  In this work, we attempt to provide a comprehensive granular account of the
pace of technological change. More specifically, we survey estimated yearly
performance improvement rates for nearly all definable technologies for the
first time. We do this by creating a correspondence of all patents within the
US patent system to a set of technology domains. A technology domain is a body
of patented inventions achieving the same technological function using the same
knowledge and scientific principles. We obtain a set of 1757 domains using an
extension of the previously defined classification overlap method (COM). These
domains contain 97.14% of all patents within the entire US patent system. From
the identified patent sets, we calculated the average centrality of the patents
in each domain to estimate their improvement rates, following a methodology
tested in prior work. The estimated improvement rates vary from a low of 1.9%
per year for the Mechanical Skin treatment - Hair Removal and wrinkles domain
to a high of 228.8% per year for the Network management - client-server
applications domain. We developed a one-line descriptor identifying the
technological function achieved and the underlying knowledge base for the
largest 50, fastest 20 as well as slowest 20 of these domains, which cover more
than forty percent of the patent system. In general, the rates of improvement
were not a strong function of the patent set size and the fastest improving
domains are predominantly software-based. We make available an online system
that allows for automated searching for domains and improvement rates
corresponding to any technology of interest to researchers, strategists and
policy formulators.
