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."

Comments

Flying Car

[corsec67]

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.

Re:Flying Car

[biryokumaru]

I would contend that it is much simpler to avoid accidents in three dimensions than two: you have significantly more options should a collision be imminent.

Re:Flying Car

[necro81]

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...

Not to mention a flying car that can fail safe, so that a mechanical mishap or minor accident doesn't prove invariably fatal from, ya know, falling out of the sky.

Re:Flying Car

[Lord Bitman]

Though there's this whole class of accidents which come about when a 3rd dimension is involved. "Stalled vehicle on highway, traffic backed up for ten miles, delayed for fifty miles, more minor accidents as a result of the start and stop flow" becomes "Stalled vehicle on highway, traffic continues to move smoothly. Hundreds dead as stalled vehicle crashes into St Baby Fluffy Kitten's home for dyslexic cute animals during a field trip from the Orphanage For The Quite Uninteresting But Still Adorable (OFQUBSA)"

Re:Flying Car

[Anne Thwacks]

My Grandfather observed "The changes between 1898 and 1914 were incredible - in 1898 we had no cars, planes, phones etc, (almost all transport was horse-drawn, and the rest was steam powered).

By 1914, we had sheduled international flights all across Europe and cheap Ford cars, phones, BBC radio, etc".

He observed that besides the technology content of the changes, there was a significant psychological factor:

By 1914, 1898 was "the last century" - he went on to predict that by 2014, 1998 would be "the last millenium" and things would seem even more old-fashioned. Of course we cannot know the future, but we also cannot know what is currently being developed behind closed doors. Invention is never at a steady pace - and many inventions may come in a single year after five years of no excitement.

Despite that, there might be a problem:

All current computers are just re-implementations of the PDP11 archictecture with minor improvements.

The iPhone is just a smaller version of the Memex predicted by Vannevar Bush

Necessity is the mother of all Frank Zappas. Maybe we don't actually need any more stuff! We need the stuff we have to work better! There is enough food, housing and porn to go round! The main thing we really do need is a better system of government.

Re:Flying Car

[jedidiah]

If you think progress has slowed down then watch a 50 year old TV show and just
observe. Note every time you think how the characters could have used some bit
of technology that we take for granted to their advantage.

It's as stark as the difference between 1914 and 1898. You've just gotten used to it.

It's not that progress isn't happening. You're just taking it for granted.

A tech revolution doesn't seem quite so disruptive anymore.

Re:Flying Car

[jcnnghm]

The only way you could honestly believe that progress has slowed since 1956 is if you discount modern semiconductor manufacturing, that global communications network thing that you are all using right now, cell phones, and routine space flight. We have made huge leaps and bounds in just 50 years. These things changed everything. When I was born in the early 80's, none of these things, except for perhaps routine space flight, was readily available. We didn't have a household computer until close to the 90s, and didn't have internet access until after that. I didn't get a cell phone until 2000. Each of these things fundamentally changed life. Everything kind of sucked without this stuff, and I would never want to go back. The internet, and the ICs that power the whole thing, are probably the single greatest, most useful, most prolific technological innovation of all time.

Re:Flying Car

[evanbd]

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...

Not to mention a flying car that can fail safe, so that a mechanical mishap or minor accident doesn't prove invariably fatal from, ya know, falling out of the sky.

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". Landing with engine out is expected; it only gets really interesting if there isn't a runway or suitable road within glide range. Handling the airplane with mechanical or electrical malfunctions is something flight instructors routinely test on (you can simulate a rather large range of electrical failures by pulling fuses, for example).

There are plenty of reasons there aren't flying cars; safety in response to malfunctions is certainly on the list. But that does not even remotely mean that an engine failure has to be a fatal problem.

Re:Flying Car

[MartinSchou]

they were both unsustainable "gimmicks" driven by political pissing contests rather than by any actual demand.

I suspect that the biggest issue Concorde faced was that it wasn't allowed to go super sonic anywhere near land.

Keep in mind that London to New York could be done in about 3½ hours (fastest is 2:52:59 from tarmac to tarmac) for a 5,585 km flight. New York to Los Angeles is 3,961 km so you'd expect something like 2:45 for that trip. Los Angeles to Tokyo is 8,830 km so you'd expect a 6 hour flight there. Since the plane is faster than the time zones, you could leave LAX at 10 AM for a 9 AM meeting in Tokyo. Currently the flight alone is 11 hours, and with time zones etc. you're probably looking at something like an 18 hour flight (i.e. leaving at 3 pm the day before). And do you really want to go into an all day meeting right after having spent the last 11 hours in an air plane? Six hours is more manageable. That's a small nap, a movie, and a quick shower and change of clothes.

And the Concorde was almost as efficient as a Gulfstream G550 business jet which is almost 30 years older.

At this time the Concorde design is more than 40 years old. The main complaint about it was noise, even though aircraft like the Boeing VC-137 were louder. One would think that 40 years of additional engine and aircraft design would allow you to reduce not only take-off and landing noise, but also that of the sonic booms, allowing for super sonic flights over land as well. And there have recent experiments and designs targeted at reducing the sonic boom. As it turns out those experiments points to how to make the Concorde a viable super sonic transport over land areas as well.

So, no - that's not political pissing contests driving development, but political pressure (justified or not) holding development back.

Let's dream up some numbers - imagine you were able to create a viable Concorde v.2010. It's more fuel efficient than the original, so let's up the 17 passenger miles/gallon to 22. That's a 30% improvement through better materials (lighter plane), better aerodynamic design and better engine. This is about 4.1 times worse than a Boeing 747-400.

At the moment a one way ticket (JFK - LAX) booked 14 days in advance is about 300 dollars for a morning flight. The flight is about 6 hours, but only about 3½ hours when you factor in the time difference (but about 9 hours going the other way). I don't fly in the US, so I just used United as my reference.

Enter the above mentioned Concorde v.2010. 3 hour flight time (on the plane), so if you have to be at LAX by 9 AM, you can leave JFK at 9 AM as well. This is currently only doable if you book a hotel at the other end or take a 5 AM flight from New York. To be in New York at 9 AM, you'd have to catch a red-eye or book a hotel the night before. This doesn't change with Concorde v.201, unless you want to leave on a 3 AM flight out of LAX with a Concorde (3 hour flight time, 3 hour time difference).

The afternoon flights are just as good. At the moment JFK - LAX would have you landing in LAX in the middle of the night, and LAX - JFK are even worse. For the Concorde v.2010 you'd be looking at a 6 pm flight out and arriving at JFK around midnight, or landing in LAX at slightly earlier than you left JFK.

So now, not only do you get to your destination about 2½ times faster, you also save the cost of hotels, AND you get to have all day meetings on different sides of the continent without it ruining the previous and following day.

From a business perspective it'd easily be worth a 10 fold ticket price. Compare 3,000 dollars as a singl

I believe so yes, specifically the last 5 years.

[AbRASiON]

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.

Are Failures More Costly Today?

[eldavojohn]

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.

Computers have stopped. Biology has not.

[MoobY]

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.

AT&T "You Will"

[michaelmalak]

Check out the AT&T future-predicting "You Will" television ads from 1993/1994. They not only fail to predict the Internet at that late date ("buy theater tickets from an ATM"), more critically, they completely fail to predict the game-changing effect of the cell phone. The cell phone is even more of a liberator of women than the (non-big-wheel) bicycle was in 1890. The YouTube video What If Movies Had Cell Phones demonstrates how the lack of a cell phone was a critical plot device in the pre-cell-phone days, and by implication how the cell phone has restructured society.

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.

Re:Obviously it has...

[jcnnghm]

Just for you, I'll address the grandparents idiocy point by point.

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.

So there is no demand for anything but food and shelter? All human beings presently produce nothing but food and shelter? I want a lot more stuff besides food and shelter, and I'm willing to work to pay for it. I don't want to live in a welfare state, I've seen the average welfare recipient.

The obvious solution of "making basic stuff for no cost to consumers" would drastically undermine the economic pyramid, so that cannot be pursued.

Who is going to make the basic stuff for no cost to consumers for free. Even if you build robots that can do all the work, someone still has to design, build, and maintain them. Why should those people have to work when nobody else does?

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.

And who exactly made the decision to slow down the pace? How did they communicate this decision, in a binding way to everyone else? How do they prevent people not directly under their control from innovating themselves? Why did they open of vast information sources like the Internet, and make them searchable, if they are trying to impede progress?

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.

Bullshit is a synonym for conspiracy in this case.

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.

Business never valued progress. It isn't a business goal. Businesses promote progress, but don't value it. It's always been about the profit. That's not to say that progress doesn't pay, there wouldn't be so many private venture capital firms if progress didn't pay, and they wouldn't be making investments in risky things like green tech.

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?).

Newer generally is better. The flip side of that is, sometimes things don't need to last forever. I was talking to an engineer that was involved in the construction of a highway once, and asked why only a portion of it was concrete, since concrete lasts much longer. He explained that before they construct highways, they study the area to see what the future growth will be like. The area that is concrete has a well understood growth chart, and was actually wider than strictly necessary so two additional lanes in each direction could be opened by repainting the lines. It made sense in that area to build a highway that would last fifty years. In the other areas, a smaller highway would do for the time being, and area expansion was unsure. Because of this, it was paved with asphalt. If the road were built to last 50 years, but it had to be expanded or rebuilt in 10 or 20, then it was originally far overbuilt, and the money would be wasted. With consumer electronics in particular, it doesn't make sense to make things last longer than there practical lifespan. Look at MP3 players from 10 years ago, then look at players today. It doesn't make sen