Garry Kasparov: world technology is moving very slowly

You may have probably purchased a new Apple II, or a new iphone and think it's cool to have one of those "state-of-the-art", "space age" gadgets and suddenly you think that current technology is advancing very rapidly in a pace that is quite unimaginable. But ex world chess champ and arguably the greatest mind in chess history think otherwise. So as many other. Kasparov believed that today's technology is experiencing an all time low in progress for the past hundred of years. And he may have a point.

“We are surrounded by gadgets and computers like never before. They are better each time; a little faster, a little shinier, a little thinner. But it is derivative, incremental, profit margin-forced, consumer-friendly technology — not the kind that pushes the whole world forward economically.”

He thinks the problem is that we’ve replaced the drive to innovate by focusing on making incremental changes to existing technologies. Kasparov drew from his own experiences facing off against more and more powerful chess-playing computers, until finally experiencing defeat at the hands (algorithms) of IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997. That was an unfortunate loss, not only for him, but for science as well because progress on building a smarter chess computer effectively ended after that, he said.

Excerpt from blogs.forbes.com