Is all the low hanging fruit gone in technology development? What we can do to shape innovation

As a recent engineering graduate, it’s easy to think the “low-hanging fruit” of technology has already been picked. The scientific revolutions of the past—mastering physics, chemistry, and biology—gave us nuclear power, plastics, and antibiotics. Back then, inventing calculus could change the course of history; today, mastering it is merely a graduation requirement.¹

Yet the opportunities for innovation are far from over, although we may need to look for them in other areas. In fact, the pace of technological change is accelerating. The real challenge now is not just to invent, but to guide our inventions—to steer them toward a future that benefits humanity rather than harms it. To do that, we must first understand innovation in context and its history.²

An explosion in progress after the scientific revolution (1600s-)

We owe much of our modern world to the Scientific Revolution of the 1600s. It created a culture that placed trust in evidence, mathematics, and experiment over dogma. For the first time, humanity could answer fundamental questions about nature through modeling and observation. The printing press acted as an accelerant, spreading new ideas across Europe and allowing them to compound over generations.

By the 1800s, this scientific mindset had matured into an explosion of technological progress. Many of these innovations came from our improved understanding of basic natural sciences - physics, chemistry and biology. The Industrial Revolution began in Britain with the steam engine, powering factories, locomotives, and ships. Electricity followed, unlocking a path that led eventually to computers and the internet. Chemistry brought the periodic table, synthetic fertilizers, and new materials; physics delivered relativity, quantum mechanics, and nuclear power; biology gave us germ theory, vaccines, and antibiotics.

Being able to to see how our tools based on scientific theory could shape the world through the tools we use, we also greated several grand projects based on public funding. For example:

• 1860: London sweage system

• 1869: The Suez Canal connected the Mediterranean to the Red Sea.

• 1914: The Panama Canal cut the route from Atlantic to Pacific in half.

• 1968, the world put its first man on the moon.

A stagnation in development since the 1970s?

However, as if we had squeezed most of the juice from the fruits provided from the basic natural science - it feels that innovation in the West doesn’t have the same relentless climb we had before. Farming efficiency has plataued after inventions like fertilizer and farming mechanisation, combustion engines have nearly reached their physical efficiency limits and even measures like life expectancy appear to be nearing natural biological ceilings as we eliminate malnutrition and infectious diseases. Innovation now is focused much more on finance and the digital world rather than the physical. Furthermore, in developed countries, the challenge seems less about producing more, and more about fairer distribution and optimised use of resources.

In fact, this language exactly encapsuates our attitudes towards technological development. Peter Thiel says ‘the division of the world into the so-called developed and developing nations implies that the “developed” world has already achieved the achievable, and that poorer nations just need to catch up.’

If you look at innovation now, many of the mature industries built on advances in physics, chemistry, and biology have become institutionalized and slow to change. Following the paths of the iconic scientists from textbooks no longer guarantees world-changing breakthroughs. As innovation drifts further from the physical world, its impact on daily life becomes harder to see.³ After all, we live in a physical world, not a digital one. “Deep tech” shows one way forward - innovations in fusion energy, gene editing and advanced materials have promise to change the future concretely.

However, for the last 50 years software and the internet have been the main drivers of growth - so much many people mainly associate the word “technology” with information technology or “tech”. One promising avenue is the developments in AI, which could maybe accelerate innovation as the printing press once did - although only time will tell how true this is. Nevertheless, the US economy is taking a heavy bet on AI with 40% of the S&P 500 being in tech companies. Although maybe it feels like we haven’t had many “man on the moon” moments recently, looking at things with a broader scope we can see innovation as a whole is increasing rather than decreasing.

How development on a wider scope shows the rate of innovation is increasing

If we measure development through GDP over the last 2000 years, innovation is clearly speeding up instead of stagnating or slowing down.⁴

Compounding effects and large 100 trillion times growth like this aren’t visualisable in our brains, but a simple calculation would tell you that the US economy growing 10% each year would mean it produces more dollars in a year than there are atoms in the universe in about 1500 years. For reference, modern humans have existed for about 40,000 years, so we’re at a unique point in history where such rapid progress is possible and we’re probably about to see a lot of change if this trend continues.

Interestingly, looking at this graph on a logarithmic axis we get a somewhat clearer look at past growth. We can see that technology has always been improving people’s lives, it’s just that 2000 years ago it was relatively slower on an absolute scale, so groundbreaking inventions were further apart.

Many inventions had to happen for us to get to this point: the controlled use of fire around 1,000,000 BC, the development of Egyptian geometry around 3,000 BC, the introduction of Arabic numerals around 700 AD and the concept of atoms proposed by Greek philosophers around 400 BC. These set the foundation for the scientific revolution in the 1600s-1700s AD. And as our tools get more efficient (so more people have time to invent) and as our knowledge and teaching builds upon itself, it seems ground-breaking innovations are going to come much more frequently. Although it is important to note, these are long term trends so on the scale of countries and decades there might be less clear of a trajectory. Culture and government policy are some of the things that can impact this, as we’ll see.

How countries can slow or speed up technology development

Given how much the world has changed and will continue to change dramatically within our lifetimes, it is vital to steer technological innovation deliberately and cultivate a culture that supports bold progress. Major breakthroughs like electricity and the computer didn’t emerge by chance; they required committed, long-term vision and coordinated effort.

In this regard, if we take public projects as a measure of ambition, Europe and the United States appear to be lagging. Institutional drive has weakened, with progress increasingly dependent on private initiatives apart from a few exceptions such as universities. As a contrast, China’s Five-Year Plans provide clear, strategic direction, and India recently celebrated a historic achievement by landing its first spacecraft on the Moon. Meanwhile, the UK has faced setbacks such as cancelling significant portions of its only high-speed rail project. If we want to shape the future, we must foster a culture that embraces long-term ambition and public commitment to innovation.

Of course, the West has experienced several significant decades of innovation - Bell Labs is a classic example of this in a company, credited with inventions such as the transistor, laser, and solar cell. However, in recent years even the private sector seems increasingly shaped by incentive structures that prioritise short-term, incremental growth over bold, long-horizon innovation. Many future leaders focus on projects that can get them a promotion within two years, rather than pursuing transformative five- to ten-year endeavours that can’t be neatly summarised on a CV. New graduates are incentivised to go into industries like consulting and finance, where instead of “working for years to build a new product…[they can] rearrange already invented ones.”

Reshaping culture is difficult, but here are some ingredients that are important for improving innovation:

• Grand visions are necessary
• New technologies won’t be made from incremental improvements
• Plans with long term dedication (at least 5 years is necessary)
• Educating people on the new frontiers of innovation

What innovators can do to shape the future of technology

For me, the most important thing to realise is that you cannot think just as a basic engineer, by focusing on improving metrics and achieving defined goals. Innovators go beyond this to solve problems (~business) and fill gaps in knowledge (~science). To do either well, you need a good understanding of not only where a new solution could work - but also anticpating the impact of that work. This is something called taste which is hard to develop.

• On the science side of things, it is important to have deep knowledge in at least one field, but ideally across multiple. As we discussed, many of the “sexy” problems right now are related to tech (although this is maybe even more true on the business side). However, if you come from a more institutionalized field, you can think about how your skills can be applied in growing, interdisciplinary areas. Crossovers such as physics applied to economics, or statistics used in biological sciences, often hold rich potential.
• Then on the business side, the most useful advice I’ve heard so far is that you have to realise you can’t build technology around people, you have to build for people. At the end of the day it’s humans who have to find utility in what you create.

Overall, given imperfect systems, it is can feel difficult for one person to make a change. Developing good taste for profitable ideas or significant breakthroughs feels difficult enough - without having to consider the benefit to society. Other issues arise too, for example the investments in fundamental science that lead to breakthroughs often don’t immediately benefit the thinkers behind them but are crucial for long-term progress.

Thankfully, I think that understanding what actually benefits society is sometimes one of the easier forms of taste to develop. Most people have an intuitive sense of what matters - for example what has greater value to humanity: advertisements or vaccines? Importantly, even a small shift in taste and priorities among a few people can create a lasting impact over a long time.

Thank you for reading

I hope this article has helped you be more aware of the trends of innovations as a whole and inspired you to help shape them in positive directions.