The calculations I was doing for the first-year graduate ...

The calculations I was doing for the first-year graduate students yesterday were that, in terms of the proportional rate of increase in our stock of productive ideas about technology and organization, we are now creating them at a proportional rate 100 times the rate at which useful ideas were being created as recently as 1500. Is that going to speed up as ideas increasingly need instantiation not in large clunky macro arrangements of atoms but as patterns of information? Quite possibly...