Does Human Knowledge Double Every 5 Years?

Programming, Software and Computer Science

Computer programming has a lot of work and a lot of people centered around it. If the Singularitarians are correct, we're going to need them all.

After all, what good is it if computing speeds and memory keep doubling if we cannot program computers to do what we want them to do? And the Singularitarians want computers to do some pretty ambitious things. In fact, given their wish list, it seems clear that human knowledge of computer programming has to double every five years if we are going to get the magic box to do what we want it to do. We will need new programming languages, tighter coding, better algorithms, and quite possibly a new way of looking at programming. Is this happening?

We've seen elsewhere that the number of people engaged in computer sciences has grown to 180,000 new entrants per year in the U.S. alone--and considering the base date for this field, that is evidence of healthy growth. Let's use Scirus to see what this growth in professionals has produced in the way of patents and journal articles.

Preliminary results: between 2002 and 2006, 38,685 journal articles were published with the word 'programming' in the title or abstract. As the total is 145,404, only 26.6% of all journal articles were published in the last five years. Of the 367,971 patents noted on Scirus with 'programming' in the title or description, 201,548, or 54.7% were published between 2002 and 2006--so that has doubled. Not the first time we have seen differing growth rates for journals and patents.

For 'software,' the period 2002-2006 saw 224,696 journal articles published, 46% of the total of 486,262. For patents, as with 'programming,' the period was more robust--589,919 out of a total of 900,846, or 65% of the total.

The base year for 'programming' is 1940, when a UK patent was filed for improvements on a statistical calculating device. The compound annual growth rate for journal publications is 12.55%--good, but not good enough to double every five years (it is less than six years, to be fair). The compound annual growth rate for patents is 12.83%.

Remember that we need a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 14.87% to double every five years.

For 'software, the base year is 1965, when 5 journal articles were published and 1 patent was filed. And software is a winner, with CAGR of 22.83% for journal publications!  Hooray for coders everywhere! And a double huzzah to IBM, Microsoft, Sun and countless others, as patent growth since 1965 has a CAGR of 33.53%. Another winner!

As there are so many more patents than journal publications for both search terms, we should probably give more weight to patents, and be extremely pleased that human knowledge appears to have doubled in the past five years in this area, especially given the gloomy results reported in my previous post last week.

Click below to see results and analysis.

Outcomes

Advances in human knowledge should make life better. That's hard to measure. However, we can measure if human life gets longer (it does), healthier, richer (if not more rewarding), etc.

The rest of this post is philosophizing--feel free to skip. And in a previous post, I talk about the Outcomes Fallacy. But if you want thinking on the issue of human knowledge and outcomes, click to read more.

Sobering News

The post below from yesterday, which details the stately, rather than exponential, increase in granted patents in the U.S., has really got me thinking, and I think we'd better report on the state of play here.

Let's detail those areas where we have seen adequate growth to double human knowledge every 5 years:

Update: We have since found other areas where the CAGR is sufficient to double human knowledge every five years:

Update 2: A modest review revealed errors in my calculations regarding oncology. Its position has changed (and not for the better).

Prions, where academic journal publications have increased at a CAGR of 25.57%, and patents have increased by 33.76%

Software, where academic journal publications have increased at a CAGR of 22.83% and patents have increased by 33.53%

Post-graduate enrollment in China, which has increased at a CAGR of 22.38% (although see below for more discouraging information about the growth of tertiary education worldwide)

(All percentages are CAGR (compound annual growth rate.)

1. Nanotechnology, with a blistering growth in publications of 97.16% per year. Patents, 76.15%.

2. Global Warming publications, with a of 16.85%

3. Total Chinese patent applications, at 25% per annum

4. Chinese computing patents, 58.29%

5. Chinese telecommunications patents, 30.26%

(was oncology)

7. Epidemiology patents, 22.76%

So far, that's it.

Now let's look at where we did not find anything like doubling every five years (remembering that we need a CAGR of 14.87% to double in five years time):

Update: We have now found other areas where human knowledge does not appear to be growing at a rate that will double in five years time:

Worldwide university enrollment, which has a CAGR of 4.85%

Alzheimer's disease, where academic publications have a CAGR of 9.65% and patents a CAGR of 11.26%

Programming, where academic publications have a CAGR of 12.55% and patents a CAGR of 12.83%

Chinese university enrollment, with a CAGR of 9.76%

1. U.S. patents granted, 5.21%

2. Epidemiology publications, 8.85%

3. Shale oil extraction, publications 5.59%, patents, 2.61%

4. Publications on Mars, 5.78% (see also here and here)

5. U.S. Book publishing, 5.14%

6. Indian university enrolment since 1947, 5.51%

7. Climate Models, 12.66% (Very close to 5-year doubling rate of 14.87%)

8. Improvements in Climate Models, 13.76% (Also very close)

9. Growth in publication of scientific and technical papers, 1995-1999

             OECD 0.1%

             U.S., -1.8%

             Canada, -2.2%

             UK, -0.1%

             Netherlands, -0.5%

10. Publications in astrophysics, 4% (since 1970)

11. Growth in percentage of cancer patients surviving 5 years after diagnosis, 0.7% (1960-2005)

12. Drop in percentage of soldiers dying from wounds received in battle, 1.54% (1941-2006)

13. Projected growth in number of scientists (U.S.), next ten years, 7.18%

14. Patent filings in India, last five years, 8.45%

15. Increase in patent filings, World International Patent Office, 1 year, 6.4%

6. Oncology pubications, 9.23% (revised)

Considering I cherry picked areas that I thought would be most likely to show robust growth, this is scary.

          

Back to Global Warming

And back to Scirus, the compendium of scientific publication. Okay, it's a search engine returning titles of journals, patents, etc.

What are we to make of the fact that searching for global warming on Scirus returns 100,000 more results than a similar search for nanotechnology? It's been studied for 20 years longer than nanotechnology, so global warming should reflect that... But there are 8,000 fewer academic articles in the database (28,000 for nanotech vs. 20,584 for global warming). What does that mean?

We found 5,184 patents on the Scirus database for nanotechnology. For global warming... 9,419. Scientists and technologists have been studying global warming for more than twice as long, so that may mean nothing. But, let's look at the statistics and see what they tell us.

As shown below, playing by the same rules as we did for nanotechnology and the study of Mars, we hereby proclaim a base year of 1975, as it saw 18 journal articles published and one patent filed. That gives us 31 years to measure growth. This indeed gives us a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 16.85%, which in fact does show doubling every five years! Hooray, we have another winner!

The CAGR for patents is higher yet--26.08%. (But again, it seems to have leveled off in 2002.) We saw below that growth was disappointing in the subsector of climate modelling, but it's being more than made up for elsewhere.

But, given the potential gravity of the consequences of global warming, am I the only one to look at the growth rates of human knowledge in this field, compare them to the growth rates for nanotechnology, and feel slightly disappointed?

The data is below. Click if you want to see the numbers.

What Is The Singularity?

Okay. Here is the definition provided by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI):

"The Singularity is the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence. There are several technologies that are often mentioned as heading in this direction. The most commonly mentioned is probably Artificial Intelligence, but there are others: direct brain-computer interfaces, biological augmentation of the brain, genetic engineering, ultra-high-resolution scans of the brain followed by computer emulation. Some of these technologies seem likely to arrive much earlier than the others, but there are nonetheless several independent technologies all heading in the direction of the Singularity – several different technologies which, if they reached a threshold level of sophistication, would enable the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence."

The Institute is described on Wikipedia here. I emailed the founder, Eliezer Yudkowsky, to get his thoughts on what I am doing here. He hasn't responded as yet.

For 'Singularitarians', the Singularity is a big transformative concept, one of those spectacular theories that will change human life as we know it. When we create intelligence greater than our own, we will solve problems that we cannot solve today. Furthermore, many of the technologies (and especially nanotechnology) that will be used to create artificial intelligence will be used by the artificial intelligence to help us with healthcare, energy (PDF), space travel and more. God help us if we create an artificial intelligence that wants to sit on the couch and watch the soaps.

Those who fear artificial intelligence, nanotechnology (and perhaps big transformativc concepts), manage to create a vision of some rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem waiting to be born. From fears of grey goo (nanotechnology run wild) to the destruction of human ambition, AI is a threat--perhaps the biggest outsourcing threat of all, especially if it is embodied in robots.

Nanotechnology and Human Knowledge

There's a search engine called Scirus for scientific information. A search performed on Sunday, 22 April 2007 with the search term 'nanotechnology' returned 637,500 results. Fortunately, we can winnow that down to 28,846 journal results and sort them by date. (We also found reference to 5,148 patents) So, here we go again... 23,489 of those journal articles were published after 2002 ended. That's 81% of the total. Similarly, 4,494 patents were filed since the end of 2002, 87% of the total.

Using 1987 as a base year, we find CAGR in journal publications of 42.03%, which would double in 1.98 years. For patents, we see a CAGR of 44.91%, which would double every 1.87 years.

And this is why Ray Kurzweil and the rest of the Singularity gang get excited. Remember we need annual growth of 14.87% to double in five years. Nanotechnology has got it in spades.

Last year's growth was 37.87%. Maybe they will take over the world... but I will explain later why I think growth in nanotechnology is a necessary, but not sufficent pre-requisite for the Singularity.

Note that the advanced search by year  yielded 28,863 journal results (but it found all 5,148 patents )(one reason these types of databases drive academic researchers crazy--I hear Google Scholar is worse, and I'm afraid I'm going to find out soon...)

Click if you want to see the numbers

Chinese Papers in Nanotechnology

Well, I was going to wait before starting on nanotechnology, but I don't have a convenient place to park this information, so you get it in toto:

From PhyiscsToday.org: "A paper by Ping Zhou and Loet Leydesdorff (PDF) suggests that China is rapidly developing research expertise in nanotechnology. Six years ago, US-based scientists published 50% of the papers in the journal Nanotechnology and China accounted for zero. Today 25% of papers in the journal are from US-based scientists and 15% from China. Zhou and Leydesdorff report that between 1999 and 2005, for 85 journals in the fields of chemistry, physics and material sciences that are relevant to nanotechnology, the number of papers published by China rose exponentially to 8.34%, while papers published by other countries either remained steady or declined. China's overall world share in science journals is 6.52%, suggesting that China is aiming to be at the forefront of research into nanotechnology."

The paper this article is based on talks about a ratio between GDP and R&D, the return of overseas scholars and other factors. The paper then details research that looks like what we're trying to do here--except they're doing it a lot more... scientifically. They even call it scientometric analysis! I'm going to steal that...

Where I am using crude statistics available for free and for fun, they use "indicators like total publications, total citation rates, percentage of world share of citations, as well as the top one percent of most highly cited papers in order to measure scientific output."

Something else I'm going to have to look at--"For the input indicators, we used the OECD's Main Science and Technology Studies published online and in print (OECD 2004)." Like me, they experienced difficulty in searching large databases of publications. They found their own solution, but it won't help me going forward.

Some interesting findings:

• Between 1999 and 2004, China moved from 10th to 5th place in terms of overall scientific publications
• The overall US share has dropped from 35% to 30% between 1992 and 2004 (but if the overall number is rising, who cares?)
• Countries where English is commonly spoken (and written, obviously) appear to have an advantage when it comes to having your paper cited by others
• More than 4,400 science and technology journals were published in China in 2001
• Half a million articles are published annually in Chinese journals
• It appears that Chinese scientists read the work of scientists in other countries, but that international scientists don't read (or at least don't cite) work published in Chinese journals (with the exception of some Chinese journals that are published in English)
• The Chinese government declared nanotechnology a critical R&D priority in 2001, and a group of commissions and ministries issued a strategic plan for development of nanotechnology through to 2010
• Definitions are tough. It was hard for the researchers to find all nano-related papers, and only nano-related papers. (I know what that's like--and what it means. You actually have to read, instead of count, and that takes time)
• The paper's authors use really, really cool graphs to show their work. I am extremely jealous

Now I just have to find out where they got those numbers at the end of the news release...  they could have listed those 85 journals...

It Should Be Lumpy, Right?

We wouldn't expect a uniform doubling of human knowledge within a 5-year timeframe, right? Even if this is a law as inexorable as Moore's (and that doesn't seem as inexorable as it once was, or am I reading the Dell ads wrong?), one would reasonably expect that human knowledge would advance a little in some areas and a lot in others. You with me?

Given what the world's attention has been focused on since 2002, here are some of the areas where I think human knowledge should have increased fastest:

• Epidemiology, thanks to SARS and Avian flu
• Biofuels
• Vaccines
• Proteome
• Oil extraction from rock and shale
• Mars
• Genetically Modified Organisms
• Fishery management
• Global warming
• Solar activity
• The Long Tail
• Stem cell cultivation
• Infectious diseases

I will treat this as a proxy list of subject areas to explore. I'm going to be digging around to see if we've seen dramatic advances in any or all of these. I'll probably dedicate a few posts to each of them. Got any suggestions?