4 ms·

I agree the graph is bad - I was rushed and it was the 1st item that popped up on my search. Better graphs do exist, showing technology growth over a far longe

I agree the graph is bad - I was rushed and it was the 1st item that popped up on my search. Better graphs do exist, showing technology growth over a far longer time period (e.g. widespread use of bows, farming tech, etc).

dahart 5y ago
That seems totally fair. It’s just that graphing technology progress on a plot might be an impossible task. Plus, once I’ve seen two bunk graphs in a row, now I start to suspect something about the core idea might be BS. It would interesting to see a truly plausible and convincing plot. To show technology progress accurately and fairly, we need to include all developments, right? And we need to understand and show the precursor inventions that lead to another -- there is no technology that wasn’t born from other technology. The integrated circuit came after the transistor, which came after the vacuum tube, which came after a series of mechanical calculators. Would we have to weight the difficulty of each invention in the context of it’s technological surrounding, and the lasting impact of each invention? What should the Y-axis of the graph be? There’s no question that human technology had a pretty big bump in the rate of progress since the printing press. There’s no denying how much our world has changed in the last hundred years, and even in my own lifetime. Cars and the internet have changed the fact of this planet, for better or worse. But is “progress”, meaning new inventions, really exponential? Seems unlikely. Is it leading to a “singularity”? Sounds like fantasy to me. One fear I have, one thing that’s hard to see right now, is whether the invention of software has slowed down all the rest of physics and mechanics and materials progress. Software is so cheap and easy compared to anything else, that’s what most people working in technology do. It’s a bit difficult to demonstrate the progress of technology with software - what exactly is being invented. There has been some, no doubt, but YouTube and Facebook are indicators of technology scale, not indicators of technology progress, which are somewhat (but not completely) separate things. It is clear that the technology of microchips and software has just scaled from small to global. It’s not at all clear that this recent trend will continue, once everyone has a phone and internet and a self-driving car. The number of people and physical resources put a natural cap on scale. Hitting the end of Moore’s law is also changing the rate of scale as we speak.

dahart 5y ago

That seems totally fair. It’s just that graphing technology progress on a plot might be an impossible task. Plus, once I’ve seen two bunk graphs in a row, now I start to suspect something about the core idea might be BS. It would interesting to see a truly plausible and convincing plot. To show technology progress accurately and fairly, we need to include all developments, right? And we need to understand and show the precursor inventions that lead to another -- there is no technology that wasn’t born from other technology. The integrated circuit came after the transistor, which came after the vacuum tube, which came after a series of mechanical calculators. Would we have to weight the difficulty of each invention in the context of it’s technological surrounding, and the lasting impact of each invention? What should the Y-axis of the graph be? There’s no question that human technology had a pretty big bump in the rate of progress since the printing press. There’s no denying how much our world has changed in the last hundred years, and even in my own lifetime. Cars and the internet have changed the fact of this planet, for better or worse. But is “progress”, meaning new inventions, really exponential? Seems unlikely. Is it leading to a “singularity”? Sounds like fantasy to me. One fear I have, one thing that’s hard to see right now, is whether the invention of software has slowed down all the rest of physics and mechanics and materials progress. Software is so cheap and easy compared to anything else, that’s what most people working in technology do. It’s a bit difficult to demonstrate the progress of technology with software - what exactly is being invented. There has been some, no doubt, but YouTube and Facebook are indicators of technology scale, not indicators of technology progress, which are somewhat (but not completely) separate things. It is clear that the technology of microchips and software has just scaled from small to global. It’s not at all clear that this recent trend will continue, once everyone has a phone and internet and a self-driving car. The number of people and physical resources put a natural cap on scale. Hitting the end of Moore’s law is also changing the rate of scale as we speak.