Meeting notice: The 00.08.01 meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we are. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Suggested topic: The end of rapid technological change. Biological processes tend to be self-quenching, self-saturating. When a pathogen finds a virgin population the infection rate soars until the infection itself manages to breed and select resistant features into the affected population, at which point the rate collapses. Specific technological changes follow the same curve; in the 80's the rate of PC adoption was often in three figures; now it is just over 10% a year. The reason is not that everyone in the population has a machine (50% don't). The PC has altered the nature of the population of nonusers in the direction of PC-resistance by selecting out the members who were not resistant. The question is whether technological change itself is another of these curves: does it automatically breed resistant features into the population for technological change in general, and if, what would those features be? Perhaps the most objective measure and definition of technological progress is not lower prices or the introduction of new tools but a steady increase in the number of kinds of things. A recent study by the Federal Reserve found that between 1980 and 1998 the number of kinds of breakfast cereal increased from 34 to 192; of cooking oils, from 20 to 161; of paper towels, 11 to 126; of dog-food brands, from 58 to 180, and so on. While admittedly one would expect the differences between those 192 kinds of breakfast cereal to be trivial, the multiplication-of- kinds effect appears to operate on all the category levels: not only more kinds of breakfast cereals, but more kinds of breakfast foods (diet drinks), more kinds of foods (tofu steak), and so on. This rampant differentiation of product both reflects and stimulates a companion effect in the roles and behaviors of humans, since the expanding universe of product kinds necessarily spins off changes in the roles of designers, marketeers, service personnel, and so on, not to mention consumers. The long list of job types that can be seen in the Sunday ads of any reasonably large newspaper had no parallel in the papers of 50 years ago. Fifty years ago my neighborhood was relatively homogeneous and predictable, as was all of Boston, relatively speaking. Today when I visit a neighbor's house I almost always see something that surprises me. In short, the number of socio-cultural niches has increased and (therefore) the average number of occupants per niche declined. Both trends raise the costs and complexity of innovation; the first because finding and assembling a mass market is harder (which is why political campaigns have gotten so expensive), the second because each particular microniche returns a smaller revenue flow to compensate for the design, development, and marketing required to reach it. This doesn't seem to be much of a problem today, though perhaps if I was a marketeer I would feel differently. But there is no reason (I can see) why the reduction in market niches shouldn't continue -- 400 breakfast cereals, 800, 1500 -- until it simply becomes too expensive too continue. And since the multiplication of product types is just another way of talking about technological change, at that point technological change would seem to have become too expensive as well. What's the flaw here? <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Hoot of the week: www. gastrobots.com. It would be interesting, which is not the same thing as a good idea, to see this team hook up with Brandeis' Golem Project (http://www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu/golem). <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> The prospect that rejuvenation technologies will lead to living for long periods in a state of considerable neurological decrepitude is nicely investigated at http://www.ozemail.com.au/~claw/tithonus0.htm by SF writer Chris Lawson. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Legend: "NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group. The Group meets on the first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 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