New standards are building on past achievements, introducing improvements for further evolution. Standardisation is in a way standing on each others shoulders. Successful iterations of standardization commands, almost by it self, for new and ever more far-reaching standardization.
What we see happening is a pace acceleration in standardization. Evolutionary returns accelerate at a non-linear rate. The power of exponential growth cannot be overestimated. Just an example from another realm to illustrate exponential growth: computer power
- It took 90 years to achieve the first $1,000 computer capable of executing one million instructions per second (MIPS).
- Now we add an additional MIPS to a $1,000 computer every day.
- By around 2020 a $1,000 personal computer will have the processing power of the human brain—20 million billion calculations per second.
- By 2055, $1,000 worth of computing will equal the processing power of all human brains on Earth (plus or minus a year or two).
I have asserted the thesis before that most of our technological evolution in fact is about the evolution of standardization and vv. I now would like to up this by stating that to understand our societal development as humans we have to consider standardization as one of the major evolutionary trends.
NB Besides standardisation other mechanisms for implicit collaboration are e.g. trust and laws, while we as humans carry psychological, sociological and cultural prewiring firmly aiming us at collaboration. All these aspects will be covered in future posts at Red Planet Dust.