The speed of innovation and technology

It's not just the speed of change in technological innovation today; it's also the pace of adoption of technology that is remarkable. Gutenberg is credited with inventing the printing press around 1436. His print run of 200 copies of the Bible took 3 years to produce. Within a few decades, the printing press had changed the world. A fascinating chart here illustrates the number of years it took for different technologies in the 19th and 20th centuries to be used by one-quarter of the American population. The telephone took 35 years, the radio took 31 years, and the television took 26 years.

Remarkably, in 2022/2023, Chat GPT is estimated to have reached 100 million monthly users (global) in just 2 months. It's certainly not an apples-to-apples comparison, but remarkable nonetheless.