When Will this Low-Innovation Internet Era End?

It's an age of unprecedented, staggering technological change. Business models are being transformed, lives are being upended, vast new horizons of possibility opened up. Or something like that. These are all pretty common assertions in modern business/tech journalism and management literature.

Then there's another view, which I heard from author Neal Stephenson in an MIT lecture hall last week. A hundred years from now, he said, we might look back on the late 20th and early 21st century and say, "It was an actively creative society. Then the Internet happened and everything got put on hold for a generation."

Stephenson was clearly trying to be provocative. But he's not alone in the judgment that we're not actually living in an era of great innovation. Economist Tyler Cowen's ebook-turned-book, The Great Stagnation made similar points: Compared with the staggering changes in everyday life in the first half of the 20th century wrought by electricity, cars, and electronic communication, the digital age has brought relatively minor alterations to how we live. Electricity is still electricity, and still generated mostly with fossil fuels; cars are better but not all that much better, and still propelled almost entirely by fossil fuels. Only communication has been truly transformed, but is the transformation really as profound as the advent of telegraphs, radio, and TV? (For much more on this, consult economist Robert J. Gordon's productivity research.) We have no colonies on Mars, we still can't get by without prehistoric fuel, the dishwasher still doesn't get all the dishes clean, and very few of us have personal jetpacks. You call this progress?

More prosaically, the 15 years since the Internet became a major part of our lives has been marked here in the U.S. — birthplace of the Internet — by mostly disappointing economic growth. The only exception was in the late 1990s, when excitement over how much the Internet was going to change everything spurred an investment bubble that briefly drove real growth. (And yes, the story has been different outside the U.S., but the emerging markets boom has generally been more about catching up than exploiting cutting-edge technology.)

The most common response to such griping has been, just wait. Many techno-optimists base their thinking on a famous 1990 paper by economic historian Paul David, which described how, for decades, electricity had little effect on industrial productivity as manufacturers simply swapped out older energy sources for electric power but changed nothing about how they made things. It was only as new factories were built that took advantage of the unique properties of electric motors that a productivity boom ensued. Just give the digital age a bit more time, and you'll see huge changes (and, one hopes, improvements) in how we work and live.

MIT's Erik Brynjolffson has been compiling evidence for years that this productivity revolution is in fact under way, and recently co-authored an ebook on the topic with his MIT colleague Andrew McAfee called Race Against the Machine (if you prefer your arguments on video, he and Cowen debated the matter at the Techonomy conference last fall). But the innovations Brynjolffson has been looking at are mostly organizational. At some point we really do have to get beyond the organizational, and the digital, to the real.

Or, to look at it another way, until the prime example of an innovative major corporation ceases to be Procter & Gamble, we probably aren't in a truly innovative era (Tide to Go is awesome, but it's not exactly the transistor).

There are intriguing signs that we might be approaching the point where digital innovation takes a big leap into the physical world: 3D printers are breaking into the mainstream, tech billionaires are backing an asteroid mining venture, and lots of people keep saying that biotechnology is the next great frontier. Then again, the 3D stuff is still mostly prototypes and novelties, and asteroid mining and the biotech revolution haven't actually happened yet. Even beyond the technological challenges, there are lots of other obstacles to change. Stephenson, who has "devoted a shocking amount of time" lately to learning about alternative space-launch technologies, said at MIT that "the reason none of them happen turns out to be insurance."

So we wait, and we check Facebook on our iPhones.