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Your articles seem to follow a theme of "no new ideas/breakthroughs". The anecdote of the NASA head imploring people to come up with ideas was striking. Any gue
by ahk 16y ago
Your articles seem to follow a theme of "no new ideas/breakthroughs". The anecdote of the NASA head imploring people to come up with ideas was striking.
Any guesses as to why this is happening now? After all, we _were_ having critical breakthroughs through much of the last century.
- robertfortner 16y agoTo some degree, I'm critiquing Ray Kurzweil who generalizes about progress. So, for better or worse, I take a lesson from that which is to be empiricist: look closely at each field to see whether it's vaulting forward or not. It's not happening in space (although hypersonics seem to be getting more real). It's not happening in AI or speech recognition/understanding. It's not happening in medicine. So the net empirical situation looks like the opposite of what Kurzweil says. Only IT and Moore's Law are going totally nuts. One can conjecture about why, but I think that's conjecture and there aren't deep fundamental principles about scientific and technological progress, at least that we've found so far.