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Honestly our rate of increased knowledge is unreal, basically humanity had very little tech/science improvements for most of our history and then just world cha

Honestly our rate of increased knowledge is unreal, basically humanity had very little tech/science improvements for most of our history and then just world changing improvements in the last 2 generations/lifetimes. Crazy. Who knows what things will look like in 1 more lifetime. I'm still blown away by the memory of getting constantly lost growing up, my dad hand drawing maps for people, comedians stopped telling jokes about men not asking for directions and it still feels like nobody stopped to notice. It's partly that impulse to never stop and appreciate what we have, that dissatisfaction, that keeps people pushing into the unknown.

simonh 5y ago
>Who knows what things will look like in 1 more lifetime. The usual prediction I see is that the rate of discovery will continue and in another 2 lifetimes everything we think we know now will seem just as silly and naive as what people believed 2 lifetimes before us. I don't think that's the case. It's a question of whether we're on a (near) infinite exponential curve of discovery, or on the rapid upward stretch of an S curve. I'm in the S curve camp, and I suspect we're at least half way up it on most topics. Just look at relativity, quantum mechanics and cosmology. Most of the great discoveries in these fields were actually quite a while ago. Relativity and Quantum mechanics are over 100 years old and most of the advances were made in the early decades. Progress has not stopped but massively slowed down. In cosmology it's been slower progress, but we've charted time back to milliseconds after T=0 of the big bang, detected thousands of exoplanets, analysed the gravitational waves from black hole collisions and mapped the cosmic microwave background. There's more to learn about dark matter and dark energy for sure, some serious mysteries there, but how much difference will those answers actually make? The Higgs boson discovery was cool, but really just a cherry on top of the standard model rather than a revolutionary discovery that upended science. I'm not sure there are any of those still to come. The closing chapter on the big questions in science still has to be written, but I think the chances it will force us to completely rewrite, rather than simply revise and update the previous chapters, seems slight IMHO. I'm expecting the GUT to simply update or reframe relativity and quantum mechanics to make them compatible, not throw them out completely. It truly is astonishing to be alive at this nexus in human development, whatever our individual take on it might be.
- manigandham 5y ago
  Progress has slowed down because we solved all the easier problems that we could with the human mind. Now technology is catching up to give us the computing power, massive collective memory, digital records, and AI to start gaining again. We basically have to build a better mind to get to the next level.
  - fellowniusmonk 5y ago
    Agree. I think people really underestimate how many intractable "needle in a haystack" problems are now tractable due to RNNs, CNNs and other ML/ai stuff. We are still in the early days of applying that tech to the fields it's going to effect most. We're in the "get a home page for your local business" phase not yet the "faang has changed the face of civilization" (for the better or worse) phase. This is going to continue to ramp knowledge in bioinformatics and other areas, the technology is still in the infancy of being harnessed for biology and medicine. That combined with cheaper robotic arms and cheaper sequencing machines which is just now coming dropping below certain cost thresholds. (I know a group/lab that's automating discovery of drug/compound targets doing purely NDA'd work for merck and other pharmaceuticals, the tech is wild and still in it's infancy.) Cutting edge voice and image style transfer, realistic computer speech, computer vision.. the list goes on, that's just the highly visible stuff and there is still only a small pool of people versed in those areas of tech.
- brobdingnagians 5y ago
  I think it is likely that some things will be revised and tweaked, but other things will have to be majorly rewritten. We may not know what those are yet, but from looking at history, it is wise to believe that in some things we are hammering away at a faulty path. When we rewrite that, there will probably be major rapid improvements very quickly, then slow over time. Perhaps a lot is slowing recently because we've had less major breakthroughs which usually open up fertile fields. Maybe that's because we have the low hanging fruit of major breakthroughs or our society isnt as good at getting them, either way, it will be interesting to see what the future holds.
manigandham 5y ago
Yes, always reminds me of Louis CK's "Everything's amazing and nobody's happy" clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFB7q89_3U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFB7q89_3U
- spacemadness 5y ago
  Everything is not amazing. We’re still social creatures and there is arguably a lot of stress and angst in the social world we find ourselves in. If “everything” is so amazing why are people working over 40/50/60+ hours a week to make ends meet? Why are people made destitute over hospital bills in America? This is something the more privileged among us seem to forget over and over again. Humanity has a ways to go yet before everything is amazing. We can’t just look at our incredible advances in science and technology and call that enough. Yes I’m fun at parties.
  - manigandham 5y ago
    It's just the title of a clip of a comedian on a late night show more than a decade ago; not a thesis on current society. And yes, I'm fully aware and very grateful that I live a life better than billions, however it's also indisputable that the world is better today than it's ever been before. > "incredible advances in science and technology" That's what this thread is about. Please note the context.
    - spacemadness 5y ago
      My apologies. Obviously I don’t agree with what’s implied by “we have all this cool tech, how could people be unhappy?”, but I admittedly read some context into it and regardless I could have dialed it down a notch.
pyrrhotech 5y ago
> Honestly our rate of increased knowledge is unreal, basically humanity had very little tech/science improvements for most of our history and then just world changing improvements in the last 2 generations/lifetimes. I feel like this is more a modern misconception than reality. Play a game of Civilization and you'll start to appreciate just how deep human technology really is. In Roman times, they probably said similar things thinking about how advanced they were compared to the Macedonians a couple hundred years back. Yea we lost some progress or at least the rate of change greatly slowed from 400 - 1600, but other than that blip I think the progress has actually been fairly linear from 4000 BC to 2021 CE. It just seems like it's not because of the cognitive bias to take for granted all the things that seem so basic compared to computers or nuclear reactors, but in reality, those things actually were very difficult to develop with the knowledge and production techniques available at the time.
- fellowniusmonk 5y ago
  We'll have to disagree on the shape of the curve I guess, it's just my personal take. For what it's worth... I've been to Ephesus (which is amazing, I'd like to check out Pompeii as well) the armory in Venice is one of my favorite repos of old cutting edge tech and having spent time in Rome, truly their achievements are amazing and the Pantheon absolutely blows my mind, it's no wonder the village dwellers believed the God's lived in Rome, I would have. But harnessing the power of the atom, understanding fundamental physics, biology and sound/light speed global communication... and the technology that these things have enabled (including my own living past 3 years of age due to modern medicine) is truly a leap, in my opinion the Roman's and those brilliant technologists and logistics civilizations of the past were still closer to living in caves by modern comparison. I would not have wanted to live back then and I literally couldn't have. Our recent exponential explosion certainly depends on their hard fought knowledge, but in my reckoning even their best tech and logistics are deep in the early part of the curve.
- hardolaf 5y ago
  > In Roman times, they probably said similar things thinking about how advanced they were compared to the Macedonians a couple hundred years back. The fall of the Roman Empire, and actually really even the decline from when the city stood at more than a million people during the time of Augustus and Tiberius until the far, saw massive declines in technological knowledge and even scientific knowledge. Much of that information was not rediscovered until the Renaissance when the last remaining archives of the Roman Empire were evacuated from Constantinople to nobles and merchants across Europe during the Turkish invasion. Even today we're still rediscovering material science knowledge that the Romans and ancient Chinese had. In fact, much of our rapid advancement in technology was not even due to knew ideas, it was due to ideas that had be theorized by Greek and Roman philosophers and alchemists, and which were recorded and stored in the archives. There was real stagnation in most knowledge and technology throughout the world. In the West because of the decline of the Roman Empire (most likely caused in part due to lead poisoning and decreasing fertility of North Africa and Judea) and in the East due to constant infighting and political strife preventing unification of India or China under stable rulers for long enough to see real advancement.

simonh 5y ago

>Who knows what things will look like in 1 more lifetime. The usual prediction I see is that the rate of discovery will continue and in another 2 lifetimes everything we think we know now will seem just as silly and naive as what people believed 2 lifetimes before us. I don't think that's the case. It's a question of whether we're on a (near) infinite exponential curve of discovery, or on the rapid upward stretch of an S curve. I'm in the S curve camp, and I suspect we're at least half way up it on most topics. Just look at relativity, quantum mechanics and cosmology. Most of the great discoveries in these fields were actually quite a while ago. Relativity and Quantum mechanics are over 100 years old and most of the advances were made in the early decades. Progress has not stopped but massively slowed down. In cosmology it's been slower progress, but we've charted time back to milliseconds after T=0 of the big bang, detected thousands of exoplanets, analysed the gravitational waves from black hole collisions and mapped the cosmic microwave background. There's more to learn about dark matter and dark energy for sure, some serious mysteries there, but how much difference will those answers actually make? The Higgs boson discovery was cool, but really just a cherry on top of the standard model rather than a revolutionary discovery that upended science. I'm not sure there are any of those still to come. The closing chapter on the big questions in science still has to be written, but I think the chances it will force us to completely rewrite, rather than simply revise and update the previous chapters, seems slight IMHO. I'm expecting the GUT to simply update or reframe relativity and quantum mechanics to make them compatible, not throw them out completely. It truly is astonishing to be alive at this nexus in human development, whatever our individual take on it might be.

manigandham 5y ago
Progress has slowed down because we solved all the easier problems that we could with the human mind. Now technology is catching up to give us the computing power, massive collective memory, digital records, and AI to start gaining again. We basically have to build a better mind to get to the next level.
- fellowniusmonk 5y ago
  Agree. I think people really underestimate how many intractable "needle in a haystack" problems are now tractable due to RNNs, CNNs and other ML/ai stuff. We are still in the early days of applying that tech to the fields it's going to effect most. We're in the "get a home page for your local business" phase not yet the "faang has changed the face of civilization" (for the better or worse) phase. This is going to continue to ramp knowledge in bioinformatics and other areas, the technology is still in the infancy of being harnessed for biology and medicine. That combined with cheaper robotic arms and cheaper sequencing machines which is just now coming dropping below certain cost thresholds. (I know a group/lab that's automating discovery of drug/compound targets doing purely NDA'd work for merck and other pharmaceuticals, the tech is wild and still in it's infancy.) Cutting edge voice and image style transfer, realistic computer speech, computer vision.. the list goes on, that's just the highly visible stuff and there is still only a small pool of people versed in those areas of tech.
brobdingnagians 5y ago
I think it is likely that some things will be revised and tweaked, but other things will have to be majorly rewritten. We may not know what those are yet, but from looking at history, it is wise to believe that in some things we are hammering away at a faulty path. When we rewrite that, there will probably be major rapid improvements very quickly, then slow over time. Perhaps a lot is slowing recently because we've had less major breakthroughs which usually open up fertile fields. Maybe that's because we have the low hanging fruit of major breakthroughs or our society isnt as good at getting them, either way, it will be interesting to see what the future holds.

manigandham 5y ago

Yes, always reminds me of Louis CK's "Everything's amazing and nobody's happy" clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFB7q89_3U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFB7q89_3U

spacemadness 5y ago
Everything is not amazing. We’re still social creatures and there is arguably a lot of stress and angst in the social world we find ourselves in. If “everything” is so amazing why are people working over 40/50/60+ hours a week to make ends meet? Why are people made destitute over hospital bills in America? This is something the more privileged among us seem to forget over and over again. Humanity has a ways to go yet before everything is amazing. We can’t just look at our incredible advances in science and technology and call that enough. Yes I’m fun at parties.
- manigandham 5y ago
  It's just the title of a clip of a comedian on a late night show more than a decade ago; not a thesis on current society. And yes, I'm fully aware and very grateful that I live a life better than billions, however it's also indisputable that the world is better today than it's ever been before. > "incredible advances in science and technology" That's what this thread is about. Please note the context.
  - spacemadness 5y ago
    My apologies. Obviously I don’t agree with what’s implied by “we have all this cool tech, how could people be unhappy?”, but I admittedly read some context into it and regardless I could have dialed it down a notch.

pyrrhotech 5y ago

> Honestly our rate of increased knowledge is unreal, basically humanity had very little tech/science improvements for most of our history and then just world changing improvements in the last 2 generations/lifetimes. I feel like this is more a modern misconception than reality. Play a game of Civilization and you'll start to appreciate just how deep human technology really is. In Roman times, they probably said similar things thinking about how advanced they were compared to the Macedonians a couple hundred years back. Yea we lost some progress or at least the rate of change greatly slowed from 400 - 1600, but other than that blip I think the progress has actually been fairly linear from 4000 BC to 2021 CE. It just seems like it's not because of the cognitive bias to take for granted all the things that seem so basic compared to computers or nuclear reactors, but in reality, those things actually were very difficult to develop with the knowledge and production techniques available at the time.

fellowniusmonk 5y ago
We'll have to disagree on the shape of the curve I guess, it's just my personal take. For what it's worth... I've been to Ephesus (which is amazing, I'd like to check out Pompeii as well) the armory in Venice is one of my favorite repos of old cutting edge tech and having spent time in Rome, truly their achievements are amazing and the Pantheon absolutely blows my mind, it's no wonder the village dwellers believed the God's lived in Rome, I would have. But harnessing the power of the atom, understanding fundamental physics, biology and sound/light speed global communication... and the technology that these things have enabled (including my own living past 3 years of age due to modern medicine) is truly a leap, in my opinion the Roman's and those brilliant technologists and logistics civilizations of the past were still closer to living in caves by modern comparison. I would not have wanted to live back then and I literally couldn't have. Our recent exponential explosion certainly depends on their hard fought knowledge, but in my reckoning even their best tech and logistics are deep in the early part of the curve.
hardolaf 5y ago
> In Roman times, they probably said similar things thinking about how advanced they were compared to the Macedonians a couple hundred years back. The fall of the Roman Empire, and actually really even the decline from when the city stood at more than a million people during the time of Augustus and Tiberius until the far, saw massive declines in technological knowledge and even scientific knowledge. Much of that information was not rediscovered until the Renaissance when the last remaining archives of the Roman Empire were evacuated from Constantinople to nobles and merchants across Europe during the Turkish invasion. Even today we're still rediscovering material science knowledge that the Romans and ancient Chinese had. In fact, much of our rapid advancement in technology was not even due to knew ideas, it was due to ideas that had be theorized by Greek and Roman philosophers and alchemists, and which were recorded and stored in the archives. There was real stagnation in most knowledge and technology throughout the world. In the West because of the decline of the Roman Empire (most likely caused in part due to lead poisoning and decreasing fertility of North Africa and Judea) and in the East due to constant infighting and political strife preventing unification of India or China under stable rulers for long enough to see real advancement.