
Major Technological Changes Are Coming More Slowly Than They Once Did - pseudolus
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/despite-what-you-might-think-major-technological-changes-are-coming-more-slowly-than-they-once-did/
======
beat
How did this crap rate publication in Scientific American? It's really just a
Millennial version of "uphill both ways".

I'm 53, and the amount of technological change I've seen in my lifeime is
astonishing. I can clearly remember the first time I saw a video game (Pong)
because I was 8 or so - old enough for it to make a huge impression. The first
time I used a cell phone in a memorable way, I was 36 years old (9/11, calling
my spouse to tell her what I just heard on NPR). This is ubiquitous, world-
changing technology that simply didn't exist when I was young.

Now, think of CRISPR and other DNA-altering technology, and what that will
mean going into the next century. Think about renewable energy more or less
completely replacing fossil fuel in coming decades. Think about the
extraordinary amount of light-cognitive work, like driving, that will be
replaced by automation.

Final perspective... I have a potentially deadly chronic illness that hit me a
few years ago, but I've probably had latent since childhood. It affects
children more than adults at onset. If it had happened to me as a child, I
would have died. Now, it's an inconvenience.

~~~
simonsarris
> I'm 53, and the amount of technological change I've seen in my lifeime is
> astonishing

I think its somewhat telling that your "Think about..." statements are all
hoping on technology yet-to-be, not technology that exists today.

> Think about renewable energy more or less completely replacing fossil fuel
> in coming decades.

But we thought peak oil was gonna be around 1970. Today petroleum engineering
still has better job prospects than nuclear engineering. I think the track
record for "just around the corner" is quite poor.

> Think about the extraordinary amount of light-cognitive work, like driving,
> that will be replaced by automation.

I think that the track record...

The examples you have for technology that's actually happened in your life are
just computers. Which are great, nobody doubts those strides. But how's the
subway vs when you were 10? How much has schooling changed for the better? Are
kids happier in school now, or completing it faster?

How has how most people get to work different than 50 years ago? Are more
people able to walk or use fast public transport than ever before? Hows your
experience at the airport?

How about building roads? Is it cheaper than ever, like with computers? How
about housing? If computers getting cheaper and faster is progressing
technologically, by the same metric are not roads and houses going backwards
technologically?

How's the quality of our food tech improved in the last 53 years? Are we all
reaping the rewards of that? Why are we so much more obese and diabetic?

How's the quality of life for the average child? Can they spend their day
doing more of what they wanted vs 53 years ago? Or are they under what is
essentially house arrest more than ever? If we have more technology, why isn't
their environment safer and freer? Why can't they easily get to the library
and museum on their own, like they can in Japan? If the technology we _do_
have is improving our lives, are children (and adults) less depressed now than
53 years ago?

 _What are the things that stopped working?_ I don't think its a flippant
question that can be answered only with computers and cell phones. Some
technology has definitely advanced, but it should be just as obvious that some
has almost completely stalled.

~~~
awinder
> How's the quality of our food tech improved in the last 53 years? Are we all
> reaping the rewards of that? Why are we so much more obese and diabetic?

Purely talking about the technology, food manufacturing tech has experienced
radical innovation over the last 53 years. Not just "with computers", but
through biology / biotech etc. These things have nothing to do with
socioeconomic issues which largely underpin, e.g., public health issues like
obesity and diabetes.

That's actually the common refrain through this whole list, it mostly seems
you're arguing that technological innovation hasn't kept pace with social
progress, which might be true, but is also a completely orthogonal point.

> How's the quality of life for the average child? Can they spend their day
> doing more of what they wanted vs 53 years ago?

Speaking of technological progress, medicine! Your stat measure has the same
problem. The correct answer is: 1/10 infants died in 1915, to .3/10 in 1950,
to .07/10 in 2000 to .05/10 per day. Each step along the way, due to
technology/scientific advancement, measurable & meaningful numbers of kids got
to experience life, who would not have been able to without those
advancements. This is why we do what we do, and here's to knocking .05 down to
.01 because that is who we are.

------
commandlinefan
I wish I could find the attribution, but I read an interesting comparison -
imagine somebody from 1880 who was transported to 1950, and imagine how
shocked he would be at the changes in the world: cars, washing machines,
television, airplanes… now transport somebody from 1950 to 2019. He would be
impressed, but not overwhelmed, at the changes that have occurred in the same
time period. Besides the computer, most of what we have now is just better
versions of what they had 70 years ago.

~~~
hhs
Agreed, and there's a related point too: These days, strangely, ideas are
getting harder to find and research productivity is poor. There was a neat
discussion of this a few years ago [0], and here's the paper [1].

[0]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13211153](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13211153)

[1]:
[https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/IdeaPF.pdf](https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/IdeaPF.pdf)

------
PaulHoule
Note the computer revolution has come of out of successive improvements to a
very particular technology (FET transistors on silicon.)

Back in the 1960s there was wild speculation of what kind of elements people
would make computers of, but the last alternative material that people took
seriously was Gallium Arsenide back in the 1980s. (Rumours that there is an
Indium Phosphide based microprocessor for military use notwithstanding.)

The revolution that came from the 1960s was embedded in the System/360
mainframe and it was that architecture was independent from hardware so you
could wait a few years and expect to get a computer that was better than your
old one and could still run the same software.

x86, ARM, Power all attained the same thing, but DEC failed to accomplish this
with the PDP-* and VAX machines. The 8-bit machines of the 1980s turned out to
be dead ends for the same reason.

~~~
jackcosgrove
I would argue the FET transistor has been such a revolutionary technology _in
the applications it has allowed_ that we are still mining the offshoots of
this technology. The fact that there is still so much money in computing means
that vein has not been exhausted. And yes, I also believe that this has
redirected talent from other fields into computing.

Robert Gordon's examples of new technology are almost all physical. It may be
true that 1970 was the end of a century long "mechanical age". Now we are in
the information age, and innovations are virtual/mental rather than physical.

As such I would place the breakdown of cultural barriers as a result of
information technology as a major breakthrough. Gordon is using how long it
takes to clean your house as a metric of innovation. He's not using the fact
that the current inhabitant of that house may be from another part of the
world, and yet still feel comfortable because shared culture is more
accessible.

~~~
fnord123
>Robert Gordon's examples of new technology are almost all physical. It may be
true that 1970 was the end of a century long "mechanical age". Now we are in
the information age, and innovations are virtual/mental rather than physical.

I think this hits the nail on the head.

The other issue is that the closer to the present we get, the harder to see
the impact of any particular advance. This is why, e.g. Nobel Prizes are so
late in recognizing work.

That said, some advances are already possible to be recognized: reusable
rockets, good search, good automated translation.

------
Simon321
'[except for] the exponential increase in computing power.'

Yeah, just take out thé major industry where all change has taken place the
last few decades and then sure, changes are coming more slowly.

~~~
CharlesColeman
> '[except for] the exponential increase in computing power.'

That would be incremental improvement, not major technological change. Take
this list from the article:

> In our century, for better or worse, progress isn't what it used to be.
> Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon argues that by 1970, all the
> key technologies of modern life were in place: sanitation, electricity,
> mechanized agriculture, highways, air travel, telecommunications, and the
> like.

Most of the major technological changes in computing were already available by
1980:

Software compatibility across computer generations (IBM 360), microprocessors
and personal computing (8-bit micros like the Apple II), packet-switched
networking, GUIs (Alto), all the major modern types of programming languages
(imperative, functional, object-oriented), etc.

Most of the seemingly big things that have happened since fall more into the
category of incremental improvements and popularizations than "major
technological change."

~~~
navaati
The big one missing is mobile telecommunication/computing. Basically the last
most transformative tech since your list is the lithium battery I guess ?

And this transformative effect keeps on giving, with the transition to
renewables and "electrified everything" (such as cars, but not only).

~~~
CharlesColeman
> The big one missing is mobile telecommunication/computing.

The major technological advancements that permitted that are old. Cellular
telephone technology dates to the 70s/80s, etc.

~~~
beat
And where will DNA editing be in 40 years?

~~~
CharlesColeman
The thesis isn't that major advancements aren't happening, but that they're
happening more slowly. Or maybe more accurately, there was an period in the
20th century that is now over where major advancements happened unusually
quickly.

~~~
tossAfterUsing
not to bang the trope drum too loudly, but Kurzweil mentions this phenomenon
when describing the way that growth looks exponential over a long scale, but
feels more like S-curves[1]

1- [https://www.slideshare.net/olandri/l03-exponential-
world](https://www.slideshare.net/olandri/l03-exponential-world)

------
mlb_hn
The author doesn't seem to include any metrics for how they're measuring
technological changes, or am I missing that? Seems like a graph and numbers
would be useful for measuring what sort of slowdown it's talking about; most
of the arguments seems to be looking at what wasn't accomplished.

~~~
davidivadavid
That's the main problem with those articles.

We have no metric for innovation. So all we get is a bunch of cherry picking
of what constitutes "major" "progress" based on undefined criteria, and then
comparing those things across different eras.

Some organizations have created innovation indices, but they tend to measure
inputs (e.g. R&D spending) more than outputs, or measure outputs that have
questionable relationships to innovation (e.g. number of patents registered).

~~~
beefman
There are some obvious metrics that are likely to be very good: global energy
use, global GDP, and economic efficiency from their quotient. It's the data
we're missing (prior to 1970). It could be estimated, but almost no one has
tried.

Another idea is to count the occurrences of strings representing years ("1974"
etc) on wikipedia.... possibly weighted by the PageRanks of the containing
articles...

~~~
davidivadavid
I don't know about "very good." GDP is sometimes underrated as a metric, but
it does have serious flaws that would prevent me from calling it "very good."

Capabilities-based approaches seemed more promising for a while, but it seems
like they haven't resulted in anything better yet. I'm still unclear why there
seems to be so little research on measuring actual value created by measuring
things like consumer surplus (at least heuristically).

~~~
beefman
Really? I'd call it 'more descriptive of human civilization than any scalar
has a right to be'.

What do you make of the S&P 500 index as a descriptor of the stock market?

Consumer surplus is one of those economics concepts that probably doesn't
exist. People will generally pay anything they can afford. Fortunately, what
they pay for positional goods and such mostly washes out as transfers or asset
inflation and doesn't pollute GDP, which measures intrinsic value (bits,
ultimately).

~~~
davidivadavid
Sure, it could be one of those things that's "the worst except for all the
other options." It's still flawed, the flaws have been known for a long time,
and their magnitude is potentially large enough to warrant looking for other
indicators.

The S&P 500 describes the S&P 500 fine, but it seems like a much simpler
problem? They represent an estimate of a future cash flow generated by a
basket of companies. That's way more straightforward than measuring value
perceived by consumers.

How does consumer surplus not exist? How would you value something like e.g.
Wikipedia?

~~~
beefman
Stock market and GDP indices are generally the same in that they are sums of
correlated time series. Summing suppresses uncorrelated variance (often
measurement noise) and retains correlated variance. The index's returns are
essentially the first principal component of the returns of the index memebrs.
This is how the CAPM works – stocks are analyzed by factoring out their
responsiveness to the market.

Stock market and GDP indices are also particularly related, as stock prices
are tied to corporate earnings and corporate earnings are a major component of
GDP.

GDP has nothing to do with human perception. It measures the productive
capacity of civilization, which is a physical quantity.[1]

It's often claimed that if you give something like Wikipedia away for free,
its value will not show up in GDP. In fact, if Wikipedia is valuable, it must
have a positive impact on civilization. This will be reflected in GDP, even if
it's in the form of extra time/money people spend on ice cream in the
summertime.

The maximum someone would pay to access to Wikipedia is likewise irrelevant.
For one thing, it's a function of their personal wealth, which is an unrelated
quantity. But in any case, paying more than something costs to produce just
increases the buying power of the people selling it... But it can't increase
their buying power above what civilization can produce. It's a just a wealth
transfer. Money can't defeat physics.

All of that is straightforward. What can be surprising (at first) is how well
GDP measures human happiness,[2] drives wealth and income inequality,[2] and
predicts election outcomes.[3][4][5] Economic peaks coincide with moon
landings, complexity in popular music, the discovery of canonical physics,
commercialization of computing technology, and various athletic records.[6]

[1]
[http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Economics/](http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Economics/)

[2]
[http://lumma.org/econ/Happiness.html](http://lumma.org/econ/Happiness.html)

[3]
[https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2014.05.002](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2014.05.002)

[4] [https://pollyvote.com/en/components/econometric-
models/time-...](https://pollyvote.com/en/components/econometric-models/time-
for-change-model/)

[5] [https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/which-economic-
indicato...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/which-economic-indicators-
best-predict-presidential-elections/)

[6]
[https://gist.github.com/clumma/90a1a53a1376699dd4001823e2760...](https://gist.github.com/clumma/90a1a53a1376699dd4001823e2760904)

------
mandazi
The advances in computer power is great. Unfortunately what is the computing
power being used for?

~~~
choward
Ads and mining bitcoins?

~~~
wheelerwj
i was at the gym the other day and saw a few tv ads for the most... USELESS
apps.

apps for dieting, apps for shopping, apps for ordering help for specific
jobs...

it makes me want to give up tech startups and maybe just go plant some trees
or something.

------
pseudolus
Related:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20657796](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20657796)
"Great Ideas Are Growing Scarce. That's Not So Great".

------
tabtab
Here is somebody's chart of inventions plotted over time:

[http://wiki.c2.com/?BigInventionsTimeline](http://wiki.c2.com/?BigInventionsTimeline)

In short, there seem to be spikes or groupings roughly every 50 years or so.
The most recent spike is relatively light in comparison. However, the impact
of inventions is perhaps subjective and debatable. The Internet has had a huge
impact on society, changing the way we communicate almost completely, from
personal socializing to news.

------
gamblor956
They're coming faster then ever before. There simply spread out over many more
disciplines.

------
not_a_cop75
I never realized that Scientific American cared so much about unsubstantiated
opinion.

------
cryoshon
my take is that we've harvested the easy pickings which were accessible as a
result of formalized and professionalized scientific research and engineering
processes. now, we're entering the era of formalized and professionalized
data-driven processes.

the advances delivered by this latest technological movement aren't going to
take us from gazing at birds to being able to construct a plane. they're going
to take us from inefficiency to efficiency, and from ignorance about deep,
broad, and complex phenomena to descriptive knowledge. if we're lucky, it'll
take us to knowledge about causation in some areas too, but this technological
revolution isn't about causes so much as about coping with effects.

it's the subtle stuff that reshapes the world invisibly and in ways that are
difficult to comprehend without a wide view. for instance, in science, data-
driven research via genome-wide association studies (GWAS) etc can lead to
more efficient allocation of diagnostic resources in healthcare, meaning that
people with certain characteristics can on average be healthier as a result.

------
throwanem
Good. It'd be nice for us as a species to have a chance to catch our breath,
for a change.

------
biorocks
So let’s leave out all the advances in biomedicine, personal genome
sequencing, immunotherapy for cancer, genetic engineering advances for
incurable diseases, etc. All of these are “technological”, yet this author was
too focused on consumer tech to notice. What about battery technologies and
new solar energy tech which make small devices and EV’s possible. The enormous
advances in machine learning and AI (and algorithms in general across all
areas of computation). Bioinformatics, advances in protein engineering, etc. I
could go on and on. I think this article is going to be one of those quoted in
ten years as being incredibly mistaken.

------
johngalt
Progress has never been a linear slope of ever increasing capability in all
technology areas. It's better to think of progress as a series of new
directions that we couldn't access without the prior advances.

------
buboard
We still got our 140 characters! (280 now!!)

BTW what technical advances did you expect to have by now? For me, simple
things:

\- Robotic cooking machine or some sort of ubiquitous and super cheap
automated food system

\- Self-cleaning house

\- All gene-related diseases cured

~~~
Mvhsz
Self-cleaning house seemed like it would be here already. If you had described
the technologies available in 2019 to myself in 2002 (when the roomba came
out) - I would have expected there to also be a boston-dynamics-esque floor,
window and countertop cleaning bot that was reasonably affordable. I didn't
expect that walking around a house and picking things up would be this hard to
automate.

------
alephnan
If this would true, it would cast away The Technical Singularity hypothesis'
premise that technological changes accelerates.

~~~
beefman
Not necessarily. "Accelerating returns" is just another name for exponential
growth. And the economy is growing exponentially. But the rate since 1970 is
possibly lower than it was during the "special century".

Also, for what it's worth, Moore's law and its variants are just special cases
of Wright learning.[1][2][3]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_curve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_curve)

[2]
[https://twitter.com/clumma/status/740267279255015424](https://twitter.com/clumma/status/740267279255015424)

[3]
[https://twitter.com/clumma/status/740268490687291392](https://twitter.com/clumma/status/740268490687291392)

------
lunias
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM9f0W2KD5s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM9f0W2KD5s)

Lots of relevant conversation within.

There's a quote in there somewhere along the lines of: "we've built the
computer from the starship enterprise, but we possess little other tech from
Star Trek"

------
makerofspoons
Climate change and its impact on our agriculture, infrastructure, and
political systems will be an increasing damping force on technological changes
this century that I'm surprised didn't get a mention in this article.

~~~
rdlecler1
If necessity is the mother of inventions shouldn’t it be an amplifying force?

~~~
makerofspoons
That really depends- if we get on war footing to address the problem like we
confronted WW2 perhaps. If we procrastinate hunger, water scarcity, and
conflict have a tendency to be destructive to knowledge.

~~~
beat
Hunger has become far less of a problem in the 21st century than it has ever
been before, at any point in human history. And population growth is leveling
off - the global population has quadrupled in the last century, but will
probably level off about 50% higher than today in the next 50-100 years.

So you're postulating that hunger will get _much_ worse than it is today,
without really tremendous population growth, and with significant
technological opportunity available in terms of applied computation/robotics
and genetic engineering. This seems like an emotional argument, not a
scientific one.

~~~
Vraxx
it seems you're not considering the effects that the climate crisis is
expected to have on the conditions that our food production infrastructure is
based upon. Water/soil/temperature are all pretty big components of this
process that will (and already are to some extent) impact our ability to grow
food.

~~~
beat
And we can't change crops? Or change methods? I'm not buying that. Humans grow
crops everywhere, from equatorial deserts to the arctic circle. And the
changes that make a given crop totally unworkable (as opposed to not quite as
efficient as before) are generation-scale, not the flip of a switch.

Water will still exist. Soil will still exist. Short of postulating worst-case
scenarios (which are possible), this is all stuff we can handle with existing
technology, much less the technology of a century from now.

------
bryanrasmussen
This is why I haven't had future shock in nearly a decade!

also, the changes are coming slower than they once did.

------
m23khan
could it also be the case nowadays, major technological changes require huge
amounts of research and budgets as they tend to span multiple teams and many
people are involved in the process.

In other words, more and more, it is a team-based effort to discover new
things these days.

------
SomeOldThrow
Perhaps technological development is a sigmoid? At least until you escape the
solar system.

------
fnord77
so I guess the singularity isn't near. sorry ray kurzweil

------
ghobs91
I can't remember the name of the phenomenon, but there's a theory that
technological progress happens in cycles.

The first half of each cycle contains large spurts of innovation and change
which result in big shifts to how the world works (internet, vaccines, the
automobile, jets, nuclear power/weapons).

The second half contains incremental improvements on those big innovations and
focus more on convenience/leisure (social media connecting the world, uber,
netflix, airbnb, etc).

We're currently in the second incremental half, but things like Space X (mars
colonization, cheap rockets), CRISPR (gene therapy curing numerous ailments),
and the like, tell me that we're not far away from the beginning of another
paradigm shift innovation phase.

~~~
leggomylibro
Your examples of "improving every day quality of life" are "social media
connecting the world, uber, netflix, airbnb"?

Wow, we have very different perspectives on the world.

~~~
ghobs91
Maybe "quality of life" isn't the best way to describe it. I meant things that
are more focused on entertainment or making life more convenient, as opposed
to completely changing culture/life for people.

------
losvedir
The article feels a little weak (though the bit about Wright, Lindbergh, and
Armstrong were interesting). Scott Alexander has another take on the topic
here [0]. It has more examples and charts, but no real conclusion.

[0] [https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/26/is-science-slowing-
dow...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/26/is-science-slowing-down-2/)

------
sylens
sophons

~~~
datenwolf
In the books those only sabotaged experiments regarding subatomic fundamental
physics. There was still tremendous progress in engineering above the quantum
scale.

------
mncharity
Slowing progress? Why is this a surprise?

Take HN threads on drones, where it's taken for granted that they should be
regulated so as to be "perfectly safe".

New personal transport tech, that I hear of mostly via they're being variously
banned.

Shenzhen with few-hour delivery on assorted scooters, vs NYC's long-term
debates over just what kinds of scooters to un-outlaw.

A visiting teacher from a high-school that still has lathes, near a middle-
school with bandsaws, and their New England colleagues shock.

Fire and building codes that are a century thick accumulation of violations of
the guidance that you shouldn't make major life decisions in the immediate
aftermath of disaster trauma. Built on assumptions of decades-old now obsolete
tech.

A high-water mark of running directly onto the BOS-LGA shuttle, with flight
attendants later walking the aisles to collect two twenties from everyone, now
sunk to security theater and prohibitive expense.

Greyhound leveraging corruption in politics and law enforcement, and press
incompetence, to crush low-cost competitors. Leaving a black market mostly for
illegals, the poor screwed, and the labor pool less flexible.

An industrial policy around patents that's been recognized as badly adjusted
for tech for my entire multidecade career, and I don't expect to be fixed
before retirement. Extensive valleys of death between research and
commercialization, and between commercialization and long-term availability.

Progress in human interface devices being straightjacketed for decades into
DIY by patents, then building towards ferment around VR/AR, only to be laid
waste by acquisitions. If the soviet-design-bureaus of FAMG quickly achieve
mass deployment, then it may have sort of been worth it, but what a cost of
missed opportunities.

One could go on, but I'm unsure even this was useful.

The US has been a major driver of world technological change. And it seems the
US has come to embraced friction over ferment, a geriatric peaceful quiet over
the dirty disruptive inconvenience of progress.

Watching US writing about China, I'm repeatedly reminded of an old Europe
writing about a new US. Sclerotic societies marveling and contemptuous and
angry at one less mired. They did eventually improve - rebuilding after
massive death and cities become rubble. Hmm, the Black Death had a similar
effect. Perhaps with improved social tech and AR, we can manage a less painful
rejuvenation?

