
The pace of major breakthroughs has declined - huac
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2015/09/you-call-this-progress/
======
ZenoArrow
> "Should we succeed at controlled, sustained, net-positive fusion, we would
> qualify it as a new face at the table. I might characterize it as the most
> expensive way to create electricity ever devised (and electricity is not the
> hard nut to crack)."

It's not even been developed, yet the author is convinced it will be 'the most
expensive way to create electricity ever devised'.

The article is riddled with statements like that, that twist history to serve
the author's narrative. In the list of developments unfamiliar to the person
from the 19th century we have the toaster and the blender, listed as if these
would be modern marvels. In comparison, the push into space over the last 65
years is downplayed, as if the fact we aren't all taking space holidays is
some indication that the field has been stagnant. Whilst it's a shame there
haven't been any manned missions to moons and planets since the 70s, there's
been a ton of development in the field... satellites, telescopes, space
probes, space stations, etc...

I'd also suggest that a lot of the developments in technology over the past 65
years have been too small to see. Semiconductor manufacturing, bio sciences,
etc... Does it really matter if developments aren't immediately obvious to the
eye?

~~~
DennisP
If he's only looking at ITER he might have a point. He's ignoring much cheaper
possibilities, ranging from conservative but more compact approaches like
MIT's ARC design and UW's dynomak, to aneutronic designs like Tri-Alpha and
Helion.

UW claims the dynomak would cost less than coal:
[http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/inside-the-
dynomak-a...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/inside-the-dynomak-a-
fusion-technology-cheaper-than-coal)

Aneutronic fusion has the potential to be far cheaper than any other energy
source.

~~~
gus_massa
I made some calculations.

The total cost of ITER is $14 billons (and going up :) ). The total production
of electricity in the word is 20000TWh/year.

If we magically switch to 100% tokamak fusion production, and we want to
recoup the inversion in one year, it would add 0.7 $/MWh to the production
(and distribution cost).

A more realistic scenario is to generate only the mythical 1% using tokamak
fusion reactors, and recoup the money in 10 years. With this modification the
R&D cost is 7 $/MWh.

Just for comparison, the current cost of electricity is 50-150 $/MWh. So 0.7-7
$/MWh is not too much.

Anyway, the ITER project is not even close to make a functional power
generator, so the final cost may be much bigger than $14 billons.

~~~
DennisP
Sure but it's not mainly the R&D, it's the capital cost of such large, complex
reactors. MIT's ARC, to take the most conservative alternative, is also a
tokamak, but with much stronger superconductors it can be built a lot smaller
and cheaper.

MIT has a lot of experience in this area since they already have a tokamak
with the strongest magnetic fields of any in the world. They've made at least
one fundamental breakthrough with it, not too long ago. Of course Congress is
about to cancel their funding.

------
chasing
Sure, if you cherry-pick what you consider "progress," you can manipulate the
numbers to show we've slowed down our rate of progress.

Also, don't belittle "refinements." Sometimes it's figuring out how to make a
single airplane fly that's the easy part -- it's "refining" that idea into a
global network of safe air travel where the real hard work and innovation
happens.

Anyway. This article is silly.

~~~
zzalpha
Not to mention his dismissing computers as "interactive televisions", for
example, is absurdly reductionist in an attempt to force his point.

Agreed, terrible article.

~~~
wutbrodo
I thought that was the stupidest part of the article until I saw this:

"But consider that the amount of funding poured into medical research has
skyrocketed in my lifetime, so that the progress per dollar spent surely is
going down."

Complaining that research is becoming more expensive in _dollar terms_ is
stacking the deck against pretty much any society that has _economic growth_
(read: every society).

~~~
idlewords
This argument is actually correct when it comes to pharmaceuticals. The number
of drugs discovered per $1B in (inflation-adjusted) research spending has
dropped by a factor of 80 since the 1950's. Do a search on 'Erooms Law' for
the relevant papers.

~~~
pixl97
Is that even an argument though? A better way to say the same thing is "Easy
problems get solved first". Or another way to say it "You aren't going to
spend a billion on a problem if you solve it in 10 million".

What we have here is a measurement problem. For example looking at curing
polio and curing AIDS as one issue is disingenuous, it tells us nothing about
the complexity of the actual problem we are solving. To cure AIDS we may have
to solve many hundreds of different problems, many of them usable in other
applications.

~~~
idlewords
Read the paper
([https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85192141/2012-scannell.p...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85192141/2012-scannell.pdf)),
it addresses these objections. The "easy problems" objection is just a form of
the "no true Scotsman" fallacy, where you redefine difficult problems to be
the ones you haven't stumbled across a solution for.

~~~
keithwhor
Uh, isn't that what makes a difficult problem... difficult? I don't think
there's any redefinition going on. I'm not sure I've ever heard somebody say,
"this is really easy, I can't figure it out."

~~~
idlewords
The thing is we don't figure out drugs, we find them by inspired accident. The
attempt to move to a "let's figure it out" approach with computational methods
seems to be what's making us worse at drug discovery.

------
PuffinBlue
This article seems to ignore the speed at which things can be done nowadays,
which makes all those 'familiar' things that bit more amazing to a 1950's
traveller. It also seems to set the metric for progress as the visible
physical changes in the world around us. This ignores the amazing things we
can do today.

Need to get to the other side of the world? 24 hours max. Need to write to
someone other side of the world - instant email. Need to face to face with
someone on the other side of the world - instant video.

Live TV from everywhere, instant access to the worlds information fight in
your pocket, instant social networking when needed too.

Need something built for you? Commission anyone from anywhere in the world in
moments. Maybe even 3D print your complex project overnight.

Got a problem? Ask for help and get responses from people around the world in
seconds. Got a complaint? Publish your grievance and have it shared around
millions of times, maybe even get together with your countrymen and bring down
a tyrannical government using just the power of social communication.

What about simulation and the power computing gives us to 'get it right first
time'? We can do incredible things with minimal physical testing thanks to
computer simulation.

And medically - the author skips over almost the entire field of transplant
surgery as just one single example. We've progressed amazingly far in
medicine. Even in the last 15 years huge advances have been made in trauma
care (thanks in part to Iraq/Afghan wars) that would be astounding to doctors
of the 1990's let alone the 1950's.

We live in a wondrous world full of things that we take for granted. Maybe the
author doesn't realise just how much more connected we are nowadays and just
how much more empowered an individual is in terms of knowledge and creative
potential. And that's not to speak of the incredible advances in energy,
materials science, social progress, reduction of poverty, transport,
communication, education and scores of other fields.

Just because there aren't such highly visible physical changes immediately
apparent (though they're there), that doesn't mean 2015 would be any less of a
stunning place.

~~~
rakoo
You're right, but you're not rebutting his point, you're actually reinforcing
it: all of those things were possible in 1950, we just made them faster. The
whole point of the post is that very little is completely new, meaning (close
to) not understandable to a 1950 man:

> They will no doubt be impressed with miniaturization as an evolutionary
> spectacle, but will tend to have a context for the functional capabilities
> of our gizmos

You say that we can now face to face with people from the other side of the
world in real time -- he says if there was as much _innovation_ (and not just
refinement) as there was between 1885 and 1950, we should be able to interact
with a hologram of someone from the other side of the _Solar System_.

The real change a 1950's man would see is probably how more linked humans are
(mostly first world humans though) and how much more interaction there can be.

~~~
pixl97
Welcome to science.

First rule, exponential growth is not capable forever.

Second rule, duplicating what is already there is far easier than creating
something new.

The second rule is what is important. All of our 'innovation' from 1750 to
1950 was because we decided to interact with the world using the scientific
method. Once we started correctly classifying observations and experiments we
quickly learned the limits of physics. Light speed is light speed and there is
no getting around it. Instantaneous communications over long distance is not
possible. The problem we have is non scientists attempted to make predictions
of the future with no understanding of how reality works. This gave us the
incorrect expectation that we could use unlimited energy forever. Just using
more and more energy to get the job done is not innovative.

With all the easily observable gains taken early, the things we do now are
highly innovative, but require massive amounts of data to do. The reduction in
the amount of energy required to accomplish a task will be the legacy of our
century.

------
brudgers
In 1885 people were flying in balloons. In 1950 radios were ordinarily
furniture, portable radios were luggage, and radio operation was a military
rating. A mere twenty years ago, I accessed the internet with bauds, phone
numbers, parity and gopher. A SVGA resolution picture [800x600 for anyone on
my lawn] took about a cup of coffee to download and the idea of an online
encyclopedia was the stuff of science fiction.

And science fiction is largely a cultural invention of the article's second
epoch. Around 1950 is when it went from a few authors to a literary genre and
ideas about the technological details of the future went from projecting steam
into the future as rockets and submarines to projecting computers and radios.
We don't have personal helicopters for two reasons: the laws of physics and
the laws of information theory. I can order my potatoes and herring online.
Strapping on a jetpack and flying to the Isle of Man for my fix, isn't just
impossible, it's absurd.

I've got Hari Seldon's prognostic pocket calculator prognosticating
Wednesday's weather and wending through the ether to an encyclopedia galactic.
I can text you a photograph of it from a chair in the sky.

The article does not list irony among the cultural we got from ancient Egypt,
and it is civilization which is not attributed a great sense of humor in the
popular cannon. Yet certainly it had been invented by Socrates' day.
Fortunately it thrives today.
[https://youtu.be/ZFsOUbZ0Lr0](https://youtu.be/ZFsOUbZ0Lr0)

------
Moshe_Silnorin
It seems to me that the progress we are making is in technologies of great
generality, computers, AI, and genetics. Once these reach an inflection point,
the world will get impossibly weirder than it ever has.

Genetically informed iterated embryo selection looks like it could lead to
children with higher IQs than any human that has ever lived. Regardless of the
ethics, someone somewhere is going to do this. A world where the average
kindergartener is learning chromodynamics? Talk about a historical
discontinuity.

If we get human level artificial intelligence, this again is a historical
discontinuity.

If we get whole brain emulation, things will get very weird very quickly.

We're just now getting good VR. False realities that seem real and immersive.
This seems like a much bigger jump than that from radio to television.

Maybe we are in a period of stagnation - I'm unsure if this time travel
thought experiment is a good means of measuring progress. However, it seems to
me the world is about to get much weirder this century.

~~~
dogma1138
Well hitting a biological limitation wall is most likely a thing that will
happen and at that point AI and genetic engineering might will be required for
progress to happen but It's not sure if were there yet, and it's not clear if
it will be a "hard" stop or a sluggish ride through much while getting there.

We have fairly limited understanding on how intelligence works at this point,
for example while the general consensus is that average human intelligence has
evolved even in the past 1000 years it's still not clear how "smart" would say
an AMH from circa 100,000 BCE would compare to us today, and many people
believe that with correct nurturing they will be indistinguishable form a
modern human born into a "high IQ" family.

It seems that excluding extreme cases (e.g. mental deficiencies and the
unicorns the likes of Newton) overall intelligence has more to do with your
early development than your genetics. This has been getting more and more
supportive evidence from adoption studies (including separated twins
incidents), use of surrogates, egg and sperm donors show very little
correlation between pure genetics and IQ or academic performance.

On the VR part this isn't a really good example, were getting good VR now
because the components are dirt cheap and available so it requires much less
R&D effort to develop, all of the current VR trends are software based and
they can afford to be because they can get cheap and readily available high
performance high resolution screens, accelerators and other components
required for VR to work. This is exactly the opposite of say the 90's where
the likes of SEGA had to develop side projected micro CRT's and specialized
LCD's to make even the basic premise of VR feasible. However if there was
sufficient reason to pursue VR then well we would've had gotten it much much
sooner.

Allot of the technical innovation especially the one that comes to the
consumer market is more often than not a perfect combination of available
technologies rather than a focused effort. I don't personally see VR as an
example of innovation or any meaningful development effort it's probably the
best case of using current technology rather than innovating I've seen in the
past decade. Heck the VR experience I had as a child in SegaWorld in London 12
years ago impressed me much more than the Oculus Rift 2 SDK i got a year ago.

And this might be an issue there might be less of a pressure today to
"innovate" than it was before, conflict was always an integral part of our
drive for innovation, and it seems that once the 2 leading nations at the time
stopped trying to one up eachother things slowed down.

We could've had a better particle accelerator than the LHC over 30 years ago
if the cold war was still going on, heck the only thing the defense department
seems to care these days about cutting edge particle physics is still neutrino
detection since it can give them a way to detect nuclear submarines.

I for one would not mind if everyone in the world would get a life time dose
of the old Soviet Space religion that would inspire everyone to drive for
something better, but sadly i think we'll need to have a real impending
catastrophe for the bigger nations and the entire planet to start caring about
that again.

If you build a doomsday clock that would say earth will self destruct in 50
years we will have a mars colony withing 30 because this is how our species
works, but as soon as the only thing we care about is the size of the screen
it shouldn't surprise you that some innovation stops because those resources
are now being direct at quite pointless things.

~~~
Moshe_Silnorin
>It seems that excluding extreme cases (e.g. mental deficiencies and the
unicorns the likes of Newton) overall intelligence has more to do with your
early development than your genetics. This has been getting more and more
supportive evidence from adoption studies (including separated twins
incidents), use of surrogates, egg and sperm donors show very little
correlation between pure genetics and IQ or academic performance.

This is, to put it charitably, not the consensus of the relevant science. Once
you get adequate nutrition, which western countries have, IQ if influenced far
more by genetics than environment. Adoption studies show consistently that
adopted children's IQs resemble their genetic parents not their adopted
parents. Twins separated at birth tend to have very similar IQs and
personalities. Programs like Head Start and brain training regimens have
proven to have little impact on IQ and future outcomes - which you wouldn't
expect if environment was the prime factor. We are biological robots, we
should expect our source code to have a significant influence on our
cognition.

The "environment is all that matters" idea is basically Lysenkoism and its
popularity is more do to ideology than science. Your statements are from a
mirror world. I assure you, you're misinformed.

~~~
chrispeel
I'd be happy for a couple of references from you (Moshe_Silnorin) and
dogma1138.

~~~
Moshe_Silnorin
I don't want to play study tennis with dogma. However, here are some
representative examples:

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3182557/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3182557/)

[http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/13/4/148](http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/13/4/148)

IQ and its heritability are about as uncontroversial among psychiatrists as
global warming is among climate scientists.

Here's a good blog post about the personal implications of this, and how this
knowledge can be used productively and charitably:
[http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-
tale...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/)

~~~
dogma1138
That's not completely honest and not the main issue here, it's not about
heritability and the IQ potential but the actual fixed IQ of adults. People
with higher genetic potential for intelligence are considerably more
influenced by their environment and for longer periods than people with lower
potential.

So unless we are talking about <100 and in many cases <90 IQ individuals the
environment plays a bigger role than pure genetics in the final outcome, I've
linked a very recent and very extensive study on that same subject.

~~~
Moshe_Silnorin
Dogma, the claim I disagree with is this: overall intelligence has more to do
with your early development than your genetics.

You know what has a huge influence on your early development, your genetics.
Do you really think I could be as good at math as Terry Tao if I had spent my
childhood practicing? If we raise a chimp right, could it beat Terry Tao?

Yes, high IQ people vary more between tests, but much of this is regression to
the mean. And still scores are relatively stable. The common superstition that
environment and effort matter more than innate capacity is false - also
perseverance is hereditary to some extent, too. I have not read the paper, but
I very much doubt this effect would mean environment matters more than
genetics. If you clone Terry Tao, and let this clone be raised by two average-
IQ parents, he will not grow up to be average.

The summery you provided doesn't seem to discount the value of biological
interventions to any great extent, as the "extended period of synaptogenesis"
would likely have a genetic cause, given our knowledge about the heritability
of IQ.

------
tlogan
I think it is hard to get progress when number of Americans unsure about
evolution _increased_ from 7% to 21% from 1985 to 2005 [1].

I think Idiocracy prediction [2] is what we are getting.

[1]
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16902112](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16902112)
[2] [http://uproxx.com/movies/2014/10/the-many-signs-that-mike-
ju...](http://uproxx.com/movies/2014/10/the-many-signs-that-mike-judges-
idiocracy-is-almost-upon-us/1/)

~~~
dogma1138
As long as we don't start watering our fields with Gatorade and elect
wrestlemania stars as presidents will be alright...

~~~
Omniusaspirer
Reality show star for president isn't looking all that impossible, so we're
probably halfway there.

~~~
reubenmorais
Not just any reality show, Trump has starred in Wrestlemania specifically:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMKFIHRpe7I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMKFIHRpe7I)

~~~
dogma1138
[http://i3.kym-
cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/990/005/721...](http://i3.kym-
cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/990/005/721.jpg)

Were doomed then...

------
lsc
I don't think that the author understands just how computers have changed
everything.

>The big differences are cell phones (which they will understand to be a sort
of telephone, albeit with no cord and capable of sending telegram-like
communications, but still figuring that it works via radio waves rather than
magic), computers (which they will see as interactive televisions),

sure, someone from the '50s would see games systems as interactive televisions
and probably not be too shocked; games systems aren't a world-changing thing
(vs. tv) - the same is true if you use cellphones as, you know, mobile
telephones.

Think about the information we all have in our pockets now.

Like how to fix things... if you don't repair your own stuff... you should try
it one weekend, just for fun. I've used youtube to figure out everything from
how to assemble a crazy-complex sony vaio to replacing a bad fan in a fridge,
to replacing shocks on my motorcycle.

and the textual information that is available to you is also absolutely huge.
We're all carting around a really bad interface to a library that is more vast
than the library of congress... in our pockets.

What I think is interesting here is the huge availability of what would have
been out of print books in the '50s... books who's copyright has expired;
those are available at the snap of the fingers. Even more modern stuff is also
available, of course, it's just not as available as the out of copyright
stuff.

Actually, I think this is the interesting thing going forward... who can
access information, and at what cost. But I think there is sufficient focus on
that.

------
hyperpallium
The major changes to "consumer" behaviour were the Aricultural and Industrial
revolutions. I'm unsure when the so-called "Information revolution" began -
with the first writing, which was Sumerian accounting records (certainly data
storage and processing)? Perhaps markets and the "consumer" were the most
fundamental change.

We try to accomodate technological change - shape it to existing consumer
behaviour - rather than change everything.

A great example is Moore's Law. The mind-boggling doubling of transistor
density fortyearly is now routine. We're actually _unsettled_ by the hiccups
at 10nm.

Thought experiment: can you imagine a new technology which changed costs so
drastically that current societal structures (municipal; national;
consumer/market; informational) could not accomodate them, and instead would
require another revolution? [limited by imagination, of course]

At some point, we'll have succeeded at modelling human nature, and we're self-
limited from further change. Aliens might do things differently (or might not
- it coud be that the greater part of humanity is just cooperative
intelligence, common to all sapients).

------
reasonattlm
The article reinforces a point I was making recently; biotechnology and
medicine is essentially invisible to most people, and they ignore the massive
gains made in past decades, and ignore the potential for the near future.

[https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2015/10/the-
arcane.php](https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2015/10/the-arcane.php)

We are in the midst of a transformative revolution in the capabilities of
medical technology and other biotechnologies. But most people don't care, take
their vague ideas of the present state of medicine as a stable situation, set
in stone, and don't devote any attention to medicine until they have to.

Medical research and development is an arcane world: invisible, you don't know
anything about it, and yet it is the greatest of influences upon your own
personal future, determining whether you will live or die, suffer or be
healthy.

------
kisstheblade
I would think anybody from the fifties would be absolutely shocked if you gave
them a tablet with an internet connection and showed them how to use it. They
could access any newspapers, books, songs, movies from any time, all the
information they ever needed, all their friends whereabouts and actions, and
could contact them instantly with text, voice or audio. Learn new things or
just play fun games. Look at the map of the earth with street views from all
around the globe. Even pictures from the surface of mars. And on the more
disturbing side they could look up any sick violence or sex stuff to their
hearts desire...

Yes it's "kind of incremental" but my god, all this in a device the size of a
clipboard pulling stuff out of thin air. Now that's magic, no other word for
it.

And this is just a tablet. Plenty more amazing "incremental" improvements. Put
this time traveller in a tesla and push the pedal down. No sound and instant
acceleration...

------
robryk
The author fails to note the difference in the ease of access to information.
Some time ago, if I wanted to e.g. find out what is the half life of some
medication in blood, I'd be lucky to find that in encyclopaedia and would
probably need to visit a library or consult a pharmacist. Now I can find that
out in one minute, without leaving my home.

~~~
ghaff
Specifically you'd probably want the current PDR (physicians desk reference).
There were a number of these fat and expensive references for various fields
that were still woefully incomplete and non-current by modern standards.

------
pm90
I don't really agree with the author's method of measuring progress.
"Progress" is not measured by how surprising today's world is compared with a
world, say 100 years ago.

Despite the frenzy around technology and startups today, I do sincerely
believe that we are making a lot of "scientific progress". We have more people
than ever before doing scientific research and publishing papers. We have more
physicists, doctors, more engineers etc. and I would argue that having so many
skilled people in itself is "progress". Also, we have come a long way with
society: normalizing gay marriage, stripping down racist laws etc.

Anyways, point being: scientific and social progress does not always manifest
itself as glitzy gizmos.

------
mojuba
Technological progress mostly relies on discoveries made in physics. Things
that will amaze a 1885 person in 1950 were mostly made possible with
electricity and derivative technologies, plus nuclear physics, and a few other
things. Even engines for our flying machines wouldn't have been possible
without electricity.

So the reason the leap between 1950 and today is not as noticeable in terms of
the author's time machine experiment, may be because there have been no more
major, truly groundbreaking discoveries made in physics, as in, e.g.
discovering a new force in nature not known before etc.

But the author is of course right in saying that the past 65 years were marked
with a lot of hard work rather than earth shattering discoveries.

~~~
OopsCriticality
> Technological progress mostly relies on discoveries made in physics.

I couldn't disagree more. Take the Haber process as a counterexample from
chemistry, or vaccinations as a counterexample from medicine.

~~~
mojuba
Medicine is not technology. Materials are, but in the end chemistry is just a
subsidiary of physics.

~~~
OopsCriticality
By that logic, physics is merely an ersatz subsidiary of mathematics,
therefore technological progress mostly relies on discoveries made in
mathematics.

Obligatory xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/435/](https://xkcd.com/435/)

------
perlgeek
I think one of the biggest differences a visitor from 1950 would notice is
food.

The Germans were called "Krauts" in the second world war because they ate
Sauerkraut, a then prevalent way to preserve some food with vitamins for the
winter.

And today you can go into the store in winter, and buy twenty kinds of fresh
fruit from all over the world, and twenty more types of vegetables.

You don't have to stockpile for winter, and don't have to change your diet
signficantly because fresh stuff is unavailable.

We don't think of that as a huge technological advancment, but it has a huge
impact on the daily life. Likewise the prevalence of washing machines. The
availability of public and private transport in a way unimaginable to somebody
from 1950.

------
pja
Related: “Eroom’s Law”[1], coined in this Nature paper:
[http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v11/n3/full/nrd3681.html](http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v11/n3/full/nrd3681.html)
which states that the cost of discovering a new drug has been increasing
exponentially for 60 years.

Obligatory log graph: [http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/wp-
content/uploads/site...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/wp-
content/uploads/sites/2/2015/04/RD-trend.png)

Some discussion at the “In The Pipeline” blog:
[http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2012/03/08/ero...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2012/03/08/erooms_law)
[http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2012/03/14/the...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2012/03/14/the_blackian_demon_of_drug_discovery)
[http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2012/03/12/the...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2012/03/12/the_brute_force_bias)

[1] You may now groan.

------
unoti
Medically, we now have drugs that break up blood clots and give heart attack
patients a fighting chance if they get to the hospital fast enough. Same thing
with some stroke victims. Today people who would have died from anaphylactic
shock from peanut allergies or bee stings can carry around an Epi pen and a
couple of Benadryl tablets and have a great chance of surviving an attack[1].
When I was a boy scout, I was taught the sequence of CPR was ABC- Airway,
Breathing, Circulation. They very recently changed it to CAB, and there were
quite a few other things that we've learned along the way that changed how it
works. I understand that the CPR program is changing again at the end of this
year.

Of course, these change are small and not on the scale of nuclear fission. But
there have been tons of significant medical changes in the last 40 years that
increase quality of life and let people live who otherwise would die. And I'm
not even getting into the changes I consider even more significant medically,
or in AI. Things computers are doing today weren't even imagined a generation
ago.

[1] Epi pens started going out to the public in the 80's. If you have a
serious allergy that could lead to your airway closing up, and don't yet have
an Epi pen, go see your doctor and get some. People still needlessly die from
that stuff all the time, and it can be prevented.

------
oneJob
This has been said about a billion times before, in many different periods, in
many different ways. Breakthroughs often come only after long incubation
periods, which to me should be counted as part of the breakthrough, just an
unseen part. We are about to see incubation give way to a Cambrian explosion
of innovations. I just hope we survive this evolutionary trial.

~~~
ZenoArrow
I agree. To give an example of what I think you're referring to, the field of
synthetic biology is evolving rapidly (perhaps too rapidly in my opinion, the
implications are fairly far reaching and I'm not sure we have the cultural
maturity to handle them). Even if the most visible fruits of this field appear
later they'd still be linked to the research happening now.

------
Taek
A big source of the perceived slowdown partially comes from the grant-
oriented, near-sighted, and incredibly toxic environment that today's
researchers have to deal with.

Making something faster, cheaper, or smaller is incremental progress with
immediate payouts. It's easy to sell that as a research project. But some
newfangled warp drive? Flying cars? Self sustaining space stations? None of
those things have any sort of short term payout, and so they don't get
dollars. Or at least, a lot fewer than they probably deserve.

And so we get incremental progress on existing technology instead. If we want
more _new_ , then we need to finance it. And that means making investments
with 0 return for 20 years. That means financing people who are coming around
at things they don't understand with no certainty of financial return.

------
cronjobber
What's happening today is technological (and socio-technological) _change_ at
a great pace. However in order to call it _progress_ most people would require
it to be _good_ for us, the people.

That's where the article's concluding question becomes relevant: "How reliant
are you on the narrative of progress for your sanity and understanding of our
world and its future?"

The answer is that to a thoughtful observer much of the aforementioned
_change_ is not of the _good_ kind anymore. People are increasingly
disenfranchised in the new techno-social environent; the recent upswell of
talk about the robopocalypse etc. is just a projection of trends long
underway.

So we end up with feel-good "progressivism" as a prosthetic replacement of
actual progress.

------
chrispeel
Horace Dediu has looked at how quickly technologies are adopted. He doesn't
see any increase in speed of technology adoption (he said this in a recent
"Critical Path" podcast), which he was expecting and looking for.
[https://twitter.com/asymco/status/631108777333403648](https://twitter.com/asymco/status/631108777333403648)

Technology becomes more complex with time, so _new_ technologies are
necessarily more complex, and require an increasing amount of effort to
develop. The Wright Bros could research and develop an airplane on their own.
I see no chance that two brothers can invent and implement a fusion reactor or
spaceflight to Mars on their own.

------
openfuture
I think this is a symptom of all the 'technical debt' we have as a
society/species in law, morals and other 'difficult' things.

That quote about the future (It's already here - just not evenly distributed)
is a good description of the situation.

There's going to be a war (its sort of already started), hopefully we can come
out the other end ready to innovate again. Right now it is too dangerous to
share some technologies (for example how to harness nuclear energy) so it puts
a hamper on innovation.

Basically we're starting to reach our moral limits in more fields meaning we
need better morals before we can continue.

~~~
pixl97
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter)

You're assuming morals can be overcome. Information complexity may simply be
an obstacle that cannot be overcome. At higher energy levels technical and
societal change may simply be too dangerous, and to survive long term
societies must lock themselves into a steady state where innovation is
actively quashed.

~~~
openfuture
Well that sucks.

But when faced with problems the only option is to find a solution.

------
afarrell
We have indeed had fewer innovations in consumer goods that take up visual
space in a living room.

However we have had massive innovation in medicine--many diseases that were
once a death sentence are now treatable.

Cars, though still totally recognizable as cars, are much safer than they
were. Airplane flights are both cheaper and safer.

Infant mortality has dropped. Certain diseases have been eradicated.

Due in part to the ability to communicate and coordinate economic activity on
a global scale, the number of people in extreme poverty has declined since
1950--Not the percentage of people, the absolute number of people.

~~~
dtech
You're missing the authors point, heck you're even reinstating it yourself:

> Cars, though still totally recognizable as cars, are much safer than they
> were. Airplane flights are both cheaper and safer.

> Certain diseases have been eradicated.

That's what he's saying. We've mostly (massively) refined existing technology
instead of revolutionized it: vaccines, airplanes and cars are all pre-1950
technology.

Not sure if I agree, but it feels like you haven't even read the article.

------
baldajan
I think the reason he or others may perceive a slow down in innovation happens
because innovation is more incremental, but is released far more quickly, thus
making up for small increments.

A good example is the Windows or Mac OS, which took 2-7 years to be released;
now it's happening on a yearly basis, and we're finding that too slow. So
maybe in some unintuitive sense, we perceive a slow down due to it speeding up
in innovation.*

*this of course doesn't apply to everything, and some ideas do takes years to develop a working prototype.

------
guard-of-terra
You won't see many planes in 1950, and TV was unheard of on most of the
planet. Change comes with different pace to various places of the world.

But yes, we're mostly catching up, not leaping forward.

~~~
wtbob
> But yes, we're mostly catching up, not leaping forward.

What concerns me is that we (or at least some folks) used to leap forward. I'm
struck by a comparison to the citizens of the Soviet sphere of influence: they
were almost all materially much better off than they had been years before,
but they weren't as much better off as citizens of market states. The Soviet
system did, indeed, enable them to catch up and even surpass the Britain of
1914 or the America of 1917—but that didn't seem as good a deal in 1987.

I wonder how much potential innovation and improvement has died in the cradle
due to regulation, financial disincentives, cultural aversion &c. Sure: we're
better off now than we were a decade ago, but how much better off could we be?

~~~
guard-of-terra
We could be a lot better. Assuming "we" is "people from reasonably developed
country".

We could work 6 hours per day, 4 days a week.

We could avoid having problems with drugs, ghettos, extreme poverty - that
sort of self-breeding thing.

We could live in fairer world, with less government supervision. Right now
there are whole classes of businesses for which ripping customers off is okay
(cell companies for example). This did not have to be the norm.

The price? Some undeveloped countries will probably be left to their own
devices. Which is an unstable situation: once you solve infant mortality for
them, you get population boom and then political instability. Hunger, I'm
afraid - maybe on grand scale. Some things will be more expensive. Right now
services are expensive and goods are cheap. It could be reversed a bit.

------
eitally
I would argue that the advances in industrialization, miniaturization, energy,
and computing are no less important that some of the more visibly valuable
inventions in prior decades/generations, but that they are largely supporting
technology that provides a scaffolding for us to invent upon rather than
inventions that [externally] impress by their own merits. And it's not like
our race to the moon was technologically more impressive, either; we just had
a direct application of technology we decided to pursue. My $.02 is that for
the past 20 years or so, when high-tech manufacturing exploded the domestic
economies of the developing world, we've been in a dichotomous environment
where the advanced nations continue to pursue original research [but in a
largely aimless manner due to all sorts of political incompetence] while the
rest of the world accelerates their internal development and jockey for
position to gain seats at the table as humanity collectively decide what's
next.

"Next" may be manned flight to mars, or it may be elimination of fossil fuels,
or eradication of disease, or something completely off the wall, but the point
is that -- excepting poverty, war and education -- the world is in a pretty
good place right now and the only thing separating most countries from another
development-wise is money, not invention.

------
rch
> They will no doubt be impressed with miniaturization as an evolutionary
> spectacle

They might also take note of how difficult these devices are to repair

------
lordnacho
In terms of material progress, you need to understand fundamentals before you
can apply them.

There are only so many fundamental things about the universe. We are still
learning, it's true. But we've pushed the darkness back on a lot of fronts
since the late 1800s. You kind of expect that once science takes a hold there
will be fewer mysteries.

As it happens, the late 1800s and early 1900s were boom times for fundamental
science. Radioactivity, Relativity, Quantum, and so on.

Once you have the fundamentals, you need some economic organisation to occur
before thing like mobile phones appear. People need to be figuring out exactly
how the theories will be useful, what kinds of work there will be in the area,
and so forth. Much of what we've seen lately is this, finding niches for
things we know about the natural world.

I can understand the author's disappointment. Not many things that are new are
undreamed of. But remember your imagination depends on how you think the world
works, and we now know more about that.

------
abecedarius
In a related vein, one transformative idea
([http://www.theguardian.com/science/small-
world/2013/oct/21/b...](http://www.theguardian.com/science/small-
world/2013/oct/21/big-nanotech-atomically-precise-manufacturing-apm)) has been
mostly ignored over the last 15 years or so -- as if "Space travel is utter
bilge" had won out instead of Sputnik. At some point the continued progress in
fields like biomolecular engineering is going to make the potential too
obvious to miss, and we'll be reminded that technology is not a synonym for
computers.

(This is another 'jam tomorrow' response, like a lot of others here. I pretty
much agree with the OP about the progress seen before and after 1950.)

------
argumentum
Whether you view a new fangled technology as "magic" depends on if you
understand how it works. Scientists in the 1800s knew much about electricity,
combustion, etc well before a "19th century rube":

 _Our 19th Century rube would fail to recognize cars /trucks, airplanes,
helicopters, and rockets; radio, and television (the telephone was 1875, so
just missed this one); toasters, blenders, and electric ranges. Also unknown
to the world of 1885 are inventions like radar, nuclear fission, and atomic
bombs. The list could go on. Daily life would have undergone so many changes
that the old timer would be pretty bewildered, I imagine. It would appear as
if the world had blossomed with magic: voices from afar; miniature people
dancing in a little picture box; zooming along wide, hard, flat roads at
unimaginable speeds—much faster than when uncle Billy’s horse got into the
cayenne pepper. The list of “magic” devices would seem to be innumerable._

Similarly the perspective of the average 21st century "rube" (though likely to
be better educated than his 19th century counterpart) has little understanding
of computing or networking, or genome sequencing etc.

Growing up in the 90s reading Bruce Coville's "my teacher is an alien" series,
I remember being awed by the description of a "universal translator" device
gifted by aliens to the main character. Yet within 20 years, everyone I know
has a much more capable version of that device in their pocket.

The author obviously has a right to his opinions, but it's clear that this
article is just that: an opinion piece. Since he's a physicist, his
perspective might be somewhat muddled by the place of science in technological
progress:

Science > Engineering > Market Adoption

Today's scientists are discovering things that tomorrow's engineers will turn
into technologies that day after tomorrow's entrepreneurs will consumerize.
It's worked this way throughout history, and yes, it's faster now than ever
before.

------
scythe
This guy is a perpetual Chicken Little. He's been featured on /r/economics
multiple times. His argument is two-pronged: he plays up the inventions of
yesteryear, and plays down the inventions of today.

Even the invention of the television was gradual. It was developed via
"refinements" of the facsimilie. Ignorance of history is a bad argument. Ditto
antibiotics: first arsenic, then atoxyl, then arsphenamine, then
sulfanilamide, finally penicillin. The car was nothing but a road-adapted
train. The airplane was preceded by ground-towed heavier-than-air craft. And
NASA's budget was massive relative to the Wrights'. The telephone came from
the telegraph, and the steam engine might have been invented in Alexandria
when Jesus was around (assuming He existed).

------
thesumofall
At least in one domain, life expectancy, progress hasn't stopped. It just
might not anymore have the extreme momentum of earlier times:
[https://thaddeusktsim.wordpress.com/2012/02/24/were-there-
no...](https://thaddeusktsim.wordpress.com/2012/02/24/were-there-no-old-
people-in-1900/)

Same for GDP. Would be interested in median income over the last 100 years
though. [http://ourworldindata.org/data/growth-and-distribution-of-
pr...](http://ourworldindata.org/data/growth-and-distribution-of-
prosperity/gdp-growth-over-the-last-centuries/)

------
powera
This article is a hypothesis looking for evidence. And ignoring evidence
blatantly when it doesn't fit his hypothesis. And I'm not even sure what his
hypothesis is apart from the statement that we're not inventing electricity a
second time.

------
Futurebot
It's worth noting that Peter Thiel has also advanced a version of this
argument (progress stagnant since 1970):
[http://www.technologyreview.com/qa/530901/technology-
stalled...](http://www.technologyreview.com/qa/530901/technology-stalled-
in-1970/)

along with Tyler Cowen (low hanging fruit has been picked, specifically in the
US):
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Stagnation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Stagnation)

------
joesmo
Yes, the pace of fundamental inventions has slowed down, but that has nothing
to do with progress.

I think the author confuses two ideas: progress and technological inventions.
Progress is not defined by the appearance of new "fundamental" inventions. A
lot of it comes from how we use technology. Sure the Internet was just a
bigger network, but by being a world-wide network instead of a LAN, it has
enabled many things previously not possible. The author's take on
technological inventions is very narrow. He's only looking for new
"fundamental" inventions.

And new inventions have nothing to do with progress. You know what I call
progress?

"Economic growth over the last 200 years completely transformed our world, and
poverty fell continuously over the last two centuries." \--
[http://ourworldindata.org/data/growth-and-distribution-of-
pr...](http://ourworldindata.org/data/growth-and-distribution-of-
prosperity/world-poverty/)

That's the only real, measurable progress. Everything else he lists as
"fundamental" inventions are simply a means to an end. They are not progress
itself. Finding the cure for smallpox isn't progress. Progress is curing
smallpox. Nuclear fusion isn't progress. Progress is getting it developed
enough for it to become a real energy source and getting people to use it.
Even the author acknowledges this, but he's way too confused on inventions vs.
progress.

Finally, he adds a section on social progress. It's hard to argue that at all.
Yes, we're more open to differences ... in the West. But obviously, the author
has completely forgotten about such nation-states as Russia, Saudi Arabia,
Qatar, UAE, Afghanistan, China ... yeah, I really don't need to keep going.
Global social progress is indeed a myth, but I do think certain parts of the
world are making some progress. Finally, he also ends up equating decline of
'social progress' with lack of progress which is ridiculous because social
progress is only local and just because something reverts back to the way it
used to be doesn't mean progress wasn't made for a time (although this is a
rather popular, yet extremely wrong idea in the US).

------
api
Open Question: do we think that we basically understand all the laws of nature
at this point?

If that were true, we should expect few new fundamental breakthroughs... ever.
We will simply explore the vast combinatorial space of what is possible within
these laws, essentially remixing the 20th century forever.

I am personally skeptical of this. I think it might be an illusion created by
dogmatizing what we have now and being a bit too satisfied with that. Same
thing happened with the wisdom of the greeks, taking us over a thousand years
to finally realize heavier objects don't fall faster.

------
JesperRavn
If one looks at GDP per capita or life expectancy, progress did not stop or
slow in the 50's.

I think the main difference is that progress is now made in much smaller
increments. E.g. smartphones have transformed our lives, and yet the
smartphone era really begin with the iPhone, which was itself not
revolutionary from a purely technological viewpoint. It was however,
sufficiently better in its hardware and software to appeal to a much larger
market.

------
streptomycin
_Cancer, Multiple Sclerosis, and a raft of other pernicious diseases resist
cures despite large continuing investments._

I'd much rather get cancer today than in 1970:
[https://c0nc0rdance.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/crukmig_1000...](https://c0nc0rdance.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/crukmig_1000img-12647.jpg)

------
igl
I only agree about the 'energy predicament' not being taken seriously. I don't
think progress can be measured like he described. The steam-engine and
frequency signaling where huge, transformed our society greatly and still are
the base of many things we do now. But he sounds like "there are no
hoverboards so progress must be declining".

------
DrFunke
Part of the issue here is classifying non-linear ideas in linear terms (i.e.
Bubble or no Bubble). What we regard as the tech industry is an integration of
countless individual markets, each moving at their own relative pace. A
collapse in something like the app-game market wouldn't necessarily dictate a
collapse in AI.

------
nickthemagicman
I've always wondered if there was a limit to human knowledge.

Just like a Chimpanze can't even 'comprehend' how to use a cell phone.....

If we are indeed animals and monkey descendants would that mean that there's a
limit of understanding the universe that human will never be able to surpass?

And are we getting closer to that limit?

~~~
pixl97
The human body is chock full of limits. So much so that you are using
electrons modulated at different voltages to communicate to another person
instead of using analog mouth vibrations right now. The story of humanity is
one of using tools to surpass those limits. Now as our technology advances we
can understand the nature of human limitations, and possible novel ways of
overcoming them, such as gene therapy or direct brain to computer interfaces.
There is also the possibility that we will create our replacement capable of
surviving the harsh realities outside of our comfortable planet.

------
ndr
This would definitely look like sci-fi to someone jumping from 1950:
[https://www.ted.com/talks/hugh_herr_the_new_bionics_that_let...](https://www.ted.com/talks/hugh_herr_the_new_bionics_that_let_us_run_climb_and_dance)

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Since around the same time, income inequality has grown massively and rises in
wages have become mostly confined to the top earners.

I wonder if these are related.

The era of unrelenting progress and ever-rising living standards is gone. It
was a real thing for a few decades, but I think it's coming to an end.

~~~
afarrell
Income inequality in the United States has grown massively.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I'm talking about the Western world, yes. But is this not also true in others
parts of the world? Has anywhere seen income inequality _decline_?

~~~
manifold
Yes, inter-country inequality has been coming down despite in-country
inequality going up. The rich have been getting richer and the poorest have
been getting richer while the middle class have stood still.

------
markbnj
Just taken at face value there is nothing surprising about the article's
premise. As we continue to increase our knowledge more problems move into the
"solved" category, and what remains is the harder stuff.

~~~
frewsxcv
Could it be the case that everything that has been 'discovered' in history has
at some point been 'the harder stuff'?

~~~
markbnj
Well yes, but I am thinking on a more meta scale... or do we believe there is
an endless supply of hard problems? At some point, assuming we continue, will
we not have figured it all out?

------
DrNuke
At the end of 2015, major breakthroughs are combined science & tech efforts
involving so many players and so many small, incremental steps that we may
even not be aware that they are just happening under our eyes.

------
crimsonalucard
We live in a dream world where we believe technology can eventually save us
from our sins. We dream that technology will allow us to live unsustainably,
forever in a world with limited resources.

Unfortunately, we are bounded by limitations in physics, energy and nature.
Technology is derived from the same universe, and therefore, like all other
things in nature, there is a limit. We can't keep sucking oil out of a well
forever.

Whether we have reached peak technology is debateable. It would be wise to
approach such an idea with caution. But to utterly deny that a technological
peak even exists is a fools errand.

------
oldmanjay
i don't have much of a reason to believe that breakthroughs need to be
regular, since by nature they are unpredictable.

in a monstrously reductive sense, I feel like this article is analyzing a
series of coin flips and commenting on a streak of tails.

it doesn't help that the scope of the topic is far broader than could be
covered in the given text, and entire fields were ignored out of existence.

in all, I was entertained, so I'm happy.

------
fizixer
Looks like calculated trolling. Either it's a social experiment or the author
is trying to look for something in responses.

Or he has no idea what he's talking about.

