ABSTRACT
Martin Ford, in his 2015 best-seller, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future , describes a model in which technology evolves according to a series of starts, stops, and accelerations in an S-shaped pattern rather than a consistent diagonal linear development curve. He uses the airplane as an example of a technology that followed the S-curve model of downswings and upswings. In the early 1900s, basic aircraft technology was slow to develop until improvements were made to propellers in the 1920s. The second major aircraft technology development came with the introduction of jet engines, which were widely accepted in the 1950s. However, the supersonic Concorde, which could have ushered in a new era of airplane travel in the 1970s, proved economically unfeasible and was decommissioned in 2003. This diffusion of innovation theory has been adopted by a number of economists and others to explain technology evolution. Everett Rogers (2003), in his seminal book , Diffusion of Innovation , traces the theory to the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, who plotted the original S-shaped diffusion curves in 1903. More recently, Clayton Christensen (1997, 2013) warned corporations and organizations of disruption and used the S-curve model to emphasize the acceleration step of technology adoption.
