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Has the Rate of Technical Progress Slowed?
Amiga Trombone writes "An article in the IEEE Spectrum argues that the rate of technological progress has slowed in the last 50 years. While there have been advances in areas such as computers, communications and medicine, etc., the author points out that these advances have largely been incremental rather than revolutionary. He contrasts the progress made within the life-span of his grandmother (1880-1960) with that in his own (1956-present). Having been born the year after the author, I've noticed this, too. While certainly we've produced some useful refinements, little of the technology available today would have surprised me much had I been able to encounter it in 1969. While some of it has been implemented in surprising ways, the technology itself had largely been anticipated."
Where is my flying car?
Honestly, in a few ways we might be considered to be going backwards:
I have seen the end of supersonic passenger aircraft (for the time being, with no resumption in sight).
The last time man was on the moon was before I was born.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Yes, it has. I wouldn't emphasize 50years though. Just look at computers the last 10years and computers 20years ago. In 1999 I was on slashdot from a computer not much different from this one. In 1989 I was trying to get a dial-up modem so I could connect to a BBS from my Amiga.
While some of it has been implemented in surprising ways, the technology itself had largely been anticipated.
This can also be an indicator of how we now interface with technology conceptually, more than a quantitative measure of said technology.
Reply to That ||
The patent process and IP lawyers help create innovation.
After a minor shipping delay, flying cars have arrived for all. As of today, all major cities also feature moving pavements and weather control and commuter flights to the Moon will be commencing tomorrow.
Earth President Barack Obama welcomed the representatives of the Galactic Brotherhood to Washington, assuring them that the many wars on Earth were now to be conducted entirely by robots, though the robots would be carefully monitored and pulled out of battle and granted citizenship the moment they achieved sentience. He also offered the galactics free access to Google, with only the requirement for tasteful contextually-attuned text advertising to be imprinted on their DNA.
The reactionary forces of the twentieth-century United States finally conceded defeat and shut down the Five-Year Plan Tractor Plants of Detroit, where ridiculous oversized transport was bashed together by semi-literate peasants between fifths of vodka from the nerve gas factory next door, and the Five-Year Plan Software Plants of Redmond, where ridiculous oversized operating systems were bashed together by semi-numerate fresh graduates between fifths of Red Bull. The record and movie company back catalogues have been placed into the public domain for the preservation of human culture and the comic-book capitalists of Wall Street have been sent to calming, soothing, humanistic re-education facilities. "We'll teach them to love again," said Mr Obama.
Robot housecleaners are now universally available at quite reasonable prices. The robot companion for your child, designed to say "I LOVE YOU" while the child hits it repeatedly, was an early release for Christmas 2007. The new model features the voice of Justin Fletcher from CBeebies and is designed for parents to hit repeatedly.
Future innovations for the century include the rise of the Great Old Ones from their eternal sleep to take back the Earth and consume the souls of all humanity, first driving them slowly insane. The citizenry is being prepared for this eventuality using repeated broadcasts of Teletubbies, Waybuloo and In The Night Garden.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
We seem to be specializing in making things cheaper, not better ... perhaps it's economy or globalization related. I just don't think think we're spending the research money that's needed to continue the pace of previous decades. We are getting quite good at combining the work of others ... and even better at patenting it.
I miss some things of the latest decades : LED's/OLED, TFT, solar cells, double- and triple-pane glass; all important stuff, but most of those things are IMPROVEMENTS of older technology, not really NEW stuff (except solar cells, those are really important)
To the author of the slashdot post, I recommend that if one thinks technology is slowing
down, you better get busy and start inventing something. Moreover, don't copy or rehash
other peoples opinions since your opinion above is one that gets rehashed just about
every other year on the same topic. No article originality either.
Not much more to say really, things are slowing down, improvements to products are minimal.
Actual, genuine newfangled technology what is there? Everything is an iteration upon an iteration.
We still use the microwave, we still use the freezer, the cooktop, the oven, we mostly use the combustion engine, we still mostly use steam for power plants, computers have gotten faster and we have LCD's now but nothing huge has hapenned, we don't have anti-gravity, we don't have teleportation, we can't change one thing in to another (easily), medically we still aren't growing replacement bodies.
Yes things have gotten better but I haven't seen a huge revoloutionary change to be honest in my lifetime, maybe the mobile phone I guess.
Everything that can be is already known. It's the reason why the patent office only grants crap patents now. Otherwise, they'd be out of a job.
Well, there are thousand and one ways to consume porn today. I call that progress.
Back on topic: It's all about virtual things like money, ethics and laws. Before it was ok to launch chimps to space at great expanse, just so you can beat the russians. Today, you'd upset the tax payers and peta.
It's easy to get carried away and say that all our great technologies were dreamt of during the 60s (or whatever time period suits you) but there is a very big difference between dreaming of new technologies and actually implementing them. By this article's line of thought, we won't have any progress until the star trek era because some people have already thought of technologies until then? Nonsense.
Also, I'd like to bring up the fact that there are many many fields in which technology can advance today and even with incremental progress, it's harder and harder to keep track of everything. To say it simply, there's just no way you can be a multi-field specialist anymore the way there were back in the renaissance era when knowledge was a thing for the elite.
Oh no, this will mean Raymond Kurzweil has to eat even more vitamin pills (exponentionally??) to sit it out until they find a cure against mortality!!!
"Cool" or "surprises me" may be not the best metric for measuring technology progress. Maybe if you cut off Internet, TV and other sources of information for 5 years you would be as much surprised as your grandmother
What if the author had found data on inventions that failed? Would the author see a huge amount in the lifetime of his grandmother (if those records exist) and very few during his own lifetime (per capita in both time periods)?
Sometimes it feels like for every one hobby project I take on there are nine more that die at some point in development. Perhaps today we bet on sure things -- like incremental developments on things already existing -- instead of investing our time in risky ventures? Possibly because development and production of an idea is a costly venture with many people needed along the way. It gets harder to be a one stop shop as we're trained to be specialized and therefore our failures become more costly. Our economic system has evolved to reward only those that succeed and really really punish those that don't.
Probably not an adequate explanation but may explain part of it.
My work here is dung.
I often do a thought experiment and compare multiple fields in roughly similar intervals:
American Revolution, American Revolution #2 (aka Civil War), WWI, Vietnam War, Present
In each field I list, we have made vast strides, for example in Communications:
American Revolution: letter, signal lanterns, flags (much like the Romans)
Civil War: electronic telegraph
WWI: radio, telephone
Vietnam War: TV, satellite, limited computer communications
Present: cell phones, sat phones, GPS, Internet, etc.
To someone living in the present, the pace seems to be slower as you don't realize the life/world changing events until a few years down the road, yet much is happening.
would disagree with the article.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
The saddest poem
The pace has slowed because it doesn't need to be so fast. You are always going to get more done if you feel the survival of your culture and independence depends on it.
Germans where spooked in 43-45, tried a lot.
Soviets and Americans (Brits and French too) took what they could in tech and people, building on what they could.
Soviets raced the USA in anything and everything, this saw a big push for real science education (GI bill helped ect).
End of the cold war, no need for an educated public, a gov/private push to get science back as an arts subject and the population spending, dumb and greedy again.
If you cant understand it, it cannot harm you, rust belt production lines can stay open, profits are safe.
So now we have gone from a Unix like brain to a MS like gui slop.
No need for deep understanding, just spend, point and click.
The problem is science spending is just not an easy sell to the east or west coast or middle America.
The east and west coasts want to keep the existing power/profit structures, the middle America just wants "science" in the dust bin and back to safe, faith based engineering subjects.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I'd mostly agree with the recent lack of "big invention" like the aeroplane or the car, however the author underplays the role of the computer and associated communication technologies. Now whether we like it or not we are moving towards a single, small world where everybody can communicate with everyone else and can access most of the world's public knowledge cheaply and effectively. This is increasingly replacing travel and having profound effects at every level of the society. Furthermore, whereas the car and the aeroplane were used for war, the computer so far has mostly been used for peace. As a result we have avoided a third WW so far that would have destroyed us utterly. Of course this is not strictly true but by and large not altogether incorrect.
At the same time we are becoming aware that the world is small, exeedingly finite and that resources are scarce on the one hand, and that expanding our universe to other planets is extremely difficult on the other. We are at an important point in history. Either we rise to the challenge of providing cheap energy, food, shelter, clothes, learning and health for everybody, or in a few short decades we will be all dead. We do not have another couple of millennia ahead of us.
The good thing is that we have now more thinkers, scientists, engineers and industrialists than at any point in history, by several orders of magnitude. However, we are all driven by greed. The odds are almost even, but maybe I'm an optimist.
Many of the breakthroughs of the past century were done in times of war (between WW1 and WW2), since there was a real interest in having applicable research. From this perspective, I'd rather have slower progress rates...
He is the Path, the Truth and the Life
I can't believe a tech magazine has gone OUT OF ITS WAY to make this article practically unreadable.
Nothing works - Single page view still shows me about 65% page-width of sidebar, there is no print view to speak of, only a "Print" option that I could use to make a PDF, except even that is too shittily formatted to read, and for some reason the text column decides it's a good idea to get even narrower at some point after the insanely difficult-to-decipher timeline image. Of which a convenient PDF download is linked to, which is THREE FRAKKIN MEGABYTES and still a total disaster to read.
Is this some sort of test about who RTFA and who doesn't?
Well, even TFA is one meandering, rambling muse better suited for a blog, which is a real pity, as the writer Alfred Nordmann has two reasonably well written essays up on his site. *sigh* Some people are just better at papers than articles with word-limits.
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War is probably the greatest catalyst for change and technological advancement. The period from 1880 to 1960 was one of the most turbulent in World history. Both the Great War and WWII spurred a lot of tech, not just killing machines, but also in medicine and materials sciences amongst many other things.
I guess it is a good thing that we have lived in relatively-speaking peaceful times in comparison. However, hopefully there is a way of humanity getting its act together to precipitate change without the need for life and death conflict. The cynic in me however, suggests that maybe war is a necessary mechanism for social change. Kind of like forest fires, plagues, etc, in the ecosystem.
Finally running out of (cheap) oil might cause some innovations.
I'm feeling lately that a lot of "advances" haven't really improved our lives. Our "technologically advanced" running shoes don't offer any more protection than what Roger Bannister wore fifty years ago when he ran a four minute mile. (See "Born to Run", Christopher McDougall). Our food supply system as a result of the "green revolution" (by which I mean industrial agriculture following World War II, not the environmental movement) that was supposed to feed the world is actually making us less healthy than the family farms that used to supply our food. (See "The Omnivore's Dilemma", Michael Pollan). Plastic, what was enthusiastically proclaimed as "the future" for Benjamin in "The Graduate" in 1968, turns out to be the bane of living things when it disrupts our endocrine systems. (See "Our Stolen Future," Theo Colborn, et al). I'm not a Luddite. I just don't see all technology or "The Future" in general exclusively through rose-tinted glasses.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
I doubt your grandmother had an industry of science fiction writers and movies to prepare her. My grandmother never used a computer and barely used the telephone.
I believe that science fiction is a larger driver for break through work than anything else. I've seen high ranking generals in the military discussing the latest scifi movies at dinner parties and wishing they had access to some of those tools.
For example, all the RPVs used today were discussed at parties in the late 1970s. The goal was for video games to become the method of control for these vehicles.
BTW, we can already see through building walls. I'm just waiting for large scale deployment by public safety teams to be caught on TV. Wouldn't it be good to know where people were inside a crack house before breaching?
And to some extent, there's no harm in asking the same question for copyright and trademark laws respectively.
And don't lump them all together in a reply - specify why this is (not) the case for the three subjects.
When we look at what happened before we were born, we only see the big steps. But our own time, we've been living through gradual changes, that we don't notice. When we think about the future, we again see the big steps.
It's the same as when you see a kid growing up. It's a gradual change, you don't really notice. But if you haven't seen the person for a while, suddenly it's a huge change.
All progress is gradual, although sometimes there is an enabling invention, that later can be seen as a huge step, when you know the progress that it enabled. But at the time it was just a crazy idea.
Example: Cars. The enabling invention was basically a horse-carriage without a horse. A crazy idea to most people at the time. From then to now, we have the gradual progress. But those of us who didn't see that progress, tend to combine the two. So suddenly we have this huge invention, that replaced horses.
Example: Computers. Wasn't it IBM's Thomas Watson who said something about there being a world market for five computers? At the time, computers were a crazy idea. But as gradual progress improved the capabilities and size of computers, now we all have at least one. Look back at it. I'm sure those of you who started on PC's think of PC's as gradual progress, where as PC's were a revolution compared to what came before them. I started on the C64, and to me, the PC is not much different. The first PC's weren't much faster, and it actually took PC's some time to catch up with the C64 when it comes to graphics and sound. But the C64 was a revolution. Likewise to someone who has grown up with mainframes, then minis, supermicros, micros, PC's, it will all have been a gradual progress. To him, the revolution lies in the step from vacuum tubes to transistors.
Those of you who have children, tell them the stories from your childhood, then you'll find out where the huge revolutions happened. My guesses: Cell phones, the Internet, MP3 music.To us, they are just a gradual evolution, to them, the thought of being without either is like the dark ages.
The mapping of the Human Genome, the creation of software/hardware that understand the concept of following faces, Robots that actually have been accepted into homes, and the photographing of individual atoms... Every generation wants to say that they aren't as good as what came before, but I would argue that if we transplanted a person from 1969 to the year 2009, they would think differently.
To those who want their flying cars: you can't measure progress by looking at science fiction and lamenting that it's not yet fact. The concepts of 'impact' and 'progress' aren't really the same. Technological progress -- whatever that means -- is usually measured by the productivity of some factor, like labour or raw materials. Impact suggests that an innovation has to diffuse and have a broad social and economic effect. Inasmuch as impact is socially constructed by our own wants, it's possible we're disappointed because we spend so much time talking about the future, and because rapid progress has become normal.
that's because every improvment has a huge impact on economy and let's face it, stock markets is world wide now it's not just local like 70 years ago.
Hydrogen car----Pretty sure it,s being held back by oil companies because they would lose it all
Flying cars-------Anti-gravity no but alterbative plane/cars are in progress.
Body parts--------Well, they have done some interesting things with mice but religious groups are blocking growth in this area every step of the way.
Disease-------------Same as the above, God is in the way of progress.
So major things have not happen because of GOD and MONEY that's it.
the day GOD is not over the law anymore and human beings are ready to accept casualty of progress like losing your job to a better cleaner energy, then, maybe, we'll see major improvment.
If you look at the technical advances of the first half of the 20th century, there is a common thread. Many (most?) were the direct result of basic science research (antibiotics, pasteurization, lasers, radio, even flight). Furthermore, many benefited from our dramatic increase in knowledge of the physical world. You can look at the list of Nobel prize recipients in physics, etc and thank them for research which directly improved your life.
If you want more advances, call your congressman and tell them that you want increased funding to the NSF, NIH, NIST, DOE, and NASA for basic research. Then sit back ten or twenty years.
How do you measure the rate technological progress?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I don't think it has at all - the thing is, in terms of revolutionary inventions we've picked off all the low hanging fruit. Biomedical science and Physics seem to suffer from this 'problem' to a huge extent. The research is still being done (much more so, and with more investment, and much better equipment), into the truly toughest, most complex systems mankind has ever tried to understand.
We'll get our revolutions, but they'll be far more infrequent, and far far bigger.
You geeks need to learn that the world doesn't work like a bad scifi novel.
And to some extent, there's no harm in asking the same question for copyright and trademark laws respectively.
And don't lump them all together in a reply - specify why this is (not) the case for the three subjects.
A better yardstick for technological progress is not the utility of technology, but the internal complexity of the technology. A Mercedes today may still be an internal combustion engine automobile - but far more engineering has gone into the design of the auto than into a mercedes of 1959. There's far more sophisticated embedded systems inside it, from electronic keys to a sophisticated crash mitigation system. Aerodynamics and reliability and numerous other factors have had countless iterations of engineering put into them.
Yet, of course, the actual improvement in your life if you owned either car is small. You're more likely to survive a crash in the newer automobile - but crashes don't happen every day, and people drive more dangerously today, so the death rate is comparable. Either car can go 70 mph on the interstate.
All the rest of technology today is similar. A lot of things don't seem to have improved much - but the complexity of the internals have increased. Doctors and hospitals today have a much longer list of things they worry about when they treat for a disease - although outcomes are only slightly better.
He is right about one thing. For the nanotechnology and flying cars and other wonders of the "singularity", the internal complexity of that technology will dwarf anything we have today. Human beings, even working as large teams, don't really have the brain power to create technology this complicated within a reasonable investment timespan. That's why the first stage of the singularity is information technology : we first have to augment our ability to handle complexity (whether through AI or cyborgs or whatnot). The flying cars and the immortality granting nanotechnology come later.
Some advancements at odds with large well financed corporate business models are buried before they get off the ground. Others are bought out and ripped up for competing. Where the cat is already out of the bag, war is waged against the advancement to try and control the damage (*IAA Vs the Internet). These anti-competitive practices have only got worse as the decades roles by and as we can see from all the *IAA lawyers in the DOJ, appear to have the full backing of government, regardless of who is in power (a vote for anti-progress perhaps?).
In the space of less than 15 years we have more or less put online the combined sum of all human knowlegde ; made it accessible and searchable. And for good measure we added instant and nearly free communication (remember when long distance was expensive?) and wired to the Internet everyone with a monthly income over US$ 100. Personal networks are no longer limited to your church community or secret society -- a typical family keeps in daily contact with its members around the world.
You can moan about flying cars all you want, but creating those billions of webpages has kept busy all of Generation X&Y.
Still waiting for Generation Z to get bored with playing online games... common you slackers.
Answering this question from the viewpoint of IT, CS or electronics in general, yes, I have the same feeling.
However, if you look at other sciences, like biology, there's an amazing evolution of technologies, methodologies and revolutionizing new insights that are going to change the world around is, possibly in more disruptive ways than computers have. If the 20th century is the century of computers, we're still strongly believing that the 21st century will see (and is seeing) a lot of revolutions in biology.
So if you feel, like me, that CS is dead and still want to go on a technological quest, try something else.
--- Sigmentation Fault - Comments Dumped
My friend S.A. Scoggin wrote a screenplay once about this subject:
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
If they're going to be a popular kids' toy in 6 years, shouldn't there be an expensive research/early-adopter version in the works by now?
America, along with western EU, were the most innovative countries going. The reason is that we had the infrastructure to building ideas in a reasonable fashion. We had lots of cheap raw material and we encouraged it by pushing engineers. As such, it was the lone innovators that pushed thing. Also, the US gov had until 1982, pushed all sorts of RD for the basic science. America was primed to be a technical innovator.
But under reagan and then under W, America backed off from basic science RD. In addition, we have been allowing our manufacturing to flow to China and Software to India. Neither of these countries have the infrastructure that the west has, BUT they will get it. Once it is there, then you will see a resurgence in technical progress.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
...and because of corporatist capitalism. We have two major things going on:
1. Technology of the 1970's can provide enough food and shelter for the entire world. However, we cannot employ the entire world in the production of food and shelter, because at some point we have all the food and shelter we need and thus people become unemployable again. The obvious solution of "making basic stuff for no cost to consumers" would drastically undermine the economic pyramid, so that cannot be pursued. Therefore, the only way to maintain the existing economic pyramid is to slow down the pace of technology until such time as other social controls (e.g. consumer debt) can become more effective. Call this is the Conspiracy Theory version of why we don't develop technology advanced enough such that we no longer need to work for The Man.
2. Globalization's "race to the bottom" has produced a business culture that values short-term profits over long-term progress, such that it makes more economic sense to squeeze a little more money out of what we have than take the risk of shooting for something much better. Thus it is more profitable to make things last just until the manufacturer's warranty runs out than as long as possible, partly due to existing infrastructure but also largely due to consumer preferences for newer-is-better (who still wants power tools from the 1950's even if they continue to work well?). This has led to the death of craftsmanship and the skills necessary for significant innovation. Call this the Idiocracy Theory of why it doesn't make business sense to fund R&D.
Mobile phone and internet are certainly revolutionary from a social point of view.
Technologically, however, pretty much all progress is incremental.
Tele-visual radio transmissions built upon radio transmissions of sound, which built upon radio transmissions of morse, which built upon wired transmission of morse, so on and so on. Each of these had dramatic social consequences, but technologically, they were still incremental - even if the increment was large in some cases
There are obvious reasons that the internet wasn't invented in the 19th century, or that television wasn't invented in the 17th. They had to invent microchips and radio first.
I'd contend that it isn't possible to say that the rate of technological progress has slowed significantly in the last 5 years, as to do so properly would require enough time to observe the full range of social effects, once economics and continued development allow things to propagate out of the lab and into society.
See http://www.sff.net/people/teaston/front7.htp. The piece appeared in 1998, but it's relevant.
I would say, yes, the rate of technological progress has declined but not for the reasons you may think. The largest economy in the world, the U.S., has typically driven innovation. With the extreme emphasis (you might suggest "Fiduciary Responsibility") of Corporate America to make a profit, at any cost, the goal is not to innovate, but to create a better mousetrap in order reap the rewards of large market penetration and profitability. You didn't think we'd be able to do both, did you?
We need to find that monolith on the moon. This is the only fool-proof way of evolving the human race.
Surely that must have been the main objective of W. when he decided to send a man back there.
No. The author is just fixated on certain aspects of advancement that apparently don't include the extroidinary advances in semiconductor technology that we've made. I can fit a computer in my pocket that is more powerful than anything 20 years ago. I'd say that some pretty swift advancement. The author disagrees. We've changed the focus of our technology, not the pace.
There have been any number of absolutely amazing and revolutionary changes in the last 50 years, they just haven't been as "in your face" as the ones in the previous 50 years.
In the last 50 years, we've had cures for diseases they didn't even know existed 50 years ago. We've had degrees of miniaturization which are just ridiculous, as well as increases in efficiency which are monumental. Yes these may seem like refinements in their results, but the technology behind them has been absolutely amazing. No one realistically predicted things like integrated circuits 50 years ago, even if they predicted the kinds of things that would be made with them. There's no car, or plane, or anything like that, but it doesn't change the fact that revolutionary discoveries have been made.
There's also the sci-fi factor. The 20th century, particularly the second half, was really the peak science fiction, people envisaged all sorts of things, many of which are probably impossible, they just imagined everything. This make it seem like everything we have was old hat, whereas just because an author came up with the idea it doesn't mean that making it work wasn't revolutionary. We've been fantasizing about flying cars for probably as long as there have been cars, but that won't mean that if/when they actually work it won't be a revolutionary discovery.
Not only has the rate not slowed, but the rate has never been higher. I can present two different arguments to how wrong it is to assert that the rate is slowing, etc.
1. 10 years ago, we all would have been thoroughly shocked to walk into a store and get a 1TB drive for our PC's for under $100. To say that in 1969 there wouldn't have been widespread shock at the current state of the Internet, PC's, automotive technology, etc. in general is nothing short of utter rubbish. Let's take another example: cars. Do you think that drag cars in 1969 could do a quarter mile in under 4 seconds? That would have crushed the low 7 second times at the time, and it would have blown everyone's mind that you could even get to a speed like 330 mph in just a few seconds without a rocket engine.
2. This is just a more specific form of an argument that has been made every few decades since the beginning of written history, the argument that "we have done everything". This argument was made by famous physicists in the early 1900's, before Einstein and quantum physics. This argument was made about locomotive trains, or any vechiles for that matter, ever reaching over 50 mph without sucking people's lungs out from the high rate of speed. This argument was made about achieving mach 1 in an airplane. This argument is made about the progress of fine art.
Here's why the argument fails. Human history as written is fixed. The future of humanity is not fixed and has not been written yet, and extends infinitely far into the future compared to any of our lifetimes (end of the world theories aside). Thus, the sum total of human knowledge approaches zero compared with the sum total of what may exist into the future, depending on how far out you want to look. Not only have we not invented everything, we kinda "haven't invented anything yet" compared to what the future will bring.
stuff |
We do have new technology, but we fail to implement it. New types of energy could, and should, be implemented a.s.a.p.
Right now, we have an economy that aims to produce more for less. In the good old days, there was energy to spare, and it was quality that mattered. But in order to get quality, you need to spend more energy. And since energy is the bottleneck nowadays, we should be tackling that first.
With a nice new shiny infrastructure for clean energy, we can again send people to the moon and build flying cars. But I wouldn't even want a flying car if that means I have to spend 200 euro on gas just to get to work and back.
A second remark:
While we don't all have DNA analyzers at home, some serious advances have been made in the medical field. While we didn't put another man on the moon, 2 rovers have been driving around Mars for several years. While computers have been around for years now, they do start to resemble a tricorder in many ways (except that we still can't set our blackberry to stun).
I think that we're just getting very used to technical progress... and if you want a "revolution"... the internet itself is one.
A last remark:
The more stuff you have, the more you need to spend on maintenance. In the good old days, people just didn't have so much, and spent all their efforts on creating new stuff. Now, we spend all our efforts just to keep all the stuff we built over the last decades up and running.
...the middle America just wants "science" in the dust bin and back to safe, faith based engineering subjects.
Can you even imagine a faith based engineer?:
- The Lord will split the river in two for us to build the dam, amen.
- Let's pray to Jesus Christ this holy bridge, made in the image of Moses' Ark, holds its own.
Might sound silly, but if some zealots have their way in changing education content, say, with stuff like intelligent design... who knows
the DMCA and "intellectual property rights" cant possibly have caused a lull in innovation. those are around to protect your "freedoms." theyre certainly not designed to corner the market on an idea and lock users into a product or service that never changes for 20 years.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I would argue that the Internet is changing the world just as much as any other advancement in the last 500 years. Globalization has fundamentally changed society, and the world at large. While not being hard technology, information exchange is what will shape our future. Since the Gutenberg bible, there hasn't been such an advancement.
... and all the "safety first" crap that's been going on in recent time. (e.g. the NASA of today would have never made the 1969 deadline for Apollo, it would have failed with the Apollo 1 fire and subsequent 3-4 year safety meeting and canceling launches because of lightning 100 mile away.)
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
There's a couple of reasons why technology has sort of fizzled out, as I see it.
First of all, DIY is dead or dying. Electronic components are harder to get hold of, and information about electronics is harder to get hold of (Internet is all good, but it really doesn't compare to the old electronics magazines). Heck, even the toys that 20th century kids engineering, like Lego and Meccano, have been either mutilated beyond recognition, or canceled.
Secondly, patents. For every technological invention, there's a fair chance that someone has patented something in a way that they at least think they own they invention. Not only is it a turnoff to have to jump legal hurdles all the time, it's also really expensive and most people just don't have the resources.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Well for one thing technology has had to "dumbed" down for average consumer, that in itself will dampen big advances like we used to have. It seems to me that we were smarter on the whole when men used slide rules to build things, you REALLY had to know what you were doing. In the age of point of point and click, it's no wonder we aren't progressing more rapidly. On the other hand, technological evolution does seem to go in fits and spurts, it takes a while for a culture to "digest" new technologies and then want more. Right now in the age of consumerism, we have fabulous technology at our fingertips, game consoles that rival supercomputers of 20 years ago, cell phones that do extraordinary tasks, big ass TV's that hang on the wall, Mp3 players the size of matchboxes, sure it's no flying car, but would you really want your dumb ass neighbor to be buzzing your house everyday anyway? patience my padawan, patience....
Of course the rate of technological progress has slowed down...
Lately, all the smart people are being hired by an advertisement company!
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
The RIAA
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
Don't mention Amigas, or you'll prove the article correct before the debate has begun ;) If you do, at least mention anomalies.
Seriously though... while all of these advances are useful, they're hardly revolutionary leaps -- just steady progress.
For me though, this seems pretty natural... we discovered the electromagnetism and the S/W nuclear forces; entirely new forces at the heart of the universe. Of COURSE we're going to make big leaps after that, just like we made big leaps when we discovered fire. But until we make another such discovery, things are going to SEEM to plateau a little. I say seem, because we know expect many things we can do with these new forces. Still, any of the small bits of progress in using these forces would be almost equally magical to people who knew nothing of them.
I expect we'll have plenty more huge leaps in future, when we finally figure out what's going on (and what's not) with string theory, dark energy, etc. Until then, we'll just have to be patient.
After all, we're only a little smarter than chimps. How quickly SHOULD a smart chimp progress? ;)
The accomplishments are still there in other subjects - genetics, biology, materials science, manufacturing. For example, the quality of automobiles is tremendously improved from 50 years ago. If you equate technology with computing, that is probably a mistake. If it is just that computing is important to you, take some solace in the quality of operating systems, the pervasive nature of computing that gives rise to other improvements, the quality of electronic networking components, the rise of internet communications and social sites, the rise of the open-source movement, the MUCH better software development scenarios and languages, etc.
That said, we have allowed technological imperialism to move us away from education (as mentioned above). If we insist on cleanliness in the environment, then the jobs go to other countries. If we do not fund research, other countries send their best and brightest here to be educated. Then they go back and make improvements in their own countries.
My pissantly nature puts some of the change in funding, education, and attitude at the hands of accountants. If they were still struggling with green eyeshades and pencils, they would not have insisted on everything having the same, bland, vanilla profit structure. Some improvements require investment. Look at the benefits (as mentioned above) that came out of pure research in the cold war years. You cannot do that now, given the fight for government funds from all quarters. So, we suffer the results. America has changed.
Are you sure it's slowed or is it simply that the small changes made last 1800s and early 1900s, spurred by many empire building wars, had a much bigger impact than any change since?
We had carts, so we added engines.
Travel further and faster, so the media industry built up quicker, spreading news quicker to more people.
More information spreading quicker, people learn more facts.
The more people learn, the more they want to learn.
Don't forget nothing spurs the need for technology faster than a bloody good war amongst the super-powers! Jet engines, computers, etc.
The last sentence says it all. We simple expect innovation now. Plus innovation goes in spurts and in different fields.
Our culture has become so risk averse that it's no longer possible to do anything new. Minor changes from what's already been done have minor impacts and they're "safe". No one has to worry about being sued out of existence by taking someone else's idea and finding a way to produce it cheaper. There are a lot of companies in China who only produce products based on someone else's R&D. These companies are successful because they make cheap stuff, the companies that do the R&D for new products rarely turn a new product into a giant cash cow. Someone who wants to do something truly innovative has to take substantial risks. In the case of space travel, there are so many potential risks that lives have to be risked to make progress.
A friend once used the example that in the past, projects like the Golden Gate Bridge accounted for a certain number of unavoidable deaths per mile and budgeted money for the families of those workers to make the jobs appealing, even with the risks. Now, it would be hard, maybe impossible to take on such a project because of all of the people who would insist on absolute safety. If a safety inspector makes recommendations that increase the cost of the project 100x, that doesn't matter to the inspector or governing organization. There is no one with the authority to say "we accept that risk" without the risk of being put out of business by the government or sued into the ground.
Flying cars are a bad metric of progress. People generally don't take driving seriously, spending most of their time on the phone, texting, or otherwise trying to distract themselves from the act of driving. Add to that mentality another possible axis of movement and the chances of accidents go way up. Do you want some distracted teenager flying over your house and stalling their flying car? At least if they stay on the roads, the risk areas are pretty well defined.
I thought robots would be doing all the house work by now?
Ok, we have mowbots and vacuum cleaners, but they're pretty simple.
There's certainly been very little progress in the computer interface in years. It's still largely WIMP.
Now I don't really want a computer I have to talk to or wave my arms around like a idiot to use. But surely some form of human-computer interface progression is possible?
Communications ("information") technology has been the biggest change in the last twenty years. Internet, cell phones, gps, wireless...none of this existed (to any significant degree) in the 1980s. Also, this list of patents by calendar year indicates that inventiveness, at least as measured by pursuit of IP protection, has a trend of increasing annually.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
From a technology viewpoint, we -- the tech leaders of the world, from whatever country -- seem to be focused on iterative improvements more than anything else.
Following the money trail, this almost certainly goes back to the people holding the purse strings and their (relatively) myopic, short-term desire to bet only on a sure thing. Game-changing technology isn't researched and brought into production because the monetary risk is too high for the short term. The focus is simply on "shipping" incremental improvements to existing tech sooner to keep the money flowing and the budget guys happy.
This is pretty sad, for several reasons. Sticking to an always-incremental approach trains people to accept that approach as normal. Minor improvements are lauded as fantastic innovations. Thinking "outside the box" falls by the wayside and is considered radical. Only goals that can be met in the short term are actually set. And "the bar" drops lower and lower.
I know full well that there is some excellent research and science going on around the world, and it's contributing to our general knowledge every day. That's fantastic. What we need, however, is more innovating applications of that technology.
This is very easy to answer. Large-scale war - real or perceived - creates large-scale innovation. WWI, WWII and the Cold War were major periods of innovation. Major technological advanced were required to address mass civillian bombings and casualties numbering in the millions. Plus, there was the need to be seen to be superior to the enemy.
Nowadays, a civillian casualty rate in the low thousands dominates a decade of news. Eight years of fighting in a foreign land nets the UK just 200 military deaths. And there really isn't much technological wow-factor to flushing tramp-like beardy-weirdies out of caves.
Frankly I'm happy with the slow pace of innovation. It indicates a lack of discontent.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
All this time, and you STILL use a comma for pluralizing an acronym. What is with that??
One would have to delude themselves to think the rate of technical progress has slowed, I would argue that it is advancing faster then most of us realize. Furthermore, every single "advancement" or "invention" is incremental, usually in many ways. Sure, many people want to turn the brains off and assume the implementation of the car or the airplane or computers just magically happened one day, or that the inventor was some super genius that was able to create something revolutionary out of thin air, but the fact is every single invention is made up of a tremendous amount of hard work and the piecing together of many existing technologies.
Pull your head out, we are living in amazing times.
Cars (100+ years ago), other means of transport: similar. Electricity to the home, pretty much finished during the 1930's. Radio / TV etc. The only truly new and innovative products we have now are mobile phones - and I've had mine (not the same one, you understand) for over 20 years.
However there has been a lot of innovation around the edges of our society - since the big bit in the middle is pretty much complete. Just look at medical technology. Brain / body scanners were invented 30 years ago and have therefore only recently become mainstream / ubiquitous. Just about every type of medical operation has been massively overhauled since my birth (also in 1956). For example: have a heart attack in the early 1960's and there was almost no possible medical intervention, except to take things easy for the rest of your life - however long that would turn out to be.
Similarly technology used in cars and aircraft. Although the basic tech. has been around for a long time, the safety, economy and performance of vehicles has increased a lot due to the introduction of microprocessors, CAD and automated production. These are all things that happen around the edges - not in the mainstream. The same can be said for agriculture, employment (where are the offices full with rows of typists and ledger clerks?), entertainment: cinemas? just as they have always been - but CGI films - that's brand new.
So in summary, there is just as much innovation as there has always been. However, now it's under the cover and around the edges: making things we've always taken for granted so much better.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Will /. submitters ever think of another way to craft a headline? Instead of asking... make a claim! Or better yet... use the headline as a place to summarize the article. "IEEE Spectrum thinks...". If you're going to make a question headline, at least try to avoid asking a vapid question like this.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
I'm pretty sure that if you beam someone straight from 1969 to 2009, he would probably not believe his eyes. Cell phones, internet, memory cards the size of a fingernail storing gigabytes of data, ATM's, high speed trains, I doubt if he would be able to cope with all that (and more).
Now if someones travelled from 1969 to 2009 at the more comfortable speed of 1 second per second, change would be gradual enough for him to hardly notice and to just adapt to the changing world around him. The thing about revolutions is that you seldom notice them when they're going on.
Actually, we *are* growing synthetic organs although they're still expensive, we now have things like laser optical tweezers and MEMS, we generate electricity from incinerating garbage, we actually have solar panels power all sorts of public works (think emergency phones and deer-sensors on highways); oh, and we have the MRI scanner and the internet, and our robot dinosaurs are starting to work *real* good.
It's just that our technology advancements now come in the form of complex systems. An MRI has a gazillion parts and can't be stored at home, because it uses a superconducting cryomagnet. But it was made in the last 50 years, and has had a profound impact on life expectancy and our understanding of medicine.
We're currently in a period of systems consolidation and preparation for the next big tech paradigm. When it happens, we're going to have humanoid robots walking the streets; we'll have outpatient clinics where people can have synthetic organs grown; and we'll be powering things with a lot more solar/wind/biofuels.
Don't mistake the myths of advance technology for advance technology. The myths of anti-gravity and teleportation are simply human's desire to overcome physical limitations of the physical universe. But they don't necessarily have anything to do with where the tech advancements are actually occurring. The major tech advancements are occurring in biology and systems science nowdays; not in physics and chemistry.
Yes things have gotten better but I haven't seen a huge revoloutionary change to be honest in my lifetime, maybe the mobile phone I guess.
I'm assuming you're fairly young. You didn't experience how disconnected the world was 40, 30, or even 20 years ago. 20 years ago, it was possible to dial a phone and talk to someone on the other side of the planet. Expensive, so it was not common, but not surprising. 30 years ago, it was a Big Deal to talk to someone on the other side of an ocean. 40 years ago it was a tear-filled occasion to get a phone call from overseas: "Anna, go wake the kids, it's our little Jimmy calling from Over There!" Having grown up with that kind of a reaction to a phone call, for me to now yawn while calling my developers in Bangalore for a status meeting while I ride the train to work, yeah, I can see that as a huge change.
What annoys me more about the timeline is that marking "world wide web" as a single point is like marking the discovery of electricity once and then ignoring every electrical invention since because it's already covered. The internet created a new landscape upon which data lives; it changed how people live, work, and play, and it's being filled with even more magical wonders at a staggering pace. Just because they're riding piggy-back on the single "invention" of the web doesn't mean they're not new.
John
It was really nice belonging the generation that could hang on to the extreme pace of technological evolution, racing miles ahead the parent generation. We are all getting older and will have trouble keeping up the same pace. So if we don't have to have the door of irony slammed in our faces by future generations mocking us for being out of time, I'm glad.
One thing I notice is that people as young as 30-35 still pull the 'of course, this wasn't around when I was a kid so I don't understand it' card when referring to stuff like PCs, Home Cinemas, mobile phones, Sat Navs etc. Speaking as someone of 46 who has used computers and programmed them since I was 15 in 1979, I find this somewhat frustrating. Is it possible some people are just fed up of the rapid change and starting to push back against it and refusing to spend too much time keeping up with it all?
Another thought is that we seem to reinvent the wheel far more often these days. For instance, I was listening to a web dev podcast (not bad for an olden eh? (get off my lawn!)) where they noted they had just discovered that most of the stuff they thought their generation had invented (information architecture, UI design etc) had (gasp) been around for decades and how they now realised they could learn stuff from the older generation of app designers and architects.
As a species, I suspect we know far more than we can adequately document and track so spend far too much of our efforts and resourcing doing stuff that already exists. You see this a lot in the news with some headline proclaiming a 'new scientific discovery' which I knew about when I was a kid but clearly, those younger than me had forgotton/not known about and discovered it all over again.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
...we're not making progress??? It's funny.
IMHO, we are so obviously in the middle of the revolution brought on by our computers. We now have the capability to share information on any topic with any point on the earth instantaneously. Once we collectively figure out what this means, the technological advances are inevitable. We have no idea what we don't know yet, but throw nanotech, genetic mapping, Moore's law together (for starters) and the advances are inevitable.
Note I called them "advances" and not "progress". I agree with ciahound that these advances could and probably will come back to bite us.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
While it may be true that large scale engineered technologies have not sprung up at the revolutionary pace they did for a while (planes, trains, etc), I think the point of the article is in fact wrong. At least in the sciences, specifically in molecular biology, there have been numerous technological revolutions within the past 50 years, and certainly within the past 10. PCR, a technology which allows us to magnify tiny trace amounts of DNA has revolutionized both forensics as well as genetically modifying organisms whether for our food, medicines, or pure research purposes. The ability to sequence the genomes of organisms has appeared on the scene and gone from a multi-year million-billion dollar endeavor, to today when you can sequence an organism's genome in about a year for around $1 million, and that is always improving. There are tons of other advances, truly revolutionary ones, in science that have come along. As a last example, we now within the past 25 years or so have the ability to change regions of DNA that we are interested in to EXACTLY the bases we desire, EXACTLY where we want to do it through the process of site-directed mutagenesis. Its crazy when you think about it. I would count all these as technological improvements. I am sure other fields have them as well, its just I don't study those as much.
Also, a lot of technological advances, as always, are war- and government-centered and shrouded in secrecy. Although predicted in 1948, more than the stipulated 50 years ago, Big Brother has become a reality in the NSA office of the San Francisco AT&T building. GPS, Tomahawks, and Predators make destruction of arbitrarily-specified buildings and infrastructure available at the touch of a button. The cat ia out of the bag now regarding the Google sub-campus of the NASA Ames campus, which is known for its Artificial Intelligence research -- they have now named it the Singularity University -- who knows how much progress they've made thus far and whether intermediate results are helping in the Big Brother effort. It's not common knowledge yet, but the five-century tradition of subjugating the world through a surface navy has ended. Surface ships, including and especially aircraft carriers, are obsolete, being vulnerable to hypersonic surface-skimming missiles. The stipulated 50 years ago, battleships were still a hot thing.
This IEEE Spectrum piece is so bad that it not only doesn't recognize these recent and often secret game-changing innovations, it failed to mention the past innovation with the greatest societal impact: the S-Bend toilet drainpipe, which allowed indoor toilets without constantly emanating odors.
Joe runs out of gas and drops 3,000 ft into local celebrity's swimming pool.
I mean, people run out of gas all the time. People don't maintain their vehicles as well as they should. What happens when there is a mechanical failure. Planes don't fall out of the sky that often because there are fewer of them per-capita than cars. Plus they are far more tightly regulated than your vehicle.
Flying cars will never happen. We will invent the teleportation device first.
I think we may have been spoiled by science fiction. Much of 2009's technology seems not-new because we saw Captain Kirk using it 40 years ago.
We haven't invented any entirely new forms of transportation in the past several decades (darn it), but within my lifetime the changes in communication technology have been revolutionary. Sure, in 1969 I could imagine having a device in my hand that could show me exactly where I was on a map, let talk with anyone else on the planet or in orbit by saying "Kirk to Spock", and record and watch a movie, but I sure as heck didn't have one. I needed paper maps, a compass, and the ability to pick out landmarks and stars; I needed to go find a telephone somewhere; and I needed either a huge video camera and tape playback system with a CRT or a movie camera, film processing lab, and projector.
One indicator of how fast technology is still changing is the level of "future shock" we're still experiencing with it. Sure, people under 25 are comfortable with most of this new-fangled stuff, because they've grown up with it. But to someone who grew up with black and white television and rotary phones, it can be a struggle to understand how to work a computer. As a society we're still trying to figure out what the basic etiquette of mobile phone usage is. Not just when and where it's OK to talk, but how to conduct a phone call (e.g. When someone answers, do you automatically assume that it's the person you wanted to talk to, or do you consider that maybe it's a shared household phone? Do you assume that they know who's calling?)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
When you get a map of technology over the last 50,000 years, I say we are still following a steep curve upwards towards an amazing future. If you consider the last 100 years only, then compare that to the last 50 years only, ....wow...then compare the last 10 years to the last 5 years...
I really don't see what this author is trying to portray. In fact, we are talking now (to my knowledge) of being moon mobile by 2020.
Having space stations, moon colonies, even space power plants, does nt sound to me like we are slowing down! As well, I heard that we are now converting HIV cells to attack cancer cells, and this is only the beginning!
Last I heard too, we had successfully teleported light particles across a room, and we were in the stages of doing whole molecules.
So how far out are we to Start Trek type stuff, maybe another 50 or so years at this rate!
Was Windows 3.1 taken into account?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I think that this stems primarily from a greater scientific understanding of the world around us. We hammered out a significantly more accurate picture of the universe with the development of quantum electrodynamics and relativity in the first half of the 20th century than the classical physics model that previous scientists and engineers had to work with. If you have a good idea how the universe works from the ground up, it becomes much simpler to predict what kinds of technologies can and will be invented in the future, and what form they will take. As the author states, the biggest surprise left lies in the creative implementation of those devices.
While new technology and general discovery has slowed, the depth of progress has continued to grow. If you use the old analogy of the iceberg where discovery of the last 50 years was the tip above the water line, we are now getting into a age where investigation is starting to happen below the line. This means that progress might be slower in terms of rate but the findings are greater and have more meaning.
string.Empty();
Remember the russian cargo plane which crashed into the passenger near the lake of constance a few years ago (mostly due to the fault of the air controller) ? That is only one example, there are enough of them that there is a special system to try to avoid such collision built in the plane (in the afore mentioned example the traffic controller overrode the instruction of that anti collision box and the russian pilot obeyed him). Recently there was a small plane with an helicopter near my home. So...?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
It's called "The Industrial Revolution" for a reason.
Let sort out malaria, dysentry, AIDS and cancer, get everyone fresh water and worry about the rest after that. Maybe then the Africans will invent the flying car...
Author misses lots of things, and makes all sorts of invalid comparisons.
For example, the invention of the electric light may seem like a big thing, but there were centrally powered lighting systems already when it was invented - such as town gas lighting. Sure, electric lights are better, but one could say it's just an 'incremental improvement'. It's just a matter of perspective.
And while the lightbulb was a big invention, it was largely unchanged for the first 50+ years. Almost every light bulb was a hot filament in a vacuum. More recently, we've been making entirely new sources of light, using entirely new chemical or physical principles.Think LEDs, OLEDs, all sorts of lasers, bioluminescence that we can now splice into rats and bunnies at will, etc... We've even made rather esoteric sources of light like beta-radiation powered lights that last for a decade.
The author also makes comments like this:
But despite daily announcements of one breakthrough or another, morbidity and mortality from cancer and stroke continue practically unabated, even in developed countries.
Well... duh. Something has got to kill us in our old age eventually, and it'll be the diseases that are hard to cure, obviously. Until we develop some sort of immortality, that's not going to change. 100% of people will die, of something, no matter how good medicine is.
Until we all become immortal, what about the major advancements, like the recent developments in growing organs? It's still in it's early stages, but even what we've got now is a massive leap forward in medicine, almost as big as the invention of modern surgical techniques.
I think it's silly to measure the rate of technological progress by its impact on humans. The universe doesn't exist to entertain humans. Whatever science discovers about it, it's all progress. Some discoveries have a big impact on our lives, most do not.
Why would the rate of progress have slowed down? We have more scientists and better tools than 50 years ago. Doesn't make sense.
The dates listed in the article, 1880-1960, are telling. They correspond to what I call the Age of Electricity. At the start of this period, electric and magnetic forces became well-understood from a physics perspective; by the end of it, we had mastered electrical engineering.
It's not every day that humanity figures out how to use a new fundamental force: after all, there are only four of them. Electricity allows totally new paradigms for energy transmission and communications. It took 80 years to work through the consequences, but I think that even millennia from now it'll stand apart as a singular moment in human history, even more of a big deal than the mastery of fire.
the technology itself had largely been anticipated
True, but it's worth pointing out that one of the great inventions of 1880-1960 was science fiction.(*) There were a lot more people getting paid to anticipate the future in 1969 than in 1880.
(*) Blah blah Mary Shelley Jules Verne yeah yeah whatever.
We still use the microwave, we still use the freezer, the cooktop, the oven, we mostly use the combustion engine, we still mostly use steam for power plants, computers have gotten faster and we have LCD's now but nothing huge has hapenned, we don't have anti-gravity, we don't have teleportation, we can't change one thing in to another (easily), medically we still aren't growing replacement bodies.
I would say that the rate of transportation and availability of things has improved greatly. If something was invented 50 years ago, it would take a long time for a product to reach us globally. Today, a new Apple product or an Xbox is spread throughout the world in days for immediate availability.
Combine this with the fact that we're living rather comfortable lives; we have ovens, cars, microwaves, food delivery, shopping malls, etcetera. Back in the good ol' days, we didn't have these things, which is why inventing it made sense. Today, new inventions aren't as necessary as they were before. More effective, compact and cheaper products are, however.
Also, I'd argue that the jump from a horse wagon to a car is smaller than from a car to a teleporter - and there aren't that many steps in between.
Full Tilt
I personally think that patents and resistance to change are a BIG issue here.
A lot of research tools and methods are patented, even what to do research on (like parts of your own naturally occurring human gnome)! When "inventing" in your backyard barn (where a lot of UK inventors spend there life) it's almost impossible to "build" anything technically without tripping over a dozen of them what makes it very costly to get from idea to product. Then there's a lot of "stuff" out there simply not released to the public at large yet. Big company's just wait for the economical and political "best" time to maximize profit. Hell they even buy good ideas and inventions to lock them away (I'm a personal witness of that) so that their current product lines can stay on the market longer with minimal effort.
Progress often takes a big toll on the existing political, economical and employment landscape. Just look at the kinds of jobs today that didn't even exist 30 years ago. New professions come and old ones go. Just imagine the amount of change needed to go for example from an oil based economy to a (greener) hydrogen based. Just look at the record company's and their difficulties in adopting a new business model when only the way they distribute has changed! Politics and the laws they make even progresses slower...
Then there's the ever larger growing group of people that (often hardly) knows how to use "things" that simply can't grasp how or why these "things" work. They just get pissed when it doesn't do what they want. Just look fifty years ago and you could service and fix a lot of stuff in and around the house yourself. This is hardly so today (even if it's because of how they manufacture things today). Need i go on?
They only had floppy disk drives internally AFAIR.
Surely this is about tech maturing.
If you start off with nothing, learning to throw stones is a big step forward but them learning to use a catapult isn't such a big step even though it allows you to throw stones much further, with greater accuracy and with less effort.
The same can be said about applications these days. Take photoshop for example. the upgrades to this software were colossal at the beginning but current upgrades are more tweaks and minor features. This is because the application is maturing.
Can't the the same be said for our tech?
I love you whack-job conspiracy theorists. Hydrogen cars being held back by oil companies? Do you know how much they would make if they got to build a new infrastructure to deliver an alternate fuel source? Especially if that fuel source were on shore, and they didn't have to deal with corrupt officials in all the oil-producing shitholes around the world? They can't wait to charge us more to sell us a new thing!
The reason these things aren't in the market yet is because they're technically hard to build for the mass-market, and very expensive to produce. Fuel cells, the promised future of energy storage and conversion, sound great. They take hydrogen, they emit pure water, and they're quiet. And to rebuild the current fleet of automobiles using fuel cells would take more platinum than exists on the planet. Oops, back to the drawing board.
As for anti-gravity, are you thinking it exists, and that we're not building flying cars with it? Check your medication doses, I think they're off.
RIP SF Age, but you're right no flying cars, except Trek Transporters won't happen either.
Instead of a flying car, I'd almost see a "3d Subway". There operators run the grid. Essentially, Subway cars don't crash.
In all seriousness, getting to work would be like solving a rubik's puzzle. (up/left/forward/down/forward/left/forward)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Perhaps things have slowed down for us here in the developed, western world, but I have heard of an amazing shift in the third world; cell phones.
For example, in Kenya there are 37 million people. Of those, only 1.3 have electricity. No lights, no fans, no TV, no electricity at all. However, 17 million people use cell phones and the number is screaming upwards every day! Imagine what a fundamental change it is to be able to talk with anyone at a distance in a developing nation? So much of what we take for granted in the western world boils down to the ability to pick up a phone and ask for what you want, be it goods or information.
The article I lifted these figures from was discussing a solar powered cell phone, which will cut the final cord from the main grid. Now people who cannot walk to a grid connected location can still call for help, call to find a job, call to talk with a distant loved one.
In the book Guns, Germs, and Steel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel it was postulated that the rise of the main Eurasian regions in history was mainly due to the free travel of ideas across a broad band of land where climatological and geological conditions were mostly similar, thus allowing different ideas about agriculture, living, and warfare to flow back and forth easily. This mixing of ideas is what made the Eurasian continent most often dominant over the Americas and the African continents, which are spread out longitudinally and thus cover a wider spread of terrain conditions and weather conditions.
The advent of the mobile phone will become an equalizing factor, ideas will be able to spread faster and faster among the populations of the South American and African regions and the quality of life there will begin to experience the same kind of rapid upward swell which we in the western world assume is our birthright.
(facts and figures lifted from this article; http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/08/21/solar.cellphone/index.html )
bend like the reed
But we can keep a clinicially dead cadaver live enough to pull its still beating heart out and put it into another patient and save their life. We can do a $500 procedure that zaps your eyeballs with lasers so you never have to wear glasses again.
Many cas stations now have cheap LCD's on every pump. Your phone has one. Your microwave has one. Your watch has one.
Because it is proven technology that works. What is wrong with that? If it ain't broke dont fix it.
Are you kidding? We change stuff into other stuff all the time! We can grow enzymes that eat oil spills an turn them into harmless byproducts. We are in the process of using algae to turn nutrients in the water into combustible fuel. Hell, we've long been able to take bacteria and turn sugar into tasty alcoholic beverages.
Because according to your definition, the only true revolutionary technology would be something dropped out of the sky by aliens. But even then, all they did was just take some idea used by the Alpha Centuri three million years ago and made a couple adjustments.
Hydrogen car Hydrogen is a very crappy way to store electricity. No, it's not held back by oil companies, it's held by the fact that it'd be even worse than electric cars.
Flying cars Yeah, there are so many technical and practical issues with having flying cars it's not even funny.
Body parts Religious groups? Are you fucking kidding? What's their impact? Oh yeah, sure, they put a minor speed bump in the way of stem cell research. Let's blame them for not being yet able to grow replacement brains.
So major things have not happen because of GOD and MONEY that's it.
No, major things haven't happened because they're not yet possible, feasible or practical.
On a side note, you know who you sound like? Hyde from That '70s Show. "There is no gaz shortage man! It's all fake. The oil companies control everything! Like there's this guy who invented this car that runs on water man!"
You just got troll'd!
You don't know what a comma is, that's very sad.
Look at the state of the art in military aircraft for one thing.
For the past 100 years it's been the bleeding edge of multiple technology fields, so it's a good gauge of where we're at.
Right now the state of the art is the F22 Raptor, ie a slightly lighter, slightly more powerfully engined TSR2 with stealthy air intakes and tail planes that flies like a brick.
Wow, we've really come a long way in the last 40 years...
Captcha: EXPORT.
Ultimate irony for anyone who knows the story of the shockingly stone-age F111 that killed the TSR2.
What utter nonsense. While the singularity folks don't have me running off to turn myself into a robotic nano-swarm just yet, the proof of continued growth is more than just speculation. The author is setting a false measure of the expansion of knowledge and then concluding that growth has slowed when society falls do measure up. A flying car argument by any other means is still a flying car argument. He admits as much by citing Moore's but quickly shifts gears to focus on going to the moon and curing cancer. Amusingly, we've made vast headway in the last 50 years in the later topic. Cancer death rates have been declining decade over decade since the 60. Cancer death amongst the young has shown huge declines during this time, a statistic that often flies off the radar due to how cancer mortality rates are reported. While there isn't a cure yet, the incremental gains we've made over the past century have turned a cancer diagnosis from a sure death sentence to a survivable disease. Just because knowledge growth has come in the form of digital growth doesn't mean that it has failed to grow or accelerate. It just means that you won't get getting your flying car (or in this case super Apollo++ rocket) anytime soon. The law of accelerating returns isn't about the market accelerating in the direction you want, it's about accelerating in the direction the market wants.
No Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaalllly?
Such a surprise!
Keep patenting and extending copyrights out to the wealthy so they can decide what is innovation and what will hurt their grand children's profits.
Keep greasing the rails so that the train of "progress" stays on the "lobbyist and collusion of government and business" tracks to monopolies so they can have ludicrous warchests of cash, locked up and not doing anything due to lack of competition. One of the great challenges Microsoft has is how to keep its enourmous cash funds out of the capital markets so it doesn't end up in a start up which would put them out of business, for example.
Then wonder why there is no capital to do any start ups or research with.
Welcome to wonderful world of corporate fascism. You play what they want to hear, you buy and use goods on their terms and the government throws you in jail if you dare otherwise.
Its here. Right now.
So when the day comes and you have to help your loved ones through hospice because we use the same protocols for cancer for the past 30 years, with corporations that deny you early prevention care because it is more profitable to make you buy extensive chemo drugs in stage 3 cancer, ask yourself this question:
What would happen if science and technology wasn't driven by greed and power to control peoples lives? No secrets about who had what idea. Everything was open, and information was freely shared. One big freaking Open Source project with one goal: improve the human condition and advance science and technology at a pace comparable to waking up and finding out tomorrow a asteroid was going to hit the earth in 24 months and destroy everything.
Science as a societal effort, pursued like every last persons life depended on it.
Its a dream right now, but I bet in 100 years we would be sending people to colonize distant star systems, with round trip journeys measurable in hours. Not millions of years.
-Hack
PS: Oh, and I bet the expansion for WoW would look just really cool. :-)
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
As much as I want to hope, as much as I want to be optimistic and as much as I want to believe, reality kicks me in the face when I consider where humanity is right now. It's like being on a big fast comfortable train looking out the window and seeing that, a few miles ahead, the bridge we are about to cross has collapsed in the middle. You try and tell people "hey the bridge ahead has collapsed - we gotta stop this train", but instead people look at you as if you have committed some massive social fo-par, because the train is comfortable and why would they want to stop.
In itself, technology is a gift that is completely neutral, it can either free or enslave. Unfortunately the current status quo is using that gift to pressure every living system on the face of this small planet, and that includes the human race. The bottom line for all of this is the economic models (that demand the pace of technological development) address natural resources as a subset of the economy, where in fact the reverse is true.
Consider the reality of systemic human activity, in the short or long term it is not sustainable. Now consider this mind numbingly simple fact: Unsustainable systems cannot be sustained.
Our technology has never been designed to be sustainable. When you realise that you realise that technology and progress, which is often demonised as the cause of all our ills, has always been misapplied to consume resources as if they are infinite, therefore, it has always been going backwards. How is that "exponential technological growth" possible with limited resources and *without* sustainability goals?
I'm not saying it's impossible to change, actually, I think change will provide the greatest of technological challenges over the next few decades. But that would be *real* progress and it will be the masses against the vested interest groups who frame such changes as 'not realistic'. If you consider it critically and honestly the only thing that is 'not realistic' is the high energy/mass consumption configuration of our society. Until we change powers controlling the application human ingenuity and direction of technological development I suspect we are heading for a tailspin no amount of technological prowess will pull us out of.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Please! You guys are passing over pivotal inventions such as Oxyclean, ShamWOW, Bump-it, and other life changing inventions. You guys don't watch enough infomercials.
All this time, and you STILL use a comma for pluralizing an acronym. What is with that??
All this time, and you STILL call an apostrophe a "coma". What is with that?
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
50 years ago, lasers were mostly sci-fi. Now they are everywhere, and among their many uses are in 3D laser scanners. A scanner like a Leica HDS6100 can record measured survey points at a speed of 500 000 points/second and an accuracy of +/- 2mm. This allows the rapid surveying of anything. Consider your house - a 3D scanner could record everything in it in an hour or two to an accuracy of +/- 2mm, and from the resulting point cloud build a virtual model and then a perfect replica. We can now record in 3D the physical presence of everything in the world.
At the very least this means the digital documentation of all the world's built historic environment is possible. See Cyark.org - now that's exciting, and unheralded, use of technology.
If you want more advances, call your congressman and tell them that you want increased funding to the NSF, NIH, NIST, DOE, and NASA for basic research. Then sit back ten or twenty years.
Because it will take Congress ten or twenty years to pass a bill that increases funding to the NSF, NIH, NIST, DOE, and NASA. Let's face it. Progess has slowed because it takes an act of Congress to perform an act of Congress.
Actually progress has slowed because we haven't discovered any new energy sources since fission. We keep talkiing about fusion, but nobody's made it happen. When we find a powerful new energy source, technological progress will boom.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Well you can only take reverse engineered alien technology so far, so fast. Let's be a little more understanding. We have done pretty damn good with the stuff in 50 years. Thank you Mr. Greys!
Obviously, the alien presence responsible for our prior leaps in technology has left the planet. We need to attract some more, segregate them into a small area, and help them voluntarily assist us in progressing as a technological society.
Scientific advances are like a coffee spill. As it spreads, it thins. This is not news, it's common sense. Oh, wait...you're fuzzy-headed liberals who can't follow logical chains of thought. Sorry.
Doctor Brown said in 1985 (Back To The Future) that he was going 30 years into the future. Were things in Back To The Future II correct for 2005? If he REALLY traveled to 2005 or 2010, would he be that impressed? No flying cars, no using garbage for fuel, no perfect weather service. I remember 1985 and other than the internet and faster computers and things getting smaller, meh. Medicine? You're kidding me! People die all the time from going to the hospital and getting an infection or a goof dr cutting out the wrong body part. I'm still stuck in...1985...Springsteen, Madonna, way before Nirvana...
Someone has patented DATA VALIDATION?!?!?
How the fuck does that not have prior art since ... well, pretty much since databases were first made?
Progress in personal communication (I would call it "personal broadcast") is a great counterexample.
Discussing your ideas with strangers all over the world in real time is a very recent concept, and it IS revolutionary.
I have one question for the OP, who was born in 1957. If the technological advances of today were "largely anticipated", how many millions of dollars did you make by investing in computers and internet technologies in the 80's and 90's?
Revolutionary advancements don't have to dramatically change the world to be revolutionary. Unlike 100 years ago, we now live in a much different type of society. That alone is revolutionary.
I live in a city with 7 million other people. A megopolis actually. It's huge. And it tends to magnify certain advancements.
The original post mentioned that current advancements are easily anticipated. Well welcome to beirng able to see the future. Predictions and foresight is an impressive effort. So is an organized research and development structure in which everyone is engaged.
It is unfair to ask that revolutions happen over-night. We're out of the industrial age where an inventor takes 20 hidden years to work, and then BAM over-night it exists to the world. We're now in a world where an inventor announces a dream invention, gets a lot of help from everywhere, tries to market that invention, then tries to invent it, then maybe it exists. We now hear of more inventions than those that succeed. That's not a bad thing.
But if you look at a the same twenty-year period, you get to see advancements in things that didn't exist at all. These days, inventions tend to be at the social level. The advancement is less often the "possibility of something working" and more often the "getting enough people to use it" because most modern inventions don't work alone in the dark.
So no, MOBILE phones aren't a big advancement over cellular phones, that's merely incremental. But MOBILE phones are a huge advancement over walkie-talkies. Think of the infrustructure, the legal commitments, the many competitors working together globally. But most people don't see that. Most people around here think that they still have a cell phone. There are no more cells for consumer communication, and there haven't been for around ten years now. You weren't suppose to notice, but it did happen.
Oh, by the way, the Internet. It doesn't get any huger than that. An that was only twenty-odd years ago. And now there's Internet in orbit. You wanna call that an incremental advancement? That's a pretty big increment.
How about just the concept of trying to help third-world countries? Again, I don't see it, I'm not interested in it. But it's there. And that's an enormous cultural advancement.
No washing machines aren't new anymore. Who cares. Roads in this city are more reliable than ever. My car doesn't break anywhere near as often as your grandmother's car did. It handles way better too.
Oh, did anyone mention that we've had robots on mars for YEARS now?! Incremental advancement my ass.
I believe the author of the IEEE article would do well to read up on a little more evolution theory. It's not the gene, it's the percentage of the population that expresses the gene that defines whether or not "it exists".
1000 years ago there were people in the world who had all the food they needed, and often grew obese (Henry VIII being the canonical example). Yet the majority of the population was one bad harvest away from starving, and were constantly beset by problems due to malnutrition.
Today, the vast majority of the world has much more food than they need. Obesity is a larger problem than malnutrition, even in places like Africa and India where the opposite was true only a generation ago.
If you compare the caloric intake of the small percentage of rich people 1000 years ago to the caloric intake of rich people today, one would conclude there has been no progress in diet. But if you consider the "expression of the effect", that a sustenance level diet applies to only a tiny percentage of the world, then one is led to a totally different conclusion - there has been massive changes in food production and intake.
Let's expand that. They had cars 100 years ago, and we have cars today. So if you just look at introduction dates, that's one invention that hasn't been beaten. But if you consider the population adjustment, you again end up with a factor of perhaps 0.001% to something like 8.5%, an enormous change in the technological landscape.
It is the _expression_ of technology that defines the technological landscape. And if anyone believes the expression of technologies doesn't continue to accelerate, I think they're not really looking at the issue.
Maury
And this is why the techno-utopian replacements for fossil fuels will never happen. Get your gardening gear and your firewood ready folks, it's going to be a bumpy ride.
Maybe the difference is that science fiction is far more popular today than it used to be. What was so surprising in 1956 that wasn't envisioned by Jules Verne ? Space travel, satellites, submarines, airplanes, all of this was predicted. Since 1956 what happened ? Well, walking on the moon is one thing, the computer revolution is another. Medicine has done tremendous progresses as well and nuclear energy became a reality. Cell phones were a thing nobody anticipated and internet brings so many things to humanity that it is mind boggling.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I think the author's observations are valid, but his conclusion is not. While the overall impact of inventions on our daily lives has declined, the rate of technical innovation continues to increase. The reason is that we've tackled all the things which make a huge impact on the overall standard of living. We've plucked the low-lying fruit, so to speak. To further increase the standard of living, we must work on harder problems, which have less of an impact, but require more innovations to achieve.
I think proponents of the singularity and the author of this article are looking at two sides of the same coin. One the one hand, we have Moore's Law, which is driving innovation at an exponential rate, while on the other hand we have the law of diminishing returns, which is exponentially decreasing the overall impact of each subsequent innovation. If you look at the overall picture in terms of utility and disruptive changes, like the author of this article does, the rate of technical progress may seem static or even declining. But if you look "underneath the hood," you see that even common and "boring" things now a days are highly complex, almost to the point of magic. Overall, I think the singularity will be a lot quieter than it is hyped to be. It will arrive, but we will not notice and it will bring with it no disruptive changes. Instead, things will simply work better and be much *less* visible as new technology. The era of disruptive change is indeed behind us, what lies ahead is the era of continual refinement.
The singularity myth, I think, is that such new technologies will bring about great increases in the standard of living. Take, for example, the highly hyped arrival of intelligent machines. Will it really radically change and improve our lives? I think it will not, after all we are already surrounded by intelligent machines, namely, ourselves. The creation of dumb machines (i.e. the industrial revolution) is far more significant than the creation of intelligent machines will ever be. In fact, the first intelligent machine will probably be somewhat of a step backwards, since now we will have a machine which may not always agree with us, may not want to blindly take our orders, and which occasionally may suffer from human-like mental illnesses. These machines will certainly be an incredible technical achievement, a testament to Moore Laws, but they won't really change our lives that much, which is something the author of this article would have foreseen.
Maybe because I actually work in research (micro and nanotechnology), I don't know why I am one of the few that disagrees that innovation is slowing down. In any case, this is my argument: nanotechknology is booming, both fundamental research as well as applied. 10-15 years ago we had no clue about carbon nanotubes - while now we have various companies developing and even producing (I am not supposed to tell you this) TV displays based on CNTs, as well as fuel cells and composite materials. There is a lot of research in using CNTs for microsensors, and for medical applications. Generally, our knowledge of material science has grown geometrically in the last 10 years, and all sorts of esotheric substances are being produced in labs all around the world. Even using DNA as a building block. 10 years ago we had barely any idea of stuff like excitons and plasmons, while nowadays these are household terms in chemistry and physics. In fact, we have chemical detectors that function based on plasmons. We have NCT and graphene transistors. We have non-carbon nanostructures, all sorts of self-assembled nanomachines (complex chemical molecules able to perform certain mechanical tasks). We have people initiating growth of neurons on carbon nanotube mats - how fucking cool is that? Being able to regenerate part of your brain tissue?
As you can see, my argument is just an overview of a small fraction of scientific research and technology - but even that, I think, is enough to refute the notion that development has slowed down.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Many technological advancements in the 20th century can be directly linked to the motivation provided by WW1, WW2 and the Cold War/Space Race.
We, as a global society, have got comfortable.
Ho i forgot to mention that Republican like YOU is also a cause for no major improvment, juste under MONEY TALKS.
But phones and cars existed in 1898! The phone was invented in the 1870s, and cars were first produced by Benz in 1888.
What happened is that they became more widely available between 1898 and 1914 - which is just like how computers and mobile phones were existing technology that became more widely available from 1993 to 2009.
How many people had a mobile phone in 1993? And to claim mobiles and computers are only "re-implementation"s, you might as well handwave cars away, saying they're only an improvement over horses.
And whilst I'm commenting, TFA is very misleading to compare his 53 year life span to his Grandmother's 80 year life span. That's about 50% longer!
The correct comparison for 1956 to now should be 1880 to 1933.
Or alternatively, we should be looking at the difference from 1929 to now, or from 1956 to 2036.
The iPhone is just a smaller version of the Memex predicted by Vannevar Bush
The issue is doing it, not predicting it. (And I think you mean the Internet, which contrary to what some think around here, did exist before the Iphone came along.)
Your grandfather needs to reread his history books before making up fake anecdotes.
BBC was founded in 1922 and broadcasting to the masses didn't come into its own until the twenties either, as it required the widespread adoption of the vacuum tube for building efficient radio receivers and transmitters. While the triode, the vacuum tube that amplifies, was invented in 1906, commercial manufacturing of tubes (by RCA) didn't start until 1920.
International scheduled flights across all of Europe before WW-I? I don't think so. It took the great war to force development of airplanes from being just toys to becoming a serious means of transportation. Even then long distance flights didn't really take off until the thirties with the introduction of the (American) DC-3 and similar planes by European manufacturers (Junkers et al.)
Finally, the telephone was in widespread use *before* 1898.
But the Ford model T was introduced in 1909, that is true.
Who should I believe? Some random nobody in the IEEE trade rag (an organization which is fast approaching the end of its usefulness) or Ray Kurzweil, someone who actually does invent things. Someone help me with this difficult decision!
The big things all came from learning to use oil energy. Now we're running out of that.
If we had cheap renewable energy, the sort of tech revolutions the author talks about would re-ignite. If we never had to think about energy, we would do AMAZING things; cover the world with skyscrapers, go to Mars for fun, flying cars, build giant computers that could create new life, etc.
The big jump in life expectancy didn't come from new technology. It came from wide spread adoption of old technology. Sewers, clean water, and garbage removal cut down the incidence of infectious disease. Healthy diet and hygiene help even further. Except for vaccinations and antibiotics, medicine adds far less to life expectancy than just avoiding wallowing in filth.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Essentially, Subway cars don't crash. Apparently you don't live in NY, CHI, SF ...
Remember that article a few days ago where a buckytube was shown with its carbon rings exposed in plain sight? They made that image using an atomic force microscope. As the tip of the scanner is to course for high-resolution imaging they picked up a carbon monoxide molecule with the tip, extending it that way into something sharper.
In case you don't see the next step... imagine a machine, able to pick up atoms and/or molecules and deliver them to the right places to create, well, whatever you want really. As long as that machine is controllable, programmable and big enough to matter you have just imagined yourself a molecular assembler. And once those are available a new world will open in which any construction small enough to fit in the confines of the assembler can be made as 'easy' as you print out a page on your printer now.
Currently this idea is still in the realm of science fiction, but the science is getting there. All it takes is some imagination to turn fiction into reality...
--frank[at]unternet.org
if all the money that was spent so that the privileged upper class can all live like kings was instead spent on science and fair wages, this world would be a paradise instead it's a hell
money truly is the root of all the real evil that there is in this world
Technology brings us better and better tools.
Doesn't mean we use them better.
Most primates fling feces in their territorial disputes,
we have bullets and bombs. Wooooo technology.
Because how else are you supposed to see that the way down (where the bottom of your flying car is in the way) is clear to make the avoidance?
And you can stop too. If you do that midair, you're going to fall down...
Nice try, I'm a socialist.
You just got troll'd!
Maybe the "revolutionary" kind of technological progress has slowed down over the recent time, but I'd argue that end-user ingenuity has increased. From a technologistical viewpoint, maybe we've only seen incremental increases in technical progress (maybe due to a more systematic education and application of science, rather than the glorified free-thinkers of the past? They still exist by the way), but from a sociological perspective I think we've evolved. We see better and more refined and indeed, revolutionary ways in using our more and more powerful tools. We've seen computers and derivative technologies used for actually solving problems better, and finding solutions to new and unfound problems. And as for revolutionary tech, maybe we're just not noticing it? R&D takes time for a consumer to notice, and in the past, a lot of tech came about from needs and times of depression. We still see ideas being materialized, albeit in a more controlled way.
of tech advancement?
C'mon now. For centuries the fastest way to move was the horse, and before that it was running. The Stone Age represented how long? Bronze Age? Iron Age? And now some pissy author is whining about the fact that he thinks we're not compressing thousands of years of technological advancement into one anymore?!?!
Geez, suck it up.
Trying to estimate the rate of technological development across decades is a phenomenally tricky business. Looking at the past, ideas that were incremental can be lumped together and thought of as revolutionary, and revolutionary ideas can be re-imagined as merely incremental. The telephone was developed in the 1880s. But the telegraph, a perfectly good way of sending binary data down a wire, had already existed for decades. Telephony brought analog signals into the mix. It wouldn't be until the 20th century that they figured out how to multiplex multiple (analog) signals on a single wire. Or developed feedback amplifiers that permitted signals to be sent across North America using a reasonable sized conductor. Or developed an automated switch to replace the human operators that physically connected your circuit to the party you wished to call. Or realized that, rather than multiplexing analog signals, it was more efficient and reliable to digitize the signal and use packet switching on a digital communications network (back to digital data, like the telegraph!). Or to set up networks of locally operating radio towers (cells) that provide a mobile telephone with seamless coverage as it travels from one place to another.
Which of these is simply incremental? Which is revolutionary? Is the 1880s telephone itself the major revolution? Note that some buildings and ships already existed with tubes designed into them for communicating (i.e. shouting) between rooms. The telephone replaces the tube with wires, borrowing the idea from telegraphy, to achieve the same purpose. Were the innovations that followed (multiplexing analog signals, feedback amplifiers, automated switching, packet switching, cell networks) incremental or revolutionary? It's difficult, I'd actually suggest impossible, to make a definitive claim.
My claim is simply that measuring the rate of technological process is a subtle and tricky business. I believe the best we can really hope for is to find metrics with narrow domains. For example, the number of transistors in an IC (Moore's law), the annual output of technical papers, or the speed at which DNA can be sequenced. These metrics only truly measure what they say they measure (transistors, papers, and sequencing speed). We may try to infer progress rates from such metrics, but logical errors arise when these metrics are used to predict progress outside the metric. (transistor counts to predict artificial intelligence.) The author of the article makes the similar estimation errors to the singularity folks when discussing technological progress, but biased in the opposite direction.
I am not a believer in the singularity. But, it is fun to think about the future, so I cut the singularity folks some slack with their over-the-top predictions. I just don't take them seriously. But I believe futurologists do some good in encouraging people to think about possible futures and what it take to achieve (or avoid) them. If the aim of the article is to remind us not to take the singularity folks to seriously, then I agree. But as it is written, it sounds more like "Get off my lawn!"
'nuf said.
This rate, it's slowdown, and the reason why, was covered in depth in Joeseph Tainter's Book "The collapse of complex societies". No, it's not a doomers' book, but rather a classic in Sociology, looking at the why various civilizations have collapsed in the past.
In short, new challenges to a society require increasing complexity. But there's a diminishing return on investment there, until it goes negative.
Anyway, he devotes a whole chapter to scientific progress, and notes that it's been decreasing since the 1920's. Basically, the low hanging fruit is gone, resulting in more specialization, and less returns for the money spent (especially if you factor in the cost of education).
It's a great read, and I recommend it to everyone.
The more narrowly you frame the question, the easier it is. Progress in semiconductors can be measured in transistors per mm^2. Technological progress as a whole is very difficult to quantify.
I have a simplified model in my head I call "the sphere of knowledge". Inside the sphere is everything we know, outside the sphere is everything we don't know, and the surface of the sphere is what we are currently discovering. If you measure the size of the sphere by the radius, and find the rate of increase is dropping, you might think the rate of progress is decreasing; however the surface area of the sphere which is proportional to the square of the radius might still be increasing at a constant rate, and the volume increasing accelerating. That captures the problem of looking at progress as a whole; it might not look like it is expanding as fast, but if you look at specific areas, the rate of change is profound.
I started in the computer business in the early 80s. It was a time of rapid change, with IC technology making computational power available to many businesses for the first time and even a few home hobbyists. The rate of expansion of computer ownership probably dropped by the early 00s. Yet during the time when "computerization" was slowing down, we saw the widespread adoption of the single most amazing technological innovation of my lifetime, far more significant in my opinion than the moon landing, which I remember watching: the Internet search engine. It's a stupendous leap in locating information, practically unimagined by science fiction even a few years before.
Of course, knowledge really isn't a sphere; it's an irregular region in hyperspace with gaping multidimensional holes in it. That means that entire new fields of knowledge and brand new job descriptions will emerge around tiny seeds of knowledge development. My bets are on biology and biotechnology. Designer drugs, artificial organs and limbs, science tested performance enhancing drugs, bioengineered organisms to perform chemical and environmental tasks, the list of possibilities goes on and on.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
1. Where is my house cleaning Robot? At Amazon, they sell for $150 (Roomba) vacuum, $300 (Scooba) floor washing.
2. Where is my robot babysitter? We call them TV. You have so many you forget about them.
3. My flying car? Anyone with a license can buy one an old helicopter for less than $50,000 What, you expect to get one without a license?
4. Where is my miraculous medical cures? Back in 1950's we did not have Lasik. We cured bad eyesight. WE CURED BAD EYESIGHT. Not to mention minimally invasive surgery and artificial hearts and pacemakers. Not to mention liver transplants. We have done so much here only an IDIOT focussed on the few things we have not cured would mention it.
5. We walked on the Moon. Yeah I know it happened before many of you were born. So what? It still happened AFTER the writer's grandmother died in 1960. We freakin walked on the MOON!
6. Computers are not simple an extension of the the 1950's version. We moved from vacuum tubes to transistors to chips. Chips are dramatically different from the tubes. As in horse to car difference. They count.
7. Those chips allowed cellphones. The interesting thing about the cellphone is NOT the radio - but the switching network behind the radio. That is dramatically different from anything they had in 1950.
8. The interenet is again another example of computer networking. That they did NOT have anything like before 1950. It is fantastic, it is remarkable, it is qualitatively DIFFERENT than the crap they had before it.
The main reasion this idiot did not recognize the differences is SIZE. Back in the first half of the 20th century we did not get 'small'. We couldn't do anything small, so we did everything huge. Bot most of the second half was doing the small things. They were just as impressive feats of technology, but they were not 'big' so the idiot ignored them. Small != unimportant.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
1. Companies make more money when slowing down innovation to a trickle and pacing features for sales.
2. Sue crazy people, lawyers, and judges who attempt to create law from the bench (especially "intellectual property rights").
3. In general, people's values are shifting to entertainment over principle (i.e. American Idol and "reality television") with entertainers, sports figures, and rap stars from prison making higher income than any researcher trying to find a cure for cancer, AIDS, or any other serious global problem.
4. Mass production quality has decreased.
5. Increases in extremely poor management and a lack of understanding of how technology actually works. Deadlines are set by random whims or customer promises by those involved in sales with little knowledge of their product or technology in general.
Man these kinds of things pop up all the time. How are we to usefully talk about 'rate of progress' when it seems pretty difficult to even define how you measure scientific progress at all? In other words...if you can't answer the question "How many horses make an atomic bomb" then you're probably asking something worth arguing either way.
And sometimes people blame "anti-competitive practices" when there's actually a valid reason why a product might fail:
- Flying cars - Costs a lot to buy, costs a lot to fuel, requires space for takeoffs/landings. Also in today's "green" climate replacing your 35 mpg car with a 5 mpg flying car would be considered a backwards move.
- EV cars - Costs a lot to buy, is cheaper to fuel, but only goes ~100 miles so people don't want it. People want freedom to make 200-300 mile weekend trips to the beach or mountains or grandma's house.
- Tram/elevated trains - Inconvenient. A car "picks you up" right outside your house; a tram doesn't.
- Betamax - Its inventor Sony claimed it had better video quality, but its initial 1 hour/tape limit was not as good as VHS' 2 or 4 hour ability. Consumers chose VHS. We see the same with iPods where people are turning their backs on high-quality CDs or DVD-Audio, because they'd rather squeeze songs at barely-audible quality to fit inside their tiny MP3 player.
- Steam engine - Although invented by a Greek circa 100 A.D., the roman empire already had cheap slaves to do all the work, so it was viewed by citizens as a toy, not something to replace the status quo.
There are a few cases where a company uses it monopoly to squash an invention, as RCA did when they purchased the patent to FM in the 1930s and then shelved it to protect their already-existing AM monopoly, but these cases are rare. In most cases products fail because consumers *choose* to make them fail.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
"While certainly we've produced some useful refinements, little of the technology available today would have surprised me much had I been able to encounter it in 1969."
Because you'd just watched three years of Star Trek in 1969? What other age grew up with those expectations as we prepared to land on the moon?
Also, 40 years is a minority sample of a century. I've been restoring a family clock I've placed at about 1904-6, firmly into the 20th century, and it's scary to think that it's the same century as the PC. So give it another 60 years. Could be wild.
It looks like there is less interest in prototyping today. Back in the day before Ford, it would have been worth it to build a complete new car from the bottom up, and it would have been a success - reporters would come to talk to the inventor, books would be written about him - all this to notify people from far away what he did. The car would have been clunky and unique and not very good but to people riding horses it would be Progress.
Today, if you don't build a new Facebook with instant millions of users, it's hardly worth mentioning your pet project on a slow news day on Slashdot. If your hardware isn't as cheap as it gets (or, in case of Apple, you don't get a good handle on the wealthier part of the population and invest millions in marketing) and mass sold in hundreds of thousands, you're bankrupt (see OLPC for a sort-of example).
-- Sig down
Particle Physics has become really wacky in recent years. Every time a current theory doesn't quite add up another particle is "created". Personally I believe that you could create a theory based on Pokemon and it would make as much sense as current theories (As always, you must choose the right Pokemon).
Now mod me offtopic.
Over the last 250 years humanity has seen incredible advances in technology, but there is no reason to think this growth will continue indefinitely.
From TFA: "Itâ(TM)s simple: a chart of productivity from the dawn of humanity to the present day. It shows a line that inclines very gradually until around 1750, when it suddenly shoots almost straight up."
Since accomplishments since 1750 dwarf all previous technological advancements, on such a chart it may look like we made "gradual" steady progress from the dawn of man to 1750, but that is not true at all. In reality, the history of technological progress is punctuated by short periods of rapid development in between long, LONG periods of stagnation and even decline. The discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel, the first use of metal tools--these are developments that are thousands of years apart in human history. There is no doubt that we are currently in the biggest of such periods of rapid development, but there is no telling how long it will last.
Remember, when you say "good enough" that means that design effort was optimized to maximize something other then longevity or usefulness. Good enough is a very difficult optimization to achieve, but it appears that the Ipod, the shitty Razr phone, WinXP, the Kia line, are all "good enough"
there are not many things left to invent...
However, innovation for these technologies developed long before such applications were conceived:
So if we're talking about progress, we need to look at patterns in technology. Innovations on the other hand give us that big, mind-boggling leap forward. Those dont seem to happen as much since the niche previously reserved for the thinking-out-of-the-box inventors of the world has been replaced with an industry built around R&D.
Funding for basic science was drastically curtailed during the Nixon administration and has been subject to continual erosion ever since. Gee, do you think this might be a legacy of that? I wonder.
That must be one of the most absurd things I've ever read. The whole home computer revolution has occurred during the last roughly 30 years. What more can be said on this topic?
The most important invention of the modern era was refrigeration. Everything else depends on it.
The effect noted is an illusion due to category error (selection of mismatched items to compare).
The data regarding older advances are taken, as stated, from revolutionary changes, whereas the newer are taken from predictable and incremental advances.
The former are primarily advances in basic science. They do lend themselves to, and are made obvious by, later advances in applied technology, but the major discoveries themselves are of a more fundamental nature. Such things are highly visible now due to the large body of applied technology they made possible. Back tracking the technological advances leads to those discoveries. Without that large body converging on the major discoveries common to them, the discoveries themselves are not that prominent.
They were not so prominent at the time due to the lack of applied technology as an indicator. Likewise, most major discoveries in the recent past have not had time to mature and bear applied fruit. We cannot know for certain as yet just which or how many of those advances are the Next Big Thing(s). However, basic research continues apace, as evidenced by grants awarded, articles published and patents obtained, as well as the natural offshoot of basic research, those far more numerous discoveries that are developed, announced and then come to naught.
The authors note the details that they believe lead them to their conclusion, but fail to recognize that in examining those facts they are creating their conclusion through selection bias and category error. It is precisely the recent incremental technological advances that stem from the more distant major discoveries that make them visible. Their data originate in a cause and effect relationship, but they attempt to compare them as effects, recent and distant, and without the benefit of data regarding widespread effects of any recent major advances (effects which obviously have not occurred yet) they assume none have occurred due to an absence of evidence.
As Thomas Kuhn posits, revolutionary changes are inevitable and their origins are in the constantly ongoing basic research. He also notes that those already established in a field are less likely than the new generation to recognize (in terms of both becoming aware of the nature of, as well as accepting and admitting the importance or even existence of) the phenomenon.
To summarize with an illustration of the extreme view presented above: major discoveries in the past have resulted in entire fields that did not exist previously. The lack of of previously unknown but conceivable fields suddenly appearing today is obviously not evidence that they are somewhere simmering beneath the surface, waiting to erupt. But the lack of such conceivable revelations can be taken to indicate that there is room for such fields to blossom, and the lack of sudden occurrence evidence of the protracted nature of their development.
Finally, historical data provides many examples of people making the same mistake, assuming that the lack of major advances in the present with the visibility of such advances in the past indicates that there are no such advances forthcoming. For just one example, from http://quotesjournal.blogspot.com/2003/07/everything-that-can-be-invented-has.html "Everything that can be invented - has already been invented". Attributed to Charles Duell, Commissioner of the United States Patent Office, 1899. Cf.Henry Ellsworth, a patent commissioner in 1843 who said something similar in a report to Congress: "The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." The most extreme example of this is, in my opinion, Stephen Hawking's oft quoted suggestion of the finality inherent in a 'theory of everything' which would be akin to knowing "the mind of God." To this I would reply that this may be so, but there have been an awful lot of gods throughout history that have been credited with ultimacy, only to be superseded by The Next Big God.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Not that we haven't made some amazing advances, as much as it is more difficult to impress us. Take for example early America, there were no cars, no one was flying. Education was non existent and people basically thought that anything beyond a plow and carriage was impossible. Now fast forward to today. Flying is commonplace, computers are everywhere, we have been into space. Technology has truly taught us that nothing is impossible. So instead of saying things like "wow soon we will be able to use a contact to monitor a persons health" or "whoa we are experimenting with using nanites" we just simply say why didn't this happen sooner? Our problem isn't that this stuff isn't amazing, it's that we now KNOW that the sky is the limit. I mean if someone created a teleporter tomorrow we would think that is cool, but not earth shattering.
We must not confuse "slowing down" with "no burst". Around the 1900's there was indeed a huge burst of big inventions. It's hard to dispute that. However, that's not the same as "slowing down". It just means we are at a "cruising speed" right now. And there may be similar bursts in the future. If you ignore the 1900's burst, there is no evidence of a general slowdown. You cannot realistically use a burst as a baseline.
Another thing, that chart is a bit misleading. Why are blue-jeans ranked so high (based on sizing)? Other perfectly-good clothing options existed before that. Jeans were an incremental improvement. Also, I'd argue that the internet should be made larger. It is as comparable to the airplane in importance to everyday life.
Table-ized A.I.
When you look back in history say your Grandmothers life. You have historical blinders (We look at advancements in periods of decades, and get to see things by choosing select locations).
Electricity took roughly 50-75 years to be deployed and common across all american households espectially in rural areas.
The Telephone the same thing. Not until the late 50's were the inventions made 50 years ago become commonplace even in rural areas.
How long did we just have the 3 main TV stations CBS, ABC, NBC. I remember having and being able to buy B&W TVs well into the 90's.
We are less interested in Mechanical advances and more into information advances.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Everything that can be invented has been invented!
About a year back I came up with "The Regression of Technology Theorem".
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/blog.php?view=12279
I blame this on the government. In part moving manufacturing over to China, and in part the monetary policy.
Sadly I believe technical development in the modern world is being held up for one reason.... sales and marketing. I strongly believe humankind would be leagues ahead of where we are now if it wasn't for sales and marketing (or larger companies in general) wanting to make there money from the current technology before moving forward. There are so many technologies emerging now that should have been out years ago but have been delayed time and time again due to companies buying up the idea or simply holding development until the current sales of the current technology has leveled.... soon as it has, the "next gen" is released and/or development is restarted. Sadly this is the world we live in, the blame can't be soley put in the backs of companies however, consumers are never going to accept a constantly evolving technology, ie. if a new & faster version of the iphone came out each week people would soon loose patience (and money), you've also got to consider the amount of work that goes into supporting and maintaining new technologies.
-Simon
I use to the attend the Santa Clara Homebrew Computer Club at Stanford SLAC in the 1970s where the two Steves drug out their wood-box Apple-I boards. When Radio Shack and Apple started selling these as pre-built turn-key computers I thought that took all the fun out of building them and no one would buy them then. Boy was I ever wrong. In retrospect the revolution so much the hardware but retail software. Before PCs hardware venders mostly wrote their own software with the help of some very expensive mainframe software companies. After PCs there were thousands of new software titles in all kinds of new creative fields.
Case number two was the world wide web coming sooner than I had expected. Yes, in the 1980s I started using networked computers and software from Sun and DEC, e.g. XWindows. But in 1993 this exploded into the public world with home internet, Mosaic & Netscape, and exponentially increasing html pages. I never expected this so fast and so soon. I thought the web would happen around 2010 or 2020.
Smart phones may be a 3rd explosive application along this line. This is a computer-communicator-entertainer always on your body. Plus dollar-store apps, music and video instantly accessable. But at least I expected this third change.
All you you need is one of these revolutions a decade to keep technology accelerating in my opinion.
We still use the microwave, we still use the freezer, the cooktop, the oven, we mostly use the combustion engine, we still mostly use steam for power plants, computers have gotten faster and we have LCD's now but nothing huge has hapenned, we don't have anti-gravity, we don't have teleportation, we can't change one thing in to another (easily), medically we still aren't growing replacement bodies.
We're still aerobic, we still transmit information as glyphs on a page (or screen), what's your point? The future won't revolutionize everything ever immediately. As pointed out elsewhere, the biggest change is the Internet. Not many would have predicted such a thing 50 years ago, and no one even 20 years ago would have predicted it's ubiquity. It's even available on mobile phones, now, which were themselves revolutionary.
I actually think the biggest problem here is that most people don't see how much change has occurred because most recent technology is so complicated, it's impossible for any one person to fully understand any one device. Most people, even those here on slashdot, have a point of complexity beyond which any device is magic. When this device is better, or faster, or brighter, it's easier to accept it if the device was magic to begin with. Just think of how much effort went in to the design and production of every single chip and component of the new iPhone, and scale that up. Grand change has occured here, folks. We've just become more accepting.
Instead of a flying car, I'd almost see a "3d Subway".
Get the scientists working on the tube technology, immediately!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
How can you now say what would have surprised you then? I think you have gotten used to the technology being around 24/7 and you cannot really evaluate from a 1956 - 1965 perspective anymore.
Flat LCD/LED/Plasma HDTV/monitors, cell phones in every hand, multi-core home computers on everyone's desk, kinetic weapons that can vaporize tanks, global positioning satellites used by the common man for travel, quality speech recognition/text-to-speech, a revolution in quantum physics that has led to devices like CERN and smaller hard disk drives and CPUs, nanotechnology (fabrics, computers, semiconducters, medical uses), surround sound, every shade of LED (blue/white/red/green/etc), cloning animals/humans, growing organs, advances in cures for cancer and AIDS, quantum teleportation experiments, basic quantum computers, the internet, wearable computers (just a few days ago LCD screens embedded in contacts), RFID, optical and holographic storage, advances in super semiconductors, the international space station (ISS), two rovers on Mars, major advances in deep space imaging and astronomy, antilock breaks/power steering, cars that drive themselves and read stop signs (even if they're not in common use, this is still an advance that has been made), tazers / sound weapons / EMP for peacefully stopping criminals, the list goes on.
#1 Our true progress has been in biosciences.
#2 All our progress now is based on marketability and maximizing profit
#3 Research is more expensive 'now' than it was 'then' i.e. Flight at Kitty Hawk vs. Supersonic Flight
rm -rf ms/*
It was easy back then because the stuff to discover was much easier to discover. Now that we have done the easy stuff, we have the hard stuff to discover, which may take many many years.
It's a rate of advance in fundamental science which is slowed. In fundamental physics all low hanging fruits are picked, now quantum gravity become a major stumbling block. Modern mathematics become so complex that it seems even outstanding human brains have trouble to cope with it, behavior some of the finest mathematicians is becoming bizarre (Grothendieck, Perelman) To lesser degree the rest of the science also becoming increasingly more complex.
No breakthroughs in fundamental science - no fundamentally new technologies like atomic energy. However intelligence amplification can break this stalemate.
You had me until you said 'magical'.
Because I don't think the article and subsequent comments are ironic enough, I blame video games.
The argument can also be made that the only way to really understand technology is to be something of an expert in technology.
A case in point would be cell phones. They exist, are here, but have you ever really thought about the battery that goes into your cell phone? Cell phones in the past have had big batteries to make them last any useful amount of time. Today you have a battery that is not much bigger then a lego block, supplying more power to your phone then did that huge 80s style big block phone. Just how much innovation and revolutionary thought went into making that possible?
In the end you can't actually 'see' many of the changes that happen in your life. They are there, and nowdays, expected.
Zeeland
Combine the exponential power growth of knowledge stacking with the fall-off of thinking capabilities of your average college grad and you get mediocre original inventions but evolutionary progress in existing technology. It is pretty obvious.
I think revolutions are social, not technological. Technology seems really mystical to outsiders. Ever had a non-geek looking over your shoulder while composing a regular expression? We think of the lightbulb as having been amazingly revolutionary in its time, but (im guessing) it is only revolutionary in hindsight. In its time it was a mere novelty; from the time of its first invention by Sir Humphrey Davy in 1811 to Thomas Edison's version in 1880 it was utterly useless. That is three generations of people that said the lightbulb had no practical application, just geeky amusement, and in their lifetime, THEY WERE RIGHT![REF]
The Internet has enabled many people to do a lot of the same things faster, others have been able to do things never before possible where geographic distance between two people is arbitrary, and for the first time in history controlling that communication with a gun has become virtually impossible. Alfred Griswold would be proud that the Internet has ruled with an iron fist that "The only weapon against bad ideas is better ideas". "Unfortunately", potential isn't revolutionary unto itself.
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
You forgot DC, LA, Japan, France, UK - Hell you left out 2/3rds of the world.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
3D subway? I'd call that an airplane.
Energy density
Thje period in question marks the switch from coal to oil power.
Human progress follows the energy curve, which is something the singularity muppets don't seem to get.
You want a flying car? You need something with a damned site more energy than oil... Before it runs out.
Progress has slowed because we're getting about as good as it gets at extracting work from oil. Get back to 100:1 EROEI (Mr. Fusion) or more and we'll see much faster progress.
Deleted
This is what happens when you have a inept patent office. allowing patents that never should be allowed
()
...have talked about what has happened, I'm going to predict what's about to happen:
The end of a lot of crime.
We've got a nationwise communication network. We have the ability to transmit audio and video over it in real time. We have devices that can monitor heartrate and other contextual clues to determine when someone is in danger.
It really just takes someone doing the math and putting all this in a cellphone, so that it alerts the authorities, or a monitoring company who then alerts authorities, when someone is in danger.
Or think of this way: It is entirely possible, right now, to easily hitchhike safely in this country. All you have to do is take a picture of the car's license plate and the driver using your cell, and send them to someone you trust.
What happens when that starts happening automatically, that whenever you interacted with someone it got recorded somewhere at your house?
We're inches away from having a revolution in stopping crime, where people set up systems to monitor themselves and record who they interact with and where they are, with manual and automatic triggers to summon the police.
And once just a few normal people start doing that, it's like concealed weapons...just a few people who might have them make the job of a criminal much more tricky.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
But, seriously, we already have personal aircraft that run on fuels with the same energy density as automotive fuels: 87 AVGAS, for example, isn't terribly different from 87-octane auto fuel.
Of course, you can drive your car from any driveway, where a personal aircraft generally requires the infrastructure of an airport, and a significantly higher level of operator training than a car does.
But, again, liability raises its' head. A car fail-safes to stopping on the side of the road: gliding a powered aircraft with no engine (and no hydraulics) to a safe landing is a much harder task, and far tougher to automate significantly to make it relatively idiot-proof. . .
And should the manufacturer fail in any way in arranging this complex task, they can expect to be sued out of existence, whereas failures in automobiles must be quite egregious before liability becomes an issue. . .
this is no fault of technology! people are just really good at writing science fiction. the ideas are all very old, it just takes time to get to where fiction has been for decades.
It's easier to get your creative fix on the network vs. tinkering with new ideas.
There are multiple cures for cancer out there. We hear about some of them on Slashdot, and I know of two basically uncontested cures through someone who works in big pharma. But it takes years and years of testing to even get approval for human trials, and then another handfuls of years to put all your ducks in a row to start producing and marketing it, all for the sake of safety.
Western society has forgotten that everything carries risks, and often greater risks are coupled with greater rewards. I can understand putting restrictions on what products can be mass-marketed, but if there is some untested drug out there that can help me with a condition of mine, and if I am willing to accept the risks of taking such an untested drug, I ought to be able to take it regardless of whether or not it is FDA approved.
Your brain is not a computer.
Of course the rate of progress has slowed. The actual rate of progress peaked around 1880. Edison's lab, in the 1880s, had a goal of a minor invention every three days, and a major breakthrough every two weeks. That was with forty people.
Look at 1880-1910. That's when it all happened. Railroads were everywhere and locomotives became huge and powerful. Telegraphs were deployed everywhere the tracks went. The steel industry went from making railroad rails and pig iron to a huge industry making steel for everything. Electric motors went from toy-sized to powering locomotives and streetcars. Telephones and electric lights were deployed. The first generating station started up in 1882. By 1910, huge turbine-powered steam plants were going into service, and most big cities had power. 1885 saw the first gasoline car that worked well (Benz), the Diesel was invented in 1892, and the first large-scale production of cars started in 1902 (Olds). The first airplane flew in 1903. Radio went from experimental to transatlantic. Even Hollerith's first computing equipment was up and running.
Steam, steel, and electricity - that's when it all came together. No other period, before or since, had as much change in the way the world worked.
We've already had the Singularity.
1) Focus on near term payoff's by small incremental progress. ie. New processors, cell phones. 2) Fear of liability. Ie. Due to a flying car falling from the sky killing several people. 3) less ambition. ie. a lot of the western world is rich and comfy, no need to push for more large leaps in progress. and a few others that other /. have postulated.
I'd say quite a lot happened since 1960...
Let's get the hoverboard up and running first before moving to automobiles.
Nuff Said
Every month with them its some new "thing" with its own name and brand. "The Long Tail." "Free." "Good Enough." It's not insightful! It's an exercise in meme-making and marketing.
"Good enough" has always been, um, good enough. For a given need, people always take something over nothing and then competitive markets walk the quality up and the cost down. A CD player has far, far better fidelity and portability than a phonograph did. But a phonograph was better than no music, so it sold well when it came out. MP3s players are already walking the quality curve--iTunes is now the #1 music retailer selling AAC (better than MP3), recently bumped to 256 kbps with "iTunes Plus."
Look at TV, which became ubiquitous using high-contrast, grainy, black and white screens. Now you can buy a 32" 1080p resolution HDTV for like $400.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
This article talks about the broad brush of technological progress that impact human society.
It is essentially correct to say that the technologies which transformed human life in the period 1850-1950 have slowed down. These were efforts which took the low-hanging fruit to transform the basic human usages of energy and the environment. By their nature - harnessing chemical and electrical energy on the macro scale to improve existing processes - they basically reach the point of diminishing returns based on the limited supply of energy, limited desire for further transformation, etc.
However, this really has little to do with intense progress of micro-scale technologies. These have indeed only revolutionized some small fraction of daily life, generally information technology supplemented rather than changed normal routine - marketing aside, most people don't need or even want a "digital stove" or "digital refrigerator" any more than they need an electric crescent wrench.
The "singularitists" at their worst have projected a singularity which is just an explosion of technology in general. But in actual fact, to have an explosion which leads to many phenomena put under rubric of singuality, all we need is continued progress along the lines of existing micro-level technologies combined with some cross-over from them.
".. or we can replace complete bodies" Yes, biology, even "biotechnology" is a disaster when compared to the progress of computers. The body is some much more complex than we could ever imagine that we won't be figuring any fine-tuned efforts to end aging. But progress at the nano level quite possibly will allow the crude kind of immortality farmers today bequeath on apple-tree clippings; transparenting heads onto cloned bodies followed up by brain-cell regeneration. Ugly and scary but possible. You think someone would choose DEATH over such a fate? No, indeed.
The other disturbing aspect of the singularians is naturally their lack of imagination concerning the downsides of this progress. Immortality? Of course the earth wouldn't be crowded to death by the immortals piling up! Autonomous, self-powered killing machines? What could possibly go wrong? LOL.
Funny how in Kurzweil's book, he mentions the automation of the battle field as if it was the automation of a spectator sport. Remember, why you lower the costs of a field, say murdering massive numbers of people, in terms of say no needing soldiers any more, you also lower to the barriers to entry, so that cults, small ideological groups and individual psychopaths could then have access to such methods. It's atomic weaponry except there's no fixed boundary.
So, might point is that we should take the possibilities raised by current technologies seriously, very seriously - it might turn out great but, uh, there's counting on that, though I would count on life in general being further transformed. The singularity is not to be dismissed.
No, it hasn't. The problem is that much of the advances are in areas that aren't immediately obvious to most people. The various biological sciences and materials sciences are prime examples.
People notice the things that fundamentally change their life; the car, the airplane, the TV, etc. They don't notice someone rewriting a virus to perform something useful, nor the work with brain implants that when fed through a computer have controlled robotic limbs, nor someone "growing" nanowires in the lab, nor the fabrics that can stop a bullet while still being light and flexible enough to make comfortable clothing, etc.
IMO, anyone that doesn't see amazing tech popping up nearly every day is either stuck in the past or simply lacks any vision of the future.
Business week has the rate of per capital GDP growth which is a pretty good all around (at least economically) measure of productivity growth which is essentially technology and its application.
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/economicsunbound/archives/long_15361_image001.gif
You can see that if anything the last 50 years outpaced the previous 50 slightly.
that a bunch of people from around the globe, stranger to each other , plus much more listening quietly, argue in real-time about whether anything revolutionary happened in the last 50 years.
Is there any formal measure of the amount of it?
If not, then this article's thesis is just someone's random, culturally
relative, attention-relative opinion and is probably a crock.
The only thing I can think of would be the number of bits of information
required to describe all the technologies we have, the processes they
support, and the consequences thereof, at any given decade say.
That would give us a measure of the variety and complexity of what were were doing.
But is increase in variety and complexity of what we are doing necessarily
progress? (ponders).
It's probable that the concept of "progress" is completely relative, and only
makes sense with respect to well-defined goals.
One good goal would be "increase probability of human-species survival",
or an even better one "increase probability of Earth eco-systems survival"
How are we doing on that one anyway?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
The fact a technology is "anticipated" is meaningless from the standpoint of progress. You can dream all you want, but the technology won't actually exist until someone goes out and develops it, and that's when it counts.
Geez, normally this is so frigging obvious (and I've been stating this for the looongest time), it isn't worthy of comment, but the remark:
"Honestly, in a few ways we might be considered to be going backwards...."
suggest that I respond "a few ways" --- naaah, how about a multitude of ways: where's my bullet train???? Where's my adjustable shoe??? Where's that lady's adjustable high heels??? (Although who can ponder why anyone would wear high heels???) Where's my factory-built house??? Where's my real news???
Devaluation of human labor is certainly the problem, but it's not due to computers and robotics. Computers and robotics have not really replaced people in very many jobs. The real issue is that as a society, we've decided to allocate most of our new wealth to people who were already rich to begin with. The US economy has grown by some enormous amount since the 70's, but wages have been essentially flat. Where did the money go? For starters:
Robotics aren't the issue here.
I've seen so much hype about this lately. The fact of the matter is, the bigger a discovery you make is, the longer it takes for people to adapt to and integrate with the core technologies. What were the big technological breakthroughs for 100 years after the Gutenberg press? Nothing to write home about. It's a cycle. I don't find a time when you are filling in the details to be all that less exciting than a time when society realizes "thanks to this new breakthrough, holy crap we can sort of do X!"
The "singularity muppets" as you call them, are more concerned with informational technology, and the implications...as opposed to physical technology, which obviously isn't progressing as quickly. Advanced AI doesn't require a flying car.
If you ever get pessimistic about the rate of change in technology, just go listen to a couple of TED Talks.
The main thing that I draw from listening to them is that our society is still working on access and ubiquity of digital communications. It is short sighted to say that technology is slowing down, as we're still grasping how to best make use of instantaneous communication. Developments such as realtime inventory tracking and RFID tagged goods will someday prove to be as big of an efficiency boost as the Cotton Gin or the Steam engine.
Robotics technology, medical imaging, ubiquity of internet access, and in particular computational solutions to problems are all techniques and technologies that still have a lot of development left. We plucked all the low hanging fruit during the 20th century, but there are still volumes upon volumes of things we don't know about nearly every science. Technology development is still happening, but its currently focused on refinement and utilization of ideas we already have.
What a terrible article. Regardless of where you fall on the issue of whether or not technical progress is accelerating, the arguments laid out in this article are just flat out bad. Here's a list of problems I spotted just on the first page.
-The author is 53, his grandmother lived to be ~80. He's contrasting the amount of technological changes is his 53 years to those in her 80 years.
-At one point he mentions "child mortality in industrialized countries dropped by 80 percent in those years". The definition of "industrialized" is not fixed, nor are nations fixed in that category. Are we to consider it less important that child mortality has dropped in "non-industrialized" nations during the later half of the 20th century?
-His metric is entirely subjective. What was a more significant invention, the telephone or the Internet? Which event has more historical significance, the launch of Sputnik, the Apollo moon landing, or the flight of Spaceship1? The author treats these questions as if the answers are patently obvious, and offers no supporting evidence for his conclusions.
-His choices of which technologies should get mention are equally subjective. The first heart transplant gets a mention, but not the cloning of Dolly the sheep. The nylon and the zipper pass muster, but not velcro.
In the end, this authors arguments against accelerating change are even more poorly made than those made for it by all the singularity believers, who take it as a forgone conclusion, that he's trying to debunk here.
What is the difference? Lack of wars!!!
We have lacked good wars. Wars are small, and relatively affordable. Technology investment in war today tends to be with tools designed more than 30 years ago. There is no real reason to innovate as you fight a war. For example, WWII or WWI all had big projects that happened just in the nick of time on all sides. Even the early cold war had some of that, but still mostly on improving on what came before front. For better or worse, piece is bad for innovation.
Living in Chile
I admit, there hasn't been much impressive development in most sectors, but computers aren't one of those sectors. Compare video games from today and 20 years ago. Hell, that's too far gone--compare with 10 years ago. Smart phones are crazy powerful. They've advanced so fast, I could hardly believe the iPhone was something real when it came out, and not something from sci-fi.
I've always though the issue was more one of key inventions. In the 19th century we invented a workable steam engine. It enabled us to easily harvest and make use of fossil fuels, which in turn has caused countless improvements in transportation, mineral exploration, sanitation, construction, indoor lighting and air conditioning, etc. Basically everything we see as modern technology can be traced back to this one single invention. The innovations related to this tech seem to have tapped out (though I can see maybe a couple more in the pipeline). That's why it appears innovation has stopped.
I heartily recommend "Monsters of Megaphone" from Mister Show for those of you with kids on your lawn...
Progress in any field depends on the number of "i" units needed to obtain the next level of innovation. An exponential growth in the energy needed for the next level means that we soon reach a level where progress stops or slows until a means is created to reduce the requirements by a large factor. At this point rapid growth can continue.
If we find that means our current level of technology could be at the 1880 point in the innovation curve.
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/images/benjacoby/2008/03/11/s-curves.jpg
http://www.chrisspagnuolo.com/content/binary/WindowsLiveWriter/Ifscrumonlyhadaheart_12C27/image_thumb_1.png
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
Yes, but at issue isn't just whether there's more progress now than in the past, but whether it *feels* like it. I doubt you could find a rational measure of "progress" that indicates a true decline. But anticipatory vaporware does lower the future shock value of the real thing.
Blame copyright law and patents, lock i tup for ever and no one can innovate off of it ever and also no one can afford ot use your crap.
Not much more to say really, things are slowing down, improvements to products are minimal. Actual, genuine newfangled technology what is there? Everything is an iteration upon an iteration.
We still use the microwave, we still use the freezer, the cooktop, the oven, we mostly use the combustion engine, we still mostly use steam for power plants, computers have gotten faster and we have LCD's now but nothing huge has hapenned, we don't have anti-gravity, we don't have teleportation, we can't change one thing in to another (easily), medically we still aren't growing replacement bodies.
Yes things have gotten better but I haven't seen a huge revoloutionary change to be honest in my lifetime, maybe the mobile phone I guess.
I'm not sure I understand why people complain about things like this. Yes, we still use the microwave. Know why? Because it works well at cooking certain foods. Yes, we still use the knife, an invention that's thousands of years old. We still use the knife because it's good at cutting things and there's no real reason to go back to the drawing board on that particular task. The fact that we are still using inventions that are old doesn't mean progress is slowing down, it means we're smart enough to know when to move on to something else.
In my life time I have seen technical advancements such as:
-Cloning
-Stem cell research (which WILL be a revolution I'm sure)
-The internet
-Cell phone
-Pictures from the surface of another planet
-Pictures of another planet from another solar system
Yeah, some of those might seem incremental, but everything always is. Technology doesn't ever undergo revolution, it undergoes evolution, as Issac Newton said "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Flying cars-------Anti-gravity no but alterbative plane/cars are in progress.
Do you really want the average person to be able to have access to aircraft? I sure don't. Most people are stupid. Really, very stupid.
Hydrogen car----Pretty sure it,s being held back by oil companies because they would lose it all
Actually you have it backward: hydrogen was being promoted because it would leave the existing oil companies on top in a green energy future. Hydrogen cars require a fluid distribution system similar to the network of gasoline stations in use today. Contrast with electrical cars which can be powered from the much more energy efficient electrical grid. Also, hydrogen is made easiest from fossil fuels, again putting the existing oil and gas companies on top.
Technically, hydrogen has very very poor volumetric energy density, making hydrogen-powered cars very expensive (needing cryogenic storage) and unable to go very far on one "tank".
(BTW--My M.S. thesis was hydrogen storage for transportation.)
I think the author is being willingly blind for the sake of the story. Looking at the last few hundred years it is obvious that technological advances are working on something of an exponential curve and that they are going at a rate now so much faster than 100 years ago that our perceptions of them have changed. We now see the huge advances as the norm rather than the exception, whereas in the authors referenced time frame we saw relatively small advances as rare and groundbreaking.
"It is better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees." - Albert Camus
In the summer of 1969, I was six years old, and not yet in first grade. I sat mesmerized in front of the color television at my grandmother's house, as Neil Armstrong took his first steps onto the lunar surface and uttered the words, "that's one small step for man...". My grandmother watched with me equally amazed. She told me then, "when I was your age, the Wright brothers had not yet flown the first airplane". I responded to this by asking, "Did you watch it on TV?". "No", she said and laughed. "Besides there not being airplanes, there was no TV, or radio. And there weren't any automobiles either. We had to walk or ride in buggies pulled by horses." She died the following year. I spent the next decade, or so, extrapolating the progress of the technological world, (and also developing expectations by watching and reading science fiction). I fully expected that by the mid 1980's, it would be commonplace to live and work on the moon. By the 1990's, manned explorations of the surface of Mars would have occurred dozens, if not hundreds of times. And by the twenty-first century, poverty, war, ignorance, and disease, would surely be things of the past. By the middle of this century, the life span of a human being would probably be about 250 years.
I'm somewhat disappointed. I think my grandmother would have been too.
Now consider the life of someone who was born in the 1880s and died in the 1960sâ"my grandmother, for instance. She witnessed the introduction of electric light and telephones, of autoÂmobiles and airplanes, the atomic bomb and nuclear power, vacuum electronics and semiÂconductor electronics, plastics and the computer, most vaccines and all antiÂbiotics. All of those things mattered greatly in human terms, as can be seen in a single statistic: child mortality in industrialized countries dropped by 80 percent in those years.
First off, don't child labor laws probably have something to do with that? Also, the author fails to mention that a much higher number of countries (and parts of countries) are industrialized now than they were in the mid-20th century. The important lesson to draw from this is that both of these events were politically, not scientifically, driven, and that we rely on a certain political atmosphere for technological progress to be implemented.
Aside from that, it seems that the author is conflating revolutions in theoretical science with adoption of technology stemming from those revolutions. Maxwell's E&M came out in the mid-19th century, but a lot of the practical innovations lagged his discovery by 20 or more years. Telephones were invented in 1876, but didn't come into the mainstream until the early 20th century. The first automobile patent by Karl Benz was in 1880, but as the author notes, his grandmother was one of the first in her neighborhood to own a car in 1924. International airplane travel may have been common in the 1910's for the elite few in Europe, but the first transatlantic flights weren't until 1919, 15 years (and one World War) after the invention of the airplane. Basic quantum mechanics was essentially developed by 1930, but lasers didn't come into common use until the 70's or 80's. And how long did we have to wait for Einstein's relativity (1915) to be practical? Until satellite and GPS technology became accurate enough for relativistic calculations to be important. With regard to recent theoretical revolutions, the Human Genome Project was provisionally completed in 2003, and the fullerenes were discovered in 1985, so if history is any indication, biotech and nanotech may have to wait a bit before they see their ideas come to fruition in the general populace.
All that being said, I don't necessarily agree with Kurzweil's assessment of the future of humanity (he discounts the possibility that the average person might not want to abandon their corporeal form), but this article is just a poorly reasoned 'good-old-days' piece of garbage.
Perhaps the speed of progress isn't at its absolute most pivotal peak in the last 5 years but it seems a little silly to get alarmed about.
It's like being a Wall Street trader and ho-humming a week in which (bear with the exaggerated numbers here) the Dow Jones went up 5000%, just becuase there have been a string of weeks in the recent past where it was up 10,000%, even though for 99% of weeks through all of history it has only climbed by 1.6%, and occasionally even regressed.
(how is that for a hamfisted analogy?)
Uh, first off. How bout comparing 80 years to 80 years or 40 years to 40 years?
What's this, "Let's compare 80 years to 40 years and say less has been accomplished in the 40."?
Secondly, way to pick an unarbitrary starting point for the 80 years at approximately the beginning of a major technological revolution and then use the current comparison time frame at a non-precursor to a major technological revolution, but rather a maturation period in the previous technology. Ever heard of incubation period?
If you want to be unbiased please compare 1860-1909 to 1960-2009. Or better yet, 1880-1960 to 1980-2060. You're going to have to wait another 50 years, but I am very eager to see your comparisons of those two timeframes with regards to rate of technological progress.
You had me until you said 'magical'.
I was thinking of Clarke's observation that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." For the vast majority of people, everything on the web and in their iPhones is magic. Hell, they think myspace and facebook are magic. And 35 years ago, I would have agreed.
John
Some reasonably visible changes since I was born - not all invented since then, but all rolling out in a major way:
Transistors were still replacing tubes when I was a kid
Integrated circuits replacing discrete electronics, semiconductor RAM/DRAM, microprocessor
Plastic replacing many glass containers
Hand held calculators, Personal computers, handheld computers (Newton, Blackberry, iPhone)
Modems, cable data services, wireless data services, BBS systems, Internet / World Wide Web
CB radio, pagers, Cellphone, texting, internet phone, video conferencing, web conferencing
digital cameras, digital video
Medical electronics - heart monitors, sonogram, Magnetic Resonance Imaging
analog electronic watches, digital watches, LED and LCD display watches, other gadgets using LCD displays
GPS
Most of the spread of cable TV, digital cable, digital TV broadcasts, internet video/TV
Most of the change from B&W to color TVs; big screen projection TVs, flat plasma and LCD TVs, tiny portable TVs
Videotape and DVDs, now BluRay disc,
Sony walkman, MP3 players, CD audio,
floppy disc, hard disk drive, CD ROM, DVD ROM, BD ROM
Video games and PC games, handheld game units, DnD / roleplaying games
Jets replacing prop planes for commercial travel, private jets, cheap/mass air travel
Further decline of the train and interstate trucking.
Interstate Highway system development/build-out
Cargo container shipping
Sputnik, communication satellites, spy satellites, earth-observing satellites
Man in space, Man on the moon, Space Shuttle, Skylab, International Space Station
teflon pans, Microwave ovens, Dish Washers all became common in the home (all invented earlier)
White dental fillings mostly replacing silver and gold. Near painless dentistry - getting a filling was horrible as a child! Workable implants.
heart pacemakers, stints, numerous chemotherapy advances
Not TOO bad a record of innovation...
"except Trek Transporters won't happen either."
And imagine if they did.
Zomg! Im in ur transporter grid pwnz0ring ur atoms!
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
The energy density argument also touches the liability argument. Could you imagine the cost of insuring a vehicle which had a nulear reactor inside of it? Lets say you accidentally bounce your flying car off the road a bit too hard and damage your reactor control rods, next thing you know the better part of the metropolitan area surrounding your destination has been destroyed. I would argue that we'll have affordable flying reactors (read: flying cars) only after sythetic inteligence has dominated the transportation world and rendered individual vehicular insurance policies pointless.
Okay. Here's a major new technology that you will probably see within your lifetime: [mass market] self-driving cars (probably no more than 30 years away; I somewhat optimistically put them around 15 years away). (Transportation may also be improved by hypersonic jets (the type that leave the atmosphere and come back to get between any two points on Earth in ~2 hours), but those may just turn out to be too expensive.) Unless you have actually spent time in a place without public transportation, the social impact may not be immediately obvious, but in a suburb like the one I grew up in, being able to drive = being able to leave the house without a parent's escort. Also, a train/plane/bus ride seems like less of a time sink because you can sleep/read/talk on the phone during it, an advantage which a ride in a self-driving car would also have. That is, despite not actually being faster, it would make transportation seem faster.
"Advanced AI doesn't require a flying car."
No. But it might be even less practical.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
We talk about this at work all the time. A lot of people would agree with the article, but that position really comes from a certain degree of ignorance. Think about this: What would someone from the 1920's think if they were transported immediately to the present and saw you using your cell phone? They'd probably think, "wow, that's a phone that doesn't need wires... and it's really small". They would recognize it as a means of long distance communication very similar IN FUNCTION to the telephones they were familiar with. In fact it is a radically different device relying on completely different types of technology than the telephones of the 1920's with which our time traveler is familiar. Most of the technology that allows that very familiar device to operate didn't exist in the 20's. To the lay person a telephone is a telephone, but to a scientist or an engineer there are vast differences between seemingly similar items. What would a person from Victorian England say when they saw a maglev train? How about "wow that's a crazy fast locomotive... where's the smoke and steam?" Other than shape and function a steam locomotive and a maglev train have very little in common. They are based on vastly different technology and speak to our continuous pace of technological advancement. Sure going from using a horse to using a horseless carriage seems like a big technological leap, but going from a bi-plane to a stealth fighter involves many more significant technological and scientific advances. Yet to a lay person the two items are clearly related and the advancement is all "under the hood".
The fact of the matter is that the human body can only do so many things and so the technology that assists us to do those things is going to look more or less the same, no matter how advanced it is. There are technological advancements that allow us to do those same things in new ways, and it is those that make it look like a major leap. For example telegraph communication existed for quite some time, but it seemed miraculous when the first trans-Atlantic cable was installed. It was heralded as a technological triumph of the ages, and in fact it radically altered (advanced) the way the world operated, but technologically speaking, it wasn't that big a leap. Sure the effort of making the cable and stringing it across the Atlantic was epic in size, but the technology was not a giant leap forward. There were problems with the first cable and it soon stopped working. Good science and engineering resulted in a clever solution, but again it wasn't like the discovery of fire. To the world though, it seemed like a really big deal, the guy who goofed up on the first system had mud on his face and the guy who came up with the solution was hailed as a genius. It changed the world, but it just wasn't that big a leap.
One day soon we'll probably be able to communicate neural implant to neural implant, this will be a huge technological leap, and it may be heralded as a giant leap forward. But it may also be seen as a really small cell phone installed in your head... ho hum. It's not that technology has stopped advancing at a frightening pace, it's that we've grown so accustomed to it.
It's hard to know where to begin with this screed. First of all, it was published over a year ago -- why this seems relevant now is a mystery to me, especially since most of the author's points have been raised by others, and countered by Kurzweil himself in The Singularity is Near.
The whole idea that technological progress appears to be slowing down is actually covered by Kurzweil quite well in that book, with several arguments to counter.
What the author of this IEEE article provides is not so much a counter-argument to Kurzweil as a flat statement that Kurzweil is wrong. In other words, it's the rhetorical equivalent of "Nuh-uh!" Nordmann doesn't even bother trying to pick specific claims made by singularitarians and dismantle them with logic. In fact, he doesn't try to prove his position at all. He relies on smug and smarmy language to assert a point without ever justifying it, apparently assuming that his position is somehow the "default" and that the singularitarians are solely burdened to make their case. Let's examine this gem from his closing paragraph:
It sounds like a fine summary statement, until you realize there is precious little actual argument to bolster those claims or views in the preceding three pages.
Presumably, he wants you to buy his book, Singular Simplicity, wherein perhaps he actually gives us some meat to back up his arguments. Based on the quality of the article, however, I am not sanguine. He gives a little time to discussing "irresponsibility," though I'd be hard pressed to know which sense of the word he means in the closing paragraph; in one spot, he does mention the ethical problems posed by new medical diagnostic tests. He does make claims about wishful thinking, citing cherry picked examples (including wild speculation about the bright future of biotechnology and medicine), but the truth is Nordmann uses the term "wishful thinking" as a pejorative for any kind of extrapolation that he considers unjustified. That's a very convenient and very subjective metric.
As for the sloppy reasoning charge, I find it difficult to square with what I know of and have read by various proponents of the Singularity -- not just Kurzweil, but Vinge (whose thoughts on the topic continue to evolve every time I circle back to him) and others. I guess it's not technically an ad hominem attack if you're smearing an entire group of people, but we have other words for that...
When I saw the author's bio blurb at the end of the IEEE article, I realized why the article seemed to have the tone and slant that it did. Alfred Nordmann is a philosopher. OK, a German philosopher -- which implies a whole lot of cultural baggage and a Weltanschauung that might rankle some from a different culture, not to mention a different set of norms for what is considered an appropriate tone for a technical / academic paper. Personally, I found the tone somewhat combative and insulting/offensive, reminding me of Churchill's famous "carnivorous sheep" comment.
Regardless, a philosopher might have a perspective on the growth of technology, but unless he has a concrete mathematical argument -- and yes, logic is considered a branch of math today, not philosophy -- I don't see how he can justify his claims. It is this same arrogance of philosophers that makes me cringe every time they make claims to a special perspective on the problem of hard AI -- Searle's Chinese Room argument stands out as a particular example of "sloppy reasoning," to borrow Nordmann's phrase. Whenever a counter-argument to Searle's Chinese Room was given, Searle would simply do the equivalent of moving the goal posts, hiding behind the ambiguities of language and some philosophical concepts which don't have much curren
Innovation will happen when someone has the means to accomplish it and a reason to do so.
In the past, when barriers to entry were lower we saw more physical inventions by individual people. We still see a lot of innovation in computers, since if you can get a decent PC of a common type (standard Windows most likely) you can get several interpreters, compilers, web page editing programs etc. Innovation within encumbered fields may go down (who wants to compete with someone likely to sue you out of existence to bury or steal your creation) but where it's easily accessible it prospers. We hit a stumbling block as we went to integrated circuits (good luck competing with Intel in your garage) but with new standard platforms (iPhone, the Palm before that, laptops with a million pre-built usb accesories available) the platform itself is the new breadbox. Designing your own circuits now is like creating your own resistors, capacitors etc was a decade ago. Perhaps you can pull it off, but why? That's not the level on which things are interesting.
One article above mentioned that computing is dying, look to biology for future growth. While biology WILL grow, growth of electronics still has a few obvious jumps. USB sticks are everywhere and dirt cheap. Cheap processors like Z80s are dirt cheap. Better and better processors will get dirt cheap. As this happens, monitors and keyboards will become dumb terminals to the full pc worn around your neck. (Which will also be disposable) We already have OS on a usb drive setups, this will get better. Instant-boot or "always-on, powered by watch battery and SIPS power" will make MS either pass away, or take the lead in developing it to avoid becoming irrelevant. Why rely on possibly iffy clouds messed up by a broken route. The cloud will probably be used, but you'll also have a dozen auto-wifi syncing personal usb PCs that you can take anywhere, with a standard wireless interface to control a nearby keyboard, mouse and monitor. At any opportunity these will sync with the cloud, and charge themselves with either solar or induction. This is just looking at the surface of what we can do now.
Following this, we'll develop (and are working on developing now) good visual recognition systems. We'll have either special sunglasses, gloves or a watch that can be aimed at something to perform a visual-based googling for what the heck that odd thing at the Indian restaurant is, and telling you what falls where between bland, spicy and WHOA.
AI will become its own field, separate from most of the rest of computer science as complications and unforseen twists force an increasing amount of specialization. The agents that Bill Gates really wanted to push will be like the demons of golden compass. As we get more selfish and annoying, increasingly unable to be tolerated, the AI that's designed to love you (as family) and be mostly silent except when asked a question will listen into everything, understand much, work as a personal secretary (if you say you want to hit a concert, it hits fandango for the tickets and reminds you periodically as the time gets closer so you don't miss it, possibly suggesting an interested friend.) Instead of blabbing on cell phones, hundreds or thousands will look like they're talking to imaginary friends. (As some headset users do today) All those who like yes-men will have a personal one available at all times.
Once AI is decent, robots will be built for special purposes, but won't be as needed as people feel. Sure your robot butler can prepare the water for your bath by hand, but why when your agent can radio a command to the bathtub to fill itself? As everything gets fitted with its OWN electronics, the need for physical robots will lessen. You'll perhaps have one or two to humanoid robots to carry things, with cart-based robots being common. Carts with arms may be the dominant robots.
There MAY be a change once butler-type robots get better, to having things become less integrated. In the short term, making
Most of what we take as part of the World Wide Web was demo-ed in 1968. Here is the link to the video that was recorded (90 minutes)
http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html#complete
So, things like the integrated circuit chips, Internet, personal computers, office applications, 3D rendering video graphic cards, social networks, cell phones, laptops, palm computers, not to mention that about half the patents ever registered were registered after the 1950s. Just be cause you are ignorant of improvements, and more are coming from outside the US doesn't mean that the pace has slowed. Sure some of the technology is used to play games with the mortgage industry. Some ideas like the video game consoles have realized such great improvements in the last five years, that I'll bet no one still plays pong, oh wait pong was invented after 1950. There is a technology industry that is making more money than the movie industry, so new technology pushes old technology aside. I'm 45, but I as a teenager wanted film cameras and a chemical dark room -- there's another entire industry replaced by new digital technology. Well I guess I can read about the new technologies in the newspaper -- ops there's another thing replaced by new technology. I'm a computer programmer, when I started programming, I had a chance of learning every programming language in use -- now there are frameworks for creating domain specific languages to program faster which only specific types of users will ever learn. So, measuring by patents awarded -- rate is increasing, measured by industries changed, rate is increasing, measured by available products, rate is increasing. So by what yard stick is the rate of technology change slowing down? Oh yardsticks were replaced by laser meters.
Its from my Aunt in Brighton, she must be out of her mind!
What's your point (assuming there is one)? Because this has been discussed before it should never be discussed again? Do you disagree with the thesis? If so why? Your comment is part of the problem, not part of the solution, because it adds nothing but irritation.
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
... as it is a brilliant movie.
That's an interesting point, but I think the "muppets" would point out that energy density is just another technological hurdle. In the terms I've heard the singularity described, the specifics are unimportant - "somebody" will figure it out and then we'll continue the exponential rate of technology advancement.
Someone else better develop psychohistory.
Nuclear reactors do not work that way.
This question of 80 year time spans is kind of silly. Take an example of agriculture, fundamental to human civilization. 200 years ago, the tools used by a farmer to harvest their crops were essentially identical to those used to harvest crops 3000 years ago. Simple, hand-made devices of wood and metal. In the past 200 years, the scythe has been replaced by the combine harvester. If that represents a slowing-down of technological progress, I'll eat my hat. Griping that not enough cool things have been invented in your lifetime is not unlike griping that not enough cool things have been invented in the past week. A longer view is more appropriate.
I like the healthy dose of reality that comes from this article. In Silicon Valley, I meet so many people who treat the Singularity as "fact" much like I meet Christians who treat their belief in Jesus as "fact." The way I can tell who's smart is how they react when I tell them that if they believe in Jesus and go to Church every Sunday, they'll go to heaven. The smart ones quickly realize that an unquestioning belief in the Singularity requires just as much irrational faith as a belief in a religion like Christianity.
Not that there's anything wrong with having faith, but assuming that one's faith in technology is right is just as silly as putting faith in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
No, I will not work for your startup
I just hope someone is working on gravity and gets it figured out (and the anti-gravity byproduct) before I die.
Really cool new technologies that are available now are not yet part of the status quo. In the future, people will look back and say, "In 2009 semi-autonomous hand launched drone planes became a cheap technology." However, it's going to be at least another 10 years before we get used to seeing them buzz across the sky for ... who knows?
Cos of course information technology runs on fairy dust.
Deleted
Some do. See here for reference (How It Works section, under "Cooling"): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor
Not necessarily.
If you lose rudder control, you can use alierons instead, the secondary effect of banking an aircraft is that it will yaw, and vice versa. If you lose elevator control, you can use your elevator trim control to get a similar effect.
So, you'd have to have a total failure of 2 systems at the same time (i.e. rudder _and_ ailerons), which while not impossible, is very unlikely.
I actually had an instructor mention that scenario to me, just as we were strapping into a glider for a flight test, just to fuck with me. He says to me, "Y'know, I had a dream last night, that right after takeoff we lost rudder and aileron...Anyway, you ready for your flight test?"
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".