Thinking about the future of technology: Rates of improvement and economic feasibility

• More than 30 technologies are identified that have annual rates of improvement that are greater than 10% per year.
• Rapidly improving technologies help us better understand new types of higher-level systems
• Rapidly improving technologies help us better analyze when new forms of higher-level systems might become economically feasible.

This paper uses data on rates of improvement to discuss when new technologies or systems composed from them might become economically feasible. Technologies must provide some level of performance and price for specific applications before they will begin to diffuse and technologies that experience rapid rates of improvement are more likely to become economically feasible for a growing number of applications than are other technologies. Drawing from a large data base on rates of improvement, this paper describes a set of plausible futures that are very different from ones that are presented in public forums.