Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
This is obvious that progress alone does not drive decisions. Money does.
As for your flying car, you'll start seeing it when we have drivers who can safely drive on 3 dimensional roads, and for that, you have to be able to do it safely on 2 dimensional roads first, which can be far, far away...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think what both of those have in common is that, although they were astounding technical achievements, they were both unsustainable "gimmicks" driven by political pissing contests rather than by any actual demand.
The progress we do have is that we've sent robot probes to most of the solar system (good) and subsonic air travel now costs less than rail travel (maybe not so good). Don't undervalue these.
Oh, and we have vastly improved inflight entertainment systems to keep us sane on subsonic flights :-)
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
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.
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 |
... 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!
What about stem cell research? Growing back teeth, nerve tissue. Maybe we should look at more than gizmos, cars and electronics. Biotechnologies have advanced by great leaps in the last decade.
Tech advances do not need to be consumable goods...
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
you cant have your flying car. It can be built but the idea is tied up for 75 years inside a damned patent.
you see what has slowed technology? Patents and Copyrights. we went from a sane span to an insane one. It stifles creativity and technology.
Want to kick start everything? Reset patents and copyright to what it was in 1920. and tell all the congresscritters that in no uncertian terms, anyone trying to extend it again will be killed on the steps as a traitor.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Wrong.
Planes can go down for free, everything else costs money.
Diving, falling and crashing are all free. It's expensive as hell to get it up there in the first place.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
Think about it: Liability alone has decimated the light-aircraft industry, imagine what it would do to manufacturers of flying cars. And International Law, such as the UN Outer Space Treaty and the Moon Treaty effectively prevents private efforts, as it seriously impedes private enterprise in space.
I'll at least argue this over the cold beverage of an opponents' choice. . .
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
That's it exactly -- it's about demand.
There's very little demand for faster computers and flying cars... I mean, we want them, sure, but the value we put on incremental improvements now is a lot less.
The focus of R&D has shifted from big, visible, obvious everyday things like car engines, colour TVs, and transistor radios onto finicky, small, non-consumer items like nanotechnology, gene therapy, advanced surgical techniques, robotics, and new materials. I mean, I am blown away by something new practically every day. Haven't there been two different cures for two types of blindness reported in the past few weeks, one using lasers and one using gene therapy? Then there was that nanomaterial that is supposed to make windshield scrapers obsolete. Bring it on!
It's just that we've done most of the big obvious stuff. Even when we haven't fully deployed it (renewable power, for instance) we've pretty much got the technology down.
Robots and augmented reality are probably going to be the next big game-changers, but the complexity of technology they require means they are going to be slow to deploy and improve. I mean, many people already have a GPS and a Roomba.
Either that or we need to brainstorm and come up with something that not a single SF author has anticipated. And you know the odds of that at this point...
There was an article related to this in the Business Week the other day. Their discussion focused around the devastating effects today's Wall Street has had on long-term corporate research. When a company is publicly traded, every move it makes is to be focused on short-term shareholder value, even so far as the the detriment of long-term viability in many cases. Companies are not nearly as willing or able to invest in long term research. The old giants that helped get us where we are today (Bell Labs, Xerox, IBM's research arm, etc etc) can no longer justify all those open-ended speculative research projects because almost all of Wall Street's money today is focused on short-term gains and not long-term investment. It does not even matter if you are a big research giant who's past record can easily absorb a research failure or two: look what happened to Proctor & Gamble when their Olean research product didn't do so well - their stock tanked from $70 to $15 (they have since managed to recover pretty well).
Then you add on top of that the fact that Mr. Bush and his administration was anti-science. Public-private partnership was also a huge part of what drove a lot of the advancement we saw through the 70s, 80s, and 90s through the likes of DARPA and others. With that "backstop" money drying up, companies are even less able to justify research projects to their shareholders.
All that said, at least we are still seeing some progress still occuring. The iPhone initiated a pretty significant advancement in smartphone interface design which we have seen Palm, Blackberry, and others jump on.
Down with the career politician! SUPPORT TERM LIMITS
Could that be because the whole point of the article is to argue that Ray Kurzweil is wrong?
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
To negate that argument:
1) Computer controlled
2) Ride-sharing
No need to "own" a vehicle. Pay the price of a cab fare, be driven to where you want to go, "cab" is flown back and maintained by Someone Who Wants To Not Kill His Customers.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
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
Cars are fairly precision instruments. On a 2 lane road, they pass within just a couple feet of each other. They stop within inches at traffic lights.
I've been designing a hover vehicle (not a traditional hovercraft). It'll probably always be in the design phase, but it's fun. One of the things I've seen mentioned a lot is the fact that any vehicle that doesn't have physical contact with the surface (i.e., tires on the road or keel in the water) can drift. On a banked or crowned road, a GEV can tend to float downhill if it's thrust is simply down, or off the top of a turn. A strong breeze can make it drift off in unexpected ways. Heck, in a tall vehicle, you get that with road vehicles too. Take a regular passenger van out during a Florida summer thunderstorm, and you may find yourself suddenly in the wrong lane, even though you were aimed straight.
A GEV tend to not respond to immediate stops quite as well either.
I intended to computerize a substantial portion of my stability control. Use of ultrasonic sensors to determine distance from the 4 corners should keep it flat in relationship to the road. Other sensors would sense drift outside of what the controls were doing. For example, if it sensed drift to the left or right without input from the driver, that would obviously be an error, and correct for it. It may be a breeze, or sliding down a banked turn. Even still, by using directed thrust (forced air), that would significantly impact other vehicles on the road. If my vehicle detected a slip to the right, and engaged it's right side thrusters to correct, if a vehicle was to the right it would push them to the right.
I thought it would be nice to have a vehicle hop over an immediate danger (impending accident, etc). That's fine and dandy if I'm by myself on the 3d road. What happens when I'm doing 60mph and hop over an accident, but the GEV behind me doing 80mph does the same thing. Now we've added a pile on top of the existing accident.
In reality, drivers don't do so well on 2d roads. While 3d roads could reduce traffic density, it would create many new problems. Hell, I've been hit by drivers making simple lane changes because they weren't aware that my car was there. They can't look left to make a lane change to the left. What happens when you add above and below to the equation.
There's good reasons pilots go through so much extra training, and it's not all because the vehicles are complicated. And yes, I've gone through flight school and flown. At flight school, I witnessed a near miss, because a student pilot with instructor, who had called his turns perfectly and announced his intention to land was coming down to the runway. Another (non-student) pilot taxied out onto the runway in front of him. I was on my downwind. He was on his final. We both saw him taxi out, luckily. It wasn't complicated. We all used the same radio frequency (freq for the uncontrolled tower), and there was only one active runway. Even if the other pilot didn't have a radio (not required), he was required to look and make sure it was safe to taxi out. I don't know how you miss another aircraft a few hundred feet out, with his landing lights on, unless you were just oblivious. There were 3 or 4 of us in the pattern, so it wasn't difficult to figure out someone may be landing very soon.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Each of these things fundamentally changed life.
My grandmother was born in 1884 and died in 1980. She was born into "a world lit only by fire" for all practical purposes (the first Edison plant was a few years old).
I was born in 1962, when commerical nuclear power plants already existed and human beings had (just) orbited the Earth.
For the first half of her life medicine was mostly a matter of not getting sick. For the second half, antibiotics and vaccinces cut disease rates by orders of magnitude. This has not changed in my lifetime.
When she was born, horse, rail and ship were the only practical modes of long-distance transport. When I was born, cars and planes--which didn't even exist when she was born, had taken over, and have not changed much since.
When she was born, telegraphs were the only means of fast long-distance communciations and mass media did not exist. When I was born we had telephones, radio and TV, and the only change since has been the Internet and cell phones. This is the ONLY area of revolutionary technological change in my lifetime.
When she was born, people burned wood and coal at home. When I was born people used electricity from central generating stations that burned coal or oil, used nuclear power, or hydroelectric power.
The list of entire industries that did not exist when she was born that did when I was born would be long. The list of industries that did not exist when I was born that exist now would be short: biotech, software development (which existed in 1962 but wasn't yet an industry) and the Web. The semi-conductor industry existed, and many of the same companies back then are still around today: HP, TI, Sony, etc.
You have to understand what this argument is saying: it is not that there has been no change in the past 50 years, but that the pace of change by any measure has been much smaller than in the preceding 50 years.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.