
Has the rate of technological progress slowed in the past 50 years? - tsestrich
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/robotics-software/singular-simplicity
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recampbell
What do we mean by "technological progress"? Do we mean the quantitative
improvement over previous generations of technology? Or do we mean qualitative
improvements in our standard of living?

When you can eliminate the fear of hunger, automate mindless domestic chores
and provide highly-accessible world-wide transportation, these are huge
qualitative changes in our standard of living. But once you reach a certain
level in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, big technological improvements don't
make as big of a difference in your perceived quality of life.

Is it really surprising that storing 2000x more music on your iPod doesn't
have the same impact on your standard of living as a cheap and reliable source
of food?

~~~
potatolicious
Not to mention that the computer and internet revolution is, for the most
part, entirely contained within the past 50 years... and IMHO the advent of
mass computing and the internet is likely the most important leap in human
technology for the past few _centuries_.

Think back to how life was in the mid 80s, and tell me we have not advanced by
absolute leaps and bounds.

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sophacles
One of the big problems with this article, and it also applies (albeit
slightly differently) to the singularity folks, is this: You are comparing
normal existence today with front edge people of the past. This is easy to
accidentally do, because it is much easier to see the people who really jumped
all over lighting, and telephone in the past when looking from now. Further it
is much more common to write about those people than it is to write about the
smiths, who not keeping up with the Joneses, didn't get the telephone for
another decade. There were plenty of places in the us that only used outhouses
into the 70's. Horses were used for plowing and whatnot into the 1950's
(tractors having been around for decades at that point).

My point is, in 50 years we will be writing about the curve the internet took,
and my children's kids will grow up believing everyone did this internet thing
fluently. It will be hard to explain to them how a lot of my contemporaries
will never quite get it. Much like I still can't quite wrap my head around the
telephone troubles my grandfather's parents seemed to have.

I guess the point is, there really is not a good way of measuring impact of
technology until we can look back and go, "woah, that was a big change!" or
"what a dud!". Compare period write-ups of the future of zepplins or pneumatic
tubes, to current reality.

~~~
jacquesm
Excellent point, the trouble with the singularity folks though is that their
persistence that it will happen borders on religion. It is up to the
proponents of a hard to verify claim to prove that claim to be true. The
evidence so far is against them, the singularity hasn't happened (yet), and
when it does it will be a simple matter of fact.

Until it does it is pure speculation and all that speculation and 'but it
will' stuff isn't going to make it happen one microsecond sooner (assuming it
eventually will happen, which I do not believe until I see it).

The singularity has been jokingly called 'the rapture of the nerds', and there
is a lot of truth in that.

The rapture people from the 'scriptural' side of life tend to go off on all
kinds of tangents about how 'the rest of us' do not get it and possibly will
be left behind, the 'singularity' folks seem to have many of those traits in
common.

This planet has existed for four billion years and change, the universe is
currently estimated to be between 13.5 and 14 billion years old and it _seems_
all evidence points to the fact that the singularity has not happened anywhere
in the universe, because according to that theory it would take over the
entire universe as we know it at light speed.

The only loophole this leaves is that it has happened but so far away that the
effects have not reached us yet.

~~~
sophacles
There is the possibility that reaching singularity means something different
than those folks think. For example, it could be that the singularity is real,
however one of the consequences of ever increasing technological improvements
is that more people have more power than ever before, and social structures
and protections (e.g. law enforcement) are not able to keep up. Such a thing
can result in the death of all of us at some point shortly before singularity,
via accident or madman or similar.

Another possibility (assuming singularity) is that the after effects are far,
far, different than anyone predicted, and it happens pretty frequently around
the universe. This could easily explain why we haven't heard from super
advanced species elsewhere in the universe.

Singularity effects could have reached us as many points in the past, perhaps
starting our own quest towards singularity.

Or, as you say, it could just be that singularity won't happen. (I am inclined
to agree with this myself, the above disagreement is just an exercise to keep
my mind open.)

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antipaganda
Cellphones are making a MAJOR impact on the lives of billions of people in the
third world right now, and no-one's mentioned them so far. They were invented
recently, and disruptive technologies and cultural artifacts based on cheap
mobiles are coming thick and fast.

In some ways, poverty-stricken folks in Bangladesh are leaving us fat
Westerners behind.

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ynniv
This article is fundamentally flawed in judging technological progress by its
impact on "everyday life". Many of the advancements over the last 50 years
have been of military or industrial application. Does this mean that they are
lesser advances? Where is the cruise missile? GPS system?

Even important everyday items are missing, like cell phones, and cheap air
travel. I own a phone that will let me call (almost) anyone in the world form
(almost) anywhere in the world, while showing me where I am to the nearest 15
meters on a map composed of images from SPACE. I can travel 3,000 miles in
half of a day for a weeks worth of rent. People change cities like they used
to change wardrobes.

Obviously these are just a couple of things, and wouldn't fundamentally change
his argument, but I haven't spent much time thinking of them. Asking other
people's opinions of changes to "everyday life" would have been helpful, as
there seems to be a serious personal bias in the article.

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geuis
No, it hasn't been slowing. The author fails to see that we know more about
astronomy in the last 2 years than the previous 10. More has been discovered
about the brain in the last ~15 years than people knew in the last 100,000
years. Throw in chemistry, nanoscale fabrication, materials science, etc. At
every level of society we have been impacted by the advancements that are
occurring around us daily. People who have spent their entire lives thinking
linearly have a hard time getting a sense of how much things have changed.

~~~
drcode
That increase in knowledge has been mainly quantatative, not qualatative.
Sure, we know know exactly which stars are in quadrant x27b or where
dopaminergic neurons connect in the limbic system. But that doesn't solve
practical problems that improve people's lives, the way telephones and
electricity did.

Quick: Name one practical, day to day benefit of the Human Genome Project...

~~~
roc
DNA forensics?

~~~
drcode
DNA forensics uses technology that predates the human genome project. There
are some minor (but significant) benefits to "DNA analysis" as a larger
category.

My point is that the Human Genome Project was sold as an exponential-style
technology that would revolutionize disease research within a couple of years-
But now it's been completed for a long time already and the benefits have been
slight (Though I still wholeheartedly support the project despite this- Minor
improvements are valuable, too)

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jacquesm
Great article! I don't buy the 'singularity' idea either.

It makes for fantastic science fiction but in the real world all resources are
finite and every technology we've come up with so far has had to deal with the
harsh realities of the thermodynamic laws and regular materials science. There
is plenty of room at the bottom, indeed, but the bottom is not 'bottomless',
and the engineering problems are formidable.

Sure, there is progress, and plenty of it. But to think that that progress is
'easy' or 'accelerating' belies the enormous amount of hard work that goes in
to achieving it.

And with every step every next one becomes harder, the laws of diminishing
returns.

I think that our illusion of ever accelerating progress has more to do with
the fact that ever more people are 'knowledge workers' and 'scientists' than
anything else, the greater a fraction of our society that advances our
knowledge the faster we will move forward in this respect.

The 'uploaders' are essentially practicing wishful thinking about that great
question plenty of people have had to deal with in the past: How to avoid
dying.

Unfortunately I don't think any of the people alive today is going to be able
to accomplish that feat, statistics is overwhelmingly against it, everybody
that ever lived in the past has died before the ripe old age of 150 of one
cause or another. And so will everybody living today.

If you want to be immortal your best bet is probably to write a book, compose
a piece of music or make a timeless movie.

I'm not sure if blogging counts :)

And as for the singularity, there are several other scenarios, some plausible,
some implausible:

\- a plateau of knowledge after which any future gains in knowledge will come
ever slower, in a world like that new scientific findings would be real
headline news instead of the science section on page 24

\- a 'wall', beyond which we will not be able to go without knowledge 'behind'
the wall (physics may be up against that, or maybe not but if there is
something beyond quantum may never become a settled question)

~~~
tsestrich
I think we still have a lot of room for progress, but I think it's going to
take another leap in technological innovation for that to happen (there's a
rapidly approaching point where we just won't be able to make a silicon-based
processor any faster).

We'll also, of course, keep finding new applications for current technology,
but that's unlikely to be a paradigm-shifter.

I guess you could say that the Internet has done that though to some extent,
taking what was basically a medium for exchanging scientific data and turning
it into a medium that really connects people on a never-before-seen scale. But
I definitely agree with the article in that it is ridiculous to assume that
there is some sort of exponential path for technological progress that society
is just going to somehow follow. We're really gonna have to work for every
step we take

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shalmanese
Ugh, we've been through this before. Significant technological innovations
take 30 years to recognize as significant so there's always a bias when
looking at the recent past. It's a measurement artifact, not reality.

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asciilifeform
Absolutely:

<http://yarchive.net/physics/effete.html>

