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Predicting Technological Progress

Technological advancements are fundamental to our existence, and a major driver of economic growth. While technology is all around us, in many ways we understand the evolution of dinosaurs better than we understand the evolution of technology. Nonetheless, there are several intriguing laws for technological progress whose origins are not well understood. Professor Doyne Farmer, Director of the Complexity Economics Programme at The Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School will show how these make it possible to predict the cost of future technologies and assess how accurate such predictions are. He will also consider ways of viewing the relationship between technologies in ecological terms, and show the insight this brings to economic growth.