Bedau, Mark A., Nicholas Gigliotti, Tobias Janssen, Alec Kosik, Ananthan Nambiar, and Norman Packard. “Detecting the on-going emergence of technological innovations.”
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We detect a form of open-ended evolution (OEE) in empirical data about
human technological innovations. This evolution occurs in a non-biological,
cultural population that exists in the real world and is evolving in a way that
seems as open-ended as biological evolution. Using patented inventions as a
proxy for technological innovations, we mine public patent records for evidence of one specific form of OEE—the on-going emergence of technological innovations—and we compare two ways to detect it. One way is to detect the first instances of pre-defined patent pigeon holes, such as the technology classes listed in the United States Patent Classification (USPC). The
second way is to embed patents in a high-dimensional semantic space and
detect the emergence of new clusters. Both methods reveal the on-going generation of new kinds of technologies when applied to hundreds of years of
patent records, but only clusters reveal innovations that are unanticipated. Our
methodology easily generalizes to detecting unanticipated innovations in other
evolving populations that leave rich digital traces.