5 ms·

Has the rate of technological progress slowed in the past 50 years?

30 points by tsestrich 17y ago

jacquesm 17y ago
Great article! I don't buy the 'singularity' idea either. It makes for fantastic science fiction but in the real world all resources are finite and every technology we've come up with so far has had to deal with the harsh realities of the thermodynamic laws and regular materials science. There is plenty of room at the bottom, indeed, but the bottom is not 'bottomless', and the engineering problems are formidable. Sure, there is progress, and plenty of it. But to think that that progress is 'easy' or 'accelerating' belies the enormous amount of hard work that goes in to achieving it. And with every step every next one becomes harder, the laws of diminishing returns. I think that our illusion of ever accelerating progress has more to do with the fact that ever more people are 'knowledge workers' and 'scientists' than anything else, the greater a fraction of our society that advances our knowledge the faster we will move forward in this respect. The 'uploaders' are essentially practicing wishful thinking about that great question plenty of people have had to deal with in the past: How to avoid dying. Unfortunately I don't think any of the people alive today is going to be able to accomplish that feat, statistics is overwhelmingly against it, everybody that ever lived in the past has died before the ripe old age of 150 of one cause or another. And so will everybody living today. If you want to be immortal your best bet is probably to write a book, compose a piece of music or make a timeless movie. I'm not sure if blogging counts :) And as for the singularity, there are several other scenarios, some plausible, some implausible: - a plateau of knowledge after which any future gains in knowledge will come ever slower, in a world like that new scientific findings would be real headline news instead of the science section on page 24 - a 'wall', beyond which we will not be able to go without knowledge 'behind' the wall (physics may be up against that, or maybe not but if there is something beyond quantum may never become a settled question)
- tsestrich 17y ago
  I think we still have a lot of room for progress, but I think it's going to take another leap in technological innovation for that to happen (there's a rapidly approaching point where we just won't be able to make a silicon-based processor any faster). We'll also, of course, keep finding new applications for current technology, but that's unlikely to be a paradigm-shifter. I guess you could say that the Internet has done that though to some extent, taking what was basically a medium for exchanging scientific data and turning it into a medium that really connects people on a never-before-seen scale. But I definitely agree with the article in that it is ridiculous to assume that there is some sort of exponential path for technological progress that society is just going to somehow follow. We're really gonna have to work for every step we take
geuis 17y ago
No, it hasn't been slowing. The author fails to see that we know more about astronomy in the last 2 years than the previous 10. More has been discovered about the brain in the last ~15 years than people knew in the last 100,000 years. Throw in chemistry, nanoscale fabrication, materials science, etc. At every level of society we have been impacted by the advancements that are occurring around us daily. People who have spent their entire lives thinking linearly have a hard time getting a sense of how much things have changed.
- cousin_it 17y ago
  A flat "no, it hasn't been slowing" doesn't address the argument that 1900-1950 changed everyday life much more than 1950-2000.
  - ciscoriordan 17y ago
    I might agree that 1900-1950 changed everyday life more than 1950-2000, but I'm pretty sure 1959-2009 changed much more than 1909-1959.
    - cousin_it 17y ago
      Please argue your point.
      - ciscoriordan 17y ago
        In 1909 the Model T was already in mass production. I think that represents a huge shift in day-to-day life that happened between 1900 and 1950 but not 1909 and 1959. On the other end of the timeline, I think Google going from a $25 million funding round in 1999 to a $100+ billion market cap in 2009 represents major changes in how society works.
  - jerf 17y ago
    It sort of does, by denying that "changing everyday life" is the relevant metric. If we're going to measure progress, first we need to agree on a metric. Different metrics will produce different results. But a quick perusal of some alternative metrics: * How much more do we understand about the world now than we did, and how much of this knowledge is used by engineers in technology? * How many more bits (from an information theoretic standpoint) does it take to describe our technology? (Probably my favorite, as it most directly captures what I think most people are getting at. Not perfect, though, as it's not true that more bits > less bits... however, that's a decent first approximation given the scale involved.) * How much do certain things cost in man-hours, then vs. now? (For instance, see http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/opinion/10cox.html?_r=1&ref=opinion http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/opinion/10cox.html?_r=1&#3... ) Given the wide variety of other far more useful metrics, "how much has my everyday life changed" should be rather far down on the list of metrics you want to use. By most useful metrics, technology progress has indeed accelerated and continues to accelerate. That we have a bit of an intermediate area here where we're putting together the necessary bits to really open up the throttle again shouldn't be that surprising; robotics, nanotechnology, and biological technology are not easy things... but we're getting there, one bit at a time. And those things will further open up other secondary effects, like private space travel being both practical and useful (for resource extraction). I don't think it's unreasonable that we'll get at least one good energy breakthrough either, probably either an alternative fusion technology or practical satellite solar power of some sort (though that may be 15 or 20 years off, the technology necessary is a fairly simple extrapolation of existing trends, not requiring any magic). Enjoy this moment of apparent quiet, where all the action is on the Internet. There's perhaps 10 more years of it, then things are going to be exciting again. (And it's not a hard transition, so you may still not notice it unless you look for it. But it's already happening, just slowly.)
recampbell 17y ago
What do we mean by "technological progress"? Do we mean the quantitative improvement over previous generations of technology? Or do we mean qualitative improvements in our standard of living? When you can eliminate the fear of hunger, automate mindless domestic chores and provide highly-accessible world-wide transportation, these are huge qualitative changes in our standard of living. But once you reach a certain level in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, big technological improvements don't make as big of a difference in your perceived quality of life. Is it really surprising that storing 2000x more music on your iPod doesn't have the same impact on your standard of living as a cheap and reliable source of food?
- potatolicious 17y ago
  Not to mention that the computer and internet revolution is, for the most part, entirely contained within the past 50 years... and IMHO the advent of mass computing and the internet is likely the most important leap in human technology for the past few centuries. Think back to how life was in the mid 80s, and tell me we have not advanced by absolute leaps and bounds.
sophacles 17y ago
One of the big problems with this article, and it also applies (albeit slightly differently) to the singularity folks, is this: You are comparing normal existence today with front edge people of the past. This is easy to accidentally do, because it is much easier to see the people who really jumped all over lighting, and telephone in the past when looking from now. Further it is much more common to write about those people than it is to write about the smiths, who not keeping up with the Joneses, didn't get the telephone for another decade. There were plenty of places in the us that only used outhouses into the 70's. Horses were used for plowing and whatnot into the 1950's (tractors having been around for decades at that point). My point is, in 50 years we will be writing about the curve the internet took, and my children's kids will grow up believing everyone did this internet thing fluently. It will be hard to explain to them how a lot of my contemporaries will never quite get it. Much like I still can't quite wrap my head around the telephone troubles my grandfather's parents seemed to have. I guess the point is, there really is not a good way of measuring impact of technology until we can look back and go, "woah, that was a big change!" or "what a dud!". Compare period write-ups of the future of zepplins or pneumatic tubes, to current reality.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Excellent point, the trouble with the singularity folks though is that their persistence that it will happen borders on religion. It is up to the proponents of a hard to verify claim to prove that claim to be true. The evidence so far is against them, the singularity hasn't happened (yet), and when it does it will be a simple matter of fact. Until it does it is pure speculation and all that speculation and 'but it will' stuff isn't going to make it happen one microsecond sooner (assuming it eventually will happen, which I do not believe until I see it). The singularity has been jokingly called 'the rapture of the nerds', and there is a lot of truth in that. The rapture people from the 'scriptural' side of life tend to go off on all kinds of tangents about how 'the rest of us' do not get it and possibly will be left behind, the 'singularity' folks seem to have many of those traits in common. This planet has existed for four billion years and change, the universe is currently estimated to be between 13.5 and 14 billion years old and it seems all evidence points to the fact that the singularity has not happened anywhere in the universe, because according to that theory it would take over the entire universe as we know it at light speed. The only loophole this leaves is that it has happened but so far away that the effects have not reached us yet.
ynniv 17y ago
This article is fundamentally flawed in judging technological progress by its impact on "everyday life". Many of the advancements over the last 50 years have been of military or industrial application. Does this mean that they are lesser advances? Where is the cruise missile? GPS system? Even important everyday items are missing, like cell phones, and cheap air travel. I own a phone that will let me call (almost) anyone in the world form (almost) anywhere in the world, while showing me where I am to the nearest 15 meters on a map composed of images from SPACE. I can travel 3,000 miles in half of a day for a weeks worth of rent. People change cities like they used to change wardrobes. Obviously these are just a couple of things, and wouldn't fundamentally change his argument, but I haven't spent much time thinking of them. Asking other people's opinions of changes to "everyday life" would have been helpful, as there seems to be a serious personal bias in the article.
shalmanese 17y ago
Ugh, we've been through this before. Significant technological innovations take 30 years to recognize as significant so there's always a bias when looking at the recent past. It's a measurement artifact, not reality.
antipaganda 17y ago
Cellphones are making a MAJOR impact on the lives of billions of people in the third world right now, and no-one's mentioned them so far. They were invented recently, and disruptive technologies and cultural artifacts based on cheap mobiles are coming thick and fast. In some ways, poverty-stricken folks in Bangladesh are leaving us fat Westerners behind.
asciilifeform 17y ago
Absolutely: http://yarchive.net/physics/effete.html http://yarchive.net/physics/effete.html

30 points by tsestrich 17y ago

Great article! I don't buy the 'singularity' idea either. It makes for fantastic science fiction but in the real world all resources are finite and every technology we've come up with so far has had to deal with the harsh realities of the thermodynamic laws and regular materials science. There is plenty of room at the bottom, indeed, but the bottom is not 'bottomless', and the engineering problems are formidable. Sure, there is progress, and plenty of it. But to think that that progress is 'easy' or 'accelerating' belies the enormous amount of hard work that goes in to achieving it. And with every step every next one becomes harder, the laws of diminishing returns. I think that our illusion of ever accelerating progress has more to do with the fact that ever more people are 'knowledge workers' and 'scientists' than anything else, the greater a fraction of our society that advances our knowledge the faster we will move forward in this respect. The 'uploaders' are essentially practicing wishful thinking about that great question plenty of people have had to deal with in the past: How to avoid dying. Unfortunately I don't think any of the people alive today is going to be able to accomplish that feat, statistics is overwhelmingly against it, everybody that ever lived in the past has died before the ripe old age of 150 of one cause or another. And so will everybody living today. If you want to be immortal your best bet is probably to write a book, compose a piece of music or make a timeless movie. I'm not sure if blogging counts :) And as for the singularity, there are several other scenarios, some plausible, some implausible: - a plateau of knowledge after which any future gains in knowledge will come ever slower, in a world like that new scientific findings would be real headline news instead of the science section on page 24 - a 'wall', beyond which we will not be able to go without knowledge 'behind' the wall (physics may be up against that, or maybe not but if there is something beyond quantum may never become a settled question)

tsestrich 17y ago
I think we still have a lot of room for progress, but I think it's going to take another leap in technological innovation for that to happen (there's a rapidly approaching point where we just won't be able to make a silicon-based processor any faster). We'll also, of course, keep finding new applications for current technology, but that's unlikely to be a paradigm-shifter. I guess you could say that the Internet has done that though to some extent, taking what was basically a medium for exchanging scientific data and turning it into a medium that really connects people on a never-before-seen scale. But I definitely agree with the article in that it is ridiculous to assume that there is some sort of exponential path for technological progress that society is just going to somehow follow. We're really gonna have to work for every step we take

geuis 17y ago

No, it hasn't been slowing. The author fails to see that we know more about astronomy in the last 2 years than the previous 10. More has been discovered about the brain in the last ~15 years than people knew in the last 100,000 years. Throw in chemistry, nanoscale fabrication, materials science, etc. At every level of society we have been impacted by the advancements that are occurring around us daily. People who have spent their entire lives thinking linearly have a hard time getting a sense of how much things have changed.

cousin_it 17y ago
A flat "no, it hasn't been slowing" doesn't address the argument that 1900-1950 changed everyday life much more than 1950-2000.
- ciscoriordan 17y ago
  I might agree that 1900-1950 changed everyday life more than 1950-2000, but I'm pretty sure 1959-2009 changed much more than 1909-1959.
  - cousin_it 17y ago
    Please argue your point.
    - ciscoriordan 17y ago
      In 1909 the Model T was already in mass production. I think that represents a huge shift in day-to-day life that happened between 1900 and 1950 but not 1909 and 1959. On the other end of the timeline, I think Google going from a $25 million funding round in 1999 to a $100+ billion market cap in 2009 represents major changes in how society works.
- jerf 17y ago
  It sort of does, by denying that "changing everyday life" is the relevant metric. If we're going to measure progress, first we need to agree on a metric. Different metrics will produce different results. But a quick perusal of some alternative metrics: * How much more do we understand about the world now than we did, and how much of this knowledge is used by engineers in technology? * How many more bits (from an information theoretic standpoint) does it take to describe our technology? (Probably my favorite, as it most directly captures what I think most people are getting at. Not perfect, though, as it's not true that more bits > less bits... however, that's a decent first approximation given the scale involved.) * How much do certain things cost in man-hours, then vs. now? (For instance, see http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/opinion/10cox.html?_r=1&ref=opinion http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/opinion/10cox.html?_r=1&#3... ) Given the wide variety of other far more useful metrics, "how much has my everyday life changed" should be rather far down on the list of metrics you want to use. By most useful metrics, technology progress has indeed accelerated and continues to accelerate. That we have a bit of an intermediate area here where we're putting together the necessary bits to really open up the throttle again shouldn't be that surprising; robotics, nanotechnology, and biological technology are not easy things... but we're getting there, one bit at a time. And those things will further open up other secondary effects, like private space travel being both practical and useful (for resource extraction). I don't think it's unreasonable that we'll get at least one good energy breakthrough either, probably either an alternative fusion technology or practical satellite solar power of some sort (though that may be 15 or 20 years off, the technology necessary is a fairly simple extrapolation of existing trends, not requiring any magic). Enjoy this moment of apparent quiet, where all the action is on the Internet. There's perhaps 10 more years of it, then things are going to be exciting again. (And it's not a hard transition, so you may still not notice it unless you look for it. But it's already happening, just slowly.)

recampbell 17y ago

What do we mean by "technological progress"? Do we mean the quantitative improvement over previous generations of technology? Or do we mean qualitative improvements in our standard of living? When you can eliminate the fear of hunger, automate mindless domestic chores and provide highly-accessible world-wide transportation, these are huge qualitative changes in our standard of living. But once you reach a certain level in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, big technological improvements don't make as big of a difference in your perceived quality of life. Is it really surprising that storing 2000x more music on your iPod doesn't have the same impact on your standard of living as a cheap and reliable source of food?

potatolicious 17y ago
Not to mention that the computer and internet revolution is, for the most part, entirely contained within the past 50 years... and IMHO the advent of mass computing and the internet is likely the most important leap in human technology for the past few centuries. Think back to how life was in the mid 80s, and tell me we have not advanced by absolute leaps and bounds.

sophacles 17y ago

One of the big problems with this article, and it also applies (albeit slightly differently) to the singularity folks, is this: You are comparing normal existence today with front edge people of the past. This is easy to accidentally do, because it is much easier to see the people who really jumped all over lighting, and telephone in the past when looking from now. Further it is much more common to write about those people than it is to write about the smiths, who not keeping up with the Joneses, didn't get the telephone for another decade. There were plenty of places in the us that only used outhouses into the 70's. Horses were used for plowing and whatnot into the 1950's (tractors having been around for decades at that point). My point is, in 50 years we will be writing about the curve the internet took, and my children's kids will grow up believing everyone did this internet thing fluently. It will be hard to explain to them how a lot of my contemporaries will never quite get it. Much like I still can't quite wrap my head around the telephone troubles my grandfather's parents seemed to have. I guess the point is, there really is not a good way of measuring impact of technology until we can look back and go, "woah, that was a big change!" or "what a dud!". Compare period write-ups of the future of zepplins or pneumatic tubes, to current reality.

jacquesm 17y ago
Excellent point, the trouble with the singularity folks though is that their persistence that it will happen borders on religion. It is up to the proponents of a hard to verify claim to prove that claim to be true. The evidence so far is against them, the singularity hasn't happened (yet), and when it does it will be a simple matter of fact. Until it does it is pure speculation and all that speculation and 'but it will' stuff isn't going to make it happen one microsecond sooner (assuming it eventually will happen, which I do not believe until I see it). The singularity has been jokingly called 'the rapture of the nerds', and there is a lot of truth in that. The rapture people from the 'scriptural' side of life tend to go off on all kinds of tangents about how 'the rest of us' do not get it and possibly will be left behind, the 'singularity' folks seem to have many of those traits in common. This planet has existed for four billion years and change, the universe is currently estimated to be between 13.5 and 14 billion years old and it seems all evidence points to the fact that the singularity has not happened anywhere in the universe, because according to that theory it would take over the entire universe as we know it at light speed. The only loophole this leaves is that it has happened but so far away that the effects have not reached us yet.

ynniv 17y ago

This article is fundamentally flawed in judging technological progress by its impact on "everyday life". Many of the advancements over the last 50 years have been of military or industrial application. Does this mean that they are lesser advances? Where is the cruise missile? GPS system? Even important everyday items are missing, like cell phones, and cheap air travel. I own a phone that will let me call (almost) anyone in the world form (almost) anywhere in the world, while showing me where I am to the nearest 15 meters on a map composed of images from SPACE. I can travel 3,000 miles in half of a day for a weeks worth of rent. People change cities like they used to change wardrobes. Obviously these are just a couple of things, and wouldn't fundamentally change his argument, but I haven't spent much time thinking of them. Asking other people's opinions of changes to "everyday life" would have been helpful, as there seems to be a serious personal bias in the article.

shalmanese 17y ago

Ugh, we've been through this before. Significant technological innovations take 30 years to recognize as significant so there's always a bias when looking at the recent past. It's a measurement artifact, not reality.

antipaganda 17y ago

Cellphones are making a MAJOR impact on the lives of billions of people in the third world right now, and no-one's mentioned them so far. They were invented recently, and disruptive technologies and cultural artifacts based on cheap mobiles are coming thick and fast. In some ways, poverty-stricken folks in Bangladesh are leaving us fat Westerners behind.

asciilifeform 17y ago

Absolutely: http://yarchive.net/physics/effete.html http://yarchive.net/physics/effete.html