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.

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About the speaker

Doyne Farmer is Director of the Complexity Economics program at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, Professor in the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute.

His current research is in economics, including agent-based modeling, financial instability and technological progress. He was a founder of Prediction Company, a quantitative automated trading firm that was sold to the United Bank of Switzerland in 2006. His past research includes complex systems, dynamical systems theory, time series analysis and theoretical biology.

During the eighties he was an Oppenheimer Fellow and the founder of the Complex Systems Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. While a graduate student in the 70’s he build the first wearable digital computer, which was successfully used to predict the game of roulette.