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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."
would disagree with the article.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
The saddest poem
This comment dovetails nicely with a recent article in Wired: how Good Enough is taking over. Call it the MP3 effect - the smaller file size and increased portability of compressed audio won out over fidelity. The sound quality wasn't Great, but considering that you could get your entire collection into your pocket and listen anywhere, anytime meant that it was Good Enough.
Where is the fastest growth in video cameras: the Flip and mobile phones, not pricey 1080p camcorders. Fastest growth in computers: netbooks, not high-powered desktops. Biggest thing in health care: clinics to handle minor ailments, not full-service hospitals. So-so call quality from Skype? No problem. MSWord getting too bloated and expensive by feature creep? Try Google Docs, even if it is slow, requires an internet connection any time you want to do something, and was perpetually in Beta.
I'm not sure I agree with this thesis entirely, but is does make some interesting points.
This is not exactly to say that Good Enough doesn't represent technical progress. Indeed, the ability for Good Enough to be good enough is a testament to technical progress, because that has allowed computer power to become cheap and ubiquitous. In some cases, like the Flip, some might say that creating a simple device that actually does what it is supposed to, simply and easily, is progress compared to a device that tries to do everything, but is a total kludge.
Just for the sake of Accuracy, supersonic commercial flights didn't start until the 1970's.
And for those who complained about the cost, yeah flying over the pond was very costly but many thousands of people flew Concorde on charter flights and experienced flying at twice the speed of sound for far less money than a transatlantic trip.
I flew Concorde to JFK had three nights in NYC and sailed on the QE2 back to the UK for £1999.00. A memorable trip to celebrate my 15th wedding anniversary.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
"Will advance in the next decade" is more accurate. Very few of these groundbreaking biotechnologies we hear about are ready for prime time yet (to use your example, when was the last time your dentist offered to regrow your tooth instead of using an implant?) Many of them still have yet to go through clinical trials. Some will never make it, but even those that do we won't see on the market for years.
Uh, the patent term is 20 years.
There's already a commercial Maglev train in Shanghai, you can take it to the airport. It peaks at around 420km/h. I've been on it - very cool. Only maglev in the world that is open to the public, apparently.
You mean the way it does with small single-engine airplanes today? In small general aviation craft, an engine failure, electrical failure, or mechanical failure is frequently a serious emergency, with potentially fatal consequences. However, unless you're doing something seriously stupid, a competent pilot is very likely to survive a rather large subset of such failures -- basically anything excluding "wings fall off".
To extend your logical argument, then we don't need to develop flying cars --- we already have them. They're called "single-engine airplanes". Put some road wheels on them and you're done.
However, in practice the concepts are quite different. The canonical "flying car" is expected to be much smaller and maneuverable than an airplane, piloted by a non-expert, capable of flying in a much more crowded environment, and most importantly should not require the use of long runways (ideally it should have VTOL capability). Unfortunately, it's precisely these characteristics that militate against the safety characteristics you describe.
And even without those extreme requirements, small airplanes still get in plenty of trouble.