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21st translation contest: "The tides of tech" » English to Simple English » Entry by Janice Giffin


Source text in English

Translation by Janice Giffin (#27103)

Boom times are back in Silicon Valley. Office parks along Highway 101 are once again adorned with the insignia of hopeful start-ups. Rents are soaring, as is the demand for fancy vacation homes in resort towns like Lake Tahoe, a sign of fortunes being amassed. The Bay Area was the birthplace of the semiconductor industry and the computer and internet companies that have grown up in its wake. Its wizards provided many of the marvels that make the world feel futuristic, from touch-screen phones to the instantaneous searching of great libraries to the power to pilot a drone thousands of miles away. The revival in its business activity since 2010 suggests progress is motoring on.

So it may come as a surprise that some in Silicon Valley think the place is stagnant, and that the rate of innovation has been slackening for decades. Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, and the first outside investor in Facebook, says that innovation in America is “somewhere between dire straits and dead”. Engineers in all sorts of areas share similar feelings of disappointment. And a small but growing group of economists reckon the economic impact of the innovations of today may pale in comparison with those of the past.

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Across the board, innovations fueled by cheap processing power are taking off. Computers are beginning to understand natural language. People are controlling video games through body movement alone—a technology that may soon find application in much of the business world. Three-dimensional printing is capable of churning out an increasingly complex array of objects, and may soon move on to human tissues and other organic material.

An innovation pessimist could dismiss this as “jam tomorrow”. But the idea that technology-led growth must either continue unabated or steadily decline, rather than ebbing and flowing, is at odds with history. Chad Syverson of the University of Chicago points out that productivity growth during the age of electrification was lumpy. Growth was slow during a period of important electrical innovations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; then it surged.
“Is the Idea Machine Broken?”
from The Economist > Simple English


Prosperity has returned to Silicon Valley. New companies are putting up their Open-for-Business signs again in the office parks on Highway 101. Rents are shooting up and many people now want fancy vacation houses in places like Lake Tahoe. They must be making a lot of money!

The San Francisco Bay Area is where the semiconductor industry began along with the computer and internet companies that followed soon after. As a result, the ‘magicians’ in this field created amazing hi tech inventions: touch-screen phones, software to instantly search for any information we need. We can even fly a drone by remote control from thousands of miles away. Business activity has recovered well since 2010 and this tells us that progress is moving forward.

But we may be surprised that some local people think Silicon Valley isn’t developing much at all. They feel the rate of new knowledge and products has slowed down over the last ten years or more. Peter Thiel, who started PayPal and invested money in Facebook, says that innovation in America is “almost dead”. More and more economists believe that the money-making impact of new knowledge and products is much less now than in the past.

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In general, technological inventions are successful, especially if they aren’t too expensive to use. Computers are beginning to understand natural language. We can control video games with only our body movement (and many industries may soon use the same technology). Three-dimensional printing [insert link: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_printing ]
is now able to produce many kinds of simple and complex objects. In the future, 3-D printing may use living cells, even human ones.

Someone who generally expects new things to go wrong could say these future possibilities are nothing more than fantasies. But history tells us that technological progress is usually not constant – instead, it moves up and down. For example, Chad Syverson of the University of Chicago says that during the introduction of electric power, productivity growth was very irregular. Growth was slow during the late 1800s and early 1900s, when important electrical designs were being invented. But soon after, it shot up.


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