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If history has taught us anything it's that technology won't stop evolving. And whenever humans thinks surely we've reached the peak of technological advancemen

by peheje 5y ago

If history has taught us anything it's that technology won't stop evolving. And whenever humans thinks surely we've reached the peak of technological advancements, time proves us wrong. One thing is for sure, it's going to look very different from what we can imagine today.

Retric 5y ago
Technology stagnated all the time in history. The pattern is new approach gets perfected resulting in ever smaller gains and different tradeoffs. Look at say rings where personal skill plays a larger role than the advancements in technology. We might be better at mining gold today, but that doesn’t translate into a better ring. Include longevity as one of the points of comparison and a lot of progresses looks like a step back. Cheaper and doesn’t last as long has been a tradeoff people have been willing to make for thousands of years.
- oblio 5y ago
  Technology also gets as good as necessary and not necessarily further, for long periods of time. Babies have "colics", which are probably some kind of pain that we haven't identified yet, but because they go away on their own and parents are taught that they just have to deal with them, we still apply a medieval solution to the problem ("tough it out"). Rings seem to be the kind of problem where our current solution is good enough. I don't foresee computing power to be the same. We'll want more and more of it. So stagnation will be due to gaps in basic research, not due lack of interest.
  - rvanlaar 5y ago
    I see that computing power is in high demand for quite some time to come. I do believe there will be stagnation unless a different way is found. In the same way Henry Ford said people wanted a faster horse not a car. And regarding travel, I would like to have faster, much faster transportation. However it hasn't come, yet. There seems to be a local optimum between costs and practicality.
- andrewjl 5y ago
  > Look at say rings where personal skill plays a larger role than the advancements in technology. What about advancements metallurgy? And to use an adjacent example, cold-pressed steel techniques increase the number of places steel can be used. (See here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold-formed_steel#Hot-rolled_versus_cold-rolled_steel_and_the_influence_of_annealing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold-formed_steel#Hot-rolled_v...). More often that not, technology enables trade-offs to be made that couldn't be before. Making something cheaper and more fragile does lose something, service life, and so on. In exchange the cheaper thing is now used more widely. Perhaps this more widespread use unlocks something that only a few expensive yet high-quality units could not. Think of smartphones and the resulting network effects.
  - Retric 5y ago
    18k Gold jewelry has been using 18 parts gold, 3 parts copper, and 3 parts silver for a long time. In theory sure we could probably improve on it, but it works.

by peheje 5y ago

Retric 5y ago

Technology stagnated all the time in history. The pattern is new approach gets perfected resulting in ever smaller gains and different tradeoffs. Look at say rings where personal skill plays a larger role than the advancements in technology. We might be better at mining gold today, but that doesn’t translate into a better ring. Include longevity as one of the points of comparison and a lot of progresses looks like a step back. Cheaper and doesn’t last as long has been a tradeoff people have been willing to make for thousands of years.

oblio 5y ago
Technology also gets as good as necessary and not necessarily further, for long periods of time. Babies have "colics", which are probably some kind of pain that we haven't identified yet, but because they go away on their own and parents are taught that they just have to deal with them, we still apply a medieval solution to the problem ("tough it out"). Rings seem to be the kind of problem where our current solution is good enough. I don't foresee computing power to be the same. We'll want more and more of it. So stagnation will be due to gaps in basic research, not due lack of interest.
- rvanlaar 5y ago
  I see that computing power is in high demand for quite some time to come. I do believe there will be stagnation unless a different way is found. In the same way Henry Ford said people wanted a faster horse not a car. And regarding travel, I would like to have faster, much faster transportation. However it hasn't come, yet. There seems to be a local optimum between costs and practicality.
andrewjl 5y ago
> Look at say rings where personal skill plays a larger role than the advancements in technology. What about advancements metallurgy? And to use an adjacent example, cold-pressed steel techniques increase the number of places steel can be used. (See here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold-formed_steel#Hot-rolled_versus_cold-rolled_steel_and_the_influence_of_annealing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold-formed_steel#Hot-rolled_v...). More often that not, technology enables trade-offs to be made that couldn't be before. Making something cheaper and more fragile does lose something, service life, and so on. In exchange the cheaper thing is now used more widely. Perhaps this more widespread use unlocks something that only a few expensive yet high-quality units could not. Think of smartphones and the resulting network effects.
- Retric 5y ago
  18k Gold jewelry has been using 18 parts gold, 3 parts copper, and 3 parts silver for a long time. In theory sure we could probably improve on it, but it works.