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

[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.

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.