
The golden quarter - hackerjam
http://aeon.co/magazine/science/why-has-human-progress-ground-to-a-halt/
======
tacon
This piece is of amazingly low quality. Almost all the "discoveries and
innovations" are echoes of work performed before the golden quarter. For
example, Alexander Fleming noticed the effect of penicillin in 1928. The
engineering of a useful drug didn't happen until 1942. Sulfanomides were in
regular use in the 1930s. But, hey, let's assign "antibiotics" to the Golden
Quarter.

But the laugh out loud quote is this:

"if you were a biologist, physicist or materials scientist, there was no
better time to be working"

Physics is slower now because the energy levels to probe new phenonmena is
getting awfully big, but biology? That is simply ludicrous. The golden age of
biology is right now, and for the next fifty years. Today's material
scientists are building things atom by atom, with undreamed of properties, and
nanotechnology wasn't even a dream back then.

I'd summarize the Golden Quarter as that time when the low hanging fruit
dropped into the exponential growth of scientific and engineering advances.
But the idea that we aren't innovating at a blistering pace today - so far off
the mark.

~~~
sosuke
Can you recommend any other articles that share your view? The perspective of
the present time is strange. I share the authors view that progress happened
much more rapidly in the past, and that the future always seems 10 years out.
Is that simply my brain playing tricks on me or is there any validity to it?

~~~
hbosch
> Is that simply my brain playing tricks on me or is there any validity to it?

Just look at whatever device is currently in your pants pocket.

~~~
xnull2guest
Really? I feel like I can do mostly the same - and possibly a little less -
with my pocket device than I used to do with my PC in the 90s. (For context I
grew up in the 90s as a child programmer.)

I feel like the devices do mostly the same stuff, just more of it, and more
portably. With new caveats.

Obviously the hardware improvements have been incredible. The software
capabilities? I'm less inclined. (Software is probably more stable - I'll give
it that.)

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exratione
Arguing for a lack of progress today in comparison to half a century ago is
simply a matter of not paying attention. Progress today in the fields I pay
attention to, e.g. biotechnology and related materials science, is stupendous
and accelerating.

As late as the 1940s it might have been argued that we lived in a world in the
process of an exponential growth in power: storage, transmission, application,
availability, falling costs. At the same time few people then saw the
information revolution ahead. The high power/low computation path expected was
an E.E. 'Doc' Smith future of slide rules and hand calculators contemporary
with fantastical applications of raw power generation. But it turned out to be
much harder than envisaged to keep that trend going for a variety of reasons
good and bad.

If we'd got the power future instead of the computation future we'd all have a
life expectancy much the same as it was in the 1940s, but be living in a
transhuman world where $100 buys you the output of a pair of today's power
stations that can be cached in your clothing. It is somewhat interesting to
speculate just what would be done with that level of power in relation to
practical, day-to-day concerns, but getting into orbit and about across the
solar system is the least of it.

Anyway, we got the computational future because it turns out that making that
happen is much easier - and probably for the best given that computation
drives medicine, not power.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Personally, I'd expect that caching the output of a pair of power stations in
my clothing would dramatically _shorten_ my life expectancy.

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rthomas6
Could it have something to do with the increase in quality and quantity of
pleasant distractions? It's in our pockets, at our desks, in our living rooms,
everywhere. What if technological, political, and social progress has slowed
down because it's so easy to escape? _Soma_ in the form of apps, games, and
screens. Surely it is harder now for most people to concentrate on something
hard and HUGE in scope when there's something easy and fun in their pocket,
ready whenever they are. This seems to be the case for me, anyway.

~~~
mod
This ails me as well, but I don't think the people who push the world forward
are tripped up by this.

I'm not a fanboy, but I just can't think of a better person to use for my
example: you think Elon Musk is playing Angry Birds?

I just think some people have an insatiable desire to [do something]. They're
not interested in distractions--the [something] is the distraction. They're
consumed.

My father has spent his whole life consumed by pool (pocket billiards). He's
hit millions of balls. He watches videos of pool matches at home on youtube,
hours and hours of them. He reads weird, niche books with tales from pool's
storied past. He can think of nothing else, for long.

I'm more of a generalist, often to my own disappointment. I have so many
interests that I don't have those blinders on that push me to be the best at
something.

But those people exist, I think, as much as ever. And now, they have a quicker
path to success--my father could learn now in one year on youtube what it took
him 20 years to learn by trial and error.

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j_baker
> 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.

I don't understand why the author is so down on phones. You know, on the
original _Star Trek_ (which aired during the "Golden Quarter"), people found
it outlandish that someone could make a communicator that could fit in the
palm of your hand. Then cell phones started coming out, which is why they
switched to having communicators in badges in The Next Generation. Nowadays, I
guess we just take the idea for granted.

Beyond that, I have a computer in my pocket right now that is more powerful
than a giant supercomputer 20 years ago.I can take photos using my phone that
are higher quality than anything you could have found in a fancy camera 20
years ago _and_ I can send it to the other side of the world in minutes if not
seconds.

------
ajcarpy2005
There has been a lot of social progress in reality. More households with
computers and in more modern times, smartphones galore. Engineering of very
tiny scales has grown at a strong pace especially given the difficulties and
expenses of working at the smaller scales and the huge amount of mystery that
still is there for how materials behave in small dimensions/quantities.

Infrastructure has improved. Internet, Wireless Cell Coverage, etc. These
things have been limited not just by the available technology but by the
available money.

Solar panels have gained enormous advances in terms of price and even pretty
great advances in efficiency and other technological feats. Agriculture has
been heavily researched and arguably improved. (although there is a large
discussion which seems ready to turn into a movement before too long...of
getting more investment into aquaponics, hydroponics, vertical farming,
permaculture...not large monoculture farms and water pollution from agri-
chemicals)

Software has come a really long way in the last few decades. Accessibility of
data. Price of data storage has plummeted rather fantastically.

What still needs focus IMO is the sort of 'application of the application' ie.
the use of inventions beyond just their function, what is their function
ultimately solving for humanity?

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dmytrish
I hope that I may answer to this article with its own words:

"During periods of technological and scientific expansion, it has often seemed
that a plateau has been reached, only for a new discovery to shatter old
paradigms completely"

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swamp40
_> > "Half a century ago, makers of telephones, TVs and cars prospered by
building products that their buyers knew (or at least believed) would last for
many years. No one sells a smartphone on that basis today; the new ideal is to
render your own products obsolete as fast as possible."_

I enjoyed the article, but this paragraph doesn't exactly bolster his argument
that technological advances have ground to a halt.

~~~
mfisher87
Something can be made obsolete without advancement having occurred. "Oh, let's
just change the design of our proprietary charging cable for our entire
product suite next generation for zero or marginal benefit to the consumer."

------
beefman
It's important to distinguish discovery and adoption. Why don't we have
graphene furniture or software that works like a Bret Victor demo? Plumbing
existed in Roman times, but my grandparents' generation was the first to take
it for granted.

It's also important to distinguish _depreciating_ and _expansionary_ adoption.
Each generation of Intel chips depreciates previous generations and largely
replaces them in the field. The innovation increases the efficiency of
computing units more than their quantity.

I think the "golden quarter" was real. It was a time of tremendous
expansionary adoption. Scientific discovery has not slowed since then.
Efficiency-improving adoptions haven't slowed. Expansionary adoptions have.

Why? The author rightly dismisses Cowen's hypothesis of diminishing returns
but suggests something equally implausible: our attitude toward risk
spontaneously changed and sabotaged progress.

In my view, civilization is a physical process and there should be a physical
explanation for long-term trends like this. Cultural changes like attitudes
toward risk are manifestations.

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Cthulhu_
Lots of idealization and whatnot in that article, as well as some glaring
errors and apparently completely ignoring the recent developments, such as
various countries (and NASA) planning journeys to the moon, asteroids, and
Mars again (although the asteroids are probably because of the promises of
huge amounts of wealth to be gained there)

~~~
rgawdzik
I think the article is trying to demonstrate a contrast between the "Golden
Quarter" to our current quarter.

Consider comparing the recently posted Orion project vs. the first moon
landing. 8 years of development time to get to the moon vs. the estimated
22-27+ years development time to get to Mars [NASA said ~2030's for the actual
Mars voyage].

I believe that's the point the author is trying to get across, that in our
quarter, everything is moving along very slowly.

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viciousambition
The problem with this is that it assumes progress in these areas is linear.
For example, it's easier to leap from bi-plane to jets than it is to go from
jet airliner to something faster because a system gets more complex based on
both its components and the connections between them. Simply put--there's more
that can go wrong.

"Why can't I travel to my destination is less than 8 hours?" isn't so much the
question as "Can we carry enough fuel to power an engine that's faster?", "Do
we need entirely new propulsion?", "If elevation could help, how do we keep
this thing skirting the edge of the atmosphere and still function?" etc. I
don't know anything about aeronautics, so forgive my oversimplification, but
this seemed like an easy to grasp example of what I'm talking about.

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Tepix
There are lots of areas where we've seen significant breakthroughs. Astronomy
is one. And the future for astronomy is bright indeed. The Gaia telescope will
soon give us a vast trove of new data to learn from.

Virtual reality is on the brink of mass adoption. It has the potential to be
more significant than the invention of the TV.

Let's not even talk about nano technology, smartphones, tablets, notebook
computers, satellite tv, ...

------
ytturbed
Why can't recovering from WW2 have been the cause? Re-building institutions
and cities from scratch causes people to think more creatively.

------
az0xff
I have a feeling that a lot of the advances of the Golden Quarter have a lot
to do with the Cold War. Parties on both sides of the war were pushed to
create progress in order to best those on the other side. That kind of fierce
competition doesn't exist at the same scale in today's world.

Am I wrong?

~~~
wolfgke
The article says on this point:

"Conflict spurs innovation, and the Cold War played its part – we would never
have got to the Moon without it. But someone has to pay for everything. The
economic boom came to an end in the 1970s with the collapse of the 1944
Bretton Woods trading agreements and the oil shocks. So did the great age of
innovation. Case closed, you might say.

And yet, something doesn’t quite fit. The 1970s recession was temporary: we
came out of it soon enough. What’s more, in terms of Gross World Product, the
world is between two and three times richer now than it was then. There is
more than enough money for a new Apollo, a new Concorde and a new Green
Revolution. So if rapid economic growth drove innovation in the 1950s and
’60s, why has it not done so since?"

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ceedan
Another one of these "Innovation is Dead" articles. yay

~~~
beyondcompute
It is not "Innovation is dead" article. It is "Innovation adoption/spreading
is unnecessarily slow" article.

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Eleutheria
They killed the golden quarter when they killed the gold standard.

Innovation was replaced by massive plundering and easy money from criminal
politics instead of creativity and productivity from healthy economics. The
promotion of parasites who suck the tit of the state replaced the brilliant
minds who gave us all the progress of that beautiful era.

Only the internet survives as a fountainhead of innovation because it still is
considered ungoverned territory.

