11 ms·

Why has progress stalled? (2014)

109 points by scottlocklin 7y ago

Mountain_Skies 7y ago
Perhaps the burden of maintaining the world we have built leaves too little left over for the task of expanding our world.
d--b 7y ago
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.
buboard 7y ago
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.
burlesona 7y ago
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-ponzi-scheme-part-4.html https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/6/16/the-growth-pon...
petermcneeley 7y ago
"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.
- JamesBarney 7y ago
  He means that management or organization wouldn't be willing to risk the death of an individual, not that the individual wouldn't accept the risk.
  - redis_mlc 7y ago
    Shuttle engineers felt that the risk of an accident was about 1%. Managers couldn't accept more than 0.01% It turned out to be ... 1%. Talk about a disconnect in risk assessment!
- buboard 7y ago
  arent boeing and spacex preparing capsules for the moon? would you be OK with applying 1969 safety tests standards on them?
  - petermcneeley 7y ago
    The Apollo missions saw no loss of life in outside of training. Given the number of flights I would guess that it's single digit levels of risk. It's interestingly losses in space went up as time went on.
    - spc476 7y ago
      Of the 12 manned Apollo missions [1], 3 out of 36 astronauts died, for an 8% fatality rate. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apollo_missions#Manned_Apollo_missions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apollo_missions#Manned...
cortesoft 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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?
nl 7y ago
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!
bawolff 7y ago
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 7y ago
  >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 7y ago
    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/
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    The first jet aircraft (He178) flew a few days before the start of WW2.
  - 7y ago
redis_mlc 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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).
8bitsrule 7y ago
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 7y ago
  > 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.
  - nl 7y ago
    Unclear if this is an argument for or against his "golden quarter" argument, but in any case: cell phones may have been roughly static for 13 years, but since then they've been a foundational innovation for things in the software space. For example, WhatsApp now lets people do very cheap, high quality, reliable video calls from anywhere on the earth.
    - skat20phys 7y ago
      I'm amazed at smartphones and videochatting to be honest, but at some level it's something that seems like a natural evolution of what was there before. For example, in a lot of ways we live in a sci-fi future, if the number of classic films featuring videochats as a sign of the future is any indication. On the other hand, those films did basically get the idea right, that there would be some screen with some little speaker and microphone that you'd talk to someone through. If you go back a bit further though, like to the 1910s, there wasn't any idea of that at all. It was off the collective radar completely. So in some sense, we are living in some continuation of the early 1970s, in the sense it was part of a future we could accurately envision. But we're not living in a continuation of the same era as pre "golden quarter" in that we aren't really entirely part of the future they imagined (I think 1945 isn't quite right, I'd push it back to pre-WWI). At least that's one argument. I wish we could go back and time and interview a bunch of people who lived like 1900-1960+ about this issue, and compare it to what people who were born in, say, 1950, might say about it now. FWIW, my sense is that people in the mid-twentieth century underestimated change in communication technology and overestimated change in transportation tech.
Areading314 7y ago
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
- buboard 7y ago
  thats like listing airplane doors, propellers and jet engines separately from air travel.
- trevyn 7y ago
  And we’ve lost ourselves as a result.
  - sabas123 7y ago
    Implying that we ever found ourselves before.
- new2628 7y ago
  Some amazing technology in that list intermixed with some vaporware and some dubious advances.
hooande 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Did we not have an extremely large civil rights reform in 2014 with marriage equality?
mnm1 7y ago
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.
- int_19h 7y ago
  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.
  - mnm1 7y ago
    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.
jdkee 7y ago
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-fall-of-american-growth https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26634594-the-rise-and-fa...
- galaxyLogic 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
vl 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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-may-think/303881/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...) 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-Machine-Stops.pdf https://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Machi...)
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
cjblomqvist 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
  - nl 7y ago
    All of these things still exist. But there are less people in poverty now, so... that seems like a good thing?
    - CaptArmchair 7y ago
      Yes and no. This is about which frame of reference you use to look at the world. And how that can severely distort your view. Consider isolated amazonian tribes, or tribes on islands in the South Pacific. By our standards, they live in abject poverty: no electricity, no clean water, no jobs,... Then again, these tribes do not know anything else. They have lived like this since the dawn of humanity. Then consider native tribes in America, Alaska, Greenland. People whose traditional way of living have been replaced by the affordances of modern technology. And that hasn't been for the better, necessarily. We are talking about fundamental lifestyle changes that happened over the course of less then a generation. And that's even without the historical violence we tend to discuss / guilt trip over in the modern world: such as traditional colonization, imperialism and such-like. Take Inuit tribes. Just 2 generations ago - some 50 years - these people lived in small traditional fishing communities, mostly secluded from the world. The lived according to their own ancestral culture and that worked out fine for them. Today, their way of living has entirely upended. Sure, they still fish, but they now have social security numbers, salaried yet often low-wage jobs, Internet and television, pollution and noise from cars, snowmobiles and so on. The net result is that unemployment among the active population is a serious issue, as it also causes mental and physical health issues including crime and substance abuse. When native tribes protest against oil pipelines, that's not a take against the benefits modernity itself. It's a protest against the fact that the arrival of modernity literally implies the disappearance of an environmental and cultural context in which they have been rooted for thousands of years. To them, the benefits of electricity, healthcare, modern jobs and cars also come with a great cost: giving up their identity, their way of life and the risk of ending up in abject poverty due to the dynamics inherent to modern economic systems rooted in Western / European values and morals. As such, when we talk about progress, it's presumptuous to assume that anyone who doesn't have access to modern affordances is "living in poverty" and "more progress" is the only answer going forward. The big thing that traditional tribal cultures have going for them is sustainability. Sure, individuals lived precarious lives and relied on magical thinking to explain the world, but these communities as a whole have persisted for many generations with a low impact on their environment. From their frame of reference, their way of life totally make sense. Assuming that their way of thinking is backwards or obsolete, or assuming that them ending up unemployed or struggling with modernity is them not pulling their weight in "accepting progress", well, that's just our own superiority bias clouding our thinking.
giardini 7y ago
The Bad News: Primarily b/c the Baby Boomers, the most creative and productive generation the USA has seen since the Founding Fathers, are retiring and dying off. The Good News: Before the Boomers leave the planet, they will develop true AI, thus completing their generous service to mankind and undoing any stalled progress. (applause) Thank you, thank you ... The Bad News: The Boomers better do it (the AI, that is) b/c the current generations are barely able to configure their cell phones and apparently can't pay their gas bill either.
AnimalMuppet 7y ago
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.
peterhj 7y ago
NB: article was written December 2014. 1970 is now 50 years ago.
beefield 7y ago
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 7y ago
"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 7y ago
  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
mirimir 7y ago
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 7y ago
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
randomsearch 7y ago
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.
- sitkack 7y ago
  Has too much of our technological workforce been diverted from science and engineering to work on basically e-commerce apps?
calewis 7y ago
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.
tomaszs 7y ago
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.
Animats 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
tomaszs 7y ago
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
sgt101 7y ago
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.
auggierose 7y ago
Well, we live now in an age where a computer can play Go better than any human. That is fucking progress right there.
beloch 7y ago
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.
lcam84 7y ago
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 7y ago
  But who gets to decide what legitimate needs are? I doubt people will not find additional utility in new/improved products.
stkdump 7y ago
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.
boyadjian 7y ago
The response is energy : Progress is not everything, there is also energy, and more specifically, energy per inhabitant. The energy available on our planet is limited, and the population is constantly increasing, so the ratio of the two decreases. So the felling of progress decreases, but still, there is progress.
payne92 7y ago
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.
OnlyRepliesToBS 7y ago
politics and greed

109 points by scottlocklin 7y ago

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

d--b 7y ago

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.

buboard 7y ago

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.

burlesona 7y ago

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

petermcneeley 7y ago

"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.

JamesBarney 7y ago
He means that management or organization wouldn't be willing to risk the death of an individual, not that the individual wouldn't accept the risk.
- redis_mlc 7y ago
  Shuttle engineers felt that the risk of an accident was about 1%. Managers couldn't accept more than 0.01% It turned out to be ... 1%. Talk about a disconnect in risk assessment!
buboard 7y ago
arent boeing and spacex preparing capsules for the moon? would you be OK with applying 1969 safety tests standards on them?
- petermcneeley 7y ago
  The Apollo missions saw no loss of life in outside of training. Given the number of flights I would guess that it's single digit levels of risk. It's interestingly losses in space went up as time went on.
  - spc476 7y ago
    Of the 12 manned Apollo missions [1], 3 out of 36 astronauts died, for an 8% fatality rate. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apollo_missions#Manned_Apollo_missions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apollo_missions#Manned...

cortesoft 7y ago

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 7y ago
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?

nl 7y ago

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!

bawolff 7y ago

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 7y ago
>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 7y ago
  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/
- WalterBright 7y ago
  The first jet aircraft (He178) flew a few days before the start of WW2.
- 7y ago

redis_mlc 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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).

8bitsrule 7y ago

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 7y ago
> 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.
- nl 7y ago
  Unclear if this is an argument for or against his "golden quarter" argument, but in any case: cell phones may have been roughly static for 13 years, but since then they've been a foundational innovation for things in the software space. For example, WhatsApp now lets people do very cheap, high quality, reliable video calls from anywhere on the earth.
  - skat20phys 7y ago
    I'm amazed at smartphones and videochatting to be honest, but at some level it's something that seems like a natural evolution of what was there before. For example, in a lot of ways we live in a sci-fi future, if the number of classic films featuring videochats as a sign of the future is any indication. On the other hand, those films did basically get the idea right, that there would be some screen with some little speaker and microphone that you'd talk to someone through. If you go back a bit further though, like to the 1910s, there wasn't any idea of that at all. It was off the collective radar completely. So in some sense, we are living in some continuation of the early 1970s, in the sense it was part of a future we could accurately envision. But we're not living in a continuation of the same era as pre "golden quarter" in that we aren't really entirely part of the future they imagined (I think 1945 isn't quite right, I'd push it back to pre-WWI). At least that's one argument. I wish we could go back and time and interview a bunch of people who lived like 1900-1960+ about this issue, and compare it to what people who were born in, say, 1950, might say about it now. FWIW, my sense is that people in the mid-twentieth century underestimated change in communication technology and overestimated change in transportation tech.

Areading314 7y ago

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

buboard 7y ago
thats like listing airplane doors, propellers and jet engines separately from air travel.
trevyn 7y ago
And we’ve lost ourselves as a result.
- sabas123 7y ago
  Implying that we ever found ourselves before.
new2628 7y ago
Some amazing technology in that list intermixed with some vaporware and some dubious advances.

hooande 7y ago

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 7y ago
Did we not have an extremely large civil rights reform in 2014 with marriage equality?

mnm1 7y ago

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.

int_19h 7y ago
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.
- mnm1 7y ago
  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.

jdkee 7y ago

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-fall-of-american-growth https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26634594-the-rise-and-fa...

galaxyLogic 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.

vl 7y ago

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 7y ago
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-may-think/303881/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...) 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-Machine-Stops.pdf https://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Machi...)
- dredmorbius 7y ago

cjblomqvist 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.
- nl 7y ago
  All of these things still exist. But there are less people in poverty now, so... that seems like a good thing?
  - CaptArmchair 7y ago
    Yes and no. This is about which frame of reference you use to look at the world. And how that can severely distort your view. Consider isolated amazonian tribes, or tribes on islands in the South Pacific. By our standards, they live in abject poverty: no electricity, no clean water, no jobs,... Then again, these tribes do not know anything else. They have lived like this since the dawn of humanity. Then consider native tribes in America, Alaska, Greenland. People whose traditional way of living have been replaced by the affordances of modern technology. And that hasn't been for the better, necessarily. We are talking about fundamental lifestyle changes that happened over the course of less then a generation. And that's even without the historical violence we tend to discuss / guilt trip over in the modern world: such as traditional colonization, imperialism and such-like. Take Inuit tribes. Just 2 generations ago - some 50 years - these people lived in small traditional fishing communities, mostly secluded from the world. The lived according to their own ancestral culture and that worked out fine for them. Today, their way of living has entirely upended. Sure, they still fish, but they now have social security numbers, salaried yet often low-wage jobs, Internet and television, pollution and noise from cars, snowmobiles and so on. The net result is that unemployment among the active population is a serious issue, as it also causes mental and physical health issues including crime and substance abuse. When native tribes protest against oil pipelines, that's not a take against the benefits modernity itself. It's a protest against the fact that the arrival of modernity literally implies the disappearance of an environmental and cultural context in which they have been rooted for thousands of years. To them, the benefits of electricity, healthcare, modern jobs and cars also come with a great cost: giving up their identity, their way of life and the risk of ending up in abject poverty due to the dynamics inherent to modern economic systems rooted in Western / European values and morals. As such, when we talk about progress, it's presumptuous to assume that anyone who doesn't have access to modern affordances is "living in poverty" and "more progress" is the only answer going forward. The big thing that traditional tribal cultures have going for them is sustainability. Sure, individuals lived precarious lives and relied on magical thinking to explain the world, but these communities as a whole have persisted for many generations with a low impact on their environment. From their frame of reference, their way of life totally make sense. Assuming that their way of thinking is backwards or obsolete, or assuming that them ending up unemployed or struggling with modernity is them not pulling their weight in "accepting progress", well, that's just our own superiority bias clouding our thinking.

giardini 7y ago

The Bad News: Primarily b/c the Baby Boomers, the most creative and productive generation the USA has seen since the Founding Fathers, are retiring and dying off. The Good News: Before the Boomers leave the planet, they will develop true AI, thus completing their generous service to mankind and undoing any stalled progress. (applause) Thank you, thank you ... The Bad News: The Boomers better do it (the AI, that is) b/c the current generations are barely able to configure their cell phones and apparently can't pay their gas bill either.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago

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.

peterhj 7y ago

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

beefield 7y ago

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 7y ago

"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 7y ago
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

mirimir 7y ago

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 7y ago

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

randomsearch 7y ago

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.

sitkack 7y ago
Has too much of our technological workforce been diverted from science and engineering to work on basically e-commerce apps?

calewis 7y ago

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.

tomaszs 7y ago

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.

Animats 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.

tomaszs 7y ago

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

sgt101 7y ago

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.

auggierose 7y ago

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

beloch 7y ago

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.

lcam84 7y ago

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 7y ago
But who gets to decide what legitimate needs are? I doubt people will not find additional utility in new/improved products.

stkdump 7y ago

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.

boyadjian 7y ago

The response is energy : Progress is not everything, there is also energy, and more specifically, energy per inhabitant. The energy available on our planet is limited, and the population is constantly increasing, so the ratio of the two decreases. So the felling of progress decreases, but still, there is progress.

payne92 7y ago

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.

OnlyRepliesToBS 7y ago

politics and greed