The AI and Singularity hype irks me, because I'm genuinely in agreement with Peter Thiel's argument that technological progress is actually decelerating relative to how it was moving 60 years ago once you look beyond the advancements we have experienced in information technology and finance.
True that. 1880-1950 (70 years) took us from train-and-telegraph to jet-and-atom bomb. Horse and carriage was the top-tier tech for personal transportation in 1880, and they were just starting to understand that diseases are often caused by these little blobby creatures called germs.
1950-2020 (70 years) will take us much less distance.
Almost everything we're developing seems to be about information processing. If you look at the technologies that actually do things in the physical world, it seems like almost nothing has changed since the 60's. Cars, trains, bridges, rockets, sewers... all more or less the same.
I don't think it's reasonable to equate 'technologies that existed since the 60s' with 'technologies that are ubiquitous today'.
I'm in the bottom 15% of my country (UK) by income and I have access to things like: near-instantaneous hot water at all times, affordable next-day delivery services from a pocket-sized device I carry around with me, international air travel that is affordable for me, efficient fridge/freezer technology, fresh groceries from around the world at every local convenience store.
And yes things look a lot less impressive if you filter out information-technology related things. But advancements will always look less impressive if you filter out the most impressive advancements. The fact that we are close to permanently connected across geographical boundaries now isn't something to be dismissed out of hand. The level of effectiveness and miniaturisation of communications devices (e.g. 'true wireless' earphones with mobile internet) is really approaching the point of being practical telepathy insofar as it can be used.
Almost everything you listed there already started becoming common by the 1960's.
Step back and forget about informational technology. Look at the world of atoms, not at the world of bits.
Since the decommissioning of the Concorde, our fastest commercial means of transportation has actually been getting slower, not faster. Man hasn't reached farther out in space than the moon missions of the 1960s. The first half the of the 20th century brought us: antibiotics, electricity, automobiles, air travel, rockets, space travel, satellites, radio, reliable clean drinking water, indoor heating, laundry machines, diswashers, widespread indoor plumbing, and massive improvements in sanitation / literacy.
The second half of the 20th can't even come close to this level of technological growth.
Not sure I'd consider stuff like the vast majority of human knowledge sitting in my pocket to be less useful than the dishwasher because it has fewer moving parts or most people can afford to fly to be less of an achievement than the megarich can fly 50% faster.
Recent decades might a disappointment compared with the millenialist interpretation of exponential curves, but that's only the same as the disappointment a Victorian idealist might feel with the lack of stuff that happened in the twentieth century as a whole given that neither utopian socialism nor the Second Coming has occurred yet.
>Not sure I'd consider stuff like the vast majority of human knowledge sitting in my pocket to be less useful than the dishwasher because it has fewer moving parts or most people can afford to fly to be less of an achievement than the megarich can fly 50% faster.
Not sure anybody told you to consider that.
What they did ask you to consider is that technological progress, outside of the digital realm, has been slowed down.
Consider cameras that can shoot 10000 frames a second at ultra high definition resolutions; in the 1970s we had shitty auto developing film as the height of consumer tech.
Battery tech has gotten so advanced you're literally carrying around a firestorm's worth of energy in your pocket and only notice in the rare case that things go spectacularly wrong; compare that to the heavy inefficient NiCds of your parent's age.
Semiconductors are 14nm. That's not for scientists, that's not for researchers, that's for any joe that has 300 bucks. 70 years ago the idea that a pace described by Moore's law could even exist was seen with skepticism (remember it's a marketing "law" not a physical one).
We have rockets that can land themselves, cars that weigh half as much as they did 70 years ago and are twice as safe, a logistic network such that exotic foods are available year round world wide.
It just kills me to watch people post on the Internet using more than likely their mobile super computers, saying tech clearly has slown down because "they've got a feeling".
1. The important point to emphasize here is deceleration does not mean that progress isn't happening. It simply means that the groundbreaking progress we witnessed in the first half of the 20th century is not being replicated as quickly anymore.
2. Technological progress is based on the outcomes they bring with them. Easy or hard to achieve -- doesn't matter in terms of this measurement. Insane advancements in physics is not technological progress unless it enables us to vastly improve our existing capabilities to do things as humans.
Thiel argues this by pointing to a tech were all excited about: self-driving cars.
Thiel argues the original invention of the car was still a bigger innovation.
electricity -> cars -> airplanes -> rockets -> space travel
radio -> tv
laundry machines -> dishwashers
antibiotics -> vaccines
^^^All first 3/4 of 20th century. Self-driving cars would be merely a close match to any one of them. For the next 50 years to match what we saw in the start of the 20th century, we are going to need at least 4 or 5 other technological revolutions in the world of atoms for the comparison to be even similar.
>Technological progress, as long as you don't count all of this massive technological progress (which when left out conveniently makes my point), has been slowed down.
Edit: I should be less combative and provide some actual content. Take a look at semiconductors from the 60s vs now. They are clearly related to 'the digital realm' but are purely physical technology. The fast computers we have now (which enable our digital realm) are at the tip of a screaming bullet train of physical technological progress.
The fact that a relatively low income individual has access to a large number of goods and services which were once considered exclusive to the wealthy is a clear indication that technological progress has continued at a steady pace.
While 'slowed down' or 'sped up' are difficult to quantify, the fact that 3 billion human beings have gained access to smartphone technology over the last decade seems to support the idea that technological progress has in fact sped up.
Increasing air transportation speed is a very narrow application of technology and hardly constitutes a meaningful gauge of technical innovation.
>The fact that a relatively low income individual has access to a large number of goods and services which were once considered exclusive to the wealthy is a clear indication that technological progress has continued at a steady pace.
No, it's just a clear indication of market efficiencies and/or better engineering.
It doesn't say anything about what the grandparent asked for: the rate and magnitude of new scientific/technologic discoveries.
One era (early 20th) is the industrial revolution; one era (approx. 1960-now) is the information revolution. It is true that the industrial revolution has slowed down and mostly focused on incremental improvements, but it seems strange to discount the information revolution gains completely. There's been a lot of information revolution gains.
That said, I would argue that medicine too has made some pretty significant advances in the 2nd half of the 20th century... mostly in surgery techniques (transplants are 2nd half 20th century), scanning techniques (NMR and CT both were 2nd half 20th century), and pharmaceuticals. Significant vaccines (polio, measles, mumps) were 2nd half of the 20th century developments. Genetic science has made huge gains as of late. Etc.
But half of the "world of atoms" things the grandparent listed were also market efficiencies or better engineering. Trading average speed for vast improvements in energy efficiency in aircraft in order to make flight accessible to the masses certainly involved vastly more progress of a technical and scientific nature in the late twentieth century than the cited early twentieth century example of wider replication of well-understood principles of plumbing to give the masses indoor toilets.
"Market efficiencies and/or better engineering" are often enabled by technological breakthroughs.
Consider the efficiencies generated by Amazon's highly automated warehouses; their level of automation wouldn't have been feasible in, say, the 60's. Substantial technological progress on multiple fronts has been required.
Actually it isn't. As Peter Thiel would say, globalization is the copying of existing technology, it is not the manufacture of new ones.
One reason we have stagnated can be revealed in the bias of our new language. Where we once used the terms "1st World" and "3rd World" we now use "Developed" and "Developing" -- language that is excessively bullish about globalization while implicitly pessimistic about technology.
It may be, but there isn't a real good metric for societal improvement. And it seems like progress would always have ebbs and flows as different technologies have new opportunities that are squeezed -- and then other technologies look plumper, so they are squeezed, and so on.
And that's fine. I don't think anyone is complaining today about timepieces not keeping even more accurate time. Clocks today (in whatever device they are embedded in), while not 100% accurate are pretty good. The ROI in improving them further just isn't there -- in part because the good they'd serve humanity isn't there.
I think there are several quality metrics for gauging societal improvement:
- healthcare access and outcome statistics
- poverty & homelessness statistics
- education levels
- access to clean water in sufficient quantity
- access to healthful foods in sufficient quantity
- levels of environmental contaminants
- delta in income of top and bottom economic tiers
And so on. Toss in a few bullet points intended to flag totalitarian/authoritarian/fascist tendencies, worker exploitation, and the like and I think that while likely not a comprehensive blueprint that's more than enough to get started. Especially considering how poorly so many industrialized, first world, "democratic" countries in the world do on so many of these basics.
That said I agree there's no ROI on improving household items like clocks. The problem is there's also no obvious ROI on resolving homelessness.
What needs to happen is for VC and other sources of investment to stop chasing easy wins and realize huge money can be made by moving more out into the world of atoms.
How do you know moving into the world of atoms will lead to huge economic wins? Its easy for you to say someone should chase less risky investments when its not your money being invested.
Would you know a few VCs who have lost several million or more on an investment. Do it sometime and then express your optimism for the future.
Oil prices are essentially capped at $60/barrel for the foreseeable future due to unconventional extraction techniques -> was not long ago oil production was thought to have peaked. Solar power can be economical without subsidy. Robotic and minimally invasive surgery. Battery cost becoming viable for mass-market cars. Gene sequencing. Sensors for pennies. New materials (cheaper carbon fibre, metal alloys, semiconductors, graphine/carbon nanotubes). Most of the things mentioned as 'first half of 20th century' coming to the next 5 billion people.
For aerospace, how about affordability of a ticket over time (Ryanair vs Concorde)? Space travel: number of journeys per vehicle or time astronauts are able to spend in space (was minutes in early space flight, unlimited now). Transportation speed is a straw-man, the industry optimises for cost not speed.
No, because you're failing to distinguish between game-changer tech - transistors, DNA sequencing, operating systems, powered flight, all as classes of original and unexpected inventions - and refinement tech, which is made of game-changer inventions made smaller, cheaper, and more widely avaialable.
Game changer tech changes what can be imagined. Refinement tech changes what can be bought by consumers.
There's been plenty of refinement over the last few decades, but not nearly as much original game changer invention as in the previous decades.
> Since the decommissioning of the Concorde, our fastest commercial means of transportation has actually been getting slower, not faster.
Our means of travel have also gotten vastly more efficient.
Prioritizing progress in average efficiency over speed of a showpiece that is used for a very small share of actual travel isn't the end of progress, and it is very much change in the world of atoms, not bits.
It has gotten twice as cheap (if you look at average ticket prices adjusted to inflation) from 70 to now. Also point about concorde - it's more fuel efficient to fly slower (look at drag coefficient [1])
So from point of view of affordability and mobility for general public - it's good progress.
>It has gotten twice as cheap (if you look at average ticket prices adjusted to inflation) from 70 to now.
Which is consistent with the gp's point that progress has slowed down.
It had gotten 100 to 1000 times cheaper, faster, more efficient to e.g. travel intercontinentally between the 1900 to 1970 that it has between 1970 to now.
I learned a lot from researching the topics mentioned in this post, and hopefully someone else can also benefit from the following information.
tl;dr: Indoor heating significantly predates 1900. Though relevant inventions largely predate 1900, widespread adoption was indeed between 1900 and 1950 for electrification, automobiles, air travel, radio, washing machines, and indoor plumbing. The years after 1950 include most of the developments and use of the Concorde, moon missions, antibiotics, rockets, and dishwashers. I can only describe the inclusion of "space travel" and "satellites" in a list of things from the "first half of the 20th century" as trolling. The remainder of my post is what I found for each topic.
The Concorde flew from 1969 to 2003. The last time humans traveled past low-Earth orbit was 1972. (Space exploration itself started in 1957, and since then unmanned space probes have explored no shortage of interesting targets.)
Penicillin was identified in 1928 but first made available to civilians in 1945. Of the ~50 antibiotics on the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines, I found 7 discovered before 1950: penicillin G, penicillin V, chloramphenicol, dapsone, 4-aminosalicylic acid, streptomycin, and pyrazinamide. The final one was not used until after 1950.
The basics of electricity, including arc lighting (1802), incandescent lightbulbs (1878), motors (1832 or even the 1740s?), telegraphs (1774), power stations, alternating current, etc were all invented and in use before 1900. Of course, the period of electrification in now-developed countries was roughly from the mid-1880s until around 1950.
The basics of automobiles also predate 1900, but mass production began around then. Many major developments in automobiles indeed happened between 1900 and 1950.
Air travel via balloons predates 1900 by more than a century, but both rigid airships and (controlled, powered) heaver-than-air flight developed between 1900 and 1950.
Rockets were first developed by the 13th century, and found significant and widespread military use before 1900 (eg, the Star-Spangled banner was written in 1814). Modern rocketry probably began in 1926 with the first liquid-fueled rocket launched by Goddard. Germany used the V-2 rocket throughout WWII, and this presumably is the reason for inclusion in "the first half of the 20th century".
As mentioned previously, the use of rockets for space exploration (and thus also satellites) did not begin until 1957 with the launch of Sputnik. Human spaceflight began in 1961.
Early radio predates 1900, but indeed radio largely developed between 1900 and 1950.
I had difficulty summarizing the history of water treatment; it seems that many inventions predated 1900 but indeed the period between 1900 and 1950 was the main significant period of development in the United States.
Indoor heating predates the invention of writing. Almost every development in the history and widespread use of heating predates 1900.
Washing machines predate 1900, but the development and widespread use of electric washing machines was indeed between 1900 and 1950.
Dishwashers also predate 1900. Significant aspects of their development happened between 1900 and 1950, but their widespread use was after 1950.
Indoor plumbing predated 1900 by millennia, but indeed the widespread period of adoption in the United States was between 1900 and 1950.
I do not know how to summarize the improvements in sanitation, but I would probably say that 1900 to 1950 did not feature particularly notable improvements in literacy.
Very fair points. Peter Thiel actually argues the slowdown began in 1970, which would capture nearly every technology mentioned.
The period of comparison is really the start of the industrial revolution until the 1970's. This 100 year period was dramatic, and arguably, we are not matching it right now with our rate of progress outside of information technology.
> I'm in the bottom 15% of my country (UK) by income
Dude, no offense, but you're talking about the center of an empire that's literally the biggest that the world has ever seen.
That your country is wealthy and can provide for your basic necessities has more to do with this little historical fact than it does with technological advances.
Former empire. Yes it's still rich, yes the boundary of the bottom 15% of the UK is the same as the top 9.7% of the world, but most of the former empire violently rejected the UK in the second half of the 20th century (and most of the rest before then). This collapse caused economic damage that was solved in part by joining the EU, so yay irony for bringing up the long-gone Empire just as my leaders are trying to get it back. ;P
For the rest of the world… In the last 70 years, Ebloa and HIV were not only discovered but so were partial treatments; Smallpox has gone from "a vaccine exists" to "wiped out"; Rinderpest didn't have a vaccine and has been wiped out; Polio has gone from no-vaccination-possible to almost eradicated (37 cases in 2016); Guinea worm — mostly affecting the poor — has gone from multiple millions of cases per year to 25 individual cases.
For wider medicine: the first organ transplants were kidney in 1950, pancreas in 1966, heart and liver both in 1967, ovary in 2005, penis in 2014; DNA has gone from "???" to fully readable and partially editable; ultrasound, pacemakers and IVF were invented, and antidepressants have improved.
In industry, robotics relies on computer power, so I disagree with anyone who dismisses the development of computing power; likewise, telecommunications have gone from "phone calls within your town are expensive" to "let's have a live video chat across 8-time zones".
The entirety of high-temperature superconductors happened after I was born, never mind going back as far as 70 years; Kevlar, Nomex, and carbon nanomaterials were all made for the first time in the last 70 years.
The poor of the world don't have everything we have, with the exception of vaccines for illnesses we wish to eliminate, but even the stuff we discard often contains things that could not be bought at any price 70 years ago.
excellent perspective. if we take the very narrow computing field, there have been considerable inventions, especially in the field of medical science.
That's a fair point, but it does align with what I was trying to get across.
That being that achieving 'technological progress' with a milestone that applies only to the super wealthy is only one part of technological progress. Bringing it to millions of people at an affordable cost is also something worth considering.
None of the above are new technologies (last decade(s) or so) developments -- except those that concern computers (which is in accordance to what the parent said).
We can consider them "successful new developments" or whatever else we want.
We just can't consider them important new discoveries in the sense that the creation of things like steam engine, air travel, jet engines, etc were (to stay with transportation).
If you wish, the former are basically incremental engineering/efficiency improvements upon the latter.
What the parent observed as lacking/slowing was non-incremental improvements.
Again, that's information technology. That's one area where the past still moved fast like we are now, while the rest of us I am arguing hasn't (in terms of speed).
To reuse a point brought up quite often in this context, making predictions about when and if AGI might arrive based on extrapolations of current technological trends is like trying to predict when the atom bomb would have been created based on a chart of conventional explosive yields leading up to 1940. Undiscovered discoveries are not predictable, certainly not by extrapolating from the current progress. This applies to Kurzweil's highly optimistic predictions as much as it does to negative ones.
Whether or not it's likely we'll see AGI any time soon is, IMO, a matter of wild-ass-guessing more than anything else. There are no experts in AGI right now, only philosophers, because the field doesn't even exist. So nobody has any remotely educated guess about what algorithmic discoveries need to happen and whether they're in reach for human understanding, or when we'd have the computational power to exploit such algorithms if discovered.
All we can really say is that it's theoretically possible, we're living proof of that. Also that there must be a lot of intelligent needles in the algorithmic haystack if evolution was able to stumble across one without a clear fitness mandate to do so (most of the creatures that thrive don't have what we consider intelligence, so it's not that evolutionarily important). I'd probably bet on it being more a matter of "when?" than "if?", but I wouldn't make any assumptions about timescale other than "not this year, probably not next".
Actual real research in AGI was a thing when I was doing AI research in the late 1980s early 1990s (I got out just as the last AI Winter came along in the early 1990s.)
Consider things like SOAR - that was explicitly an architecture for general intelligence. Whether it was any good or not is another question - but there was an active good-old-fashioned AGI field back then.
Mind you - one of the reasons I left AI research to do web stuff from '92/'93 onwards was I was pretty sure the symbolic approaches in favour back then wouldn't scale up and that there really was only intelligence on one side of a computer screen.
> most of the creatures that thrive don't have what we consider intelligence, so it's not that evolutionarily important
I dispute that this is because they don't poses intelligence. Whenever we find an animal displaying some ability we had said required intelligence — language, tool use, self-awareness, solving abstract puzzles, driving a car — we seem to change our definition of intelligence. Just like we have done with A.I., although probably because we want to eat the former and make slave labour of the latter. ;)
The idea of the atom bomb was well established prior to 1940, the question was who would get there first, not if it was possible.
1934 was a turning point in this respect, by the 1940's it wasn't a question any more of whether or not atom bombs could be created, it was more a question of 'how' than 'if'.
It's problematic that the "experts in AGI" are generally self-designated, and have mostly produced little that is concrete, either in the form of theory or engineering. We should be concerned about long-term outcomes of technological progress, but I'm not convinced the current conversation centering on the term "AGI" is productive.
We can manipulate matter in a number of ways unimagined in 1970. For example; trapping atoms with lasers, artificial proteins, meta materials, high vacuums, near absolute zero temperatures, high energy plasma, photonic memory, microwave atomic control, ion traps, scanning tunneling microscopes, high temperature high tesla super conducting magnets, gene sequencing and splicing.
I think it depends where you look at technology and how closely...
Also look at additive manufacturing - we can make things that were literally impossible to fabricate five years ago with a 200k sintering setup. 4d printing is pretty cool to!
In your examples consider a modern turbofan blade, a single crystal of titanium grown in a xenon atmosphere and then heated white hot before being blown up like a balloon so as to allow refrigeration during operation! Another mind blowing sector is the change in medical scanning, ct, pet, mri - all new since 1970
I used to think this way too. And actually I would get a little depressed, as a software engineer, because I worried that I wasn't doing much useful work only creating software all day.
But then one day I had a profound insight: For nearly all of human history, the ONLY agent of change has been software. That is, our bodies have remained exactly the same for the last 80,000 years and the only thing that's changed is our culture, knowledge, languages, etc. We've used those changes in software and information to create new physical tools but the only thing that's taken us from the beginning to today is slow, steady improvements in software and "information processing".
I actually think that it is a high leverage phenomenon that most of our innovation is now focused much more significantly on pure information. It's hard to understand how this can't be causing acceleration in change.
And, I believe, it will stay like this for the foreseeable future. Any really new technology, that is anything that isn't an iteration on what we've had since the 60's, is going to require a leap in the ability to manipulate energy and the harnessing of forces hitherto beyond our grasp.
Yep. But... What could be better than a car, I mean the concept of "mechanized individual transportation". Same question with train "mechanized mass transportation". Sewer ? What could be better ?
While any of these is "not perfect", it's tough (at least for me) to come with something conceptually better right now.
And also, I think we have to rememeber that many of these were possible because of oil. So, I think that if we don't find a significantly better energy source, the material world will just evolve very slowly.
When I think about it, it's obvious that new stuff happens in knowledge/information space : it has a very strong innovation/energy ratio...
> A world where you could walk to the things you need because they're close?
That was the world before cars - it's cars and access to good infrastructure that changed the world to its current state where local businesses can't compete anymore.
We've made tremendous progress in that direction since 1960. What's your point?
> A world where you could walk to the things you need because they're close?
That's not a technology problem; much of the developed world is like that and more of the world is getting to be like it with progressive urbanization. The US made a deliberate social choice to focus on auto-centric development that inhibits that a bit in the US, but that's a social problem, not a technical one.
Better than a car? Mechanized individual transportation that isn't bounded in the 2d plane.
I think Elon also asked the question of what could be better than a train and threw out one possible answer: Hyperloop
Sewer? It doesn't take a lot of creativity to see how a sewer could be better. How about micro waste treatment directly inline with the sewer so now it is not carrying waste, but clean water, and just pipe it directly back in.
I think it's also important to consider and analyze technological advances in the context of various periods in the historical development of humanity.
For much more than half of the 20th century, nations were at war with each other, the British Empire was declining (and there had to be a replacement fitting for the times), etc. Man's taste for blood has not necessarily gone away with the 20th century, it only found expression in soft power and other psychological means of domination (e.g., Hollywood movies whose central theme is American Exceptionalism). This fresh awareness that actionable information is what may determine the fate of nations has also polarized technological progress in favour of advancements in understanding data and processing large volumes of it in the most efficient way possible. To be fair, Claude Shannon and Alan Turing made outsized contributions to this space.
Just as there were Economic Consequences of the Peace (thanks, J.M. Keynes), I think we will also have to chronicle the The Effects of Peacetime on Technological Progress.
As scientific knowledge advances on more fronts, extracting ever more marginal gains by spreading our intellectual capital more thinly across the expanding frontiers of knowledge, maybe AI will help reduce the decline in the rate of advancement.
A thesis like that isn't exactly career-making pop sci blockbuster material though.
Do you think this could have something to do with ingrained interests that have subverted disruptive technological progress? I have a feeling that there have been at least a few cases of this preventing the public from enjoying the benefits of "future living" that the 60's envisioned.
compared to what though ? are we assuming a linear rate of development ? in evolution organisms change gradually with occasional bursts, and the same seems to be true of human tech evolution. There are periods of stagnation with tiny increments or even regress in places, then there are rapid bursts of unpredictable change, often enabled by information from one area reaching another previously unrelated one.
Peter Thiel has made some other interesting observations:
- that our language about the ‘developed' vs ‘developing' world is excessively bullish about globalization while implicitly pessimistic about technology.
- that government has changed from thinking that progress can be achieved via planning, into thinking that it's more just there to watch random forces & statistics evolve the world. This change in mindset away from planning for innovation has made it impossible to achieve grandiose mission like the Apollo space missions. As a result if there is going to be a government role in getting innovation started, people have to philosophically believe again that it’s possible to plan.
- that environmentalism has induced a deep skepticism about anything involving the manipulation of nature or material objects in the real world. This skepticism explains why computer tech has been able to advance so much but not physical technology like transportation.
- that peer review and grant approval processes are too political, science has suffered because it is hard to find scientists who excel at both science and politics.
- that a shift from manufacturing to non-tradeable services has led to a political class (such as lawyers) that is weirdly immune to globalization and mostly oblivious to it.
in this podcast http://www.talkhouse.com/comedian-tim-heidecker-talks-with-a... Adam Curtis argues that we no longer subscribe to grand visions and as a result we're floundering as our internet-induced bubbles send us into every more fragmented echo-chambers
We're never going to achieve anything great again...it's the beginning of the heat-death of human progress! I think that the recent idolatry of the individual has weakened our ability to act en-mass. Previous generations were more cohesive.
WRT skepticism of modification of the natural world - it's so stupid. There is no "natural state" of things. Everything is modifying everything else. We probably even got the ideas to modify ourselves and our environment as early humans from other animals (ants & termites - cities, beavers - dams etc).
The thing to understand about nature is that it is made up of complex systems that have evolved into finely balanced equilibria. Our reductionist science only works well in linear systems where variables are cleanly separable, which complex systems by definition are not. Thus tinkering with nature under the assumption that it is a linear system is likely to have lots of unintended consequences. That is why science's track record in promoting health is so abysmal, and our agriculture is completely unsustainable.
The only way to really evolve a complex system is to make a lot of small gradual changes, constantly course correcting as you go.
I disagree with that. The majority of opinions in previous generations were discounted. A small percentage of people in power said: "We want this, therefore we will have it, and the rest will be damned".
We look more at the negative effects that our overreaching plans have on groups in the minority and on the environment itself. There is no such thing as a grand vision that doesn't have an unwanted effect on some group. It's much harder to unilaterally enforce a vision when everybody gets to voice their opinion.
Once you cut down all the trees you've got yourself a big ass problem, doesn't matter if a world without trees is more "natural" or not.
Case in point, all the CEOs and big-money managers who benefit from the mining and extracting businesses buy their (big) residences in pretty "natural" places, surrounded by water and lots of greenery. I'm pretty sure they and their kids don't live in the areas affected by their companies' non-natural dealings.
>- that government has changed from thinking that progress can be achieved via planning, into thinking that it's more just there to watch random forces & statistics evolve the world. This change in mindset away from planning for innovation has made it impossible to achieve grandiose mission like the Apollo space missions. As a result if there is going to be a government role in getting innovation started, people have to philosophically believe again that it’s possible to plan.
It's pretty bloody ironic to hear Peter Thiel say we need state planning.
Low return-on-investment - they did all the science they wanted back then. We could do it again (and multiple countries are considering it), but, why? The moon landings were part science (mission achieved), part reputation (done).
Actually the point has been made that we have actually lost a lot of the knowledge and expertise that existed back then, and that it would take considerable time and money to accumulate that knowledge together to do it again.
It's entirely possible that progress is being made in areas not immediately visible to the public.
You see the horses replaced with cars - what do you see of the advances in sewage management, or plastics recycling?
Also, an electric car is still a car, but it's still very different from a combustion engine, or a coal steam-engine, for that matter. Does the fact that a horse is so dissimilar to an electric/petrol car mean the two are relatively similar? That seems to be a fairly superficial distinction of change.
A flying car would be nearly magical for someone from 1880.
But a smartphone to someone from 1950? It would seem pretty fancy, but not impossible to imagine. The guy from 1950 already knows the basic tech behind it - it has a screen, it uses wireless data, and is powered by computers.
I think you have that backwards. A century ago people imagined flying cars but not smartphones. (See Albert Robida.)
Now, we would find flying cars "nearly magical" (myself included, having been recently amazed by modern vertical takeoff fighter jets) but apparently aren't impressed by smartphones (myself not included, even before having recently learned about semiconductor fabrication techniques).
Agreed. The one thing I would add though is that while a lot of the technology we are using now has roots in the first half of the century, the second half has been big in terms refining and making said technology available and accessible to an increasingly higher % of human population across geographies and across economic levels. I think that in itself is a big step forward.
That's the problem. Globalization is merely the copying of existing technology, but many in the west have mistaken it for real progress.
This is one reason why economic growth in the west is stagnant. Technological progress is what fuelled our strong growth half a century ago. Without it, politics becomes a zero sum game.
Robots and remote drones do things in the physical world, and in pretty much every area of life from medicine to scientific research to manufacturing to search and rescue to war. While there was some of that around in the 1960s, the actual use and effect on the way people work and live has been radically transformative.
Not sure about your bridges point - I see the bridges over the Forth most days which are from the 1880s, 1960s and the new one opening this year and they all look pretty different to me (cantilever, suspension & cable stay respectively).
Would something like the Millau Viaduct have been possible in the 1960s?
> Would something like the Millau Viaduct have been possible in the 1960s?
That's two questions in one.
The crossing of large spans was a solved problem in Roman times (pillars and arches).
To do it exactly like that did not require anything new in terms of materials, but there would have been quite a problem getting such a design approved without the computational homework done that it would work well in all weather conditions. Which in turn would likely lead to it being overdesigned.
Computers are excellent at such simulations leading to a higher degree of confidence in designs that have never been tried before or that push the envelope in some manner.
There were many advances in chemistry, medicine and biology, materials and manufacturing, but not all of them translated into something that's truly transformative as far as society as a whole is concerned.
That's ridiculous. Everyone has a personal computer in their pocket and can communicate with anyone in seconds across the world. The world's libraries are at your fingertips by mail order or on your screen.
We may not be on the cusp of a singularity, but that's nothing to be ashamed of.
We should be proud we haven't seen a major world war in 70 years.
Perhaps it was a greater achievement to get the first 10^4 people online than the next 10^9. More of the same-or-slightly-smaller.
I certainly got more delta-value out of pre-web Internet (email, Usenet, chat) and Web 1.0 (online papers and libraries, nearly-free publishing) than Web 2.0 onwards (Facebook, etc). Maybe it's not accelerating constantly.
I think you're really underselling things like 3G data plans which are now worldwide. That didn't exist 10 years ago.
Even just the widespread use of SMS has helped medical teams assess and treat diseases in remote areas.
When people complain about some lack of technological advancements, it sounds to me like they're just not aware of what we have accomplished. And I am not surprised that Thiel is in this category. He has a JD, not a PhD
No, I'm staggered by the wonderfulness of modern networks. It's just that taking the Internet to the masses is slightly less staggering to me than getting from POTS (analog telephone) to the Internet. And I do have some idea what is involved.
There's a big difference between technological advancements and engineering & standard development. Deploying a cell network is an engineering and logistical task, not a feat of invention.
Except this is talking about deploying 3g globally. Once the problem of a device moving from LA to SF to NY is solved, it's nothing new to add in Johannesburg and the whole of Swaziland. What's more is that this system was solved decades ago, it's not even a 3g problem.
I think it all depends on which technology. They all seem to follow a sigmoid curve where progress accelerates and then tapers off. The fastest improvement may be say 1860 for sewers, 1960 for jet engines and now for computer tech.
I'm in the camp that abstains from social media, but people are almost always going to find distractions, be it social media, movies, shows, games, novels, or consumables. In moderation, that's perfectly fine. Not everyone wants to work a crazy amount of hours or considers what they are doing from 9-5 fulfilling.
I actually think distraction from our IT devices is a major reason why things are slowing down.
Without our smartphones, spending hours tinkering would be how most people ended up spending their time. It sets one up much more so for a maker mindset over a consumer mindset.
>because I'm genuinely in agreement with Peter Thiel's argument that technological progress is actually decelerating relative to how it was moving 60 years ago
Is it possible we just covered most of the low-hanging fruit in the 1800s and 1900s, and now the only remaining discoveries that are really ground-breaking are the really difficult ones, hence the slower rate?
It's possible, even plausible, but I think it's not so. My guess is that in the decades around 1900 America and western Europe were considerably more dynamic -- there was less overall resistance to innovation. To pick a tiny example, driver's licenses weren't required in all states until, iirc, the 1950s. Radio had decades of development before the FCC. Some doctors tested new treatments on themselves. Immigration from Europe to the U.S. was unlimited. I'm not promoting going back to those days -- I don't want to get into that argument -- but I'd like to reach better understanding of how much the growth slowdown since 1970ish is about the intrinsic difficulty of innovating vs. how much is about the way we collectively think and coordinate.
There's an (underrepresented) idea when looking at the history of tech called a Kondratiev_wave[0] that says global economic changes happen in a series of predictable peaks and valleys. If the recent trends of computing really took off in the late 1990's, we should expect the wave to stagnate between 2015 and 2030, and recede into stagnation and negative growth around 2030-2050.
I don't think this is foolproof, but it _is_ a tool and a perspective for analyzing history, and one that runs counter to the most common narrative of increasing acceleration in technological development. The physics way of saying this is that velocity is always positive (we're always going up or near-neutral) but the rate of acceleration isn't spectacularly greater than the new ones. If we really are talking about the rate of change of economic/tech growth (the rate of change of market size/capability), then we're talking about acceleration!
Anyway, this was a whole rant, but my personal take is that we tend to underestimate the amount of turbulence in history, leading us to believe that the past was a stable, peaceful and simpler time, while the present day is going nuts. This kind of thinking has fueled messianism, apocalyptic cults, futurism, dreams and nightmares for centuries, and will continue to if we don't blow ourselves up. We forget that even in places like Ancient Rome the rate of change in tech and human growth was still positive and rapid, that during the Dark Ages science and technology were still exploding in the Middle East, that the differences between 1650 and 1750 were vast in terms of human thought, that between 1850 and 1950 they were seemingly greater. There was no time of mythological stasis before the present day, and it's unlikely that there ever will be as long as we're still human.
Excellent video. I highly recommend everyone working in or with IT to see it.
I think he is right.
PCs and smartphone are mostly recreating thing from the past, and not the best things either. However, this isn't because we invented everything there is to invent. It has more to do with how research in computing is currently funded and how companies approach invention and innovation.
You probably should watch that video. This is one of its core subject. Kay makes a valuable distinction between invention and innovation, and what you describe falls into the "innovation" bucket. It's incremental. Yes, our cellphones are more powerful than mainframes of the old, but do we utilize them to the same extent?
With enough work one can convince oneself that each 'discovery' or 'invention' is a trivial follow-up of existing technology. DNA sequencing is in the post-laser era. Can you build a convincing argument as to why it's not new but the laser is new?
I've always thought - and described PC's as mini mainframes.
Even the software we run on them is mainframe derived - Unix and VMS.
The mobile/tablet is truly the first "personal computer", which we've barely tapped yet. I am hopeful, but at the moment we haven't gone much beyond what we could do with very efficient punch card sorting.
That said, for most of the arguments that modern-day thinkers talk about, accelerating technological progress is totally irrelevant. You're most likely thinking of Kurzweil's school of thought around a singularity, which is nowadays far from the "norm".
If you're talking about the arguments around technological unemployment, it doesn't matter if tech is accelerating - we could, for example,, over the course of the next e.g. 30 years, replace 50% of human jobs. This might be "slower" in some sense than previous tech changes, but it doesn't change the bottom line. (note: these are made up numbers to illustrate a point, I have no good guess at the real numbers, but lots of smart people, including economists, think it's a problem we will face soon-ish).
If you're talking about the arguments around "unfriendly AI", then again, it is totally immaterial wether tech in general is accelerating. All that you need to believe in order to worry is that eventually, at some point, we will be able to create a machine that thinks, and it is not automatically guaranteed to share our values.
> You're most likely thinking of Kurzweil's school of thought around a singularity, which is nowadays far from the "norm".
I wish this were true, but it's gotten a new lease on life with Nick Bostrom's book and the various high-profile people who have been influenced by it (like Elon Musk and Bill Gates), so there's a bit of a boomlet around singularity speculation again.
But that's where I disagree with you. I think Bostrom et al's take on things is correct (at least potentially), and has nothing at all to do with the Kurzweilian norm. Bostrom's argument requires far fewer background assumptions.
>Once you look beyond the advancements we have experienced in info tech and finance
And medicine, and materials, and semiconductors (this board in particular loves to forget that these computers we all use are built on top of something), and antennas; the list goes on. What was once highly theoretical phd knowledge is now a byline in a junior level microelectronics course; the cutting edge having evolved to be unrecognizable to a person 60 years ago. It took us 40 years to go from a computer that could play chess to a computer that could win; took less than twenty to go from winning chess to winning Go (and exponential jump in complexity). In the same amount of time we've gone from mapping the human genome to editing it. Rechargeable battery technology that could power a vacuum for 30 minutes to driving a car for 400 miles.
Never forget that exponential change looks linear on the small scale.
For instance, let's say you have a small circle with a small bump on it. The circle represents current technology, and the bump is a change in technology (i.e. innovation).
Now take a much larger circle that has many small bumps on it. The bumps look tiny in comparison, but in aggregate, they are much larger than the bump from the smaller circle. In fact, at some point, they will be bigger than the old circle, even though it just looks like an un-smoothed circle.
Further, 60 years ago we were coming out of wartime, which meant that many innovations were able to come to market in a short period of time (they had been held up do to wartime limitations like rationing, material shortages, etc.)
What about genetic engineering? We can create new organisms by directly modifying genes, in fact we frequently do for drug production, etc. We can sequence genes and the cost is falling faster than Moore's law. We can introduce stem cells with different genes into the body (including brain) to cure genetic diseases. We'll be able to tweak genes in human zygotes soon.
Does this compare favorably to internal combustion or indoor plumbing? Seems to me that it does.
And AI is a huge force multiplier in all of these abilities.
