
Why has progress stalled? (2014) - scottlocklin
https://aeon.co/essays/has-progress-in-science-and-technology-come-to-a-halt
======
redis_mlc
I read the article.

Superficially, it might seem informative.

But if you look into the various industries, not so much.

In aviation, engines have become 1% more efficient per year, which means 3
related things:

1) they burn half as much fuel as ~72 years ago

2) the range is double, so that 737's can fly globe-spanning international
routes now (this is game-changing)

3) engines are "powerful enough" for the first time - for any mission, there
is an off-the-shelf engine. Until recently the v1 was always underpowered.

Computers might be banal outside of IT, but I remember when floating point was
optional and compilers were a crap shoot. :) Also, Moore's Law kept pace in
the time window the author wrote about.

We do need to put the pollution genie back in the bottle though. I remember
when the Great Lakes and Niagara River were flammable, with green froth oozing
from the banks.

There is little awareness of reuse in the West, which is hugely better than
recycling.

Not well-known, while the US recycles 99% of cars, but most municipalities
just landfill those blue bins since private garbage contractors can't make
money off them.

~~~
buboard
Arent those incremental updates? They do not create new affordances for us.
Longer flights are more economical but that doesnt enable much that wasnt
enabled by a layover cross-world flight. One could say that the pace of
progress has become so slow in so many things that we 've forgotten what it is
like to have a breakthrough.

~~~
nl
But what of the things listed really was a breakthough?

If we look at flights, he lists "8 hour Transatlantic flights" as being more
important than the cell phone(!!).

Is it 8 hours that was the breakthough? What about 9 hours? 10?

It seems to me that if there was any real breakthough in that domain (and with
travel generally) it's the change from "multi-day travel" to "waste one day in
travel" to "I can go for a meeting during the day and be back in the evening".

While Concorde technically moved transatlantic travel into the "there and back
in a day" bucket, practically it didn't - the timing of the flights meant you
had to stay overnight anyway.

In that case, there probably aren't any more breakthroughs possible - except
cheap, reliable, high quality video calling (which he totally ignores).

~~~
buboard
efficient flights made transpacific flights possible, enabled the entire
industry of tourism, and everything that has to do with global business /
science . Sure, the cellphone was a major breakthrough as was the internet
(and hopefully, remote work). the question is why not more.

And we should avoid the Kelvin trap, as we can rarely foresee a breakthrough
before it happens

~~~
nl
I'm not arguing that flights weren't important! But I'd note that
international tourism really took off when it became _cheap_ , which was an
efficiency improvement and mostly occurred after 1971.

And your point about international business made me realise he has ignored all
the huge innovations in the payments and international remittance space.

------
vl
This article is absolute nonsense, each ten years we live life markedly
differently. What’s interesting, often unimaginably so. If you would say that
in 2000nds that most of the content would be consumed and most of the
computing would be done on the tiny screen and that many people wouldn’t even
own tv, people would laugh.

~~~
dredmorbius
_Duncan Makenzie had a new minisec, and he was not quite sure how parts of it
worked._

 _The 'Sec was the standard size of all such units, determined by what can fit
comfortably in the human hand. At a quick glance, it did not differ greatly
from one of the small electronic calculators that had started coming into
general use at the end of the twentieth century. It was, however, infinitely
more versatile, and Duncan could not imagine what life would be like without
it._

 _Because of the finite size of clumsy human fingers, it had no more controls
than that of its ancestor of three hundred years earlier. There were fifty
neat little studs; each, however, had an unlimited number of functions,
according to the mode of operation - for the character visible on each stud
changed according to the mode._

\-- Arthur C. Clarke, _Imperial Earth_ , 1976

[http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1267](http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1267)

That itself was nearly a decade after the newspad of _2001: A Space Odyssey_
(1968):

[http://technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=529](http://technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=529)

[https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=-3949GAIokg](https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=-3949GAIokg)

See also Vannevar Bush's seminal "As We May Think" (1945)
([https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-
we-m...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-
think/303881/)) which discusses desktop devices, the ever-popular Dick Tracy
watch, introduced in 1946 (Garyn G. Roberts, Dick Tracy and American Culture:
Morality and Mythology, Text and Context (McFarland, 2003), p. 38), H.G. Wells
predicting a Wikipedia-like service, "The World Brain" (1937)
([https://sherlock.ischool.berkeley.edu/wells/world_brain.html](https://sherlock.ischool.berkeley.edu/wells/world_brain.html)),
and E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909)
([https://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-
Machi...](https://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Machine-
Stops.pdf))

~~~
dredmorbius
And another several examples, some quite detailed in capabilities, listed
here:

[https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/93979/did-
science-...](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/93979/did-science-
fiction-anticipate-a-device-like-a-smartphone)

------
Animats
The big previous "golden period" was 1830 to 1910.

1830 was the year the Industrial Revolution got out of beta. The Liverpool and
Manchester railway opened that year. Double track, multiple steam engines,
signals, schedules, and tickets. There were previous prototype steam engines
and railroads, but that was the first time it got beyond the prototype stage.

The next 80 years brought huge changes. Electricity. Telegraphs. Steel. (Steel
was about as exotic as titanium is now until the Bessemer converter, and it
wasn't until about 1870 that the process was fully debugged and steel mills
were built on a large scale.) By 1910 there were the first cars and airplanes.
The New York City subway was running. Sailing ships were obsolete.
Transportation had totally changed for the first time in thousands of years.
By 1910, most of the pieces of the modern world before electronics existed in
some form.

~~~
sunstone
I'm with you on this. In 1850 there was a fax line from New York to Paris. At
about the same time there were scheduled international flights from Germany to
Argentina. Trains got up to 60mph around 1875. And of course telegrams could
sent at the speed of light almost, the original email. Radio arrived in 1920
but newspapers had been collecting the world's news daily over telegrams for
50 years by then. Bicycles for personal local transportation happened in the
late 1800's (and self driving horses before that). Things have changed a lot
less than you would think from those times, though it is more evenly
distributed now.

~~~
Animats
Not quite. The first transatlantic cable was in 1858, but it could send only
Morse code, and just barely. The first transatlantic telephone cable wasn't
installed until 1956. Until then, transatlantic calls went over short-wave
radio. The holdup was developing tubes with a long enough lifespan to be used
in an underwater cable.

The first transatlantic dirigible flight was in 1919. The first transatlantic
aircraft flight (Lindburgh) was in 1927.

Steel at low cost was an amazingly late invention. The Romans could have built
a Bessemer converter. Now that would have changed history.

------
8bitsrule
The way that the writer defined of progress is part of the problem.

If you go into a virgin forest and cut down all of the big trees... that's the
easy stuff. It's kind of absurd, then, to ask why the world isn't producing as
much wood any more.

The CPUs of the 1950s, which used thousands of vacuum tubes and took up whole
floors of buildings, once seemed like a breakthrough. Today we only have these
little phone things. Only incremental progress, right?

~~~
ardy42
> Today we only have these little phone things. Only incremental progress,
> right?

Cell phones have been available for 40 years, and ubiquitous for 25.
Smartphones have been around for about 20 years, and have been in their fully-
modern form for 13 years (dated from the iPhone). They've been pretty much
static since then.

Something tells me that in 20 years people will still be trotting out cell
phones as a counterexample to claims that technological advancement has slowed
down significantly.

~~~
galaxyLogic
I was in subway today which I don't do everyday and what amused me was that 9
out of 10 people were looking at their cell-phones. This is a relatively new
thing, everybody has their cellphone now and it is not just for making calls.
Let's say in some way those 9 people looking at their cell-phone are
_learning_ something from it. Isn't that growth in education? Enormous growth
in education.

~~~
WWLink
Admittedly, back in the day if you got on a bus or train, everyone was reading
books, magazines, and newspapers anyway.

~~~
galaxyLogic
True. The difference is that now they have an interactive device to play with

------
burlesona
I think Strong Towns would point out the timeline for this “golden quarter”
was roughly the first generation of the suburban experiment, where incredible
wealth redistribution happened by paving over cities and replacing them with
sprawling suburban metroplexes. The problem is most of that development didn’t
pay for itself, and since then more and more of our wealth has been sucked
into maintaining unproductive infrastructure and development. Sustaining the
unsustainable is very hard work.

[https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/6/16/the-growth-
pon...](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/6/16/the-growth-ponzi-scheme-
part-4.html)

------
cjblomqvist
Let's not forget we also lifted millions to billions out of poverty since the
70s. If you cherry pick any statistics you can often get any type of result.
But I bet it makes a lot of people feel good about reading the essay...

~~~
FranzFerdiNaN
After we first made sure they were in poverty. I'm generally not impressed by
this statistic, because those millions if people shouldn't have ever been in
poverty, but were placed there thanks to some combination of capitalism,
colonialism, slavery, racism, politics and probably a few more of such fun
things.

~~~
valesco
They were in poverty because that's been the normal condition for thousands of
years. Not being poor and victimized was a significant accomplishment,
everywhere. Buddhism comes from the point of view that nobody can do much
against that and the suffering that it brings. But... we did. Don't minimize
it.

~~~
CaptArmchair
> They were in poverty because that's been the normal condition for thousands
> of years.

That's textbook example of biased thinking. You're comparing the historical
and present condition of other cultures by your own present condition.

When you study history or sociology, the first lesson you will be taught is
that you will need to question your own frame of reference, before you can
make factual statements about the historical record.

If anything, there are ample examples of traditional tribal communities who
are struggling with modern problems - health, addiction, crime - which they
didn't have just 50 years ago. Ask any traditional fishing community within
the Northern polar circle, for instance.

What you consider as "poverty" is the baseline way of living. Isolated tribes
simply don't know any better. The modern concept of "poverty" you try to
apply, makes absolutely zero sense from their frame of reference.

If these tribes act resentful or hostile towards modernity, then it's because
they see "progress" as an existential threat to a way of living that worked
out for them for thousands of years. And that's a totally valid way of
reasoning about how a human could live their lives.

~~~
javagram
> If anything, there are ample examples of traditional tribal communities who
> are struggling with modern problems - health, addiction, crime - which they
> didn't have just 50 years ago

This is the noble savage belief, but it really doesn’t match up with reality.
Life was nasty, brutish, and short before modern civilization. People died
early from preventable disease, war, famine, and crime was still a thing. Most
people were peasants, serfs, or slaves, chained to the land and forced to work
for a small upper class who enjoyed the fruits of their labor.

If you look at the history of South America or Africa, they still had kingdoms
and empires, they still had wars, and they certainly still had poverty. People
in China or elsewhere also weren’t in “isolated tribes” they were still poor
peasants in an empire.

(Edit: just to be clear I do accept there are some problems unique to
modernity but I want to challenge the idea that the past was a golden age)

~~~
CaptArmchair
I didn't refer to kingdoms, civilizations or any comparable large societal
system.

I was referring to ancient tribal communities that lost their traditional way
of living to Western dominated modernity.

> This is the noble savage belief

That's what you read into my statements. That's not what I implied.

Let me be crystal clear here: Of course, life wasn't easy back then. People
suffered and died. If you didn't adapt or pulled your weight, you died. If you
were unlucky in any respect, you died. I'm very much aware of that. And I
reject any glorification or comparison as "one-is-better-then-the-other"
vehemently.

The idea that modern civilization and "progress" somehow solved all of that is
manifestly false. Millions upon millions are born and live in abject misery,
simply because economies of scale have allowed those lives to exist, but
without the affordances - social cohesion, cultural identity, an authentic
belief system,... - to sustain them properly or give their lives a due sense
of purpose and meaning.

I'm pushing back against usage of the past - see, they were poor, primitive
and miserable - to be able to laud the merits of "Progress" without
considering the misery it has caused and is causing as well.

------
sgt101
Photonics and Fibre Optics stands out as a field that "happened" in the 1980's
and 90's. Erbidium doping (1986) was a massive shot in the arm for our
civilisation, enabiling low power long distance high throughput, low latency
communication. Wave Division Multiplexing (WMD) (1978) is arguably more
important still - enabling massive throughput into the Tb range, and is an
idea reused in many communication systems outside of fibre. WMD (and caches,
but they have their limits) is why we don't have a internet capacity crunch
with our backbones flooding everytime Netflix releases something. Yet no one
in this thread nor the author of the article mentions the field. I think
people understand how their cars work much better than they understand how the
internet works.

------
bawolff
Not a whole lot of evidence in this essay. Sure its possible risk aversion is
holding us back, but then again maybe it isn't. I may not have a better
theory, but i am not particularly convinced either.

Most importantly, if risk acceptance is the magic sauce, why do all these
advances just start in 1945. Its not like people were super risk averse in the
early 1900s or the 1800s. Then again i suspect there is some selection bias
here to make all the data points fit in this time period. Its not like
feminism started from nothing in 1945, first wave feminism goes before that.

~~~
trhway
>why do all these advances just start in 1945

and they actually didn't start in 1945. We entered WWII with propellers,
exited with jets, entered with visual/optical targeting, exited with radar and
targeting computer, entered with Enigma style and other mechanical primitive
calculation devices, exited with the first real computers, entered with an
idea of possibility of nuclear energy, exited with A-bomb, etc. V-2 ballistic
missile became the foundation of Space Age in US and USSR. Mass production of
antibiotics, and really mass production of anything, Liberty ships for
example. We exited WWII with tremendously scaled up R&D and mass production
capabilities which were put in significant part to peaceful use after the war.
And of course GI bill in the US. And the formation of 2 super-empires -
Eastern Bloc and NATO/Bretton Woods. As far as i see at least the technology
and economy of the Golden Quarter is firmly rooted in WWII.

~~~
christocracy
The invention of the transistor was stunted by ~5 years _because of_ ww2, when
Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain were redirected to war projects, such as bomb
sights, magnetic detection of submarines and radar.

[https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1956/summary/](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1956/summary/)

------
Areading314
Absolute nonsense. Here are some minor things that have been invented since
1971.

* Cell phones

* GPS

* Sequencing the human genome (and many others)

* Personal computers

* Drones

* Lithium-ion batteries

* The world-wide web

* Quantum computing

* Video games

* Bitcoin/blockchain

* Cheap wind and solar energy

* Hybrid cars

* The ISS (International Space Station)

* Genetically engineered crops

* SMS + instant messaging

* HDTV

* Hubble space telescope

* On-demand TV/streaming

* Self-driving cars

* Video calling

* Digital cameras

* Voice-controlled computers

* Touchscreens

* Digital music

* Social media

* Kepler space telescope, discovering 2662 exoplanets

* LED lighting + indoor farming

* Gene editing (Crispr)

* Atomic-force microscopy

* Magnetic-resonance imaging (MRI)

* Reusable rockets

* 3D printers

* MOOCs/online education

* Ebooks

* Online marketplaces

* Ridesharing

* Micromobility (e-scooters)

* Biodegradable plastics

* Automated translators

* Optical character recognition

* Asymmetric key cryptography

* RFID

* Electronic payments

* Online dating

* High-temperature superconductors

* Soft lithography

* Machine learning + deep learning

* Cloud computing

* Immunotherapy for cancer treatment

* Stealth technology (F-117, B2 etc.)

* Mars rovers: Spirit, Opportunity + Curiosity

* Voyagers I & II probes

* Cassini-Huygens probe to Saturn + moons

~~~
randomsearch
Almost everything you list could just be summed up as “computers”. What about
everything else???

~~~
jdsully
That would be like equating to car as “not much different than the wheel”.
Computers are neat but finding applications for them is non-trivial.

------
AnimalMuppet
I don't think progress has stalled. It's just that it takes a while to fully
bear fruit. When you look back at the advances that happened in, say, the
1950s, you see most of the fruit from them. When you look at the advances that
happened in the 2010s, you see very little of the fruit from them, because
most of the fruit hasn't happened yet.

This would be like saying, in 1960, that the transistor wasn't a big deal. It
wasn't... yet. It was sure going to be, though.

What might be the current stuff? ML might be a big deal. It's too early to
tell. CRISPR might be enormous. Can't tell yet. There might be stuff I haven't
heard about yet, too. Will that add up to anything as significant as what
happened in the 1950s? Ask me in 60 or 70 years.

------
petermcneeley
"Apollo couldn’t happen today, not because we don’t want to go to the Moon,
but because the risk would be unacceptable" I would imagine that there would
be hundreds of highly qualified candidates that would find this risk
acceptable. I would guess that if risk plays a role at all it would mostly the
financial risk of these kinds of projects.

~~~
solveit
Because the only reason to send a human to the moon is publicity, and having
said human die defeats the whole point. If there were an _actual_ reason to
send people to space, we'd be just fine with deaths. People die in
construction, engineering, research, war, and even recreation _all the time_.

~~~
sgt101
But not on TV.

~~~
tetris11
If construction had a reality TV component, we might be more comfortable with
the idea of death on TV. That being said, millions watch LiveLeak.

~~~
sgt101
or construction might have tighter safety constraints and better practices, or
there might be less construction!

------
jdkee
I am currently a third of the way through Robert Gordon's "The Rise and Fall
of American Growth". It does seem to argue that the low-hanging fruits of
industrialization have been harvested, in terms of material wealth, and future
productivity gains will be limited in perspective.

See [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26634594-the-rise-and-
fa...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26634594-the-rise-and-fall-of-
american-growth)

~~~
galaxyLogic
I haven't read that book but I wonder if he overlooks the power of mobile
information technology to make people work smarter together and smarter in
general with online information always accessible, and help from AI for
finding the relevant needed advice for each task or part of task.

In general it has been predicted that the next level of automation is
intellectual automation driven by AI. The work of lawyers and doctors and even
computer programmers can be done by AI they predict. Or at least AI becomes a
powerful helper for them. Does this mean there will be mass unemployment? Well
I think it is just fine if work-week is reduced to one day. The only issue is
financial inequality but that is easily taken care of with progressive
taxation.

~~~
newsgremlin
Methinks AI will be used like google is used today. Humans still need to make
the decisions but AI will provide us with the information and conclusion of
what should be done. Then it will definitely feel like AI is nearly ready to
take over jobs completely around the next corner.

We'll really progress when AI cannot be tricked by politicians double speak.

------
cortesoft
I think they are really overstating the equality gains in our society by 1971.
Yes, the Civil Rights Movement was amazing, and accomplished a ton. But the
world was still divided along race and gender to a much larger degree than now
(which still has so many problems in this area).

~~~
nl
Absolutely.

His argument also ignores all the battles for civil rights progress before
1945 (eg, Gandhi's Salt March was in 1930, the Suffragette's between 1900 and
1928. Pretty sure there was some war in the the US that did something about
slavery a while before 1945 too).

Edit: err.. _heavy_ downvotes? Isn't this obviously correct? What am I missing
here?

------
hooande
Another cause could be increased capital investment in existing systems due to
larger populations. The author brings up a good point that a lot of common
products and experiences haven't changed much in the last 50 years. But think
about what would be involved in changing the fundamental nature of something
like air conditioning or plane travel. _Billions_ upon billions of dollars are
invested in building and maintaining the current systems. Financial and
physical infrastructure that didn't exist after war world 2, and didn't have
to be replaced with something new.

This doesn't explain why we haven't sent a person to mars or had meaningful
civil rights reforms. But technological progress is often limited by the
switching costs from one paradigm to another. And those costs tend to compound
over time

~~~
Lammy
Did we not have an extremely large civil rights reform in 2014 with marriage
equality?

------
buboard
so, the (lack of) motives? Lack of imminent threat of nuclear destruction? No
longer need to outcompete the illiberal enemy? Too many old and risk-averse
people? The precipitous drop in testosterone? Lack of typically more risk-
taking male role models? Lack of competition from an even more
liberal/deregulated country? Lack of an even more terrifying (and thus
deterrence-breaking) weapon than thermonuclear bombs?

On the one hand, it s kind of sad that even the most progressive big trends in
R&D today, clean energy and space travel, will only take us forward to an
incrementally updated version of 1971. on the other hand, black swan events
like the coronavirus are forcing the world to break ranks with the slow pace
of progress. Wish the times were more interesting.

------
d--b
mmmh...

Maybe the “golden quarter” was just a coincidence of findings and engineering
feats that only owes its success to pure chance.

I mean: if scientific breakthroughs follow some kind of poisson law
distribution by discipline, then it is bound to happen that multiple
breakthroughs that are completely independent will happen during a relatively
small period.

------
tomaszs
I think the progress is there but we can't see it. Last revolution give as a
lots of Technology. This generation is playing with it. Next generation will
build tools on top of this discoveries. And next generation will use this
tools to discover new things. And just than next generation will use these
discoveries to make new stuff for people. Science is not like you can do
everything at once. There need to be new people who think in a new way based
on what they know to improve. So true revolutions can be made only in 5-6
generations. And knowing what we know now, the next revolution will be
multiplication of the last one. It will be a broad revolution that will change
our word truly. We just need to make sure we wont have wars and wont damage
Earth while it happens. Because it can stall it for hundreds of years

------
beloch
Any perceived stall may be an illusion for a couple of reasons:

1\. Real-world performance is not necessarily linear with technological
progress.

2\. Landmarks by which we measure progress may be far apart.

#1. We frequently compare computer memory to automobile engines and ask why
engines have improved so little while memory capacity has skyrocketed. It's an
unfair comparison. If we were still using magnetic core-memory, as we were in
the 60's, capacities would now be only incrementally larger. The growth of
memory capacity has been driven by a succession of novel technologies, while
the fundamentals of an automotive engine are essentially the same as they were
a century ago. We must ask, "Why is it harder to come up with novel types of
engines than novel forms of memory?". Perhaps it's due to complexity. Computer
memory is a very simple thing repeated many times. Improving that simple thing
yields great benefit with comparatively little effort. An engine is a
collection of many different parts that interact in complex ways.
Incrementally redesigning individual parts is unlikely to result in novel
types of engines with fundamentally different capabilities. To come up with a
new type of engine you have to design a very complex system all at once.
Expecting memory and engines to improve at the same rate is not realistic.

#2. What landmark comes after sending men to the moon? Sending them to Mars?
The Apollo missions were tremendously expensive and the scientific value of
research conducted on the Moon was small compared to the progress achieved in
getting there. That may be why we stopped sending manned missions to the moon.
Why it's taken so long to send men to Mars may be because the difficulty is
much greater. We need far more thrust to transfer orbits. We need to sustain
humans in space for long periods of time without protection from the Earth's
magnetosphere. We need to send squishy humans down a gravity well much more
significant than the Moon's without much atmosphere for braking. We may have
been making steady progress on all of these problems but, until we actually
land a human on Mars, the Moon remains the high-tide mark.

------
payne92
Progress in science and technology progress has supposedly "stalled".

YET, today, we carry pocket supercomputers with nearly all of the world's
information at our fingertips.

Ten years ago this was not the case.

------
beefield
I think the issue has been the slowly rising ideology that individuals know
better individually than collectively what they want to achieve. Collectively
we decided to go to the moon and the smartest people were given the recources
to achieve that.

Individually we have ended up first incentivized smartest people to figure how
to give mortgages to people who can't afford them and then how to get people
clock more ads. Lo and behold, that's what we got ...

And no, I am not promoting full on communism. I am saying there is a
goldilocks case here. There are things that are so important to research and
develop that we need to collectively put resources more than free market
allocates. There also are endeavours that are harmful and should be regulated.
And there are things that should be left for free market.

------
KingOfCoders
"That true age of innovation – I’ll call it the Golden Quarter – ran from
approximately 1945 to 1971. [...] Today, progress is defined almost entirely
by consumer-driven, often banal improvements in information technology."

Except the web. And ecommerce. And video streaming. You might call the "banal"
but they changed how people live more than then most other things before
except electric power and cars.

~~~
scottlocklin
I guess you never heard of the sears catalog?

[https://www.history.com/news/sears-catalog-houses-
hubcaps](https://www.history.com/news/sears-catalog-houses-hubcaps)

------
tomaszs
Nice article. Its just amazing how Little people know about Czernobyl. It was
not few people died. There is at least 50 people who died from being radiated
on the spot. But also hundreds of people in nearby area, from Ukraine, Belarus
and Poland. Children also. And they still die. Because radiation causes
delayed cancer and illness. Not a few. And it is reasonable people fear it
will happen again.

------
Mountain_Skies
Perhaps the burden of maintaining the world we have built leaves too little
left over for the task of expanding our world.

------
lcam84
This question of infinite progress really makes me think. Do we really want
progress that grows exponentialy indefinitly?

Humans should have finite needs so if we are competent enough for solve them
is only natural that progress will stall. That should be a good thing, is a
sign that the most relevant problems were already solved.

~~~
nielsole
But who gets to decide what legitimate needs are? I doubt people will not find
additional utility in new/improved products.

------
mirimir
TFA basically argues that risk aversion has stalled progress. As others note,
it seems like examples are cherry picked to support the argument. And some
important issues just aren't mentioned. Such as "pollution", "toxic" and
"waste".

------
neocodesoftware
the majority of the 1 billion barrel oilfields were discovered before 1971 -
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_fields](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_fields)

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randomsearch
I think one reason geeks have trouble seeing the progress stall is we spend a
lot of time in the magical world of computing, where progress has been
wonderful, and little time working in the world of physics and engineering.

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sitkack
Has too much of our technological workforce been diverted from science and
engineering to work on basically e-commerce apps?

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calewis
Is the answer not because the world was at war and throwing all it's resources
into beating the other side? Surely the GDP spend per capita on science and
research was far what it has been since.

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peterhj
NB: article was written December 2014. 1970 is now 50 years ago.

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stkdump
Well, not even the postwar period was able to obsolete the wheel or democracy
or houses or roads, so by that measure -- a time of suckers.

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auggierose
Well, we live now in an age where a computer can play Go better than any
human. That is fucking progress right there.

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nl
_Most of what has happened since has been merely incremental improvements upon
what came before. That true age of innovation – I’ll call it the Golden
Quarter – ran from approximately 1945 to 1971. Just about everything that
defines the modern world either came about, or had its seeds sown, during this
time._

Ok, Boomer.

I jest!

But yeah this is a US centric, physically biased view of the world that
ignores _major_ changes in technology and society.

Firstly, I'd note that of the key innovations he cites (The Pill, Electronics,
Computers and the birth of the internet, Nuclear power, Television,
Antibiotics, Space travel, Civil rights) all except the pill are clear
refinements of development that was occurring prior to 1945 and most prior to
WW2.

 _Sure, our phones are great, but that’s not the same as being able to fly
across the Atlantic in eight hours or eliminating smallpox._

It's not a competition, but I think there are pretty compelling arguments that
incredibly cheap, highly reliable instant communication devices available
_everywhere_ (with the exception of North Korea) are more important than being
able to fly across the Atlantic.

 _And most recent advances in longevity have come about by the simple
expedient of getting people to give up smoking, eat better, and take drugs to
control blood pressure._

There is some truth in this, but what an advance it is! In the US, life
expectency at birth in 1971 was 71, in 2019 it was 78. But this undersells the
advance, since most of the world has improved even more. For example, China
went from 60 to 76!

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mnm1
Progress is an illusion at the social level where it truly matters. Some parts
of the world go forward while others go backward. Gay rights is championed in
America but not in Saudi Arabia. Vaccines save lives except when people refuse
them and are allowed to do so. Even on a technological level, it's an
illusion. It's highly debatable that the internet we have now is better than
the one of ten or twenty years ago. Yes, it's faster, but it's also full of
ads, malware, and propaganda that tips elections the world over.

So why has progress stalled? It hasn't stalled because it was never going
forward. It was always going around in circles. A few benefiting here, a few
losing out there. And those places are constantly changing and morphing.
America was indeed making progress, 20, 30, 40 years ago. Now it's going
backwards on most of the issues mentioned in the article. We used to be
somewhat democratic. Now we are just ruled by oligarchs. Europe has taken up
the slack, whereas 70 years or so ago it was in ruins.

To think of progress as some constant driving force is a folly. There is no
such thing as progress. Things happen. In any given place, at any given time,
sometimes they are for the better, sometimes for the worse. That's the only
conclusion one can draw from history, even with a myopic look at only the last
100 years. If you go back further, there is no other conclusion to be drawn.
Progress is a dream. It's not reality.

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int_19h
By most objective metrics, things are drastically better than they were 100
years ago almost everywhere in the world. People live longer, eat better, die
less from preventable diseases, and don't kill each other quite so much.

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mnm1
Except that those things are declining, even in America, let alone in most of
the rest of the world. Life expectancy is decreasing for many (except for the
rich). Food quality has been declining for many decades. Preventable diseases
are coming back. Deaths from war have been declining for now, so I'll give you
that one. We are not quite at the levels we were at 100 years ago, but with
just about everything declining, I wouldn't be surprised if we get there in a
few decades given the damage we are doing to the environment. And that's
before you even get to social and political issues which have never
progressed, for which progress itself is meaningless and certainly
immeasurable due to the inability to even define it.

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nl
This is just wrong.

Life expectancy is increasing everywhere, in every socio-economic group except
in the US. That's bad for the US, but we don't say progress has stalled just
because of political issues in one country.

