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Progress is already winding down. Deisel engines, airplanes, splitting the atom, computing, antibiotics...all huge but not recent developments. With the excepti
by 7thaccount 6y ago
Progress is already winding down. Deisel engines, airplanes, splitting the atom, computing, antibiotics...all huge but not recent developments. With the exception of the internet, what have we done recently? Maybe human genome project? Renewable energy? Practical neural networks?
Now, we've spent the last few decades refining these ideas, but we're hitting some peaks. How much more efficient can we make an engine? Can we really get off fossil fuels when they're used for everything ranging from fuels to plastics to fertilizers. We've been working on solving cancer for decades and haven't made much progress. We're still nowhere near widespread nuclear fusion and have abandoned nuclear technologies almost altogether outside of the US Navy. Computing is all about shrinking things, but we're starting to hit walls and practical quantum computing still appears to be a distant dream. AI is still nothing like we'd hoped it would be. We're no closer to understanding the brain in a way that would lead to an AGI. More physics research occurs in a matter of months than a decade at the turn of the century. Have we reconciled relativity and quantum mechanics yet? Are we any closer to GUT? I suppose there have been some advanced in our understanding of the universe due to the new instruments we've put into orbit. Nanotechnology is still essentially science fiction outside of some nanotube devices.
- lisper 6y ago> genome project? Renewable energy? Practical neural networks? Isn't that enough? (And you left out quantum computing. Smart phones. GPS. Composite materials. Autonomous vehicles. I could go on.)
- throwaway8941 6y agoNot to mention a whole new JavaScript framework every other week.
- airstrike 6y agoQuantum computers and autonomous vehicles are more promise than fact, otherwise you might want to throw fusion energy in there as well.
- ben_w 6y agoIndeed. Half the things on this list happened after 2010. https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/the-singularity-is-dead-long-live-the-singularity/ https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/the-singula... I wrote it in 2016. I should make a new list.
- 7thaccount 6y agoI did not leave out quantum computing which is nowhere near practical right now and maybe never will be. GPS is a good technology. Autonomous vehicles work fine for the 90% use case, but will likely never reach that last 10%.