
Why I Believe That This Will Be The Most Innovative Decade In History - olalonde
http://singularityhub.com/2012/06/27/why-i-believe-that-this-will-be-the-most-innovative-decade-in-history/
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DanielBMarkham
_With every good comes a bad, and our optimism always needs to be grounded.
Synthetic biology could lead to new forms of bioterrorism; surveillance
technologies—which are becoming ever more sophisticated—already provide
governments more information than Big Brother ever dreamed about; no
guidelines have yet been developed for ethics in the exponential era. My
worry: will humanity evolve fast enough to fulfill its increasing
responsibilities?_

I've learned in several years of writing opinion articles and reading them
that there is easy optimism and there is easy pessimism. Both have benefits
and drawbacks. Neither adequately describe where we're at as a civilization.

Back in the 1940s, the A-bomb caused a lot of really smart people to ask "Yes,
we've invented it, but are we ready as a species and a society to _handle_ it?
Do we have the morals and culture in place to know what to do with this kind
of change?"

It was an incredible advancement in application of raw power -- but it was at
the state level, and states have some mechanisms already in place for managing
big things that kill people.

What's happening now is that things with more and more impact are being made
available to smaller and smaller groups of people. There _are_ no mechanisms
in place to deal with that. There is no culture, no common morality, no
historical tradition to draw on. It's like four thousand years of philosophy
and history have prepared us for a huge exam -- one in which I am not sure we
have studied enough.

This is the reason you see the state trying to intrude in on so many areas of
the Information Age -- huge amounts of social and information power is being
widely distributed in ways that never have happened before, and they feel that
they should rightly be in control of it all. (I disagree strongly, but looking
at history it makes sense why they would think so.)

Having said that, I'm mildly optimistic short-term (1-40 years), very
pessimistic medium-term (40-400 years), and agnostic long-term (after the
singularity, if it happens). We'll see. To address the post directly, yes, the
next decade will continue to show improvement just as the past one has. It
will also keep surfacing things trends that we've never seen before but
haven't reached crisis levels yet. It is definitely an incredible time to be
alive.

~~~
sophacles
As a counter to this, humans have been doing small groups more or less
effectively for... well forever. There are certain controls built into small
groups that aren't at state scale:

* stronger pressure to fit the ruleset/norms

* stronger "altruistic" motives - people within the group getting the group ahead is a stronger drive in small groups than at a state level (generally as a trend, yes there are counter examples)

* more people, in a smaller group, the members are all people, and you know them, compared to at a state level, where most people are not actual people, but 'others' (again general trend, also, other is a specific term, look it up).

* small groups are more constrained geographically. They can only exclusively occupy small spaces, or must be interspersed geographically with other groups. This necessitates certain considerations states don't have for the 'nuclear' option - e.g. sure we could nuke them, and kill all our crops and kids too, that might be dumb.

I'm not saying this is a full counter, and renders the stuff you are saying
incorrect, nor am I suggesting a full anarchist solution to the future. I just
am pointing out that there is some balances to the problem you present. I see
the points I mentioned above as bringing less state authoritarianism, and a
general aggregate good for the majority of people as small groups have the
ability to affect change for themselves. Of course, some of the concerns you
bring up are very scary and very real. The trick for us (humanity) is to find
a sane balance and strike it.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Thanks for the counter-points. I believe your argument is in some way a
version of "but just like the A-bomb example, we already have mechanisms in
place that can help deal with this"

This is true. Note that the A-bomb situation may very well still spiral out of
control over the next 20-40 years. Too often we get lost in arguing immediate
benefits or drawbacks and lose the plot on the bigger picture.

Suffice it to say that I don't understand how these local group dynamics will
do anything except exacerbate the state's interest in controlling what the
population knows and thinks. I imagine "good" effects, like promoting
altruism, will be encouraged. "Bad" effects, like pointing out gaping problems
with civil liberties and calling for massive peaceful political change, will
be stifled.

Also note that traditional ideas of small groups have them all being in the
same geographical place. This is no longer true, and this alone might have
greater ramifications than any of the other technological changes do. We could
very well see (medium-term) a re-introduction of the clan and lots of
associated desultory and internecine warfare. Or just general chaos and
instability. Beats me, I'm just an internet commenter. You should know what
kind of track record we have :)

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exratione
The early and mid-20th centuries looked like they were on the way to the
overpower future: if trends in power generation continued as they had, by now
we'd all have access to the dedicated output of a few nuclear power plants for
a hundred dollars a month. It is interesting to speculate on what technology
would arise at that point.

Instead power generation and storage turned out to be some combination of
harder than expected and less desirable than thought. We got the infotech
future instead, the path that wasn't foreseen, but is probably the better one
from the point of view of living standards, since it drives (a) medicine, and
(b) technological development as a whole.

The point here is that people still live in the 50s when they knee-jerk about
the technologies they consider progress - they think about things that are on
the line of increasing power rather than on the line of increasing data.

------
roc
I'm getting a little tired of articles making claims about the rate of
technological progress (arguing either that it's speeding up or slowing down)
that don't set any objective qualifications for where we should measure a
given innovation as falling on the timeline.

Every science mentioned in this article has been the product of decades of
research. All have _some_ practical applications already in progress. All have
_more_ promising applications on the horizon.

But if you provide no measurements or qualifications from which we can judge
to which decade they belong, you can simply drop goalposts where-ever you like
to make any argument you like.

~~~
stretchwithme
The only thing that is clear is that we are 10 years closer to any given
nirvanic innovation than we were ten years ago. :-)

The biggest thing happening how much easier and faster it is to share
information. The full impact of that is probably not yet apparent.

~~~
drumdance
Alternatively, we are 10 years further away because we only just now
understand how hard a given problem domain is. I'm looking at you, strong AI.
:-)

~~~
stretchwithme
unless part of learning how to do something is learning how difficult it is.
You don't obtain a degree in a difficult field and then feel you are further
behind because you understand the challenges better.

But yeah, the perception of how far we have to go works that way.

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amcintyre
_"In this and the next decade, we will begin to make energy and food abundant,
inexpensively purify and sanitize water from any source, cure disease, and
educate the world’s masses."_

I may just be cynical, but I don't see how that automatically follows from
rapid tech advances. I thought most of the problems of distributing food and
education were "people problems" that won't just go away because you have
fancy gadgets.

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dreadsword
The next few decades will be a time of progress & disparity. No doubt that
technology and innovation will flourish, but access to that technology and its
benefits will not be well distributed.

Greg Bear's "Queen of Angels" (and "Slant") set up a great example of this
world: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of_Angels_(novel)>

------
vacri
I find it hard to believe that any decade will be more innovative than the
1960s, which had massive structural changes across the board: to both hard and
soft sciences; international politics and the routine appearance of new
countries; explosion of mass communication; major shifts in art and music;
widespread experimentation with wildly different religions; huge increases in
foreign travel; significant strides forward in civil rights and self
determination across the globe... it's hard to think of a field that _didn't_
have strong if not fundamental changes in the 1960s. I guess we have another
eight years before we'll really know...

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doc4t
I'm amused that it seems that at any period of time the men who lived it
believed it was the most innovative or golden.

Is there a term for this perception?

~~~
abrahamsen
Exponential growth.

~~~
arethuza
Or more realistically, half way up a logistic curve.

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Mz
Eh, opinion pieces like this typically annoy me. They are about as bad as your
daily horoscope: They talk about the future as if it is something that will
happen _to_ us and is already largely predetermined rather than something we
can activly participate in creating and shaping. We all make choices every
single day which help shape the future. I think the world would be a better
place if we talked more about what we want and how we can make it happen and
less about imaginary scenarios of this sort, whether they are gloom-and-doom
or pie-in-the-sky.

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ndefinite
Even if you solely consider moore's law (even if it has slowed down
slightly)the post's title will hold true

~~~
tmh88j
I'm not sure if anyone agrees with me, but I feel like software development
will outweigh the need for significantly faster chips over the next 5-10
years. It seems like all the buzz has been about machine learning, signal
processing, software defined networking and online education rather than the
latest and greatest from AMD/Intel. That's not to say new hardware development
isn't necessary, it just seems like there's greater potential for software
development in the coming years.

~~~
DennisP
That's been going on for a while. Algorithms have advanced even faster than
Moore's Law.

~~~
Retric
Not really, sorting Algorithms as a classic example have been mostly stagnant
for the last 50 years. There have been plenty of advances in a wide range of
areas, but 'Algorithms' is way to generic a concept to fit any sort of
progress curve.

~~~
adrianN
Well, sorting is not so very difficult that you can improve it by much.
However it is true for linear programming:

[http://agtb.wordpress.com/2010/12/23/progress-in-
algorithms-...](http://agtb.wordpress.com/2010/12/23/progress-in-algorithms-
beats-moore%E2%80%99s-law/)

~~~
Retric
Sorry, I have made 200x speedups in a specific code over the course of a few
weeks that does not mean I am millions of times faster than mores law, just
that I spent more time solving that problem. If you take the performance on
that data set use it on a benchmark on the same hardware it's not going to be
43,000 times as fast in another 15 years due to 'better' algorithms. After all
it's been 2 years is the code 10 times as fast on today's hardware?

PS: Not to mention architecture specific improvements such as ever increasing
L3 cache sizes that make may algorithms a lot faster on today's hardware
without showing similar speedups on hardware that's 10 years old.

~~~
DennisP
No, they really do mean that on the same hardware, solving the same problems,
we have algorithms that will solve those problems 43,000 times faster compared
to fifteen years ago...at least for the problems they looked at. And that
progress is continuing.

The assumption here is that at any given time, you're reading the latest
published papers and implementing the best known algorithms, in a field that
uses complicated algorithms on big problems.

It's not just because of faster chips that Google has a self-driving car now.

(As for sorting, it's been proven that the best you can do is O(n log n), and
John von Neumann achieved that with mergesort in 1945.)

~~~
Retric
With a large enough data set O(n^2) vs O(n^1.99999) be 43,000 times faster or
43,000,000 times faster. Which is one of the reasons that metric is next to
meaningless. Looking back you can find plenty of great speedups but as I said
it's in no way steady progress across all fields.

PS: Also Radix sorting is O(n) operation under conditions where mergesort is O
(n log n). (AKA in practice merge sorting distinct strings is 0 (n * (log n) *
(log n) as you need to look at an ever increasing number of symbols, or if
your strings have a fixed max length or if your theoretical computer can
compare infinitely long strings in a single step then Radix sorting is also
O(n).)

~~~
DennisP
I should have specified "for sorting algorithms that depend on comparing
elements to each other."

You're right that it's difficult to measure algorithm progress, but using
problem sizes that you're interested in running in practice is probably a
decent heuristic. "I wanted to run this problem but it would have taken 80
years. But then I caught up on recent published algorithms and look, I can do
it in an hour on the same machine."

I don't think I claimed the progress was steady. Then again, Moore's Law might
get more jumpy as silicon wafers reach their limits, and we transition to
memristors, spin devices, or whatever else they come up with.

------
turar
Can anybody list any truly significant scientific or technological advances in
the past 40 years? Say, starting from late 60-s, the time when ARPANET was
developed?

~~~
xiaoma
I think writing a novel genome on a computer, injecting it into a cell and
'rebooting' the cell as an organism like no other and descended from no other
before it is significant.

------
Tycho
So what has been the most innovative decade so far?

------
ajuc
Desktop DNA printers are scary.

