In the age of blockchain, AI, and cloud computing, it can be hard to keep up with how fast technology is advancing. This is why we’ve gathered a short list of stats and facts about technological growth, and while the answer is not as simple as we’d hope, there are several fascinating things everyone needs to know in 2023.
Read on and satisfy your curiosity!
So, How Fast is Technology Advancing Today?
The classic response to this question is known as Moore’s Law: every 18 months to two years, the number of transistors per chip doubles. This observation about the exponential growth of technology has since held true in computer technology. However, it doesn’t apply to all technologies.
(Intel)
Useful Technological Growth Statistics and Facts
When it comes to how fast technology is advancing, statistics show there are more factors in play than Moore’s law and that the pace of growth varies depending on category. Moreover, some technologies are advancing at breakneck speed, exceeding the rates Moore predicted for microchips.
Transistors are Still Following Moore’s Law.
While NVIDIA proclaimed Moore’s law dead, Intel (co-founded by Moore) considers the law of exponential growth in technology to be very much alive. However, the difference in opinion is in the economic viability of putting transistors on ever smaller surfaces, now measured in nanometers. Recent developments have seen microchips changing design and growing in height, allowing more transistors to fit in the same space.
(KarlUpp)
Between 2003 and 2021, the cost of human genome sequencing decreased in compliance with Moore’s law.
From $300 million in 2003, the price of generating a so-called draft of the human genome fell to $14 million in 2006. In the next decade, the price dropped to about $4,000, and then $1,500 by late 2015. By 2021, the cost had already dropped below the $1000 mark. This is one of the examples that shows that the acceleration of technology, with sufficient effort and investment, comes with a significant decrease in cost.
(National Human Genome Research Institute)
Over 80% of technologies grow slower than 25% per year.
Research overviewing 97.2% of all US patents has shown that most technologies don’t grow as quickly in terms of patent numbers. Of course, Moore’s law was an observation concerning the development of microchips, which have high investment rates, and whose improvement benefits almost all modern technology, so it cannot be applied to the growth of all technology.
(Science Direct)
11% of technology domains accelerate faster than Moore's law predicts.
Numbers show that information technology growth happens at the fastest rate, as it accounts for most of the 11% of domains. Moreover, the top ten fastest-growing technologies are all IT technologies, and the first on the list is the domain of dynamic information exchange and support systems integrating multiple channels, at 216% predicted annual growth.
(Science Direct)
Exponential technological growth is even faster in AI, where the compute doubles every three months.
While Stanford’s results are from 2019, they show the pattern is consistent, with AI beating Moore’s law and doubling four times as fast. Moreover, 2022 results from an MLPerf AI competition, sometimes dubbed the AI Olympics, confirm that AI is still on this trajectory of astounding growth in training times.
(Stanford, IEEE)
Compared to 2015, there were 30 times more AI patents filed in 2021.
For AI, the rate of technological advancement measured in the number of patents is 76.9% per year. This concurs with the growing investment in AI as well as the increasing number of use cases for the technology, along with international cooperation in the field.
(Stanford)
97 zettabytes of data will be created and consumed in 2022, compared to only 6.5 zettabytes in 2012.
The pace of technological change can be seen in the exponential growth of data. The volume of data rises along with different technologies, including telecommunications, IoT, and cloud computing (growing at a stunning rate) that enable people to consume, produce, and analyze such unprecedented amounts of data.
(Statista)
The adoption of technology also has an exponential growth rate.
For example, in 2011, 35% of US households reported using a smartphone. The percentage had already hit 68% by 2015 and 85% by 2021. The use of the radio also grew from 10% in 1920 to almost 90% in 1946. The use of most other household technologies has grown following a similar S-curve.
(Statista, Our World in Data)
The number of global internet users grew from over 1 billion in 2005 to over 5 billion in 2022.
The internet’s importance for the development of new technology is difficult to overstate. Still, it’s good to remember that global internet penetration is still on the increase. Among other technologies such as smartphones, Big Data, and IoT, the internet has also enabled the invention and the adoption of crypto.
(Data Reportal)
The Future of Technology
In the end, there is more than one answer to how fast technology is advancing. Microchips, the basis for many other technologies, are still following Moore’s law, as are some other technologies. However, information technology is advancing much faster, while the majority of other technologies don’t reach this growth rate―over 80% of technologies in the US grow at less than 25% per year.
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