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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.
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.
Of course! The granting of legal monopolies in the production of something is just bound to lead to an explosion in innovation. No one would ever invent one obvious thing and sit on it forever, never producing anything ever again.
SSC
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.
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
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.
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.
The patent process and IP lawyers help create innovation.
Actually, the article did point out capitalism
So on what do intelligent people base the idea that technological progress is moving faster than ever before? It'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.
But that's hardly surprising. Since around 1750 the world has witnessed the spread of an economic system, by the name of capitalism, that is predicated on economic growth. And how the economy has grown since then! But surely the creation of new markets and the increasingly fine division of labor cannot be equated with technological progress, as every consumer knows.
At least in the United States, patents have been granted as far back as 1646 with the first patent act being put in place in 1790. The concept of patents has been around as long (maybe even longer) than this explosion of technological progress the article talks about. And you can argue both ways quite easily that it promotes inventing. The first being that with patents I have such a huge reward waiting for me that I am driven to invent and license patents because it is so lucrative and there's a system in place to protect my interests. The second being that I can take other people's inventions and modify them or mash them together without having to pay royalties or worry about litigation. In the United States we currently have the former while in China you might find a mix of the two to foster growth at different levels. I'm not arguing for or against either idea but I don't think that really has a proven effect for or against inventing. I will say that the first patent act in the U.S. was passed in 1790, 40 years after the "productivity" explosion in 1750 that the article mentions. Just something to consider.
My work here is dung.
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.
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.
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.
This is why I boycott Sonny Bono's music. Actually, so far I have been surprisingly strong in this.
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
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.
I also don't think the implications of the instant copy and transfer of information were predicted or understood. The closest we came to predicting 2009 back then was the fear that automation would close our factories and cost us jobs. Nobody saw that the ability to copy or transfer information would transform society the way it has, from the slow collapse of the music industry to the outsourcing of information jobs.
John
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.
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 |
...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
... 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!
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
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.
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
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.
...which is it, since a patent is a government-issued ("legal") decree that one ("mono") company or person can control the manufacture of a thing.
Bell Labs' successes mostly came during the pre-AT&T breakup age, when it was part of a heavily regulated monopoly telecommunications company. A heavily regulated monopoly can provide conditions conducive to innovation: if it starts exploiting patents, or not producing new ideas, its regulators can smack it into line, while at the same time the lack of competition can allow a longer-term view.
On the other hand, patent trolls use the monopoly granted by a patent is a unregulated way.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
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
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
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.
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.
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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.
What do you believe the state produces? It's fueled entirely by the production of others, and the redistribution of their production.
The state produces the most valuable commodity of all, and the one that no other organization is equally equipped to produce: security.
This applies at a national-security level, at a personal security level (police), a property security level (fire departments, levees). It by rights should apply at an economic level (rent stabilization for the economically vulnerable, a social safety net, a national system to provide health care), both for moral reasons and because financial security leads to increased consumer confidence and higher aggregate demand -> driving the economy, and because the state is better equipped to do this than private industry (e.g. private life and health insurance, which aim to reduce risk/increase security). It can sometimes apply in a pathological way, such as when the security institutions of the state are used to solidify unjustly or artificially stratified social orders (think things like software patents, as well as more structured, systematized oppression in the favor of specific moneyed interests). In some cases the state also produces public infrastructure, such as highways, water and electricity distribution systems, etc. (and it tends to do a better, or at least more thorough, job of this than private investment; think of the TVA ferinstance, despite its faults).
But to claim that the state produces nothing is remarkably naive.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.