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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
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.
I often do a thought experiment and compare multiple fields in roughly similar intervals:
American Revolution, American Revolution #2 (aka Civil War), WWI, Vietnam War, Present
In each field I list, we have made vast strides, for example in Communications:
American Revolution: letter, signal lanterns, flags (much like the Romans)
Civil War: electronic telegraph
WWI: radio, telephone
Vietnam War: TV, satellite, limited computer communications
Present: cell phones, sat phones, GPS, Internet, etc.
To someone living in the present, the pace seems to be slower as you don't realize the life/world changing events until a few years down the road, yet much is happening.
Germans where spooked in 43-45, tried a lot.
Soviets and Americans (Brits and French too) took what they could in tech and people, building on what they could.
Soviets raced the USA in anything and everything, this saw a big push for real science education (GI bill helped ect).
End of the cold war, no need for an educated public, a gov/private push to get science back as an arts subject and the population spending, dumb and greedy again.
If you cant understand it, it cannot harm you, rust belt production lines can stay open, profits are safe.
So now we have gone from a Unix like brain to a MS like gui slop.
No need for deep understanding, just spend, point and click.
The problem is science spending is just not an easy sell to the east or west coast or middle America.
The east and west coasts want to keep the existing power/profit structures, the middle America just wants "science" in the dust bin and back to safe, faith based engineering subjects.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I'd mostly agree with the recent lack of "big invention" like the aeroplane or the car, however the author underplays the role of the computer and associated communication technologies. Now whether we like it or not we are moving towards a single, small world where everybody can communicate with everyone else and can access most of the world's public knowledge cheaply and effectively. This is increasingly replacing travel and having profound effects at every level of the society. Furthermore, whereas the car and the aeroplane were used for war, the computer so far has mostly been used for peace. As a result we have avoided a third WW so far that would have destroyed us utterly. Of course this is not strictly true but by and large not altogether incorrect.
At the same time we are becoming aware that the world is small, exeedingly finite and that resources are scarce on the one hand, and that expanding our universe to other planets is extremely difficult on the other. We are at an important point in history. Either we rise to the challenge of providing cheap energy, food, shelter, clothes, learning and health for everybody, or in a few short decades we will be all dead. We do not have another couple of millennia ahead of us.
The good thing is that we have now more thinkers, scientists, engineers and industrialists than at any point in history, by several orders of magnitude. However, we are all driven by greed. The odds are almost even, but maybe I'm an optimist.
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.
But you've hit the nail on the head. In the fifty year span that the author considers (taking liberties with certain invention dates to improve his point) he ignores communication technologies.
The phone (fixed-line) gets a mention as part of his grandmother's lifespan, but mobile phones? Didn't happen. The Internet? Didn't happen.
Those two inventions alone are signs of huge progress. I'm not sure how they could be labelled as "incremental evolutions" of the phone and the computer. One meant that people stayed in contact with each other regardless of location, and the other meant that we automate communication tasks. Both complete revolutions that have changed our lifes completely.
(yes, in the space of 50 years. If you look at 20 then for early adopters of these techs it would look more like a flat plateau).
The irony is that his claims will have been read casually by millions using these technologies, where-as 50 years ago they would have been printed and distributed to a few locations.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
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
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.
That would be incremental progress.
No, that's bullshit. That's willingly overlooking the original invention of the Internet and of personal computers. That's also overlooking the revolutionary consequences of the popularisation and eventual ubiquity of these. Over the last 15 years, personal computers and the Internet have profoundly changed the way we live and the way we do many things.
I for one am a great example of that. I don't have a TV, I don't make or receive telephone calls, I don't go to the movies, I don't own a video game console, I don't buy music, I don't read newspapers and I don't buy pornos because the Internet superseded all of that. Not only that, but I owe my practically flawless English (I'm French) to chatting with Americans on AIM ever since I was 15, I also learnt my job mostly on the Internet (I'm a mostly self-taught DSP dev), and to top it all off I'm a self-employed software dev who makes all of his income from software sales from all around the world. That didn't affect just "us", my uncle after being divorced fell in love with a woman in South America (not Mark Sanford) he "met" on MSN, and now he lives with her there. The Internet made him move to Colombia and marry a woman he never met before, out of the blue.
If you still fail to see how personal computers/the Internet have revolutionised things you're just blind. I'm not arguing that things are going faster or slower, I personally don't think that it means anything to talk about progress rate, and I even less believe that there is any sort of general trend, just sectors that get "bursts of progress" before stabilising. I find it silly to try to bring "progress of anything" into a unidimensional variable (but if anyone disagrees please give me a reading of your progress-speedometer. Oh also, what progress wasn't "incremental"? There were steam automobiles in the late 18th century that could reach a few miles per hour. Airplanes are just gliders with a propeller, and manned gliders have flown since 875 A.D.. Telephones are just fancy eletrical telegraphs, television has evolved from so many different things (photography, radio, Nipkow disks, pantelegraphs...), and the Internet itself is just a fancy evolution of transoceanic electrical telegraphy (if you think about it, the worldwide telegraph network of the later part of the 19th century is very Internet-like). I don't see what can possibly be "non-incremental", nothing suddenly just "popped up" to cause a revolution. Many of those were centuries in the making.
You just got troll'd!
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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