mother’s death, conceives the idea

of creating the perfect, strong and untouch-

able being. Frankenstein creates his

creature by sewing together different parts

of corpses and brings him to life with

electricity. At that time there was widespread

trafficking of corpses fuelled by medical

schools and their need to practice dissection

and at the same time groundbreaking

studies on electric current (Hans Christian

Ørsted, 1820 Michael Faraday, 1821

André-Marie Ampère, 1826 Georg Ohm,

1827) were laying the groundwork for

the invention of electric motors and the

second industrial revolution.

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he novel, Jurassic Park, written by

Michael Crichton in 1990, imagined

that the development of genetic engineer-

ing would have allowed to bring prehistor-

ic giants back to life using the fossilized

DNA of dinosaurs. On the 30th of July 2003

a team of French and Spanish scientists

succeeded in bringing the bucardo (a recently

extinct Spanish mountain wild goat) back

to life for just a few minutes. In 2012, in

San Francisco, the project Revive&Restore

was launched with the aim to rescue extinct

animals by implanting their embryos in the

most genetically suitable species.

In Jurassic Park the genetic code extracted

from mosquitoes was read by super

computers, able to reduce the length of a

two-year operation down to just a few

minutes. When the novel was written the

Human Genome Project

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was in its early

days. It required a 2,7 billion dollar invest-

ment and was declared complete in 2003.

By 2015 the human genome could be

sequenced in a few hours at the cost of 1,000

dollars. We are therefore witnessing a

short-circuit: the time frontiers imagined

by science fiction are broken down and

the periods of time are becoming increas-

ingly short.

The appearance of the communicator in

Star Trek in 1966 inspired the invention of

the mobile phone. Martin Cooper, head

of a research team for Motorola, developed

a prototype in 90 days that was then

presented to the press in New York, on the

3rd of April in 1973. The first mobile

phone was marketed in 1983, at $3,995

($9,300 in today’s prices). Technology

fuels both hope and concern, it is the engine

for human creativity, which in turn

accompanies and traces the future: generat-

ing a short-circuit. The boundaries between

the present and the future, between imagina-

tion and reality, are worn thin: it is in fact

science fiction itself that inspires and

drives the technological evolution. Speed is

undoubtedly key: first of all in the develop-

ment of technologies but also in their

diffusion and use in different sectors and

geographical areas. Added to the fact that

the web already connects every corner of

the earth and makes the sharing of any

invention even more rampant: because

they can spread in practically almost

no time at all and there is an increasing

number of people who, getting to know

about them, can help to enhance and

improve them.

approximately 1% of the energy released

by steam combustion. Between 1765

and 1776 Watt enhanced this performance

three-fold. From the first 4,4 kW model,

Watt went on to build a 7,5 kW model in

1781. In 1876 a 1.000 kW steam engine

was produced, in 1900 a 2.200 kW one.

Gradually, however, as technology reaches

a certain maturity, increasingly intense efforts

can lead to increasingly modest results:

the physical levels of improvement have

been reached. The difference is given by

the rhythm and rate of improvement and

by its duration. The historian Ian Morris

wrote: “even if the (steam) revolution took

several decades to develop, it was, in any

case, the biggest and fastest transformation

in the entire history of the world”.

electricity, the weight of automobiles,

the physical limits are tangible. The digital

world and information technology present

us instead with a different set of problems.

The limitations are much more relative:

“They concern the number of electrons per

second that can be made to pass through

a channel in an integrated circuit, or how

fast the rays of light can pass through a

fiber optic cable”. Brynjolfsson and McAfee,

researchers at the MIT and the authors of

The Second Machine Age

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(2014), observe

that the exponential speed leads us to ideas

of such magnitude that they seem abstract,

or rather “in an era in which what arrived

first is no longer a particularly reliable guide

for what will follow: science fiction contin-

ues to become reality”. Human beings are

not the only ones who exchange informa-

tion: machines “chat” increasingly more.

The M2M devices (machine to machine),

they literally communicate between devices,

and not by users, using any communication

channel represented 34% of all internet

connected devices in 2016. The remaining

66% was made up of personal computers,

tablets, desk tops, televisions and smart-

phones. According to CISCO, they forecast

that, by 2021, the number of M2M

devices, including cars, industrial robots,

medical equipment and fitness sensors

will, at 51%, overtake the traditional online

devices. The neologism Internet of

Things was used for the first time in 1999

to describe objects able to the react to their

surroundings, collecting and transmitting

data, drawing on and using information.

The objects communicate between

themselves and with their surroundings

by means of chips and sensors. Today, the

physical world can be (almost) entirely

digitalized, and this itself is one the most

important innovations to have taken place

over recent years.

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but also in type and in speed. The need to

analyse and process tonnes of heterogeneous

data in increasingly shorter time scales

is driving the development of analysis tech-

niques that go under the name of Big Data

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.

can, at a surprisingly fast rate, be connected.

Digital technologies coupled with the

exponential rate of improvement in informa-

tion technologies allow for the simultane-

ous development and recombination of

innovations in different sectors: new

materials, additive manufacturing, DNA

sequencing, nanotechnology, renewable

energies, advanced robotics and quantum

information technology. According

to Klaus Schwab, founder of the World

Economic Forum, “the combination

of these new technologies and their interac-

tion through physical, digital and biologi-

cal domains make the industrial revolution

different to the previous ones”.

First there was the steam and the mechani-

zation of work carried out by humans

or animals, then, there was electricity, the

assembly line process and mass produc-

tion. The third industrial era came later

with the advent of computers and automa-

tion, when robots began replacing human

beings in the assembly line. Now we are

entering into the fourth industrial revolution,

in which computers and automation will

blend innovatively together, where robots

will be controlled through systems of

Artificial Intelligence

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, able to assimilate

and operate without any human intervention.

allow us to exploit the potential of new

technologies has grown. The US Advanced

Manufacturing Partnership, the Industrie

4.0

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a project adopted by the German

government, the strategic plan Made in China

2025 are examples of national strategies

aimed at stimulating and directing the

application of technological innovations,

to determine the outcomes of the fourth

industrial revolution. But the range of

transformation will be much greater and

will go well beyond the industrial scope.

The companies based in Silicon V alley

including Uber, Airbnb, Linkedin,

Facebook, Amazon, Google, Netflix, Twitter

have already created a “break” with the

past by changing, potentially everywhere

and for good, our way of travelling, of

moving, of buying, of looking for jobs, of

communicating, of using multimedia

content and so on.

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1. Westworld is a science fiction television series.

Season 1 was shown in the USA in 2016 by HBO.

2. Human Genome Project was an international re-

search program whose goal was the complete mapping

and understanding of all the genes of human beings.

3. “Integrated circuits will lead to such wonders

as home computer – or at least terminals connected

to a central computers – automatic controls for

automobiles, and personal portable communications

equipment. The electronic wrist-watch needs only

a display to be feasible today.”

Gordon E. Moore, Cramming more components,

Electronics, Volume 38, Number 8, April 19, 1965.

4. Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, The Second

Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in

a Time of Brilliant Technologies, W. W. Norton & Co

Inc, New York, 2014.

5. Data that is unstructured or time sensitive or

simply very large cannot be processed by relational

database engines. This type of data requires

a different processing approach called Big Data.

6. Artificial intelligence is an area of computer

science that emphasizes the creation of intelligent

machines that work and react like humans.

7. Zukunftsprojekt Industrie 4.0 (I40) is a national

strategic initiative from the German government.

It is pursued over a 10-15-year period and is based on

the German government's High Tech 2020 Strategy.

The initiative was launched in 2011, allocating € 200

million in funding.

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exponential rate and prolonged over

time puts us in front of things, that in terms

of size and magnitude go beyond our

ability of understanding. Terms of scale

we are actually “not equipped for”.

n the other hand, emerging technolo-

gies have a high improvement rate

after the prototype phase and when they

start to be applied. Before James Watt

came about, steam engines harnessed

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T

standard language, the binary one, means

that information from different fields,

Technology

Stories and Matters

2018

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a new dimension. In 1965 Gordon Moore

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,

the co-founder of Intel, observed that the

number of transistors contained within an

integrated circuit increased two-fold every

year: there were only ten components in

the first chip that was assembled in 1958.

He ventured that in the short-term their

rate of growth would have been steady.

Moore’s Law proved to be accurate for

over 50 years: the number of transisters in

a chip doubled every 18 months. In June

2017 IBM, Samsung and Globalfoundries

announced a new industrial process that

would allow for the development of chips

containing 30 billion transistors. The

speed and energy efficiency of the super-

computers, the speed of downloading,

the efficiency of the hard drive, and other

numerous innovations in the digital

and information technology fields reflect

Moore’s Law. In 1996 the American

government developed ACSI Red: it cost

55 million dollars, took up a surface area

of 200 square meters and consumed 800 kW

an hour. It was the first supercomputer

to exceed 1.8 teraflops in speed. In 2006,

however, a new computer was built able

to perform at the same speed: it cost 500

dollars, took up much less than a square

meter in space and used 200 W an hour.

It was the play station 3.

peed and duration are relative concepts:

information technology has taken us to

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ustainability of exponential growth

physical phenomenon into the

language of computers, in a sequence of

numbers expressed in a binary format,

or in other words into information that can

be archived, modified and re-used.

The economic implication is huge: digital

information has a marginal cost of

reproduction that is next to nothing, and

it doesn’t run out when used, indeed its

value increases with the increase of users

who use it. Data is produced, in real time

and on a large scale, from sensors, audio

and video devices, networks, transactional

applications, log files, internet and social

media. Ninety percent of the data that was

available in 2013 had been created in the

two years leading up to it. This data, after

all, continues to increase, not only in volume

rowth takes place at an unprecedented

over time sure enough takes on a whole

new meaning. When it comes to steam

engines, airplane speed, the production of

neous in origin and content, into a

igitalizing means transforming a

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to make choices and take decisions, but

the ever increasing volumes and speed with

which this data is produces mean that

new storage technologies are required (like

blockchain) and the development of

technologies that make it possible to take

full advantage of the computing power

of the machines to perform ever increasing-

ly complex operations. In The new

division of labour, written in 2014, the

authors Frank Levy and Richard Murnane

predicted a labour market in which the

professional skills required would be found

only within the limits of computers and

information technology. The former are, in

fact, able to perform all sorts of symbolic

operations, from mathematics to logic,

through to language, and therefore can

already replace any human activity that

can be described using algorithms.

The exclusively human ability to examine

the information and to recognize models

or patterns would be preserved.

The example that is usually given is that

of driving in traffic: “A truck driver has a

windscreen and so is able to recognise

what is ahead. Articulating this knowledge

and inserting it into an IT program for

every situation [...] is an extremely difficult

task at the moment. Computers cannot

substitute human beings so easily”.

In 2004 the Grand Challenge failed.

otentially such information can be

processed and used in real time in order

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the DARPA, the US Defense Advanced

Research projects Agency. The aim was

to complete, in the shortest time possible,

a 200 kilometer track in the Californian

desert. The car that went the furthest covered

just 5% of the track and then went off the

road on a tight bend. Shortly afterwards, on

the 9th of October 2010, Google announced

its success on 140,000 miles of tarmac:

“our automated cars use video cameras,

radar sensors and a telemeter radar in

order to “see” traffic, just as our detailed

maps do. All of this is made possible by

our data processing centres that process

huge amounts of data from our cars while

they are mapping the terrain”.

his was a challenge open to completely

autonomous vehicles, sponsored by

he conversion of data, that is miscella-

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the speed with which we change our habits,

intuitively and systematically exploit the

potential of innovations and conceive new

ways of designing processes, organize

work and combine information.

For example, only 0.5% of the available

data is used today in decisional processes.

It should, after all, be remembered that the

transition from steam engines to electric

motors didn’t bring about an immediate

improvement in production. The historian

Paul David noted that technicians and

managers at that time limited themselves

to replacing technologies, without chang-

ing, for example, the layout and the

organisation of the factories. It was only

the next generation who were able to fully

exploit the potential of electric engines.

Steam required only one source of energy

and machinery that required greater power

was positioned closer to the energy source.

On the other hand, with electricity, every

machine can be powered by a single

engine, therefore, the layout of factories

and manufacturing plants started to be

designed on the basis of work flows and

materials.

etting back to the present, on a global

scale the number of projects that

favour and drive the breakthrough that will

nover – the most important IT trade fair

– Japan presented its government pro-

gramme Society 5.0 with the intention to

lead the transformation of social structures

that will accompany the new revolution of

machines. Even if we are not yet able to

accurately outline the results of this transfor-

mation, to use the words of McAfee and

Brynjolfsson, it will surely “be character-

ized by numerous examples of intelligence

of machines and by billions of brains that

will be interconnected and work together”.

The outcome will depend on our ability to

imagine and build the future-present that

awaits us.

he biggest limit to the full deployment

of technology’s potential is actually

n March 2017, at the CeBIT in Han-

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