Onward to 2022 — Convergence

I spent the holiday week scanning all the reading I never got to in 2021. Sound familiar? There are so many interesting things to read about. With the onslaught of information coming from everywhere — apparently we are presented with 100x the information we used to consume 10 years ago — I just could not keep up while doing my job, and so parked a stack of magazines in the corner to come back to later: Aviation Week and Space Technologies, MIT Technology Review, Discover, The Economist, Atlantic and a few books — Pre-suasion by Robert Cialdini, A History of the American People by Paul Johnson (only a few chapters).

The theme that emerged? Convergence….my perception through scanning approximately 300 articles in a short amount of time: electrification of the aircraft propulsion systems, hydrogen power, sustainable aviation fuels, movement of things in space — computer vision, sensors, oxygenation, cryogenics…and so on.

It struck me that the cycles of innovation, of technologies emerging and interacting with each other and/or leveraged for different applications, are getting shorter. It turns out that this could be the case. The Atlantic published a review of patent activity as a proxy for the pace of technological evolution — which suggests not just faster technological discovery but an accelerating curve: How Fast is Technology Accelerating? (theatlantic.com)

Some of these trends aren’t so new — but have been building over the last few years if not a decade or more. What I can say is the pace seems to be…