Kasparov: We’re resting on our technological laurels

Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov posits, among other things, in a forthcoming book, that we do not really live in an age of unprecedented technological development; rather, we are just coasting with improvements on some of the genuine advances of yesteryear. Among other things, he says:

We feel that we literally have something new every month, but in fact it is progress that is proceeding from technological innovations and revolutionary inventions of the 1960s and 70s. For example, my iPod contains the latest technology from 1981. In medicine there nothing similar to penicillin has been invented. If we talk about the Internet, then do not forget that the whole theoretical framework has been prepared in the 1960s in America, and the first communication session was 1969. A patent for mobile communications was registered in 1962, and the first call was made in 1973. The fact that the phones are smaller, thinner, more beautiful, does not change the fact that they are basically the same technology.

An example of real innovation was the emergence of personal computers, introduced by Apple in 1977. After that, it is hard to find innovation of this level. Everything that followed were modifications that made them smaller, but the principle remains the same. Steve Jobs created the entire line of Apple's Macintosh, and it was a breakthrough because it created the basis for everything else. It has reached a new technological level, which we now master, but it is based on the work of 1950s to 70s.

Why is this happening? The main reason is probably a common desire to reduce the element of risk. For example, in the last 60 years our planes have grown more comfortable, but they now fly more slowly since the decommissioning of the Concord. It's an unusual fact: over the past 40 years the first time in human history we have begun to move slowly. This is much due to the fact that we have started to pay attention to overall comfort, to social issues and the need to reduce risk.

People have a sense that we should receive benefits from our investment, but need to reduce the uncertainty. Risk should be less, but the income should be the same. This creates a gap, because in a free society, in a market economy, there is a direct relationship between risk and return. If you want to avoid risk, but receive ten percent of of your annual income from your investment, you open the way for the so-called financial engineering. In fact this is all fake, not real income, because it is not based on real changes in the economy, because you do not create new and tangible assets. In the 1960s young boys dreamed of becoming aerospace engineers, now they want to be financial engineers, working in investment companies, which are the most attractive spheres for talent. This naturally affects the quality of the total scientific potential, because financial engineering creates nothing.