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This is ridiculous. We’re seeing innovation EVERYWHERE, and looking back, this will be a golden age for progress (if the species makes it far enough to look bac

This is ridiculous. We’re seeing innovation EVERYWHERE, and looking back, this will be a golden age for progress (if the species makes it far enough to look back, that is). Think of it like this: we invented personal computers. At the time, only nerds had access to computation. These days, all kinds of scientists just script up things in python. We have how many million people who are able to code? I don’t even care how minuscule the odds are that ONE coder changes the world. The numbers make it impossible for us to lose on all the fronts. Tech is basically matured to the point where all the questions of the 90s are now solved. Ad tech? Check. Search? Check. Mobile hq video and photo beyond the 90s imagination? Check. The list goes on. Computers ALREADY BEAT HUMANS AT GO, let that sink in. I don’t even care how pessimistic you are - if you fail to see how we are a) blooming right now and b) will continue to bloom for the foreseeable future, the wording is exactly right: YOU fail to see it. It’s there. It’s everywhere. The fact that you can read this message, that I’m typing while my girlfriend lies in my arm in our bed, should be mind blowing. If you lost that sense of wonder, maybe it’s time to reconsider your models.

mehphp 5y ago
Yes, thank you. I’m tired of the constant negativity.
cushychicken 5y ago
Yeah, I knew this article wasn't for me when I read the first sentence. Genius is so widespread these days that it's almost pedestrian. It's just way less concentrated and elite than it used to be - which makes its findings harder to disseminate.
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago
  What's your definition/bar for genius?
mschuster91 5y ago
The problem is, we could be doing so much better as a species, but our best minds are either selling ads or working in finance. Neither of which creates real progress for the masses. Not to mention that the government and the military have all but scrapped their research programs - a lot of the progress of the last decades has fundamental roots there (most notably the Internet). Instead, we let private companies like SpaceX and the whims of billionaires decide on where and how to progress. This is wrong on so many levels. We need to tax billionaires of everything above 10 billion dollars, and use the seized money to improve the lives of everyone.
- slibhb 5y ago
  The private sector taking the lead in space exploration is healthy. The government should be involved when it needs to be. That was the case in the past but isn't any longer.
- rustybolt 5y ago
  > The problem is, we could be doing so much better as a species, but our best minds are either selling ads or working in finance. Neither of which creates real progress for the masses. So what does create real progress to the masses?
  - candiddevmike 5y ago
    Crisis (recently lead to the general availability of mRNA treatments) and war (starlink recently showed how easy it is to reconnect a country during wartime)
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    A clear vision of a target. That worked for the removal of lead, for the combat of acid rain and for the ban of CFC gases, and right now many European cities are piloting the vision of a "car free city" with astonishing results.
- beiller 5y ago
  Keep in mind some of the best and brightest minds in the past, some cutting edge medical experts, were highly paid to perform lobotomies. And that is just one example. I was reading recently about cutting edge "medicine" back in the day, that was literally just radioactive water made from radium. Killed lots of rich people because of how expensive it was as a treatment.
- hans1729 5y ago
  Let me offer a diverging perspective: >we could be doing so much better as a species ...relative to your expectations. If your model of the world (from which these expectations arise) was accurate, it would predict the world as it is, opposed to an ought. Things are not good or bad. They just are. And how we react to this status quo then can be evaluated as good or bad subjectively, and the closer you look at the metrics you use for the evaluation, the more of it will be culture, local, and meaningless in the greater scheme. If you don't like how individuals allocate their resources, give them a reason to do it differently. Just being sad because in a theoretical instance of our world things could be better, won't close the delta between our is and your ought. >We need to tax billionaires of everything above 10 billion dollars this, for example, is based on the assumption that our core problems are derived from an unfair distribution of resources. While you can certainly make that argument, I would strongly recommend you to reconsider wether thats truly the root of our problems - it's not. Try to understand us as a collective organism of nodes that exchange information. Try to understand the underlying systems that drive our behavior. Go deeper. Understand for the sake of understanding. The more you judge with your heart, the more blind your brain becomes, and that won't get us anywhere. Cheers!
humanistbot 5y ago
You're absolutely right, although on a completely different topic: I'd argue that most of the things you mentioned might not be good for society, especially when combined with the view that most technological development takes place in publicly traded companies whose primary obligation is to maximize quarterly profits. I guess it is innovation when a personalized recommender system is able to pick exactly the right conspiracy video to HD stream to someone's phone that will get them to keep watching videos on an ad-supported platform. But not exactly society "blooming" in my view. Edit: Obligatory "I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by advertising KPIs" reference
- hans1729 5y ago
  fwiw, that's a very time-local judgement of the progress we made. Objectively, as a species, we solved inter-connectivity, high quality media, etc. - the fact that we currently live in a culture where these means are distributed in the name of wealth will simply be meaningless a couple hundred years down the line.
  - forum_ghost 5y ago
    why? status, hierarchy, etc, will be genetically edited out to turn our species into a faceless mass of obedient drones, ruled by the selected few? I see simply no other way out of very deeply the status/hierarchy thing that's so deeply ingrained into our species.
    - hans1729 5y ago
      Because the feedback-loops that allow for notions as isolated material wealth will lose traction (or at least that's what I estimate will happen). Where do you think automation will lead us over the course of ten generations? What will AI be capable of at that point? After, say, 50% of people have nothing meaningful to contribute to society anymore via jobs, how will this change the perspective on work/wealth/etc as a whole? Now add another five generations after we reached that point, just to get rid of some friction of people holding on the the past. The system design of power/hierarchy makes sense in a partitioned world of limited resources. If we expect any continuous level of progress in our problem-domains (for example fresh water), its just a matter of time until culture eradicates certain inequalities. As of now, there is an active demand for inequality. People want to be wealthy, and as it is, that requires others to be poor and do the shit jobs. One part of this equation will continue to change in our favor - maybe forever. I don't think this is "so deeply ingrained into our species", I think its nothing but culture, or maybe some middle ground, in which case culture will be the dominant factor over the long run.
Victerius 5y ago
Are we really seeing a lot of innovation? The last technological breakthrough was the smartphone. We still don't have space stations that can accommodate more than a half dozen people (spoiler: I want to live on Cloud City). We don't have Moon colonies. We don't have 3D holograms (not the ones that rely on spinning a stick really fast and using a projector). We still don't have a cure for any type of cancer. No warp drives. No anti-grav. No 200 year life expectancy. No human cloning. No $25 000 flying cars. No mass produced technology or consumer products using graphene. We make smaller chips, miniaturized computers, made fancier looking user interfaces, made rocket boosters reusable, and video game graphics are approaching photorealism. Great.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  > The last technological breakthrough was the smartphone. That's fairly recent, and pretty damned significant. How often are you expecting such society-changing innovations to occur? Your list of things we don't have that you want is kinda odd. Is there a need for cloned humans? What huge societal improvements do holograms permit? Why is a consumer product with graphene meaningful but the massive innovation in small, powerful batteries not?
  - Victerius 5y ago
    > kinda odd. Is there a need for cloned humans? Cloned militaries. Eliminating birth defects. Relieving women from the pain of childbirth. Also to solve the problem of low birth rates, and allow people to perpetuate themselves. Elon Musk could clone himself and raise his copy to eventually take over his businesses after him. > What huge societal improvements do holograms permit? Look man, the Jedi didn't use Slack, did they? > Why is a consumer product with graphene meaningful but the massive innovation in small, powerful batteries not? Life is graphene. It's fantastic.
    - spywaregorilla 5y ago
      > A. Clone. Army. So... are these clones slaves that are forced to join the army? > Also to solve the problem of low birth rates, and allow people to perpetuate themselves. Elon Musk could clone himself and raise his copy to eventually take over his businesses after him. He could also do this with his children?
drewcoo 5y ago
If we live in an age when we're all outlier Einsteins, then none of us are outlier Einsteins.
snarf21 5y ago
Agreed, this article's premise is nonsense, while well written with some interesting history. The geniuses are making things that are now so common place that we've lost our wonder. Nanometer computer chips? That sounds like genius to me. Editing the human genome with CRISPR (et.al.)? That sounds like genius to me. It is true that some of our smartest minds are now focused on ads and exploiting complex derivatives but we also rolled out a vaccine to a world of billions in 9 months. There is plenty of genius, but the bar is higher and the easy things are done. This author seems to miss the genius required to let me watch live streamed video from the other side of the world on a watch as I "drive" 70 mph down the highway while the car keeps me in my lane if I stop paying attention.
shubb 5y ago
One really major innovation is that we have developed the capacity to do experiments at a massive volume physically, and are just - with the big data revolution - developing the capability to understand these data volumes and translate them into findings. Whereas science used to be done in a relatively small number of labs, with little communication between countries - there are now thousands of universities and commercial labs in every developed country doing research. And that research uses machines that measure thousands of variables at high speed. And yet - we still lack the ability to put all this data together. Even the volume of scientific papers published is greater than any individual could keep up with. Their finding are often extracted into databases - for instance in biology a new enzyme would end up in the Uniprot database. But getting from this newly discovered enzyme to a genetically engineered bacteria that makes gasoline is a journey of hops between fields that it rarely happens. Yet. What I suppose I'm saying is - the progress you talk about in AI and computation has been amazing, but it has much more to give. The next 50 years, should we survive that long, will be another tidal wave of innovation.
- JackFr 5y ago
  > Whereas science used to be done in a relatively small number of labs, with little communication between countries - there are now thousands of universities and commercial labs in every developed country doing research. And that research uses machines that measure thousands of variables at high speed. And the median value of that reasearch is zero. There is literally too much research being done. Because of perverse incentives (in both academia and industry) there are a fair number of results that are not useful along with some which are simply wrong. I believe we could easily cut off the bottom half of the research being done and the appreciable impact would be to increase the sum total of knowledge of the species.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    You're mistaken, I think, because one of your assumptions is not necessarily true - that wrong/useless results are a bad thing and slowing us down. First, the notion that "wrong" research is bad. We have to remember that literally the best results science have to offer are in fact wrong today, and have been more wrong in the past. What science produces are models of reality, and while they may be highly accurate at predicting reality they are not in fact reality. They are wrong in some way. So we can't just throw out all of the wrong results because then we would have to throw out all of the results. Instead of going down this path, we can instead be content that some research is wrong, because the scientific process is one of continually refining those results. Also, we note that despite everything literally being wrong, society, technology, and engineering still make progress. Being wrong does not mean being useless. Second, the notion that "useless" research is bad. The thing about usefulness is that it's hard to quantify, and it's also not a static property. Sometimes research that is useful in one era is completely useless in another. For example, deep learning wasn't very useful until the era of big data and limitless compute. Before then, people could make guesses as to the usefulness of this research, but no one really knew for sure how useful it would be when it was brand new. Should that research not have been done until it was more useful? I don't think anyone would argue that. How then, are we able to determine ahead of time how useful a research project will be? If we knew how to do that, then it wouldn't be research, would it? So really, if you aim to cut off the bottom half of research with the intent that it would increase the sum total knowledge of humanity, you have to show how you: 1) identify the bottom half of research before it's conducted 2) quantify the "useful" research potential of a project, and how do you intended to squelch useless research while allowing useful research to persist unimpeded 3) intend to separate "wrong" research from "right" research 4) fund useful research while passing over useless research I think the answer to those questions would basically involve re-inventing the scientific process. I mean, just think of it this way: research that may turn out to be useless at least has the positive value of showing how something isn't to be done. This has the positive result of allowing someone else to try a different method, which may be equally useless, or may be the key to unlocking new knowledge. I think it's impossible to get the latter without the former.
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
Is the blooming you refer to helping humans and making them healthier and happier though? Or smarter? For the average person in the USA that I encounter it seems like the answer to smarter is a resounding no. And this seems to correspond with the rise of social media in the timeline in my head. Human intelligence doesn’t evolve lower in such a short time period, but the knowledge in that head varies greatly with what you put in it.
- beardedetim 5y ago
  I think we're seeing _many_ people's health be raised in the past ~30yrs. Maybe not Americans/Western Europeans but I would venture to guess that _most_ people are now living _healthier_ lives than they were 30 years ago _globally_. For damn sure "smarter" by any definition of education and intelligent that I could come up with. Sure, maybe not Americans/Western Europeans. Sure. But _globally_ has our education system gotten better and people gotten "smarter"? I think so! Happier? Oh hell no, I don't think we're _happier_ now.
entropi 5y ago
Agreed with all your points, except for this one: > b) will continue to bloom for the foreseeable future I don't think this will be the case. True, it was/is a golden age, but I don't see how this demonstrably unsustainable machine can go on fore the "foreseeable future". Unless we get a huge breakthrough on the order of fusion, I don't see this golden age going on more than 50 or so more years.
- hans1729 5y ago
  The reason I see us continuing to progress is: we have tons of spare intellectual resources. I can't imagine a world where millions of people live in rich countries, who can code, who can read scientific publications, that just stops progressing. Of course the system we've built is constantly evolving, so some things will certainly collapse. E.g. the web will be more and more partitioned - not everything just gets better and better. But I don't see us stopping to make progress any time soon, far from it, and the network-effects of the various things to come will change the face of the earth to a completely unpredictable degree - every couple decades. 2060 is absolutely unpredictable, letalone 2080 or 2100. Rising sea levels notwithstanding.
  - Beltalowda 5y ago
    Climate change is not going to wipe out the human species, but it will cause a large amount of economic upheaval, migration, and things like that. Not exactly the sort of circumstances that are conducive to progress. Then there are many political reasons; the internal politics of many western countries are kind of in a stalemate, and have been for quite some time. It all keeps working for the time being, but it seems to me that there's a very plausible chance a crisis is looming on this front as well. The geopolitical situation I'm a bit less worried about by the way, in spite of Ukraine and China's chest-beating about Taiwan. Once this kind of infrastructure for progress gets compromised then things will become very hard. I dare not make any predictions: it can go both ways, but I'm a lot less confident things will work out as easily as you say.
    - hans1729 5y ago
throwawayozy 5y ago
I disagree. The "innovation" that pervades through our current times is shallow and false. The only substantive innovations we've had in the last couple of decades has been the internet -- and unfortunately its applications have been a net harm on society. I will also say, despite how disagreeable it is, you are part of the problem vis-a-vis "Why we stopped making Einsteins": because your perception of things is not rooted in anything more than self-service and how it affects you -- and not the world at large. If one were to look at the fruits of academia without any self-deception, it's mostly "scientists" making careers for themselves, and constantly engaging in long-cons, grifting for grant money. And if we include the amount of useless (or even out-right damaging) research that has been published (because, once again the incentives for most science is not love of truth, discovery, or practical application -- but self-service) it will seem like it has done more harm to the human soul than organized religion has in the past. Millions of people are able to code, and where has that got us? The questions of the 90s -- how many of them were actually useful, and not simply a distraction from reality? Ad tech? Search? Phones in your pockets with the ability to magnify and create a hyper-reality better than could possibly ever be experienced in real life? Yes, the list goes on, but I don't consider any of these things to be good. What have they done for the human condition besides atomize and intensify certain things -- while neglecting the rest? Machines beating people at Go? We've created automatons that can best us at what should be leisurely activities and hobbies -- to what end? We don't have Einsteins anymore because our culture would not be able to recognize an Einstein until decades past his innovations -- when all the hype and hoopla as died down, and we can look at them detached, and with a cool head and ask ourselves "how much impact has this really made?" (For Einstein, it has been quite large. But I'm certain in 100 years, if we ever wisen, that we'll look back at the things you've listed as appalling detriments, and wonder how could we have been so foolish). It's not pessimism -- it's just looking at the world without painting one's emotional state over it.
ramesh31 5y ago
>This is ridiculous. We’re seeing innovation EVERYWHERE, and looking back, this will be a golden age for progress (if the species makes it far enough to look back, that is). Innovation is not the same as genius. Innovation generally occurs as a linear function from point a to b, whereas genius operates as a step function. Geniuses are the people who make that mental leap of progress in t=1 instead of t=sqrt(2), and they sit up there waving their hands saying "Hey guys! Look what I found up here!", and we all say "How the hell did you get up there so fast? What the heck are you talking about?" until we start catching up and go "Oh yeah... that makes sense".
fullshark 5y ago
Not to get political but people don't care when they can't afford a house, and their kids' future doesn't appear to be brighter as their town is shrinking + all future jobs will be low paying service/technician jobs unless you are working on building these new technologies.
derbOac 5y ago
So, I basically agree with you that there's lots of progress to be amazed by. I also think that the "genius" model is fundamentally flawed, at least in today's age -- there's something to be said for the possibility that education and support systems have improved to the point where maybe geniuses are everywhere. If anything I think we have too much of a genius mythology, and maybe this paper is sort of inadvertently pointing out that the Einsteins of the past were more about the social structures they found themselves than their "genius" per se. There is another argument to be made, though, that goes something like this: a lot of what people are pointing to are basically engineering achievements rather than anything else. Most of what we know of as modern computing was essentially in place by the early 1980s, and alot of what's happened since is just refinements of that. So, being able to casually videochat on your phone is kind of like living in the future, but it's something that basically just took a ton of engineering refinements to get to. That might be fine enough on its own, but there has been a ton of money thrown into things at the same time, far more than in the past. So we go from a desktop PC in 1985 to your smartphone today? It's pretty remarkable, the miniturization involved, but how much money has been thrown at that? I don't want to sound too critical, as I'm basically on board with you and I think the OP is sort of off the mark in a number of ways, but I do think it's coming from a kernel of truth at some level. Let me put it a different way: the idea that there would be no progress in anything over the last 50 years seems like a strawman. It's not really what these pieces are arguing. What they're arguing is basically that the years from say, 1915-1975 or so, especially 1940-1975 or so, were really remarkable scientifically speaking, and we're kind of in a period of just engineering the hell out of those advancements since then. Of course I admit this could all be nonsense; I wish these sorts of papers and essay had more empirical backing behind their basic arguments but with a couple of exceptions I don't see it.
- spupe 5y ago
  That's a good way to look at it, I think. It is fair to the article's intent. But there are two counterpoints to this line of thought: 1. Even if everything now is mostly engineering rather than science, the difficulty in such feats has to be taken into consideration. Anything from a nuclear bomb to the Moon landing was much more interesting from an engineering rather than a scientific perspective. So, perhaps we have directed our geniuses to implementing change in the world, rather than writing essays or doing other abstract work. 2. To go from 1985 desktop computers to modern phones, a lot of scientific work had to be done. To pick one example, the AI research we are developing in order to perform face recognition, semantic search, translation, and so on is simply revolutionary. Just because we cannot pinpoint a single genius behind any of these achievements, we should not underestimate how significant they were.
flavius29663 5y ago
People keep saying how fast flight evolved, such that a person was alive both for Wright brothers and landing on the Moon. We live in a similar (or even higher) acceleration now, with a lot of us born during floppy disks, magnetic tapes and punch cards and we're witnessing having the entirety of world knowledge in our pockets, anywhere in the world, for free!
- brimble 5y ago
  > We live in a similar (or even higher) acceleration now, with a lot of us born during floppy disks, magnetic tapes and punch cards and we're witnessing having the entirety of world knowledge in our pockets, anywhere in the world, for free! I've been here (old enough to at least meaningfully spectate) for almost all of the Internet revolution and for all of the Web's history, and that what's available online is still really far from "the entirety of world knowledge", most of the parts that matter aren't free, and that what is there is horribly poorly-organized and poorly-presented, is part of why I'm pessimistic on the whole technological-progress-as-meaningful-progress thing. A huge proportion of the intellectual value of the free (as in beer) Internet is tied up in a single book and academic paper piracy website. A half-decent academic library still crushes the Web, and it's not even a close contest, if you only count legally-distributed free (to the user) material. This should not be the case, but it is. We've seen about three decades of the Web's promise squandered by broken social structures, laws, and economic incentives. Web-native material remains anemic and largely secondary. The Web's promise as a repository of knowledge and computers in general's utility as teaching tools remain, as far as I can tell, badly under-explored, without much sign of improving soon. We should have an entire, hard-to-beat-by-any-means edutainment-heavy curricula (plural) by now, so engaging it's hard to get kids to stop learning and go ride a bike. Instead, that space has been, at best, treading water since back when I was its target audience. We have institutions that could push these uses, open interoperability between platforms, free interactive materials organized in a useful way, et c., and which have the money to at least make a good attempt at it, but they mostly rest on their laurels and collect pay checks (Wikimedia Foundation, Firefox, that kind of thing) or are just bizarrely uninterested (governments—gee, wouldn't any amount of serious work on that front have been hugely helpful in the last couple years?). The best we have is something like Khan Academy, a better-than-nothing but still sadly-limited marriage of video lectures and multiple choice tests. There's Youtube, but little of even the best material there's good for actual learning versus the illusion of having learned, and some of the best of it's just recorded lectures (Strang, say) which are great and all, but... is that all we've got? All we've done with the capability we have now? "VR's coming and that'll change everything", says someone, I'm sure. Nah, it'll be more of the same. Why would we use that to anything resembling its real potential when we haven't with gestures about this?
jjulius 5y ago
I don't wholly disagree with your overall point, but I'm not entirely onboard, either. I feel like, as someone else mentioned, you're perhaps conflating innovation and "Einsteins" (read: genius) a bit too much. I also think that you're too narrowly focused on innovations within tech, while genius can occur in countless other fields and the article itself doesn't even keep it's focus on "genius" so narrow. >... all the questions of the 90s are now solved. This is exceedingly hyperbolic and I can't imagine you actually think this is true. >Ad tech? Check. Ah, yes! Advertising technology! I think we're all delighted, as a species, that we've innovated so hard in this realm. Invasive, targeted advertising is the bee's knees and will really propel us forward as a civilization.
- hans1729 5y ago
  >you're perhaps conflating innovation and "Einsteins" (read: genius) a bit too much you're right to step over this, my point was directed at broad intellectual progress rather than Einsteins. That's because there is no such thing as Einsteins. We only had one. And then we had Ramanujan, and Turing, and von Neumann [...]. Point being: you can only find out about general and special relativity once. After that, every following genius would have to make a dent of the same proportions relative to the now-already-made discoveries. We're just too far down the line to detect that level of genius. I'm 100% convinced that there are at least 20 people on the planet right now who have the same intellectual depth and potential for breakthroughs as Einstein (or any of the above, honestly) did. We just won't be able to contrast them to the rest of the population as we used to be able to, simply because almost everyone who works for Google is ridiculously intelligent and educated. >This is exceedingly hyperbolic and I can't imagine you actually think this is true. Yes, it was hyperbole, to illustrate that of the things that we really put resources into, everything was solved or we at least made significant progress. Excuse the wording. >Ah, yes! Advertising technology! Wether you like it or not, it's a significant step. Modulating content to maximize the attention-reach of your audience is scientifically significant. Again, that we use this for bullshit is a side-effect of your broken and time-local culture, it doesn't invalidate the progress we made along the way.
  - glhaynes 5y ago
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syshum 5y ago
Where is my Flying Car, Where is my Space Tourism, Where is my Space Colony, Where is my Underwater Colony, Where is my Cheap Plentiful Environmentally friendly Energy Generation / Storage it seems to be we are stuck, we are improving current technology, but we have not created new technology in a long time, Sure computers got smaller and more powerful but that is just iteration of the same design.. We need another major shift in technology, not just iterations / improvements on the same old, same old
- tastyfreeze 5y ago
  Prior to the invention of telegraph and rail Thomas Jefferson lamented the fact that transport and communication were so slow. Modes of transportation and communication hadn't changed in centuries. Technological progress had seemed to slow to a crawl. Shortly after his death, telegraph and rail were invented and technological progress boomed. Technology is constantly refined slowly for long periods of time. Then there is a new discovery and everything changes rapidly. I believe we are on the precipice of such a boom. ReBCO high temperature super conductors were invented in the 80s and reached manufacturable maturity in 2010. Anything that uses powerful electro magnets is just starting the process of being made more powerful and cheaper. This invention is why there is a sudden interest in commercial fusion. I have seen recent papers calculating upgrades to MRI that will make them more powerful, cheaper to build and run. I already feel the future of my childhood has arrived. I am very excided for the technology we will see in the next couple decades. PS I only used Thomas Jefferson because I recently read Undaunted Courage that talked about Jefferson's lamentations of slow progress. PPS Computer aided design could be seen as the last great technology boom. It has allowed us to build more efficient and lighter machines that were not possible before.
- JackFr 5y ago
  You got communicators and tricorders instead. You're welcome.
andrewclunn 5y ago
People who think there are no new great minds are looking for society to hand them socially approved "great minds." The thing about great minds is that your mind has to be at least not entirely eclipsed by them to recognize their greatness.
bitlax 5y ago
https://youtu.be/HJGp19h47o4 https://youtu.be/HJGp19h47o4 Peter Thiel would say you're describing innovation in bits as opposed to atoms.
- deleted 5y ago
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bruce343434 5y ago
I can't tell if this is a parody and/or copypasta > that I’m typing while my girlfriend lies in my arm in our bed, should be mind blowing
- hans1729 5y ago
  Why so cynical about it? That's just what the situation was. The topology of our species' communication changed entirely within a single biological generation, from centralized orgs that delay and transform the signal, to the point where one node streams natively to any channel of their choosing, no transformations applied. How is that not worth mentioning in this thread, and how is it justifying cynic remarks?

mehphp 5y ago

Yes, thank you. I’m tired of the constant negativity.

cushychicken 5y ago

Yeah, I knew this article wasn't for me when I read the first sentence. Genius is so widespread these days that it's almost pedestrian. It's just way less concentrated and elite than it used to be - which makes its findings harder to disseminate.

ZephyrBlu 5y ago
What's your definition/bar for genius?

mschuster91 5y ago

The problem is, we could be doing so much better as a species, but our best minds are either selling ads or working in finance. Neither of which creates real progress for the masses. Not to mention that the government and the military have all but scrapped their research programs - a lot of the progress of the last decades has fundamental roots there (most notably the Internet). Instead, we let private companies like SpaceX and the whims of billionaires decide on where and how to progress. This is wrong on so many levels. We need to tax billionaires of everything above 10 billion dollars, and use the seized money to improve the lives of everyone.

slibhb 5y ago
The private sector taking the lead in space exploration is healthy. The government should be involved when it needs to be. That was the case in the past but isn't any longer.
rustybolt 5y ago
> The problem is, we could be doing so much better as a species, but our best minds are either selling ads or working in finance. Neither of which creates real progress for the masses. So what does create real progress to the masses?
- candiddevmike 5y ago
  Crisis (recently lead to the general availability of mRNA treatments) and war (starlink recently showed how easy it is to reconnect a country during wartime)
- mschuster91 5y ago
  A clear vision of a target. That worked for the removal of lead, for the combat of acid rain and for the ban of CFC gases, and right now many European cities are piloting the vision of a "car free city" with astonishing results.
beiller 5y ago
Keep in mind some of the best and brightest minds in the past, some cutting edge medical experts, were highly paid to perform lobotomies. And that is just one example. I was reading recently about cutting edge "medicine" back in the day, that was literally just radioactive water made from radium. Killed lots of rich people because of how expensive it was as a treatment.
hans1729 5y ago
Let me offer a diverging perspective: >we could be doing so much better as a species ...relative to your expectations. If your model of the world (from which these expectations arise) was accurate, it would predict the world as it is, opposed to an ought. Things are not good or bad. They just are. And how we react to this status quo then can be evaluated as good or bad subjectively, and the closer you look at the metrics you use for the evaluation, the more of it will be culture, local, and meaningless in the greater scheme. If you don't like how individuals allocate their resources, give them a reason to do it differently. Just being sad because in a theoretical instance of our world things could be better, won't close the delta between our is and your ought. >We need to tax billionaires of everything above 10 billion dollars this, for example, is based on the assumption that our core problems are derived from an unfair distribution of resources. While you can certainly make that argument, I would strongly recommend you to reconsider wether thats truly the root of our problems - it's not. Try to understand us as a collective organism of nodes that exchange information. Try to understand the underlying systems that drive our behavior. Go deeper. Understand for the sake of understanding. The more you judge with your heart, the more blind your brain becomes, and that won't get us anywhere. Cheers!

humanistbot 5y ago

You're absolutely right, although on a completely different topic: I'd argue that most of the things you mentioned might not be good for society, especially when combined with the view that most technological development takes place in publicly traded companies whose primary obligation is to maximize quarterly profits. I guess it is innovation when a personalized recommender system is able to pick exactly the right conspiracy video to HD stream to someone's phone that will get them to keep watching videos on an ad-supported platform. But not exactly society "blooming" in my view. Edit: Obligatory "I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by advertising KPIs" reference

hans1729 5y ago
fwiw, that's a very time-local judgement of the progress we made. Objectively, as a species, we solved inter-connectivity, high quality media, etc. - the fact that we currently live in a culture where these means are distributed in the name of wealth will simply be meaningless a couple hundred years down the line.
- forum_ghost 5y ago
  why? status, hierarchy, etc, will be genetically edited out to turn our species into a faceless mass of obedient drones, ruled by the selected few? I see simply no other way out of very deeply the status/hierarchy thing that's so deeply ingrained into our species.
  - hans1729 5y ago
    Because the feedback-loops that allow for notions as isolated material wealth will lose traction (or at least that's what I estimate will happen). Where do you think automation will lead us over the course of ten generations? What will AI be capable of at that point? After, say, 50% of people have nothing meaningful to contribute to society anymore via jobs, how will this change the perspective on work/wealth/etc as a whole? Now add another five generations after we reached that point, just to get rid of some friction of people holding on the the past. The system design of power/hierarchy makes sense in a partitioned world of limited resources. If we expect any continuous level of progress in our problem-domains (for example fresh water), its just a matter of time until culture eradicates certain inequalities. As of now, there is an active demand for inequality. People want to be wealthy, and as it is, that requires others to be poor and do the shit jobs. One part of this equation will continue to change in our favor - maybe forever. I don't think this is "so deeply ingrained into our species", I think its nothing but culture, or maybe some middle ground, in which case culture will be the dominant factor over the long run.

Victerius 5y ago

Are we really seeing a lot of innovation? The last technological breakthrough was the smartphone. We still don't have space stations that can accommodate more than a half dozen people (spoiler: I want to live on Cloud City). We don't have Moon colonies. We don't have 3D holograms (not the ones that rely on spinning a stick really fast and using a projector). We still don't have a cure for any type of cancer. No warp drives. No anti-grav. No 200 year life expectancy. No human cloning. No $25 000 flying cars. No mass produced technology or consumer products using graphene. We make smaller chips, miniaturized computers, made fancier looking user interfaces, made rocket boosters reusable, and video game graphics are approaching photorealism. Great.

ceejayoz 5y ago
> The last technological breakthrough was the smartphone. That's fairly recent, and pretty damned significant. How often are you expecting such society-changing innovations to occur? Your list of things we don't have that you want is kinda odd. Is there a need for cloned humans? What huge societal improvements do holograms permit? Why is a consumer product with graphene meaningful but the massive innovation in small, powerful batteries not?
- Victerius 5y ago
  > kinda odd. Is there a need for cloned humans? Cloned militaries. Eliminating birth defects. Relieving women from the pain of childbirth. Also to solve the problem of low birth rates, and allow people to perpetuate themselves. Elon Musk could clone himself and raise his copy to eventually take over his businesses after him. > What huge societal improvements do holograms permit? Look man, the Jedi didn't use Slack, did they? > Why is a consumer product with graphene meaningful but the massive innovation in small, powerful batteries not? Life is graphene. It's fantastic.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    > A. Clone. Army. So... are these clones slaves that are forced to join the army? > Also to solve the problem of low birth rates, and allow people to perpetuate themselves. Elon Musk could clone himself and raise his copy to eventually take over his businesses after him. He could also do this with his children?

drewcoo 5y ago

If we live in an age when we're all outlier Einsteins, then none of us are outlier Einsteins.

snarf21 5y ago

Agreed, this article's premise is nonsense, while well written with some interesting history. The geniuses are making things that are now so common place that we've lost our wonder. Nanometer computer chips? That sounds like genius to me. Editing the human genome with CRISPR (et.al.)? That sounds like genius to me. It is true that some of our smartest minds are now focused on ads and exploiting complex derivatives but we also rolled out a vaccine to a world of billions in 9 months. There is plenty of genius, but the bar is higher and the easy things are done. This author seems to miss the genius required to let me watch live streamed video from the other side of the world on a watch as I "drive" 70 mph down the highway while the car keeps me in my lane if I stop paying attention.

shubb 5y ago

One really major innovation is that we have developed the capacity to do experiments at a massive volume physically, and are just - with the big data revolution - developing the capability to understand these data volumes and translate them into findings. Whereas science used to be done in a relatively small number of labs, with little communication between countries - there are now thousands of universities and commercial labs in every developed country doing research. And that research uses machines that measure thousands of variables at high speed. And yet - we still lack the ability to put all this data together. Even the volume of scientific papers published is greater than any individual could keep up with. Their finding are often extracted into databases - for instance in biology a new enzyme would end up in the Uniprot database. But getting from this newly discovered enzyme to a genetically engineered bacteria that makes gasoline is a journey of hops between fields that it rarely happens. Yet. What I suppose I'm saying is - the progress you talk about in AI and computation has been amazing, but it has much more to give. The next 50 years, should we survive that long, will be another tidal wave of innovation.

JackFr 5y ago
> Whereas science used to be done in a relatively small number of labs, with little communication between countries - there are now thousands of universities and commercial labs in every developed country doing research. And that research uses machines that measure thousands of variables at high speed. And the median value of that reasearch is zero. There is literally too much research being done. Because of perverse incentives (in both academia and industry) there are a fair number of results that are not useful along with some which are simply wrong. I believe we could easily cut off the bottom half of the research being done and the appreciable impact would be to increase the sum total of knowledge of the species.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  You're mistaken, I think, because one of your assumptions is not necessarily true - that wrong/useless results are a bad thing and slowing us down. First, the notion that "wrong" research is bad. We have to remember that literally the best results science have to offer are in fact wrong today, and have been more wrong in the past. What science produces are models of reality, and while they may be highly accurate at predicting reality they are not in fact reality. They are wrong in some way. So we can't just throw out all of the wrong results because then we would have to throw out all of the results. Instead of going down this path, we can instead be content that some research is wrong, because the scientific process is one of continually refining those results. Also, we note that despite everything literally being wrong, society, technology, and engineering still make progress. Being wrong does not mean being useless. Second, the notion that "useless" research is bad. The thing about usefulness is that it's hard to quantify, and it's also not a static property. Sometimes research that is useful in one era is completely useless in another. For example, deep learning wasn't very useful until the era of big data and limitless compute. Before then, people could make guesses as to the usefulness of this research, but no one really knew for sure how useful it would be when it was brand new. Should that research not have been done until it was more useful? I don't think anyone would argue that. How then, are we able to determine ahead of time how useful a research project will be? If we knew how to do that, then it wouldn't be research, would it? So really, if you aim to cut off the bottom half of research with the intent that it would increase the sum total knowledge of humanity, you have to show how you: 1) identify the bottom half of research before it's conducted 2) quantify the "useful" research potential of a project, and how do you intended to squelch useless research while allowing useful research to persist unimpeded 3) intend to separate "wrong" research from "right" research 4) fund useful research while passing over useless research I think the answer to those questions would basically involve re-inventing the scientific process. I mean, just think of it this way: research that may turn out to be useless at least has the positive value of showing how something isn't to be done. This has the positive result of allowing someone else to try a different method, which may be equally useless, or may be the key to unlocking new knowledge. I think it's impossible to get the latter without the former.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

Is the blooming you refer to helping humans and making them healthier and happier though? Or smarter? For the average person in the USA that I encounter it seems like the answer to smarter is a resounding no. And this seems to correspond with the rise of social media in the timeline in my head. Human intelligence doesn’t evolve lower in such a short time period, but the knowledge in that head varies greatly with what you put in it.

beardedetim 5y ago
I think we're seeing _many_ people's health be raised in the past ~30yrs. Maybe not Americans/Western Europeans but I would venture to guess that _most_ people are now living _healthier_ lives than they were 30 years ago _globally_. For damn sure "smarter" by any definition of education and intelligent that I could come up with. Sure, maybe not Americans/Western Europeans. Sure. But _globally_ has our education system gotten better and people gotten "smarter"? I think so! Happier? Oh hell no, I don't think we're _happier_ now.

entropi 5y ago

Agreed with all your points, except for this one: > b) will continue to bloom for the foreseeable future I don't think this will be the case. True, it was/is a golden age, but I don't see how this demonstrably unsustainable machine can go on fore the "foreseeable future". Unless we get a huge breakthrough on the order of fusion, I don't see this golden age going on more than 50 or so more years.

hans1729 5y ago
The reason I see us continuing to progress is: we have tons of spare intellectual resources. I can't imagine a world where millions of people live in rich countries, who can code, who can read scientific publications, that just stops progressing. Of course the system we've built is constantly evolving, so some things will certainly collapse. E.g. the web will be more and more partitioned - not everything just gets better and better. But I don't see us stopping to make progress any time soon, far from it, and the network-effects of the various things to come will change the face of the earth to a completely unpredictable degree - every couple decades. 2060 is absolutely unpredictable, letalone 2080 or 2100. Rising sea levels notwithstanding.
- Beltalowda 5y ago
  Climate change is not going to wipe out the human species, but it will cause a large amount of economic upheaval, migration, and things like that. Not exactly the sort of circumstances that are conducive to progress. Then there are many political reasons; the internal politics of many western countries are kind of in a stalemate, and have been for quite some time. It all keeps working for the time being, but it seems to me that there's a very plausible chance a crisis is looming on this front as well. The geopolitical situation I'm a bit less worried about by the way, in spite of Ukraine and China's chest-beating about Taiwan. Once this kind of infrastructure for progress gets compromised then things will become very hard. I dare not make any predictions: it can go both ways, but I'm a lot less confident things will work out as easily as you say.
  - hans1729 5y ago

throwawayozy 5y ago

I disagree. The "innovation" that pervades through our current times is shallow and false. The only substantive innovations we've had in the last couple of decades has been the internet -- and unfortunately its applications have been a net harm on society. I will also say, despite how disagreeable it is, you are part of the problem vis-a-vis "Why we stopped making Einsteins": because your perception of things is not rooted in anything more than self-service and how it affects you -- and not the world at large. If one were to look at the fruits of academia without any self-deception, it's mostly "scientists" making careers for themselves, and constantly engaging in long-cons, grifting for grant money. And if we include the amount of useless (or even out-right damaging) research that has been published (because, once again the incentives for most science is not love of truth, discovery, or practical application -- but self-service) it will seem like it has done more harm to the human soul than organized religion has in the past. Millions of people are able to code, and where has that got us? The questions of the 90s -- how many of them were actually useful, and not simply a distraction from reality? Ad tech? Search? Phones in your pockets with the ability to magnify and create a hyper-reality better than could possibly ever be experienced in real life? Yes, the list goes on, but I don't consider any of these things to be good. What have they done for the human condition besides atomize and intensify certain things -- while neglecting the rest? Machines beating people at Go? We've created automatons that can best us at what should be leisurely activities and hobbies -- to what end? We don't have Einsteins anymore because our culture would not be able to recognize an Einstein until decades past his innovations -- when all the hype and hoopla as died down, and we can look at them detached, and with a cool head and ask ourselves "how much impact has this really made?" (For Einstein, it has been quite large. But I'm certain in 100 years, if we ever wisen, that we'll look back at the things you've listed as appalling detriments, and wonder how could we have been so foolish). It's not pessimism -- it's just looking at the world without painting one's emotional state over it.

ramesh31 5y ago

>This is ridiculous. We’re seeing innovation EVERYWHERE, and looking back, this will be a golden age for progress (if the species makes it far enough to look back, that is). Innovation is not the same as genius. Innovation generally occurs as a linear function from point a to b, whereas genius operates as a step function. Geniuses are the people who make that mental leap of progress in t=1 instead of t=sqrt(2), and they sit up there waving their hands saying "Hey guys! Look what I found up here!", and we all say "How the hell did you get up there so fast? What the heck are you talking about?" until we start catching up and go "Oh yeah... that makes sense".

fullshark 5y ago

Not to get political but people don't care when they can't afford a house, and their kids' future doesn't appear to be brighter as their town is shrinking + all future jobs will be low paying service/technician jobs unless you are working on building these new technologies.

derbOac 5y ago

So, I basically agree with you that there's lots of progress to be amazed by. I also think that the "genius" model is fundamentally flawed, at least in today's age -- there's something to be said for the possibility that education and support systems have improved to the point where maybe geniuses are everywhere. If anything I think we have too much of a genius mythology, and maybe this paper is sort of inadvertently pointing out that the Einsteins of the past were more about the social structures they found themselves than their "genius" per se. There is another argument to be made, though, that goes something like this: a lot of what people are pointing to are basically engineering achievements rather than anything else. Most of what we know of as modern computing was essentially in place by the early 1980s, and alot of what's happened since is just refinements of that. So, being able to casually videochat on your phone is kind of like living in the future, but it's something that basically just took a ton of engineering refinements to get to. That might be fine enough on its own, but there has been a ton of money thrown into things at the same time, far more than in the past. So we go from a desktop PC in 1985 to your smartphone today? It's pretty remarkable, the miniturization involved, but how much money has been thrown at that? I don't want to sound too critical, as I'm basically on board with you and I think the OP is sort of off the mark in a number of ways, but I do think it's coming from a kernel of truth at some level. Let me put it a different way: the idea that there would be no progress in anything over the last 50 years seems like a strawman. It's not really what these pieces are arguing. What they're arguing is basically that the years from say, 1915-1975 or so, especially 1940-1975 or so, were really remarkable scientifically speaking, and we're kind of in a period of just engineering the hell out of those advancements since then. Of course I admit this could all be nonsense; I wish these sorts of papers and essay had more empirical backing behind their basic arguments but with a couple of exceptions I don't see it.

spupe 5y ago
That's a good way to look at it, I think. It is fair to the article's intent. But there are two counterpoints to this line of thought: 1. Even if everything now is mostly engineering rather than science, the difficulty in such feats has to be taken into consideration. Anything from a nuclear bomb to the Moon landing was much more interesting from an engineering rather than a scientific perspective. So, perhaps we have directed our geniuses to implementing change in the world, rather than writing essays or doing other abstract work. 2. To go from 1985 desktop computers to modern phones, a lot of scientific work had to be done. To pick one example, the AI research we are developing in order to perform face recognition, semantic search, translation, and so on is simply revolutionary. Just because we cannot pinpoint a single genius behind any of these achievements, we should not underestimate how significant they were.

flavius29663 5y ago

People keep saying how fast flight evolved, such that a person was alive both for Wright brothers and landing on the Moon. We live in a similar (or even higher) acceleration now, with a lot of us born during floppy disks, magnetic tapes and punch cards and we're witnessing having the entirety of world knowledge in our pockets, anywhere in the world, for free!

brimble 5y ago
> We live in a similar (or even higher) acceleration now, with a lot of us born during floppy disks, magnetic tapes and punch cards and we're witnessing having the entirety of world knowledge in our pockets, anywhere in the world, for free! I've been here (old enough to at least meaningfully spectate) for almost all of the Internet revolution and for all of the Web's history, and that what's available online is still really far from "the entirety of world knowledge", most of the parts that matter aren't free, and that what is there is horribly poorly-organized and poorly-presented, is part of why I'm pessimistic on the whole technological-progress-as-meaningful-progress thing. A huge proportion of the intellectual value of the free (as in beer) Internet is tied up in a single book and academic paper piracy website. A half-decent academic library still crushes the Web, and it's not even a close contest, if you only count legally-distributed free (to the user) material. This should not be the case, but it is. We've seen about three decades of the Web's promise squandered by broken social structures, laws, and economic incentives. Web-native material remains anemic and largely secondary. The Web's promise as a repository of knowledge and computers in general's utility as teaching tools remain, as far as I can tell, badly under-explored, without much sign of improving soon. We should have an entire, hard-to-beat-by-any-means edutainment-heavy curricula (plural) by now, so engaging it's hard to get kids to stop learning and go ride a bike. Instead, that space has been, at best, treading water since back when I was its target audience. We have institutions that could push these uses, open interoperability between platforms, free interactive materials organized in a useful way, et c., and which have the money to at least make a good attempt at it, but they mostly rest on their laurels and collect pay checks (Wikimedia Foundation, Firefox, that kind of thing) or are just bizarrely uninterested (governments—gee, wouldn't any amount of serious work on that front have been hugely helpful in the last couple years?). The best we have is something like Khan Academy, a better-than-nothing but still sadly-limited marriage of video lectures and multiple choice tests. There's Youtube, but little of even the best material there's good for actual learning versus the illusion of having learned, and some of the best of it's just recorded lectures (Strang, say) which are great and all, but... is that all we've got? All we've done with the capability we have now? "VR's coming and that'll change everything", says someone, I'm sure. Nah, it'll be more of the same. Why would we use that to anything resembling its real potential when we haven't with gestures about this?

jjulius 5y ago

I don't wholly disagree with your overall point, but I'm not entirely onboard, either. I feel like, as someone else mentioned, you're perhaps conflating innovation and "Einsteins" (read: genius) a bit too much. I also think that you're too narrowly focused on innovations within tech, while genius can occur in countless other fields and the article itself doesn't even keep it's focus on "genius" so narrow. >... all the questions of the 90s are now solved. This is exceedingly hyperbolic and I can't imagine you actually think this is true. >Ad tech? Check. Ah, yes! Advertising technology! I think we're all delighted, as a species, that we've innovated so hard in this realm. Invasive, targeted advertising is the bee's knees and will really propel us forward as a civilization.

hans1729 5y ago
>you're perhaps conflating innovation and "Einsteins" (read: genius) a bit too much you're right to step over this, my point was directed at broad intellectual progress rather than Einsteins. That's because there is no such thing as Einsteins. We only had one. And then we had Ramanujan, and Turing, and von Neumann [...]. Point being: you can only find out about general and special relativity once. After that, every following genius would have to make a dent of the same proportions relative to the now-already-made discoveries. We're just too far down the line to detect that level of genius. I'm 100% convinced that there are at least 20 people on the planet right now who have the same intellectual depth and potential for breakthroughs as Einstein (or any of the above, honestly) did. We just won't be able to contrast them to the rest of the population as we used to be able to, simply because almost everyone who works for Google is ridiculously intelligent and educated. >This is exceedingly hyperbolic and I can't imagine you actually think this is true. Yes, it was hyperbole, to illustrate that of the things that we really put resources into, everything was solved or we at least made significant progress. Excuse the wording. >Ah, yes! Advertising technology! Wether you like it or not, it's a significant step. Modulating content to maximize the attention-reach of your audience is scientifically significant. Again, that we use this for bullshit is a side-effect of your broken and time-local culture, it doesn't invalidate the progress we made along the way.
- glhaynes 5y ago

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syshum 5y ago

Where is my Flying Car, Where is my Space Tourism, Where is my Space Colony, Where is my Underwater Colony, Where is my Cheap Plentiful Environmentally friendly Energy Generation / Storage it seems to be we are stuck, we are improving current technology, but we have not created new technology in a long time, Sure computers got smaller and more powerful but that is just iteration of the same design.. We need another major shift in technology, not just iterations / improvements on the same old, same old

tastyfreeze 5y ago
Prior to the invention of telegraph and rail Thomas Jefferson lamented the fact that transport and communication were so slow. Modes of transportation and communication hadn't changed in centuries. Technological progress had seemed to slow to a crawl. Shortly after his death, telegraph and rail were invented and technological progress boomed. Technology is constantly refined slowly for long periods of time. Then there is a new discovery and everything changes rapidly. I believe we are on the precipice of such a boom. ReBCO high temperature super conductors were invented in the 80s and reached manufacturable maturity in 2010. Anything that uses powerful electro magnets is just starting the process of being made more powerful and cheaper. This invention is why there is a sudden interest in commercial fusion. I have seen recent papers calculating upgrades to MRI that will make them more powerful, cheaper to build and run. I already feel the future of my childhood has arrived. I am very excided for the technology we will see in the next couple decades. PS I only used Thomas Jefferson because I recently read Undaunted Courage that talked about Jefferson's lamentations of slow progress. PPS Computer aided design could be seen as the last great technology boom. It has allowed us to build more efficient and lighter machines that were not possible before.
JackFr 5y ago
You got communicators and tricorders instead. You're welcome.

andrewclunn 5y ago

People who think there are no new great minds are looking for society to hand them socially approved "great minds." The thing about great minds is that your mind has to be at least not entirely eclipsed by them to recognize their greatness.

bitlax 5y ago

https://youtu.be/HJGp19h47o4 https://youtu.be/HJGp19h47o4 Peter Thiel would say you're describing innovation in bits as opposed to atoms.

deleted 5y ago
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bruce343434 5y ago

I can't tell if this is a parody and/or copypasta > that I’m typing while my girlfriend lies in my arm in our bed, should be mind blowing

hans1729 5y ago
Why so cynical about it? That's just what the situation was. The topology of our species' communication changed entirely within a single biological generation, from centralized orgs that delay and transform the signal, to the point where one node streams natively to any channel of their choosing, no transformations applied. How is that not worth mentioning in this thread, and how is it justifying cynic remarks?