19 ms·

The fuckery is in the details. I, too, wonder why so much of technological progress seems to have stalled. In a single century we went from the mass production

The fuckery is in the details. I, too, wonder why so much of technological progress seems to have stalled. In a single century we went from the mass production of the automobile all the way to space; from telegraph to television; from typewriters to microcomputers. What an amazing period of technological development! There had been nothing like it in our history. Like the perhaps somewhat apocryphal Renaissance, we may not even realize the significance of this age for a very long time. So, what happened? Software has not, really, improved very much in many years. Our computers and phones and other devices have mated and borne tiny little offspring. But, these still feel like iterative changes on revolutionary designs. And, of course, there is the faltering space program. ...Except, Armadillo Aerospace and SpaceX and others are right around the corner, I hope. I think I've noticed a pretty ubiquitous pattern in certain kinds of projects: the sorts of projects that are huge in scope, with immediate deadlines, and a clear focus, and full of talented people whose responsibility it is to figure out how to reach the project goals as quickly as possible. They grab every available technology, and they make amazing advancements in combining it and putting it together, and in the end, if they reach their goal, they end up with something that works, but is inelegant. They build an enormous, amazing, beautiful ... hack. After that, if the progress is to continue, it's up to an entirely different kind of approach: the fucking about with the details. It's not enough just to put a human and some supplies in space; now the goal is to do it sustainably. Now we have to build reusable ships and things capable of lifting tremendous payloads into orbit while sipping their energy through a tiny straw and not costing anybody very much. And that's where the development is going right now. It requires tons and myriad tiny little developments in a huge array of sciences: in energy production and management, and in materials science especially. Like Intel, our space program has had its "tock"; now it's time for a "tick". At least, I hope that's what's happening. I'd hate to live in a world in which humans had given up on exploring and pushing against their boundaries.

doomlaser 15y ago
The proliferation of cell phones is huge, and the smart phone revolution is another gigantic social change. Conquering space in a meaningful way is a much larger problem than any of the leaps we've made technologically in the past 100 years.
- varjag 15y ago
  Female emancipation was even bigger social change, but it wasn't the article's point. If we restrict ourselves to realm of technology, smartphones are not that much of a breakthrough. I had my Nokia and my Palm back in 1990s, it wasn't really that much different.
  - hvs 15y ago
    Your Palm in the 90's had a 16 Mhz processor and 1 MB of memory. An iPhone has a 1 Ghz processor and 32 GB of memory. If that's not "much different" you have a strange understanding of scale. And that was only 15 years ago, not 50.
    - wanorris 15y ago
      The internet connectivity and storage changes are utterly radical changes in terms of what they enable. That iPhone gives you Wikipedia and Britannica and Project Gutenberg and the Kindle bookstore and Spotify and the iTunes music catalog and Netflix, all right in your pocket. Most people seem not to notice, but this is one of the most radical changes in history.
      - jwallaceparker 15y ago
        Agreed. Think about the explosion in digital artifacts we are producing for future generations (blogs, videos, music, etc.). The entire historical record of human history is tiny compared to the historical record of the past 15 years.
    - varjag 15y ago
      My Palm had a graphic touchscreen and handwriting recognition. A decent organizer package, and a thriving market of 3rd party applications. I could use it to surf the web, do email, IRC, or remote control my TV. The smartphones went a big way in usability and price department, but it's not any kind of qualitative difference. This was the time when anyone expected VRML-based web and augumented reality just around the corner. If you told me back then about iPhone in 2010, I would have really struggled feigning surprize to mask the disappointment.
barrkel 15y ago
I think it's wrong to say that there has been little improvement in software, in both our techniques of building it and the body that is in existence. I think the advance from the disconnected dumb home microcomputer of 1985 to the globally connected iPad of today is comparable to the advance from the telegraph to television. I think it's easy to underestimate how far we've come when you've lived through the change. The salience of the contrast over time is lost, because you're too close to it, and the change seems almost imperceptible; recognizing how far we've come needs some perspective. It's true that humanity is less in the game of building pyramids, dramatic edifices of might to be looked upon in wonder, but I suspect much of that was grandstanding in a global cold war, rather than driven by need or even a genuine striving for achievement. Our focus has moved in a more democratic, consumer-oriented place, where it is simultaneously less visible as a monument, but where its leverage, the number of lives it affects, is higher than ever. Space exploration doesn't make a whole lot of economic sense, until there are resources beyond our planet for which the demand exceeds supply such that the price level justifies the effort. I don't have any romantic fantasies of travelling across the galaxy, much less universe; without FTL technology (which will probably never exist) or greatly lengthened human lifetimes, it isn't realistic to focus on it. If it was really necessary to go to the moon again, I'm confident it could be done much more cheaply and safely than it was last time, but I wouldn't vote for public funds to be spent on it.
- _delirium 15y ago
  > the disconnected dumb home microcomputer of 1985 to the globally connected iPad of today But the microcomputer of 1985 was globally connected too! And that did seem like quite a technological advance: here in one's own home, a machine that, via phone lines, can exchange messages worldwide! I agree that the number of people globally connected has increased, but it seems more incremental; a matter of economics and incremental improvements, bringing down the prices and upping the speeds, so now many more people can experience that magic of global connectivity in your own home.
  - barrkel 15y ago
    Extremely few C64s and Amstrad CPC 464s were globally connected; that's the class of machine I had in mind. If you think this is just incremental, then I'd say that putting a man on the moon is just an incremental improvement in bomb-making, the culmination of the controlled release of chemical energy; a matter of slow refinement over centuries.
SkyMarshal 15y ago
It may be that all the low-hanging was picked, and progress seems slower because we're now working on the harder problems. But I think there's plenty of world-changing advancements on the way in the next decades: - Nano-scale manufacturing, 3D printing - Life extension - Quantum computers ... to name a few off the top of my head. The problem with the space program is that it's gotten about as far as it can go without propulsion and energy-generation systems an order of magnitude or two more efficient. Hopefully we'll see breakthroughs there in the coming decades as well.
- thaumaturgy 15y ago
  > The problem with the space program is that it's gotten about as far as it can go without propulsion and energy-generation systems an order of magnitude or two more efficient. Exactly! And, materials science. There's this huge problem of radiation in space that hasn't been solved yet without the use of a lot of thick, heavy ("costly") materials. From the little bit that I follow the field, this seems to be an even more challenging problem than propulsion. > - Life extension My money for the next great advancement in science is on biotechnology. All the signs are there -- the computing power has recently become available to crack some very difficult problems, imaging systems are better than ever, and we are rapidly developing new understandings of biology, including human biology. Scientists can print organs now! If I can survive long enough to become an old man, I think there's a good chance -- if I have enough money, sadly -- that I'll live to be a very very old man.
lutorm 15y ago
It seems to me that the relative stagnation in space exploration is that there is no reason to move forward. Commercially, there's practically no incentive to move beyond geostationary orbit. Militarily, probably not either. And those are the two most powerful motivators around. I heard a talk where it was suggested that the thing to aim for is to mine a small near-Earth asteroid for valuable ores. The hurdles are small compared to, say, going to Mars, and there's a commercial payoff. But even that requires a bunch of technology that doesn't exist and are at this point too far-fetched an investment for private development.

doomlaser 15y ago

The proliferation of cell phones is huge, and the smart phone revolution is another gigantic social change. Conquering space in a meaningful way is a much larger problem than any of the leaps we've made technologically in the past 100 years.

varjag 15y ago
Female emancipation was even bigger social change, but it wasn't the article's point. If we restrict ourselves to realm of technology, smartphones are not that much of a breakthrough. I had my Nokia and my Palm back in 1990s, it wasn't really that much different.
- hvs 15y ago
  Your Palm in the 90's had a 16 Mhz processor and 1 MB of memory. An iPhone has a 1 Ghz processor and 32 GB of memory. If that's not "much different" you have a strange understanding of scale. And that was only 15 years ago, not 50.
  - wanorris 15y ago
    The internet connectivity and storage changes are utterly radical changes in terms of what they enable. That iPhone gives you Wikipedia and Britannica and Project Gutenberg and the Kindle bookstore and Spotify and the iTunes music catalog and Netflix, all right in your pocket. Most people seem not to notice, but this is one of the most radical changes in history.
    - jwallaceparker 15y ago
      Agreed. Think about the explosion in digital artifacts we are producing for future generations (blogs, videos, music, etc.). The entire historical record of human history is tiny compared to the historical record of the past 15 years.
  - varjag 15y ago
    My Palm had a graphic touchscreen and handwriting recognition. A decent organizer package, and a thriving market of 3rd party applications. I could use it to surf the web, do email, IRC, or remote control my TV. The smartphones went a big way in usability and price department, but it's not any kind of qualitative difference. This was the time when anyone expected VRML-based web and augumented reality just around the corner. If you told me back then about iPhone in 2010, I would have really struggled feigning surprize to mask the disappointment.

barrkel 15y ago

I think it's wrong to say that there has been little improvement in software, in both our techniques of building it and the body that is in existence. I think the advance from the disconnected dumb home microcomputer of 1985 to the globally connected iPad of today is comparable to the advance from the telegraph to television. I think it's easy to underestimate how far we've come when you've lived through the change. The salience of the contrast over time is lost, because you're too close to it, and the change seems almost imperceptible; recognizing how far we've come needs some perspective. It's true that humanity is less in the game of building pyramids, dramatic edifices of might to be looked upon in wonder, but I suspect much of that was grandstanding in a global cold war, rather than driven by need or even a genuine striving for achievement. Our focus has moved in a more democratic, consumer-oriented place, where it is simultaneously less visible as a monument, but where its leverage, the number of lives it affects, is higher than ever. Space exploration doesn't make a whole lot of economic sense, until there are resources beyond our planet for which the demand exceeds supply such that the price level justifies the effort. I don't have any romantic fantasies of travelling across the galaxy, much less universe; without FTL technology (which will probably never exist) or greatly lengthened human lifetimes, it isn't realistic to focus on it. If it was really necessary to go to the moon again, I'm confident it could be done much more cheaply and safely than it was last time, but I wouldn't vote for public funds to be spent on it.

_delirium 15y ago
> the disconnected dumb home microcomputer of 1985 to the globally connected iPad of today But the microcomputer of 1985 was globally connected too! And that did seem like quite a technological advance: here in one's own home, a machine that, via phone lines, can exchange messages worldwide! I agree that the number of people globally connected has increased, but it seems more incremental; a matter of economics and incremental improvements, bringing down the prices and upping the speeds, so now many more people can experience that magic of global connectivity in your own home.
- barrkel 15y ago
  Extremely few C64s and Amstrad CPC 464s were globally connected; that's the class of machine I had in mind. If you think this is just incremental, then I'd say that putting a man on the moon is just an incremental improvement in bomb-making, the culmination of the controlled release of chemical energy; a matter of slow refinement over centuries.

SkyMarshal 15y ago

It may be that all the low-hanging was picked, and progress seems slower because we're now working on the harder problems. But I think there's plenty of world-changing advancements on the way in the next decades: - Nano-scale manufacturing, 3D printing - Life extension - Quantum computers ... to name a few off the top of my head. The problem with the space program is that it's gotten about as far as it can go without propulsion and energy-generation systems an order of magnitude or two more efficient. Hopefully we'll see breakthroughs there in the coming decades as well.

thaumaturgy 15y ago
> The problem with the space program is that it's gotten about as far as it can go without propulsion and energy-generation systems an order of magnitude or two more efficient. Exactly! And, materials science. There's this huge problem of radiation in space that hasn't been solved yet without the use of a lot of thick, heavy ("costly") materials. From the little bit that I follow the field, this seems to be an even more challenging problem than propulsion. > - Life extension My money for the next great advancement in science is on biotechnology. All the signs are there -- the computing power has recently become available to crack some very difficult problems, imaging systems are better than ever, and we are rapidly developing new understandings of biology, including human biology. Scientists can print organs now! If I can survive long enough to become an old man, I think there's a good chance -- if I have enough money, sadly -- that I'll live to be a very very old man.

lutorm 15y ago

It seems to me that the relative stagnation in space exploration is that there is no reason to move forward. Commercially, there's practically no incentive to move beyond geostationary orbit. Militarily, probably not either. And those are the two most powerful motivators around. I heard a talk where it was suggested that the thing to aim for is to mine a small near-Earth asteroid for valuable ores. The hurdles are small compared to, say, going to Mars, and there's a commercial payoff. But even that requires a bunch of technology that doesn't exist and are at this point too far-fetched an investment for private development.