Silicon Valley is booming again. New start-ups are opening up in the office parks along Highway 101. Rents are going up and more and more people are looking for vacation homes in towns like Lake Tahoe. This shows that people are making good money. In the Bay Area where semiconductors were first developed computer and internet companies have grown. Their leaders created many of the magical tools of our modern technology. These include touch-screen phones, instant library searches or drones that can be flown many miles away. Business has been going strong since 2010 and progress is making its way.

But surprisingly, some people in Silicon Valley don't think that they are moving forward at all. Peter Thiel, an inventor of an online payment system who also supported Facebook, is not happy with the speed of new developments. Many other engineers are disappointed as well. Some economists even think that there are not enough new ideas today compared to earlier times.

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Everywhere new things are developing, thanks to the new powerful processors. Computers begin to understand human language. People can control video games only through movement. This technology might soon be used in many business areas as well. 3D printers can create complex objects, maybe even human tissues or other organic material soon.

For pessimists, this is just a false promise. But history shows that there are not only two alternatives for the future of technology. Researcher Chad Syverson from Chicago points out that even the discovery of electricity did not always lead to more productivity. At the beginning of the last century, many electrical innovations were made, but growth was still slow at first. The boom only started later.

“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.