
Back to the Future - hhs
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/03/back-to-the-future
======
Traster
On Stagnation, I think the argument is very weak. Compare 1970 to today and we
don't have any invention better than running water. Sorry what? If you want to
compare centuries go ahead- but I think it's almost inarguable that life has
changed much more significantly 1900-2000 than 1800-1900. Information is
basically now costless to store, communication with anyone on earth is
practically free, and we can literally travel to any point on earth in a
matter of days. The idea that we've stagnated just seems frankly absurd to me.
Are all those achievements less important than running water? I don't know,
running water probably saved more lives - but Alexander Fleming was hardly a
slouch in the 1920s.

If you want to _only_ compare 1969 to now, I'd like to point out that there's
a really obvious problem. We don't have 200 years of hindsight to say "Oh that
invention completely changed the world". How are we feeling about Genome
sequencing, how about the plethora of green energy generation technologies?
How about the Electric Car? The Internet?

I just feel like the stagnation assertion is ridiculous.

~~~
coldtea
> _but I think it 's almost inarguable that life has changed much more
> significantly 1900-2000 than 1800-1900._

Yes, but much more insignificantly 1950-2000 to 1900-1950 -- and slowing down
ever since.

> _Information is basically now costless to store, communication with anyone
> on earth is practically free, and we can literally travel to any point on
> earth in a matter of days_

None of which is particularly exciting, and the latter is probably detrimental
to the planet.

We could already communicate with anywhere instantly back with the
transatlantic telephone. The rest is evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Even communication satellites we've had for 50+ years already. Heck, the base
internet is 60+ years old, and the web 3 decades.

~~~
mdonahoe
> Yes, but much more insignificantly 1950-2000 to 1900-1950 -- and slowing
> down ever since.

Here are a few more significant innovations since 1950:

0\. Search Engines 1\. Video Games 2\. GPS 3\. Medical 3D Imaging (CT/MRI) 4\.
Genetic Sequencing 5\. 3D Printing 6\. Autonomous Machines (ground robots,
drones)

> None of which is particularly exciting

You aren't excited about having all of human knowledge in your pocket? Does
something have to fundamentally change our understanding of physics for you to
get excited?

~~~
chrisco255
You can search for facts at the touch of a button, but understanding and
wisdom remains a time intensive task that requires immense focus. Focus and
attention has become a rather rare commodity in this age.

~~~
wildermuthn
Knowledge is a prerequisite for wisdom. Wisdom is up next.

~~~
mdonahoe
I feel like you can get a descent amount of wisdom with the right youtube
playlist

But an interactive tutorial would be better!

------
TomMckenny
Most likey we've done all the low hanging fruit: supersonic flight is
categorically more difficult than subsonic yet is a diminishing return given
that so much time is just spent preparing for the flight. And, Peter's opinion
not withstanding, it is impossible to communicate faster than light which is
where we are.

But if we have become decadent, it hardly surprising in a society where
opinion is give more weight than facts and people are not even willing to
preserve their democracy.

------
a_band
"As for the world outside of MIT’s PR materials, it appears much the same as
it was in 1969—just with faster computers and uglier cars."

I this sentiment is actually right, especially when you realize that Thiel has
made it clear that he isn't all that impressed with the advances of the last
30 years. We've seen innovation in software but not many breakthroughs in
physics and atoms. For example, the predictions of the 50s and 60s about how
we would live (flying cars, greater health, space travel, cleaner, futuristic
cities) seemed to hope for those breakthroughs. The reality of where
innovation happened is much more depressing: pocket computers, information
superabundance, and porn.

For example: there has yet to be a breakthrough in the last 50 years that
could even come close the impact of antibiotics and nobody has set foot on the
moon in five decades. But if you told someone that in the late 60s, I think
they wouldn't believe it.

~~~
astine
" _For example: there has yet to be a breakthrough in the last 50 years that
could even come close the impact of antibiotics and nobody has set foot on the
moon in five decades. But if you told someone that in the late 60s, I think
they wouldn 't believe it._"

This shouldn't be that surprising when you think about the situation just a
little bit. Antibiotics are important because they cover a wide variety of
diseases that formerly were untreatable. This is the case because they all
have the same cause: bacteria. Other classes of disease, such as cancer,
aren't so simple. There isn't a single treatment that can reliably cure all
forms of cancer and theoretically there really can't be. It's just a
fundamentally harder problem. There's a lot a low hanging fruit in basic
discoveries but then we hit a wall when we attempt to apply them to more
difficult problems.

Back in the 50's (I think) there was a fascination with the possibility of
weather prediction. It seemed reasonable at the time that because the weather
was ultimately a deterministic system we could predict it months in advance
just by figuring out the physics and running the correct calculations. Then we
discovered chaos theory and "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" and
we realized that weather prediction was a fundamentally much harder problem
than we could have predicted. We simply can't ever measure the atmosphere
accurately enough to accurately predict the weather more than a few weeks in
advance and even then we have to take a probabilistic approach.

There's a similar deal with fast planes as mentioned in the article. Back in
the 60s and 70s all the big aerospace engineers wanted to be working on
supersonic airliners like the Concord. Decades later, that effort seems to
have been a waste of time. It turns out that the physics of supersonic flight
present challenges and the economics of intercontinental travel don't really
cover those challenges. The changes that have been made to airliners over the
last few decades have been instead in terms of efficiency and safety. Even in
the military sector, which can throw tons of money at pie-in-the-sky ideas has
run into this. The most populous strategic bomber in the US Airforce is still
the B-52 which was introduced in the mid 50s. We do have more advanced
weapons, but we can't afford them, and we can't afford them precisely because
of the changes that make them more advanced.

If someone in the late 60s wouldn't believe that we'd not repeat the success
of antibiotics or return to the moon, it would have been because of
misconceptions about the nature of the problems involved in the 60s rather
than because of some form of decadence that settled in after the fact.

~~~
evrydayhustling
I think your argument risks being an example of how Thiel might argue that we
educate ourselves into complacency. The discoverers of antibiotics had no
reason to believe there would exist a treatment to cover such a broad spectrum
of diseases; it's only in retrospect that we understand the mechanisms within
which we say "we have found the low hanging fruit". Fleming's mode of inquiry
and curiosity led him to discover a new branch of tools, but the article
contends that our focus on specialization has taught us to bury ourselves in
complexity and accept feeling relatively helpless.

------
triangleman
Holy freaking irony, Batman. Isn't this the guy who founded Palantir, the
company enabling the current industrial/surveillance complex that will surely
prevent "sclerotic" institutions from being reformed? A gay man writing in a
Catholic journal about the problem of low birth rates? WTF am I reading?

Nonetheless he makes a few good points, but the irony burns!

------
thebear
The discussion of sterility and sclerosis seems reasonable to me. On the
subject of stagnation and repetition, I find that my perception is
diametrically opposed to what the author of the book and Peter Thiel say. I am
a baby boomer, and I am absolutely blown away by things like 3D printers and
rocket boosters returning from space and being reused, not to mention the
possibility of quantum computing. As far as the arts are concerned, I believe
the difference between the olden days and today is that today, there is way
more of everything rather than less. This causes an odd distortion of
perception. In the 1960s, you could easily name a few progressive bands,
musicians, movies, etc., because there were so few. Today, the stuff you can
find on the Internet is vast, but there are no few big names to stand out. Or,
more precisely, there are a few big names, but that's the repetitive stuff
that the author laments. The new, creative, progressive stuff doesn't have
those. Go on the Internet, you'll be surprised!

~~~
eaenki
Quantum computing, like AGI, will be 10 years away, maybe a couple more
centuries. 3D printers are pretty insignificant atm. Space x and Tesla are the
exception.

------
neonate
[https://archive.md/gjlhN](https://archive.md/gjlhN)

------
skore
Ouch, that "Subscribe today" banner should have its fonts either embedded on
the page or rendered into paths. Without that, it looks like this:
[https://imgur.com/a/kxie7Cb](https://imgur.com/a/kxie7Cb)

