With planes and ICBMs crossing the ocean, there seemed to be a pattern where incremental progress had to pass a threshold on some dimension before incremental progress on a dimension of interest mattered, which gave rise to discontinuity. Is that a common pattern? (Is that a correct way to think about what was going on?)
This reminds me of Clayten Christensen’s idea of disruptive innovation, where a new approach to a product may at first only be suitable for niche use cases, but has a higher growth rate of improvement than the traditional approach, and so eventually crosses some threshold and dominates the market.
(Disruptive innovations wouldn’t necessarily produce discontinuous progress, but the underlying phenomenon of different rates of progress for different approaches to a problem seems to be the same as what’s observed here.)
This reminds me of Clayten Christensen’s idea of disruptive innovation, where a new approach to a product may at first only be suitable for niche use cases, but has a higher growth rate of improvement than the traditional approach, and so eventually crosses some threshold and dominates the market.
(Disruptive innovations wouldn’t necessarily produce discontinuous progress, but the underlying phenomenon of different rates of progress for different approaches to a problem seems to be the same as what’s observed here.)