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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 |
It turns out that the Galactic Brotherhood is here to get compensation for our theft of their IP. Seems that SETI@home wasn't recording noise but the encoded libraries of several thousand civilizations, and we at home were processing a lot of copyrighted material. With damages and interest, we owe them everything from the center of the Sun out to about Saturn. And we get disconnected from the electromagnetic spectrum.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
... 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!
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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