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The AI and Singularity hype irks me, because I'm genuinely in agreement with Peter Thiel's argument that technological progress is actually decelerating relativ

The AI and Singularity hype irks me, because I'm genuinely in agreement with Peter Thiel's argument that technological progress is actually decelerating relative to how it was moving 60 years ago once you look beyond the advancements we have experienced in information technology and finance.

Banthum 10y ago
True that. 1880-1950 (70 years) took us from train-and-telegraph to jet-and-atom bomb. Horse and carriage was the top-tier tech for personal transportation in 1880, and they were just starting to understand that diseases are often caused by these little blobby creatures called germs. 1950-2020 (70 years) will take us much less distance. Almost everything we're developing seems to be about information processing. If you look at the technologies that actually do things in the physical world, it seems like almost nothing has changed since the 60's. Cars, trains, bridges, rockets, sewers... all more or less the same.
- uwiiuvvwu 10y ago
  compared to what though ? are we assuming a linear rate of development ? in evolution organisms change gradually with occasional bursts, and the same seems to be true of human tech evolution. There are periods of stagnation with tiny increments or even regress in places, then there are rapid bursts of unpredictable change, often enabled by information from one area reaching another previously unrelated one.
  - ExactoKnight 10y ago
    Peter Thiel has made some other interesting observations: - that our language about the ‘developed' vs ‘developing' world is excessively bullish about globalization while implicitly pessimistic about technology. - that government has changed from thinking that progress can be achieved via planning, into thinking that it's more just there to watch random forces & statistics evolve the world. This change in mindset away from planning for innovation has made it impossible to achieve grandiose mission like the Apollo space missions. As a result if there is going to be a government role in getting innovation started, people have to philosophically believe again that it’s possible to plan. - that environmentalism has induced a deep skepticism about anything involving the manipulation of nature or material objects in the real world. This skepticism explains why computer tech has been able to advance so much but not physical technology like transportation. - that peer review and grant approval processes are too political, science has suffered because it is hard to find scientists who excel at both science and politics. - that a shift from manufacturing to non-tradeable services has led to a political class (such as lawyers) that is weirdly immune to globalization and mostly oblivious to it.
    - uwiiuvvwu 10y ago
      interesting points in this podcast http://www.talkhouse.com/comedian-tim-heidecker-talks-with-adam-curtis-hypernormalisation-for-the-talkhouse-film-podcast/ http://www.talkhouse.com/comedian-tim-heidecker-talks-with-a... Adam Curtis argues that we no longer subscribe to grand visions and as a result we're floundering as our internet-induced bubbles send us into every more fragmented echo-chambers We're never going to achieve anything great again...it's the beginning of the heat-death of human progress! I think that the recent idolatry of the individual has weakened our ability to act en-mass. Previous generations were more cohesive. WRT skepticism of modification of the natural world - it's so stupid. There is no "natural state" of things. Everything is modifying everything else. We probably even got the ideas to modify ourselves and our environment as early humans from other animals (ants & termites - cities, beavers - dams etc).
      - visarga 10y ago
        > We're never going to achieve anything great again... Wikipedia, the open source, and even massive online communities such as reddit are great things.
      - CuriouslyC 10y ago
        The thing to understand about nature is that it is made up of complex systems that have evolved into finely balanced equilibria. Our reductionist science only works well in linear systems where variables are cleanly separable, which complex systems by definition are not. Thus tinkering with nature under the assumption that it is a linear system is likely to have lots of unintended consequences. That is why science's track record in promoting health is so abysmal, and our agriculture is completely unsustainable. The only way to really evolve a complex system is to make a lot of small gradual changes, constantly course correcting as you go.
      - paganel 10y ago
        Once you cut down all the trees you've got yourself a big ass problem, doesn't matter if a world without trees is more "natural" or not. Case in point, all the CEOs and big-money managers who benefit from the mining and extracting businesses buy their (big) residences in pretty "natural" places, surrounded by water and lots of greenery. I'm pretty sure they and their kids don't live in the areas affected by their companies' non-natural dealings.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  And, I believe, it will stay like this for the foreseeable future. Any really new technology, that is anything that isn't an iteration on what we've had since the 60's, is going to require a leap in the ability to manipulate energy and the harnessing of forces hitherto beyond our grasp.
  - wiz21c 10y ago
    spot on (for me at least :-))
- simonh 10y ago
  As scientific knowledge advances on more fronts, extracting ever more marginal gains by spreading our intellectual capital more thinly across the expanding frontiers of knowledge, maybe AI will help reduce the decline in the rate of advancement. A thesis like that isn't exactly career-making pop sci blockbuster material though.
- wiz21c 10y ago
  Yep. But... What could be better than a car, I mean the concept of "mechanized individual transportation". Same question with train "mechanized mass transportation". Sewer ? What could be better ? While any of these is "not perfect", it's tough (at least for me) to come with something conceptually better right now. And also, I think we have to rememeber that many of these were possible because of oil. So, I think that if we don't find a significantly better energy source, the material world will just evolve very slowly. When I think about it, it's obvious that new stuff happens in knowledge/information space : it has a very strong innovation/energy ratio...
  - jodrellblank 10y ago
    No car? A world where you could walk to the things you need because they're close? Cheap, safe, non-polluting, no maintenance car? Self-driving, self-cleaning car? Automated horse with roof and luggage compartment - no need for paved roads, muscles are quieter than engines?
    - Cthulhu_ 10y ago
      > A world where you could walk to the things you need because they're close? That was the world before cars - it's cars and access to good infrastructure that changed the world to its current state where local businesses can't compete anymore.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > Cheap, safe, non-polluting, no maintenance car? We've made tremendous progress in that direction since 1960. What's your point? > A world where you could walk to the things you need because they're close? That's not a technology problem; much of the developed world is like that and more of the world is getting to be like it with progressive urbanization. The US made a deliberate social choice to focus on auto-centric development that inhibits that a bit in the US, but that's a social problem, not a technical one.
      - jodrellblank 10y ago
- rimliu 10y ago
  I still kind of cannot get over the fact that almost 45 years have passed since the last human walked on the Moon :(
  - Cthulhu_ 10y ago
    Low return-on-investment - they did all the science they wanted back then. We could do it again (and multiple countries are considering it), but, why? The moon landings were part science (mission achieved), part reputation (done).
    - ExactoKnight 10y ago
      Actually the point has been made that we have actually lost a lot of the knowledge and expertise that existed back then, and that it would take considerable time and money to accumulate that knowledge together to do it again.
- ewjordan 10y ago
  To reuse a point brought up quite often in this context, making predictions about when and if AGI might arrive based on extrapolations of current technological trends is like trying to predict when the atom bomb would have been created based on a chart of conventional explosive yields leading up to 1940. Undiscovered discoveries are not predictable, certainly not by extrapolating from the current progress. This applies to Kurzweil's highly optimistic predictions as much as it does to negative ones. Whether or not it's likely we'll see AGI any time soon is, IMO, a matter of wild-ass-guessing more than anything else. There are no experts in AGI right now, only philosophers, because the field doesn't even exist. So nobody has any remotely educated guess about what algorithmic discoveries need to happen and whether they're in reach for human understanding, or when we'd have the computational power to exploit such algorithms if discovered. All we can really say is that it's theoretically possible, we're living proof of that. Also that there must be a lot of intelligent needles in the algorithmic haystack if evolution was able to stumble across one without a clear fitness mandate to do so (most of the creatures that thrive don't have what we consider intelligence, so it's not that evolutionarily important). I'd probably bet on it being more a matter of "when?" than "if?", but I wouldn't make any assumptions about timescale other than "not this year, probably not next".
  - arethuza 10y ago
    Actual real research in AGI was a thing when I was doing AI research in the late 1980s early 1990s (I got out just as the last AI Winter came along in the early 1990s.) Consider things like SOAR - that was explicitly an architecture for general intelligence. Whether it was any good or not is another question - but there was an active good-old-fashioned AGI field back then. Mind you - one of the reasons I left AI research to do web stuff from '92/'93 onwards was I was pretty sure the symbolic approaches in favour back then wouldn't scale up and that there really was only intelligence on one side of a computer screen.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    The idea of the atom bomb was well established prior to 1940, the question was who would get there first, not if it was possible. 1934 was a turning point in this respect, by the 1940's it wasn't a question any more of whether or not atom bombs could be created, it was more a question of 'how' than 'if'.
- paperpunk 10y ago
  I don't think it's reasonable to equate 'technologies that existed since the 60s' with 'technologies that are ubiquitous today'. I'm in the bottom 15% of my country (UK) by income and I have access to things like: near-instantaneous hot water at all times, affordable next-day delivery services from a pocket-sized device I carry around with me, international air travel that is affordable for me, efficient fridge/freezer technology, fresh groceries from around the world at every local convenience store. And yes things look a lot less impressive if you filter out information-technology related things. But advancements will always look less impressive if you filter out the most impressive advancements. The fact that we are close to permanently connected across geographical boundaries now isn't something to be dismissed out of hand. The level of effectiveness and miniaturisation of communications devices (e.g. 'true wireless' earphones with mobile internet) is really approaching the point of being practical telepathy insofar as it can be used.
  - bad_user 10y ago
    > I'm in the bottom 15% of my country (UK) by income Dude, no offense, but you're talking about the center of an empire that's literally the biggest that the world has ever seen. That your country is wealthy and can provide for your basic necessities has more to do with this little historical fact than it does with technological advances.
    - paperpunk 10y ago
      That's a fair point, but it does align with what I was trying to get across. That being that achieving 'technological progress' with a milestone that applies only to the super wealthy is only one part of technological progress. Bringing it to millions of people at an affordable cost is also something worth considering.
    - ben_w 10y ago
      Former empire. Yes it's still rich, yes the boundary of the bottom 15% of the UK is the same as the top 9.7% of the world, but most of the former empire violently rejected the UK in the second half of the 20th century (and most of the rest before then). This collapse caused economic damage that was solved in part by joining the EU, so yay irony for bringing up the long-gone Empire just as my leaders are trying to get it back. ;P For the rest of the world… In the last 70 years, Ebloa and HIV were not only discovered but so were partial treatments; Smallpox has gone from "a vaccine exists" to "wiped out"; Rinderpest didn't have a vaccine and has been wiped out; Polio has gone from no-vaccination-possible to almost eradicated (37 cases in 2016); Guinea worm — mostly affecting the poor — has gone from multiple millions of cases per year to 25 individual cases. For wider medicine: the first organ transplants were kidney in 1950, pancreas in 1966, heart and liver both in 1967, ovary in 2005, penis in 2014; DNA has gone from "???" to fully readable and partially editable; ultrasound, pacemakers and IVF were invented, and antidepressants have improved. In industry, robotics relies on computer power, so I disagree with anyone who dismisses the development of computing power; likewise, telecommunications have gone from "phone calls within your town are expensive" to "let's have a live video chat across 8-time zones". The entirety of high-temperature superconductors happened after I was born, never mind going back as far as 70 years; Kevlar, Nomex, and carbon nanomaterials were all made for the first time in the last 70 years. The poor of the world don't have everything we have, with the exception of vaccines for illnesses we wish to eliminate, but even the stuff we discard often contains things that could not be bought at any price 70 years ago.
- arethuza 10y ago
  Not sure about your bridges point - I see the bridges over the Forth most days which are from the 1880s, 1960s and the new one opening this year and they all look pretty different to me (cantilever, suspension & cable stay respectively). Would something like the Millau Viaduct have been possible in the 1960s?
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    > Would something like the Millau Viaduct have been possible in the 1960s? That's two questions in one. The crossing of large spans was a solved problem in Roman times (pillars and arches). To do it exactly like that did not require anything new in terms of materials, but there would have been quite a problem getting such a design approved without the computational homework done that it would work well in all weather conditions. Which in turn would likely lead to it being overdesigned. Computers are excellent at such simulations leading to a higher degree of confidence in designs that have never been tried before or that push the envelope in some manner.
- sgt101 10y ago
  We can manipulate matter in a number of ways unimagined in 1970. For example; trapping atoms with lasers, artificial proteins, meta materials, high vacuums, near absolute zero temperatures, high energy plasma, photonic memory, microwave atomic control, ion traps, scanning tunneling microscopes, high temperature high tesla super conducting magnets, gene sequencing and splicing. I think it depends where you look at technology and how closely...
  - sgt101 10y ago
    Also look at additive manufacturing - we can make things that were literally impossible to fabricate five years ago with a 200k sintering setup. 4d printing is pretty cool to! In your examples consider a modern turbofan blade, a single crystal of titanium grown in a xenon atmosphere and then heated white hot before being blown up like a balloon so as to allow refrigeration during operation! Another mind blowing sector is the change in medical scanning, ct, pet, mri - all new since 1970
- skynode 10y ago
  I think it's also important to consider and analyze technological advances in the context of various periods in the historical development of humanity. For much more than half of the 20th century, nations were at war with each other, the British Empire was declining (and there had to be a replacement fitting for the times), etc. Man's taste for blood has not necessarily gone away with the 20th century, it only found expression in soft power and other psychological means of domination (e.g., Hollywood movies whose central theme is American Exceptionalism). This fresh awareness that actionable information is what may determine the fate of nations has also polarized technological progress in favour of advancements in understanding data and processing large volumes of it in the most efficient way possible. To be fair, Claude Shannon and Alan Turing made outsized contributions to this space. Just as there were Economic Consequences of the Peace (thanks, J.M. Keynes), I think we will also have to chronicle the The Effects of Peacetime on Technological Progress.
- puranjay 10y ago
  A flying car would be nearly magical for someone from 1880. But a smartphone to someone from 1950? It would seem pretty fancy, but not impossible to imagine. The guy from 1950 already knows the basic tech behind it - it has a screen, it uses wireless data, and is powered by computers.
  - mcguire 10y ago
    Dick Tracy's wrist-TV, for example.
  - areyousure 10y ago
    I think you have that backwards. A century ago people imagined flying cars but not smartphones. (See Albert Robida.) Now, we would find flying cars "nearly magical" (myself included, having been recently amazed by modern vertical takeoff fighter jets) but apparently aren't impressed by smartphones (myself not included, even before having recently learned about semiconductor fabrication techniques).
- flippyhead 10y ago
  I used to think this way too. And actually I would get a little depressed, as a software engineer, because I worried that I wasn't doing much useful work only creating software all day. But then one day I had a profound insight: For nearly all of human history, the ONLY agent of change has been software. That is, our bodies have remained exactly the same for the last 80,000 years and the only thing that's changed is our culture, knowledge, languages, etc. We've used those changes in software and information to create new physical tools but the only thing that's taken us from the beginning to today is slow, steady improvements in software and "information processing". I actually think that it is a high leverage phenomenon that most of our innovation is now focused much more significantly on pure information. It's hard to understand how this can't be causing acceleration in change.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  Robots and remote drones do things in the physical world, and in pretty much every area of life from medicine to scientific research to manufacturing to search and rescue to war. While there was some of that around in the 1960s, the actual use and effect on the way people work and live has been radically transformative.
- EagleVega 10y ago
  Do you think this could have something to do with ingrained interests that have subverted disruptive technological progress? I have a feeling that there have been at least a few cases of this preventing the public from enjoying the benefits of "future living" that the 60's envisioned.
- Chris2048 10y ago
  It's entirely possible that progress is being made in areas not immediately visible to the public. You see the horses replaced with cars - what do you see of the advances in sewage management, or plastics recycling? Also, an electric car is still a car, but it's still very different from a combustion engine, or a coal steam-engine, for that matter. Does the fact that a horse is so dissimilar to an electric/petrol car mean the two are relatively similar? That seems to be a fairly superficial distinction of change.
- romaniv 10y ago
  There were many advances in chemistry, medicine and biology, materials and manufacturing, but not all of them translated into something that's truly transformative as far as society as a whole is concerned.
- vatsal 10y ago
  Agreed. The one thing I would add though is that while a lot of the technology we are using now has roots in the first half of the century, the second half has been big in terms refining and making said technology available and accessible to an increasingly higher % of human population across geographies and across economic levels. I think that in itself is a big step forward.
  - ExactoKnight 10y ago
    That's the problem. Globalization is merely the copying of existing technology, but many in the west have mistaken it for real progress. This is one reason why economic growth in the west is stagnant. Technological progress is what fuelled our strong growth half a century ago. Without it, politics becomes a zero sum game.
unityByFreedom 10y ago
That's ridiculous. Everyone has a personal computer in their pocket and can communicate with anyone in seconds across the world. The world's libraries are at your fingertips by mail order or on your screen. We may not be on the cusp of a singularity, but that's nothing to be ashamed of. We should be proud we haven't seen a major world war in 70 years.
- tim333 10y ago
  I think it all depends on which technology. They all seem to follow a sigmoid curve where progress accelerates and then tapers off. The fastest improvement may be say 1860 for sewers, 1960 for jet engines and now for computer tech.
- robotresearcher 10y ago
  Perhaps it was a greater achievement to get the first 10^4 people online than the next 10^9. More of the same-or-slightly-smaller. I certainly got more delta-value out of pre-web Internet (email, Usenet, chat) and Web 1.0 (online papers and libraries, nearly-free publishing) than Web 2.0 onwards (Facebook, etc). Maybe it's not accelerating constantly.
  - unityByFreedom 10y ago
    I think you're really underselling things like 3G data plans which are now worldwide. That didn't exist 10 years ago. Even just the widespread use of SMS has helped medical teams assess and treat diseases in remote areas. When people complain about some lack of technological advancements, it sounds to me like they're just not aware of what we have accomplished. And I am not surprised that Thiel is in this category. He has a JD, not a PhD
    - wang_li 10y ago
      There's a big difference between technological advancements and engineering & standard development. Deploying a cell network is an engineering and logistical task, not a feat of invention.
SkyMarshal 10y ago
>because I'm genuinely in agreement with Peter Thiel's argument that technological progress is actually decelerating relative to how it was moving 60 years ago Is it possible we just covered most of the low-hanging fruit in the 1800s and 1900s, and now the only remaining discoveries that are really ground-breaking are the really difficult ones, hence the slower rate?
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Very much so. More and more i feel that he PC and smartphone has just been about recreating the mainframe using smaller components. The laser may well have been the last really new thing to come about.
  - romaniv 10y ago
    Alan Kay spoke about it length in many of his talks. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o Excellent video. I highly recommend everyone working in or with IT to see it. I think he is right. PCs and smartphone are mostly recreating thing from the past, and not the best things either. However, this isn't because we invented everything there is to invent. It has more to do with how research in computing is currently funded and how companies approach invention and innovation.
    - deepnotderp 10y ago
      Making things smaller and power efficient IS invention, it's what has driven so much tech progress. Even supercomputers are a power problem now...
      - romaniv 10y ago
        You probably should watch that video. This is one of its core subject. Kay makes a valuable distinction between invention and innovation, and what you describe falls into the "innovation" bucket. It's incremental. Yes, our cellphones are more powerful than mainframes of the old, but do we utilize them to the same extent?
lordCarbonFiber 10y ago
>Once you look beyond the advancements we have experienced in info tech and finance And medicine, and materials, and semiconductors (this board in particular loves to forget that these computers we all use are built on top of something), and antennas; the list goes on. What was once highly theoretical phd knowledge is now a byline in a junior level microelectronics course; the cutting edge having evolved to be unrecognizable to a person 60 years ago. It took us 40 years to go from a computer that could play chess to a computer that could win; took less than twenty to go from winning chess to winning Go (and exponential jump in complexity). In the same amount of time we've gone from mapping the human genome to editing it. Rechargeable battery technology that could power a vacuum for 30 minutes to driving a car for 400 miles. Never forget that exponential change looks linear on the small scale.
MR4D 10y ago
I'm not sure that's the right way to look at it. For instance, let's say you have a small circle with a small bump on it. The circle represents current technology, and the bump is a change in technology (i.e. innovation). Now take a much larger circle that has many small bumps on it. The bumps look tiny in comparison, but in aggregate, they are much larger than the bump from the smaller circle. In fact, at some point, they will be bigger than the old circle, even though it just looks like an un-smoothed circle. Further, 60 years ago we were coming out of wartime, which meant that many innovations were able to come to market in a short period of time (they had been held up do to wartime limitations like rationing, material shortages, etc.) This is why I think Thiel is wrong.
- syntaxing 10y ago
  Your statement reminds me of the representation of PhD: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
VladKovac 10y ago
sigh singularity hypothesis requires no "accelerating change" any eventually upward slope will do.
jedharris 10y ago
What about genetic engineering? We can create new organisms by directly modifying genes, in fact we frequently do for drug production, etc. We can sequence genes and the cost is falling faster than Moore's law. We can introduce stem cells with different genes into the body (including brain) to cure genetic diseases. We'll be able to tweak genes in human zygotes soon. Does this compare favorably to internal combustion or indoor plumbing? Seems to me that it does. And AI is a huge force multiplier in all of these abilities.
edanm 10y ago
There's no one "AI and singularity" argument. That said, for most of the arguments that modern-day thinkers talk about, accelerating technological progress is totally irrelevant. You're most likely thinking of Kurzweil's school of thought around a singularity, which is nowadays far from the "norm". If you're talking about the arguments around technological unemployment, it doesn't matter if tech is accelerating - we could, for example,, over the course of the next e.g. 30 years, replace 50% of human jobs. This might be "slower" in some sense than previous tech changes, but it doesn't change the bottom line. (note: these are made up numbers to illustrate a point, I have no good guess at the real numbers, but lots of smart people, including economists, think it's a problem we will face soon-ish). If you're talking about the arguments around "unfriendly AI", then again, it is totally immaterial wether tech in general is accelerating. All that you need to believe in order to worry is that eventually, at some point, we will be able to create a machine that thinks, and it is not automatically guaranteed to share our values.
- mjn 10y ago
  > You're most likely thinking of Kurzweil's school of thought around a singularity, which is nowadays far from the "norm". I wish this were true, but it's gotten a new lease on life with Nick Bostrom's book and the various high-profile people who have been influenced by it (like Elon Musk and Bill Gates), so there's a bit of a boomlet around singularity speculation again.
  - edanm 10y ago
    But that's where I disagree with you. I think Bostrom et al's take on things is correct (at least potentially), and has nothing at all to do with the Kurzweilian norm. Bostrom's argument requires far fewer background assumptions.

Banthum 10y ago

True that. 1880-1950 (70 years) took us from train-and-telegraph to jet-and-atom bomb. Horse and carriage was the top-tier tech for personal transportation in 1880, and they were just starting to understand that diseases are often caused by these little blobby creatures called germs. 1950-2020 (70 years) will take us much less distance. Almost everything we're developing seems to be about information processing. If you look at the technologies that actually do things in the physical world, it seems like almost nothing has changed since the 60's. Cars, trains, bridges, rockets, sewers... all more or less the same.

uwiiuvvwu 10y ago
compared to what though ? are we assuming a linear rate of development ? in evolution organisms change gradually with occasional bursts, and the same seems to be true of human tech evolution. There are periods of stagnation with tiny increments or even regress in places, then there are rapid bursts of unpredictable change, often enabled by information from one area reaching another previously unrelated one.
- ExactoKnight 10y ago
  Peter Thiel has made some other interesting observations: - that our language about the ‘developed' vs ‘developing' world is excessively bullish about globalization while implicitly pessimistic about technology. - that government has changed from thinking that progress can be achieved via planning, into thinking that it's more just there to watch random forces & statistics evolve the world. This change in mindset away from planning for innovation has made it impossible to achieve grandiose mission like the Apollo space missions. As a result if there is going to be a government role in getting innovation started, people have to philosophically believe again that it’s possible to plan. - that environmentalism has induced a deep skepticism about anything involving the manipulation of nature or material objects in the real world. This skepticism explains why computer tech has been able to advance so much but not physical technology like transportation. - that peer review and grant approval processes are too political, science has suffered because it is hard to find scientists who excel at both science and politics. - that a shift from manufacturing to non-tradeable services has led to a political class (such as lawyers) that is weirdly immune to globalization and mostly oblivious to it.
  - uwiiuvvwu 10y ago
    interesting points in this podcast http://www.talkhouse.com/comedian-tim-heidecker-talks-with-adam-curtis-hypernormalisation-for-the-talkhouse-film-podcast/ http://www.talkhouse.com/comedian-tim-heidecker-talks-with-a... Adam Curtis argues that we no longer subscribe to grand visions and as a result we're floundering as our internet-induced bubbles send us into every more fragmented echo-chambers We're never going to achieve anything great again...it's the beginning of the heat-death of human progress! I think that the recent idolatry of the individual has weakened our ability to act en-mass. Previous generations were more cohesive. WRT skepticism of modification of the natural world - it's so stupid. There is no "natural state" of things. Everything is modifying everything else. We probably even got the ideas to modify ourselves and our environment as early humans from other animals (ants & termites - cities, beavers - dams etc).
    - visarga 10y ago
      > We're never going to achieve anything great again... Wikipedia, the open source, and even massive online communities such as reddit are great things.
    - CuriouslyC 10y ago
      The thing to understand about nature is that it is made up of complex systems that have evolved into finely balanced equilibria. Our reductionist science only works well in linear systems where variables are cleanly separable, which complex systems by definition are not. Thus tinkering with nature under the assumption that it is a linear system is likely to have lots of unintended consequences. That is why science's track record in promoting health is so abysmal, and our agriculture is completely unsustainable. The only way to really evolve a complex system is to make a lot of small gradual changes, constantly course correcting as you go.
    - paganel 10y ago
      Once you cut down all the trees you've got yourself a big ass problem, doesn't matter if a world without trees is more "natural" or not. Case in point, all the CEOs and big-money managers who benefit from the mining and extracting businesses buy their (big) residences in pretty "natural" places, surrounded by water and lots of greenery. I'm pretty sure they and their kids don't live in the areas affected by their companies' non-natural dealings.
TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
And, I believe, it will stay like this for the foreseeable future. Any really new technology, that is anything that isn't an iteration on what we've had since the 60's, is going to require a leap in the ability to manipulate energy and the harnessing of forces hitherto beyond our grasp.
- wiz21c 10y ago
  spot on (for me at least :-))
simonh 10y ago
As scientific knowledge advances on more fronts, extracting ever more marginal gains by spreading our intellectual capital more thinly across the expanding frontiers of knowledge, maybe AI will help reduce the decline in the rate of advancement. A thesis like that isn't exactly career-making pop sci blockbuster material though.
wiz21c 10y ago
Yep. But... What could be better than a car, I mean the concept of "mechanized individual transportation". Same question with train "mechanized mass transportation". Sewer ? What could be better ? While any of these is "not perfect", it's tough (at least for me) to come with something conceptually better right now. And also, I think we have to rememeber that many of these were possible because of oil. So, I think that if we don't find a significantly better energy source, the material world will just evolve very slowly. When I think about it, it's obvious that new stuff happens in knowledge/information space : it has a very strong innovation/energy ratio...
- jodrellblank 10y ago
  No car? A world where you could walk to the things you need because they're close? Cheap, safe, non-polluting, no maintenance car? Self-driving, self-cleaning car? Automated horse with roof and luggage compartment - no need for paved roads, muscles are quieter than engines?
  - Cthulhu_ 10y ago
    > A world where you could walk to the things you need because they're close? That was the world before cars - it's cars and access to good infrastructure that changed the world to its current state where local businesses can't compete anymore.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > Cheap, safe, non-polluting, no maintenance car? We've made tremendous progress in that direction since 1960. What's your point? > A world where you could walk to the things you need because they're close? That's not a technology problem; much of the developed world is like that and more of the world is getting to be like it with progressive urbanization. The US made a deliberate social choice to focus on auto-centric development that inhibits that a bit in the US, but that's a social problem, not a technical one.
    - jodrellblank 10y ago
rimliu 10y ago
I still kind of cannot get over the fact that almost 45 years have passed since the last human walked on the Moon :(
- Cthulhu_ 10y ago
  Low return-on-investment - they did all the science they wanted back then. We could do it again (and multiple countries are considering it), but, why? The moon landings were part science (mission achieved), part reputation (done).
  - ExactoKnight 10y ago
    Actually the point has been made that we have actually lost a lot of the knowledge and expertise that existed back then, and that it would take considerable time and money to accumulate that knowledge together to do it again.
ewjordan 10y ago
To reuse a point brought up quite often in this context, making predictions about when and if AGI might arrive based on extrapolations of current technological trends is like trying to predict when the atom bomb would have been created based on a chart of conventional explosive yields leading up to 1940. Undiscovered discoveries are not predictable, certainly not by extrapolating from the current progress. This applies to Kurzweil's highly optimistic predictions as much as it does to negative ones. Whether or not it's likely we'll see AGI any time soon is, IMO, a matter of wild-ass-guessing more than anything else. There are no experts in AGI right now, only philosophers, because the field doesn't even exist. So nobody has any remotely educated guess about what algorithmic discoveries need to happen and whether they're in reach for human understanding, or when we'd have the computational power to exploit such algorithms if discovered. All we can really say is that it's theoretically possible, we're living proof of that. Also that there must be a lot of intelligent needles in the algorithmic haystack if evolution was able to stumble across one without a clear fitness mandate to do so (most of the creatures that thrive don't have what we consider intelligence, so it's not that evolutionarily important). I'd probably bet on it being more a matter of "when?" than "if?", but I wouldn't make any assumptions about timescale other than "not this year, probably not next".
- arethuza 10y ago
  Actual real research in AGI was a thing when I was doing AI research in the late 1980s early 1990s (I got out just as the last AI Winter came along in the early 1990s.) Consider things like SOAR - that was explicitly an architecture for general intelligence. Whether it was any good or not is another question - but there was an active good-old-fashioned AGI field back then. Mind you - one of the reasons I left AI research to do web stuff from '92/'93 onwards was I was pretty sure the symbolic approaches in favour back then wouldn't scale up and that there really was only intelligence on one side of a computer screen.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  The idea of the atom bomb was well established prior to 1940, the question was who would get there first, not if it was possible. 1934 was a turning point in this respect, by the 1940's it wasn't a question any more of whether or not atom bombs could be created, it was more a question of 'how' than 'if'.
paperpunk 10y ago
I don't think it's reasonable to equate 'technologies that existed since the 60s' with 'technologies that are ubiquitous today'. I'm in the bottom 15% of my country (UK) by income and I have access to things like: near-instantaneous hot water at all times, affordable next-day delivery services from a pocket-sized device I carry around with me, international air travel that is affordable for me, efficient fridge/freezer technology, fresh groceries from around the world at every local convenience store. And yes things look a lot less impressive if you filter out information-technology related things. But advancements will always look less impressive if you filter out the most impressive advancements. The fact that we are close to permanently connected across geographical boundaries now isn't something to be dismissed out of hand. The level of effectiveness and miniaturisation of communications devices (e.g. 'true wireless' earphones with mobile internet) is really approaching the point of being practical telepathy insofar as it can be used.
- bad_user 10y ago
  > I'm in the bottom 15% of my country (UK) by income Dude, no offense, but you're talking about the center of an empire that's literally the biggest that the world has ever seen. That your country is wealthy and can provide for your basic necessities has more to do with this little historical fact than it does with technological advances.
  - paperpunk 10y ago
    That's a fair point, but it does align with what I was trying to get across. That being that achieving 'technological progress' with a milestone that applies only to the super wealthy is only one part of technological progress. Bringing it to millions of people at an affordable cost is also something worth considering.
  - ben_w 10y ago
    Former empire. Yes it's still rich, yes the boundary of the bottom 15% of the UK is the same as the top 9.7% of the world, but most of the former empire violently rejected the UK in the second half of the 20th century (and most of the rest before then). This collapse caused economic damage that was solved in part by joining the EU, so yay irony for bringing up the long-gone Empire just as my leaders are trying to get it back. ;P For the rest of the world… In the last 70 years, Ebloa and HIV were not only discovered but so were partial treatments; Smallpox has gone from "a vaccine exists" to "wiped out"; Rinderpest didn't have a vaccine and has been wiped out; Polio has gone from no-vaccination-possible to almost eradicated (37 cases in 2016); Guinea worm — mostly affecting the poor — has gone from multiple millions of cases per year to 25 individual cases. For wider medicine: the first organ transplants were kidney in 1950, pancreas in 1966, heart and liver both in 1967, ovary in 2005, penis in 2014; DNA has gone from "???" to fully readable and partially editable; ultrasound, pacemakers and IVF were invented, and antidepressants have improved. In industry, robotics relies on computer power, so I disagree with anyone who dismisses the development of computing power; likewise, telecommunications have gone from "phone calls within your town are expensive" to "let's have a live video chat across 8-time zones". The entirety of high-temperature superconductors happened after I was born, never mind going back as far as 70 years; Kevlar, Nomex, and carbon nanomaterials were all made for the first time in the last 70 years. The poor of the world don't have everything we have, with the exception of vaccines for illnesses we wish to eliminate, but even the stuff we discard often contains things that could not be bought at any price 70 years ago.
arethuza 10y ago
Not sure about your bridges point - I see the bridges over the Forth most days which are from the 1880s, 1960s and the new one opening this year and they all look pretty different to me (cantilever, suspension & cable stay respectively). Would something like the Millau Viaduct have been possible in the 1960s?
- jacquesm 10y ago
  > Would something like the Millau Viaduct have been possible in the 1960s? That's two questions in one. The crossing of large spans was a solved problem in Roman times (pillars and arches). To do it exactly like that did not require anything new in terms of materials, but there would have been quite a problem getting such a design approved without the computational homework done that it would work well in all weather conditions. Which in turn would likely lead to it being overdesigned. Computers are excellent at such simulations leading to a higher degree of confidence in designs that have never been tried before or that push the envelope in some manner.
sgt101 10y ago
We can manipulate matter in a number of ways unimagined in 1970. For example; trapping atoms with lasers, artificial proteins, meta materials, high vacuums, near absolute zero temperatures, high energy plasma, photonic memory, microwave atomic control, ion traps, scanning tunneling microscopes, high temperature high tesla super conducting magnets, gene sequencing and splicing. I think it depends where you look at technology and how closely...
- sgt101 10y ago
  Also look at additive manufacturing - we can make things that were literally impossible to fabricate five years ago with a 200k sintering setup. 4d printing is pretty cool to! In your examples consider a modern turbofan blade, a single crystal of titanium grown in a xenon atmosphere and then heated white hot before being blown up like a balloon so as to allow refrigeration during operation! Another mind blowing sector is the change in medical scanning, ct, pet, mri - all new since 1970
skynode 10y ago
I think it's also important to consider and analyze technological advances in the context of various periods in the historical development of humanity. For much more than half of the 20th century, nations were at war with each other, the British Empire was declining (and there had to be a replacement fitting for the times), etc. Man's taste for blood has not necessarily gone away with the 20th century, it only found expression in soft power and other psychological means of domination (e.g., Hollywood movies whose central theme is American Exceptionalism). This fresh awareness that actionable information is what may determine the fate of nations has also polarized technological progress in favour of advancements in understanding data and processing large volumes of it in the most efficient way possible. To be fair, Claude Shannon and Alan Turing made outsized contributions to this space. Just as there were Economic Consequences of the Peace (thanks, J.M. Keynes), I think we will also have to chronicle the The Effects of Peacetime on Technological Progress.
puranjay 10y ago
A flying car would be nearly magical for someone from 1880. But a smartphone to someone from 1950? It would seem pretty fancy, but not impossible to imagine. The guy from 1950 already knows the basic tech behind it - it has a screen, it uses wireless data, and is powered by computers.
- mcguire 10y ago
  Dick Tracy's wrist-TV, for example.
- areyousure 10y ago
  I think you have that backwards. A century ago people imagined flying cars but not smartphones. (See Albert Robida.) Now, we would find flying cars "nearly magical" (myself included, having been recently amazed by modern vertical takeoff fighter jets) but apparently aren't impressed by smartphones (myself not included, even before having recently learned about semiconductor fabrication techniques).
flippyhead 10y ago
I used to think this way too. And actually I would get a little depressed, as a software engineer, because I worried that I wasn't doing much useful work only creating software all day. But then one day I had a profound insight: For nearly all of human history, the ONLY agent of change has been software. That is, our bodies have remained exactly the same for the last 80,000 years and the only thing that's changed is our culture, knowledge, languages, etc. We've used those changes in software and information to create new physical tools but the only thing that's taken us from the beginning to today is slow, steady improvements in software and "information processing". I actually think that it is a high leverage phenomenon that most of our innovation is now focused much more significantly on pure information. It's hard to understand how this can't be causing acceleration in change.
dragonwriter 10y ago
Robots and remote drones do things in the physical world, and in pretty much every area of life from medicine to scientific research to manufacturing to search and rescue to war. While there was some of that around in the 1960s, the actual use and effect on the way people work and live has been radically transformative.
EagleVega 10y ago
Do you think this could have something to do with ingrained interests that have subverted disruptive technological progress? I have a feeling that there have been at least a few cases of this preventing the public from enjoying the benefits of "future living" that the 60's envisioned.
Chris2048 10y ago
It's entirely possible that progress is being made in areas not immediately visible to the public. You see the horses replaced with cars - what do you see of the advances in sewage management, or plastics recycling? Also, an electric car is still a car, but it's still very different from a combustion engine, or a coal steam-engine, for that matter. Does the fact that a horse is so dissimilar to an electric/petrol car mean the two are relatively similar? That seems to be a fairly superficial distinction of change.
romaniv 10y ago
There were many advances in chemistry, medicine and biology, materials and manufacturing, but not all of them translated into something that's truly transformative as far as society as a whole is concerned.
vatsal 10y ago
Agreed. The one thing I would add though is that while a lot of the technology we are using now has roots in the first half of the century, the second half has been big in terms refining and making said technology available and accessible to an increasingly higher % of human population across geographies and across economic levels. I think that in itself is a big step forward.
- ExactoKnight 10y ago
  That's the problem. Globalization is merely the copying of existing technology, but many in the west have mistaken it for real progress. This is one reason why economic growth in the west is stagnant. Technological progress is what fuelled our strong growth half a century ago. Without it, politics becomes a zero sum game.

unityByFreedom 10y ago

That's ridiculous. Everyone has a personal computer in their pocket and can communicate with anyone in seconds across the world. The world's libraries are at your fingertips by mail order or on your screen. We may not be on the cusp of a singularity, but that's nothing to be ashamed of. We should be proud we haven't seen a major world war in 70 years.

tim333 10y ago
I think it all depends on which technology. They all seem to follow a sigmoid curve where progress accelerates and then tapers off. The fastest improvement may be say 1860 for sewers, 1960 for jet engines and now for computer tech.
robotresearcher 10y ago
Perhaps it was a greater achievement to get the first 10^4 people online than the next 10^9. More of the same-or-slightly-smaller. I certainly got more delta-value out of pre-web Internet (email, Usenet, chat) and Web 1.0 (online papers and libraries, nearly-free publishing) than Web 2.0 onwards (Facebook, etc). Maybe it's not accelerating constantly.
- unityByFreedom 10y ago
  I think you're really underselling things like 3G data plans which are now worldwide. That didn't exist 10 years ago. Even just the widespread use of SMS has helped medical teams assess and treat diseases in remote areas. When people complain about some lack of technological advancements, it sounds to me like they're just not aware of what we have accomplished. And I am not surprised that Thiel is in this category. He has a JD, not a PhD
  - wang_li 10y ago
    There's a big difference between technological advancements and engineering & standard development. Deploying a cell network is an engineering and logistical task, not a feat of invention.

SkyMarshal 10y ago

>because I'm genuinely in agreement with Peter Thiel's argument that technological progress is actually decelerating relative to how it was moving 60 years ago Is it possible we just covered most of the low-hanging fruit in the 1800s and 1900s, and now the only remaining discoveries that are really ground-breaking are the really difficult ones, hence the slower rate?

digi_owl 10y ago
Very much so. More and more i feel that he PC and smartphone has just been about recreating the mainframe using smaller components. The laser may well have been the last really new thing to come about.
- romaniv 10y ago
  Alan Kay spoke about it length in many of his talks. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o Excellent video. I highly recommend everyone working in or with IT to see it. I think he is right. PCs and smartphone are mostly recreating thing from the past, and not the best things either. However, this isn't because we invented everything there is to invent. It has more to do with how research in computing is currently funded and how companies approach invention and innovation.
  - deepnotderp 10y ago
    Making things smaller and power efficient IS invention, it's what has driven so much tech progress. Even supercomputers are a power problem now...
    - romaniv 10y ago
      You probably should watch that video. This is one of its core subject. Kay makes a valuable distinction between invention and innovation, and what you describe falls into the "innovation" bucket. It's incremental. Yes, our cellphones are more powerful than mainframes of the old, but do we utilize them to the same extent?

lordCarbonFiber 10y ago

>Once you look beyond the advancements we have experienced in info tech and finance And medicine, and materials, and semiconductors (this board in particular loves to forget that these computers we all use are built on top of something), and antennas; the list goes on. What was once highly theoretical phd knowledge is now a byline in a junior level microelectronics course; the cutting edge having evolved to be unrecognizable to a person 60 years ago. It took us 40 years to go from a computer that could play chess to a computer that could win; took less than twenty to go from winning chess to winning Go (and exponential jump in complexity). In the same amount of time we've gone from mapping the human genome to editing it. Rechargeable battery technology that could power a vacuum for 30 minutes to driving a car for 400 miles. Never forget that exponential change looks linear on the small scale.

MR4D 10y ago

I'm not sure that's the right way to look at it. For instance, let's say you have a small circle with a small bump on it. The circle represents current technology, and the bump is a change in technology (i.e. innovation). Now take a much larger circle that has many small bumps on it. The bumps look tiny in comparison, but in aggregate, they are much larger than the bump from the smaller circle. In fact, at some point, they will be bigger than the old circle, even though it just looks like an un-smoothed circle. Further, 60 years ago we were coming out of wartime, which meant that many innovations were able to come to market in a short period of time (they had been held up do to wartime limitations like rationing, material shortages, etc.) This is why I think Thiel is wrong.

syntaxing 10y ago
Your statement reminds me of the representation of PhD: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

VladKovac 10y ago

sigh singularity hypothesis requires no "accelerating change" any eventually upward slope will do.

jedharris 10y ago

What about genetic engineering? We can create new organisms by directly modifying genes, in fact we frequently do for drug production, etc. We can sequence genes and the cost is falling faster than Moore's law. We can introduce stem cells with different genes into the body (including brain) to cure genetic diseases. We'll be able to tweak genes in human zygotes soon. Does this compare favorably to internal combustion or indoor plumbing? Seems to me that it does. And AI is a huge force multiplier in all of these abilities.

edanm 10y ago

There's no one "AI and singularity" argument. That said, for most of the arguments that modern-day thinkers talk about, accelerating technological progress is totally irrelevant. You're most likely thinking of Kurzweil's school of thought around a singularity, which is nowadays far from the "norm". If you're talking about the arguments around technological unemployment, it doesn't matter if tech is accelerating - we could, for example,, over the course of the next e.g. 30 years, replace 50% of human jobs. This might be "slower" in some sense than previous tech changes, but it doesn't change the bottom line. (note: these are made up numbers to illustrate a point, I have no good guess at the real numbers, but lots of smart people, including economists, think it's a problem we will face soon-ish). If you're talking about the arguments around "unfriendly AI", then again, it is totally immaterial wether tech in general is accelerating. All that you need to believe in order to worry is that eventually, at some point, we will be able to create a machine that thinks, and it is not automatically guaranteed to share our values.

mjn 10y ago
> You're most likely thinking of Kurzweil's school of thought around a singularity, which is nowadays far from the "norm". I wish this were true, but it's gotten a new lease on life with Nick Bostrom's book and the various high-profile people who have been influenced by it (like Elon Musk and Bill Gates), so there's a bit of a boomlet around singularity speculation again.
- edanm 10y ago
  But that's where I disagree with you. I think Bostrom et al's take on things is correct (at least potentially), and has nothing at all to do with the Kurzweilian norm. Bostrom's argument requires far fewer background assumptions.