Has the Rate of Technical Progress Slowed? 712
Amiga Trombone writes "An article in the IEEE Spectrum argues that the rate of technological progress has slowed in the last 50 years. While there have been advances in areas such as computers, communications and medicine, etc., the author points out that these advances have largely been incremental rather than revolutionary. He contrasts the progress made within the life-span of his grandmother (1880-1960) with that in his own (1956-present). Having been born the year after the author, I've noticed this, too. While certainly we've produced some useful refinements, little of the technology available today would have surprised me much had I been able to encounter it in 1969. While some of it has been implemented in surprising ways, the technology itself had largely been anticipated."
Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, it has. I wouldn't emphasize 50years though. Just look at computers the last 10years and computers 20years ago. In 1999 I was on slashdot from a computer not much different from this one. In 1989 I was trying to get a dial-up modem so I could connect to a BBS from my Amiga.
How could this be? (Score:1, Insightful)
The patent process and IP lawyers help create innovation.
Lately (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Flying Car (Score:5, Insightful)
This is obvious that progress alone does not drive decisions. Money does.
As for your flying car, you'll start seeing it when we have drivers who can safely drive on 3 dimensional roads, and for that, you have to be able to do it safely on 2 dimensional roads first, which can be far, far away...
porn (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, there are thousand and one ways to consume porn today. I call that progress.
Back on topic: It's all about virtual things like money, ethics and laws. Before it was ok to launch chimps to space at great expanse, just so you can beat the russians. Today, you'd upset the tax payers and peta.
Bad news for Mr. Singularity (Score:1, Insightful)
Oh no, this will mean Raymond Kurzweil has to eat even more vitamin pills (exponentionally??) to sit it out until they find a cure against mortality!!!
thought experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
I often do a thought experiment and compare multiple fields in roughly similar intervals:
American Revolution, American Revolution #2 (aka Civil War), WWI, Vietnam War, Present
In each field I list, we have made vast strides, for example in Communications:
American Revolution: letter, signal lanterns, flags (much like the Romans)
Civil War: electronic telegraph
WWI: radio, telephone
Vietnam War: TV, satellite, limited computer communications
Present: cell phones, sat phones, GPS, Internet, etc.
To someone living in the present, the pace seems to be slower as you don't realize the life/world changing events until a few years down the road, yet much is happening.
Re:Lately (Score:5, Insightful)
I just don't think think we're spending the research money that's needed
No, we're spending on marketing to sell the cheap stuff...
Lets try a list (Score:5, Insightful)
Soviets and Americans (Brits and French too) took what they could in tech and people, building on what they could.
Soviets raced the USA in anything and everything, this saw a big push for real science education (GI bill helped ect).
End of the cold war, no need for an educated public, a gov/private push to get science back as an arts subject and the population spending, dumb and greedy again.
If you cant understand it, it cannot harm you, rust belt production lines can stay open, profits are safe.
So now we have gone from a Unix like brain to a MS like gui slop.
No need for deep understanding, just spend, point and click.
The problem is science spending is just not an easy sell to the east or west coast or middle America.
The east and west coasts want to keep the existing power/profit structures, the middle America just wants "science" in the dust bin and back to safe, faith based engineering subjects.
Resources are finite (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd mostly agree with the recent lack of "big invention" like the aeroplane or the car, however the author underplays the role of the computer and associated communication technologies. Now whether we like it or not we are moving towards a single, small world where everybody can communicate with everyone else and can access most of the world's public knowledge cheaply and effectively. This is increasingly replacing travel and having profound effects at every level of the society. Furthermore, whereas the car and the aeroplane were used for war, the computer so far has mostly been used for peace. As a result we have avoided a third WW so far that would have destroyed us utterly. Of course this is not strictly true but by and large not altogether incorrect.
At the same time we are becoming aware that the world is small, exeedingly finite and that resources are scarce on the one hand, and that expanding our universe to other planets is extremely difficult on the other. We are at an important point in history. Either we rise to the challenge of providing cheap energy, food, shelter, clothes, learning and health for everybody, or in a few short decades we will be all dead. We do not have another couple of millennia ahead of us.
The good thing is that we have now more thinkers, scientists, engineers and industrialists than at any point in history, by several orders of magnitude. However, we are all driven by greed. The odds are almost even, but maybe I'm an optimist.
WAR, what is it good for? (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess it is a good thing that we have lived in relatively-speaking peaceful times in comparison. However, hopefully there is a way of humanity getting its act together to precipitate change without the need for life and death conflict. The cynic in me however, suggests that maybe war is a necessary mechanism for social change. Kind of like forest fires, plagues, etc, in the ecosystem.
Re:Flying Car (Score:3, Insightful)
You are assuming equal freedom on every axis.
An airplane can use climb or dive quickly, or bank, and that's pretty much it. And none of those operations can really be done on a dime.
green stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
Finally running out of (cheap) oil might cause some innovations.
Re:How could this be? (Score:4, Insightful)
The patent process and IP lawyers help create innovation.
Actually, the article did point out capitalism
So on what do intelligent people base the idea that technological progress is moving faster than ever before? It's simple: a chart of productivity from the dawn of humanity to the present day. It shows a line that inclines very gradually until around 1750, when it suddenly shoots almost straight up.
But that's hardly surprising. Since around 1750 the world has witnessed the spread of an economic system, by the name of capitalism, that is predicated on economic growth. And how the economy has grown since then! But surely the creation of new markets and the increasingly fine division of labor cannot be equated with technological progress, as every consumer knows.
At least in the United States [wikipedia.org], patents have been granted as far back as 1646 with the first patent act being put in place in 1790. The concept of patents has been around as long (maybe even longer) than this explosion of technological progress the article talks about. And you can argue both ways quite easily that it promotes inventing. The first being that with patents I have such a huge reward waiting for me that I am driven to invent and license patents because it is so lucrative and there's a system in place to protect my interests. The second being that I can take other people's inventions and modify them or mash them together without having to pay royalties or worry about litigation. In the United States we currently have the former while in China you might find a mix of the two to foster growth at different levels. I'm not arguing for or against either idea but I don't think that really has a proven effect for or against inventing. I will say that the first patent act in the U.S. was passed in 1790 [wikipedia.org], 40 years after the "productivity" explosion in 1750 that the article mentions. Just something to consider.
Re:Lately (Score:3, Insightful)
Another way to put this though is that we're democratizing technology. 50 years ago, only the wealthy could afford to own a car, or a television, or a computer, or to travel by air. Today, everyone except for the very poorest can afford all of those things. I'd argue quite strongly therefore that cheaper is better.
Depends on the point of view (Score:1, Insightful)
When we look at what happened before we were born, we only see the big steps. But our own time, we've been living through gradual changes, that we don't notice. When we think about the future, we again see the big steps.
It's the same as when you see a kid growing up. It's a gradual change, you don't really notice. But if you haven't seen the person for a while, suddenly it's a huge change.
All progress is gradual, although sometimes there is an enabling invention, that later can be seen as a huge step, when you know the progress that it enabled. But at the time it was just a crazy idea.
Example: Cars. The enabling invention was basically a horse-carriage without a horse. A crazy idea to most people at the time. From then to now, we have the gradual progress. But those of us who didn't see that progress, tend to combine the two. So suddenly we have this huge invention, that replaced horses.
Example: Computers. Wasn't it IBM's Thomas Watson who said something about there being a world market for five computers? At the time, computers were a crazy idea. But as gradual progress improved the capabilities and size of computers, now we all have at least one. Look back at it. I'm sure those of you who started on PC's think of PC's as gradual progress, where as PC's were a revolution compared to what came before them. I started on the C64, and to me, the PC is not much different. The first PC's weren't much faster, and it actually took PC's some time to catch up with the C64 when it comes to graphics and sound. But the C64 was a revolution. Likewise to someone who has grown up with mainframes, then minis, supermicros, micros, PC's, it will all have been a gradual progress. To him, the revolution lies in the step from vacuum tubes to transistors.
Those of you who have children, tell them the stories from your childhood, then you'll find out where the huge revolutions happened. My guesses: Cell phones, the Internet, MP3 music.To us, they are just a gradual evolution, to them, the thought of being without either is like the dark ages.
Re:I believe so yes, specifically the last 5 years (Score:3, Insightful)
that's because every improvment has a huge impact on economy and let's face it, stock markets is world wide now it's not just local like 70 years ago.
Hydrogen car----Pretty sure it,s being held back by oil companies because they would lose it all
Flying cars-------Anti-gravity no but alterbative plane/cars are in progress.
Body parts--------Well, they have done some interesting things with mice but religious groups are blocking growth in this area every step of the way.
Disease-------------Same as the above, God is in the way of progress.
So major things have not happen because of GOD and MONEY that's it.
the day GOD is not over the law anymore and human beings are ready to accept casualty of progress like losing your job to a better cleaner energy, then, maybe, we'll see major improvment.
basic research and physical sciences (Score:5, Insightful)
If you look at the technical advances of the first half of the 20th century, there is a common thread. Many (most?) were the direct result of basic science research (antibiotics, pasteurization, lasers, radio, even flight). Furthermore, many benefited from our dramatic increase in knowledge of the physical world. You can look at the list of Nobel prize recipients in physics, etc and thank them for research which directly improved your life.
If you want more advances, call your congressman and tell them that you want increased funding to the NSF, NIH, NIST, DOE, and NASA for basic research. Then sit back ten or twenty years.
Re:Flying Car (Score:5, Insightful)
I have seen the end of supersonic passenger aircraft (for the time being, with no resumption in sight).
The last time man was on the moon was before I was born.
I think what both of those have in common is that, although they were astounding technical achievements, they were both unsustainable "gimmicks" driven by political pissing contests rather than by any actual demand.
The progress we do have is that we've sent robot probes to most of the solar system (good) and subsonic air travel now costs less than rail travel (maybe not so good). Don't undervalue these.
Oh, and we have vastly improved inflight entertainment systems to keep us sane on subsonic flights :-)
The article's author is confused (Score:5, Insightful)
A better yardstick for technological progress is not the utility of technology, but the internal complexity of the technology. A Mercedes today may still be an internal combustion engine automobile - but far more engineering has gone into the design of the auto than into a mercedes of 1959. There's far more sophisticated embedded systems inside it, from electronic keys to a sophisticated crash mitigation system. Aerodynamics and reliability and numerous other factors have had countless iterations of engineering put into them.
Yet, of course, the actual improvement in your life if you owned either car is small. You're more likely to survive a crash in the newer automobile - but crashes don't happen every day, and people drive more dangerously today, so the death rate is comparable. Either car can go 70 mph on the interstate.
All the rest of technology today is similar. A lot of things don't seem to have improved much - but the complexity of the internals have increased. Doctors and hospitals today have a much longer list of things they worry about when they treat for a disease - although outcomes are only slightly better.
He is right about one thing. For the nanotechnology and flying cars and other wonders of the "singularity", the internal complexity of that technology will dwarf anything we have today. Human beings, even working as large teams, don't really have the brain power to create technology this complicated within a reasonable investment timespan. That's why the first stage of the singularity is information technology : we first have to augment our ability to handle complexity (whether through AI or cyborgs or whatnot). The flying cars and the immortality granting nanotechnology come later.
Of course it slowed -- we have been too busy (Score:4, Insightful)
In the space of less than 15 years we have more or less put online the combined sum of all human knowlegde ; made it accessible and searchable. And for good measure we added instant and nearly free communication (remember when long distance was expensive?) and wired to the Internet everyone with a monthly income over US$ 100. Personal networks are no longer limited to your church community or secret society -- a typical family keeps in daily contact with its members around the world.
You can moan about flying cars all you want, but creating those billions of webpages has kept busy all of Generation X&Y.
Still waiting for Generation Z to get bored with playing online games... common you slackers.
Kind of, but not really (Score:3, Insightful)
But under reagan and then under W, America backed off from basic science RD. In addition, we have been allowing our manufacturing to flow to China and Software to India. Neither of these countries have the infrastructure that the west has, BUT they will get it. Once it is there, then you will see a resurgence in technical progress.
Obviously it has... (Score:1, Insightful)
...and because of corporatist capitalism. We have two major things going on:
1. Technology of the 1970's can provide enough food and shelter for the entire world. However, we cannot employ the entire world in the production of food and shelter, because at some point we have all the food and shelter we need and thus people become unemployable again. The obvious solution of "making basic stuff for no cost to consumers" would drastically undermine the economic pyramid, so that cannot be pursued. Therefore, the only way to maintain the existing economic pyramid is to slow down the pace of technology until such time as other social controls (e.g. consumer debt) can become more effective. Call this is the Conspiracy Theory version of why we don't develop technology advanced enough such that we no longer need to work for The Man.
2. Globalization's "race to the bottom" has produced a business culture that values short-term profits over long-term progress, such that it makes more economic sense to squeeze a little more money out of what we have than take the risk of shooting for something much better. Thus it is more profitable to make things last just until the manufacturer's warranty runs out than as long as possible, partly due to existing infrastructure but also largely due to consumer preferences for newer-is-better (who still wants power tools from the 1950's even if they continue to work well?). This has led to the death of craftsmanship and the skills necessary for significant innovation. Call this the Idiocracy Theory of why it doesn't make business sense to fund R&D.
Re:I believe so yes, specifically the last 5 years (Score:3, Insightful)
Technologically, however, pretty much all progress is incremental.
Tele-visual radio transmissions built upon radio transmissions of sound, which built upon radio transmissions of morse, which built upon wired transmission of morse, so on and so on. Each of these had dramatic social consequences, but technologically, they were still incremental - even if the increment was large in some cases
There are obvious reasons that the internet wasn't invented in the 19th century, or that television wasn't invented in the 17th. They had to invent microchips and radio first.
I'd contend that it isn't possible to say that the rate of technological progress has slowed significantly in the last 5 years, as to do so properly would require enough time to observe the full range of social effects, once economics and continued development allow things to propagate out of the lab and into society.
It's more a matter of perspective. (Score:3, Insightful)
There have been any number of absolutely amazing and revolutionary changes in the last 50 years, they just haven't been as "in your face" as the ones in the previous 50 years.
In the last 50 years, we've had cures for diseases they didn't even know existed 50 years ago. We've had degrees of miniaturization which are just ridiculous, as well as increases in efficiency which are monumental. Yes these may seem like refinements in their results, but the technology behind them has been absolutely amazing. No one realistically predicted things like integrated circuits 50 years ago, even if they predicted the kinds of things that would be made with them. There's no car, or plane, or anything like that, but it doesn't change the fact that revolutionary discoveries have been made.
There's also the sci-fi factor. The 20th century, particularly the second half, was really the peak science fiction, people envisaged all sorts of things, many of which are probably impossible, they just imagined everything. This make it seem like everything we have was old hat, whereas just because an author came up with the idea it doesn't mean that making it work wasn't revolutionary. We've been fantasizing about flying cars for probably as long as there have been cars, but that won't mean that if/when they actually work it won't be a revolutionary discovery.
NO. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only has the rate not slowed, but the rate has never been higher. I can present two different arguments to how wrong it is to assert that the rate is slowing, etc.
1. 10 years ago, we all would have been thoroughly shocked to walk into a store and get a 1TB drive for our PC's for under $100. To say that in 1969 there wouldn't have been widespread shock at the current state of the Internet, PC's, automotive technology, etc. in general is nothing short of utter rubbish. Let's take another example: cars. Do you think that drag cars in 1969 could do a quarter mile in under 4 seconds? That would have crushed the low 7 second times at the time, and it would have blown everyone's mind that you could even get to a speed like 330 mph in just a few seconds without a rocket engine.
2. This is just a more specific form of an argument that has been made every few decades since the beginning of written history, the argument that "we have done everything". This argument was made by famous physicists in the early 1900's, before Einstein and quantum physics. This argument was made about locomotive trains, or any vechiles for that matter, ever reaching over 50 mph without sucking people's lungs out from the high rate of speed. This argument was made about achieving mach 1 in an airplane. This argument is made about the progress of fine art.
Here's why the argument fails. Human history as written is fixed. The future of humanity is not fixed and has not been written yet, and extends infinitely far into the future compared to any of our lifetimes (end of the world theories aside). Thus, the sum total of human knowledge approaches zero compared with the sum total of what may exist into the future, depending on how far out you want to look. Not only have we not invented everything, we kinda "haven't invented anything yet" compared to what the future will bring.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
But you've hit the nail on the head. In the fifty year span that the author considers (taking liberties with certain invention dates to improve his point) he ignores communication technologies.
The phone (fixed-line) gets a mention as part of his grandmother's lifespan, but mobile phones? Didn't happen. The Internet? Didn't happen.
Those two inventions alone are signs of huge progress. I'm not sure how they could be labelled as "incremental evolutions" of the phone and the computer. One meant that people stayed in contact with each other regardless of location, and the other meant that we automate communication tasks. Both complete revolutions that have changed our lifes completely.
(yes, in the space of 50 years. If you look at 20 then for early adopters of these techs it would look more like a flat plateau).
The irony is that his claims will have been read casually by millions using these technologies, where-as 50 years ago they would have been printed and distributed to a few locations.
Re:Yes (Score:3, Insightful)
I blame patent trolls... (Score:5, Insightful)
Two reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a couple of reasons why technology has sort of fizzled out, as I see it.
First of all, DIY is dead or dying. Electronic components are harder to get hold of, and information about electronics is harder to get hold of (Internet is all good, but it really doesn't compare to the old electronics magazines). Heck, even the toys that 20th century kids engineering, like Lego and Meccano, have been either mutilated beyond recognition, or canceled.
Secondly, patents. For every technological invention, there's a fair chance that someone has patented something in a way that they at least think they own they invention. Not only is it a turnoff to have to jump legal hurdles all the time, it's also really expensive and most people just don't have the resources.
Cha-Cha-Changes (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Flying Car (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not because what you expected didn't happen that things are going slower. People always make wild predictions, they fail to happen, and something that they had never thought about happens instead. Sorry, no flying car for you, here, have a multiplayer game of GTA IV with some a bunch of foreigners, or download and watch a movie with your pocket telephone.
Fast forward 30 years later: "Oh noes, we're nowhere near getting our Skynet/Singularity. You suck, ghost of Kurzweil! (Oh yeah, in the future we're totally getting devices to communicate with spirits, space aliens and other ethereal beings. You heard it here first!)"
Re:Yes (Score:1, Insightful)
I have a functional computer from 20 years ago. It's a Mac classic. 8 inch black and white screen. 4 megs of ram, 40 MB hard drive. Yeah, when that was new, I really saw my current quad-core PC with 4000 MB of ram, 750 GB of disk space and a 20" high-def lcd screen (that cost less than a mac classic did at the time by the way) as an inevitability.
Re:Flying Car (Score:5, Insightful)
What about stem cell research? Growing back teeth, nerve tissue. Maybe we should look at more than gizmos, cars and electronics. Biotechnologies have advanced by great leaps in the last decade.
Tech advances do not need to be consumable goods...
Re:Flying Car (Score:3, Insightful)
1969 :
Concorde first flight - Supersonic passenger aircraft : retired
Harrier Jump Jet first flight
Moon Landings : none for the last 38 years
The internet started
Worlds fastest production Aircraft : Retired
Worlds fastest commercial airliner : Retired
Worlds fastest climbing aircraft : Retired
Moon rocket : Retired
Slowing down , I think going backwards would be nearer the mark ....
War == innovation (Score:2, Insightful)
This is very easy to answer. Large-scale war - real or perceived - creates large-scale innovation. WWI, WWII and the Cold War were major periods of innovation. Major technological advanced were required to address mass civillian bombings and casualties numbering in the millions. Plus, there was the need to be seen to be superior to the enemy.
Nowadays, a civillian casualty rate in the low thousands dominates a decade of news. Eight years of fighting in a foreign land nets the UK just 200 military deaths. And there really isn't much technological wow-factor to flushing tramp-like beardy-weirdies out of caves.
Frankly I'm happy with the slow pace of innovation. It indicates a lack of discontent.
Revolutionary? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure that if you beam someone straight from 1969 to 2009, he would probably not believe his eyes. Cell phones, internet, memory cards the size of a fingernail storing gigabytes of data, ATM's, high speed trains, I doubt if he would be able to cope with all that (and more).
Now if someones travelled from 1969 to 2009 at the more comfortable speed of 1 second per second, change would be gradual enough for him to hardly notice and to just adapt to the changing world around him. The thing about revolutions is that you seldom notice them when they're going on.
Re:I believe so yes, specifically the last 5 years (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes things have gotten better but I haven't seen a huge revoloutionary change to be honest in my lifetime, maybe the mobile phone I guess.
I'm assuming you're fairly young. You didn't experience how disconnected the world was 40, 30, or even 20 years ago. 20 years ago, it was possible to dial a phone and talk to someone on the other side of the planet. Expensive, so it was not common, but not surprising. 30 years ago, it was a Big Deal to talk to someone on the other side of an ocean. 40 years ago it was a tear-filled occasion to get a phone call from overseas: "Anna, go wake the kids, it's our little Jimmy calling from Over There!" Having grown up with that kind of a reaction to a phone call, for me to now yawn while calling my developers in Bangalore for a status meeting while I ride the train to work, yeah, I can see that as a huge change.
What annoys me more about the timeline is that marking "world wide web" as a single point is like marking the discovery of electricity once and then ignoring every electrical invention since because it's already covered. The internet created a new landscape upon which data lives; it changed how people live, work, and play, and it's being filled with even more magical wonders at a staggering pace. Just because they're riding piggy-back on the single "invention" of the web doesn't mean they're not new.
Re:Flying Car (Score:5, Insightful)
you cant have your flying car. It can be built but the idea is tied up for 75 years inside a damned patent.
you see what has slowed technology? Patents and Copyrights. we went from a sane span to an insane one. It stifles creativity and technology.
Want to kick start everything? Reset patents and copyright to what it was in 1920. and tell all the congresscritters that in no uncertian terms, anyone trying to extend it again will be killed on the steps as a traitor.
Re:Obviously it has... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Flying Car (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong.
Planes can go down for free, everything else costs money.
Diving, falling and crashing are all free. It's expensive as hell to get it up there in the first place.
Or simply (Score:3, Insightful)
Joe runs out of gas and drops 3,000 ft into local celebrity's swimming pool.
I mean, people run out of gas all the time. People don't maintain their vehicles as well as they should. What happens when there is a mechanical failure. Planes don't fall out of the sky that often because there are fewer of them per-capita than cars. Plus they are far more tightly regulated than your vehicle.
Flying cars will never happen. We will invent the teleportation device first.
Re:Flying Car (Score:3, Insightful)
That is what she said.
But seriously, you want to predict the future? We will have cut & cover maglev trains that break the sound barrier. Either the US gets them first on the eastern seaboard, or Japan gets them first. One of the two. My money is on Japan because they are in the midst of an infrastructure upgrade and we are just building ours (after having it all ripped up thanks to our fine auto manufacturers)
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not so sure; the feeling could simply be due to the sample interval of information becoming much, much shorter.
Innovation has never really been 'revolutionary', it just may have seemed so due to the slow propagation of information in earlier centuries, pretty much the same error in thinking that's behind the idea of patents. Innovations seem 'revolutionary' for those who had little insight in the fields, but were and are natural incremental advances on other incremental advances (for example, look at the number of 'lightbulbs' suddenly appearing during the two decades before and around it got 'invented').
As incremental steps are taken, eventually enough advances come together to create an economically useful and viable product. The step where advances turn possible, but unprofitable, technology into profitable technology is also one of the factors making things seem 'revolutionary'. Many of the things like flying 'cars' are possible but utterly uneconomical.
Tubes, transistors, cars, none of them could have come into existence as a 'revolutionary' invention much earlier; the prerequisites weren't there. Nor would they have come into existence much later; once the prerequisites were there technologically and economically, and the need existed, the opportunity was there.
The article also mentions 'cancer' as something which still hasn't got a cure; an obvious information problem. Both because 'cancer' isn't one disease, and also because there are various kinds that can be pretty much 'cured' or even prevented depending on their cause (for example, cancer caused by HPV, which can be vaccinated against). The fact that various vectors can screw with DNA isn't something that's going to have a revolutionary 'cure', but many incremental steps will reduce the mortality of many of them over time.
Still, DNA damage related mortality, whether in the form of cancers, or in the form of wear on the cell replacement and repair ability (which will result in eventual deadly events like strokes), which are basically two sides of the same coin, will still remain a large factor in causes of death. Especially since when you cure most other things, those are simply the ones that are going to put the nail in your coffin no matter what. Until incremental advances in various technologies come together to allow us to either replace specific cells in a perfectly targeted fashion or we can replace complete bodies.
Electricity. Also, science fiction. (Score:5, Insightful)
The dates listed in the article, 1880-1960, are telling. They correspond to what I call the Age of Electricity. At the start of this period, electric and magnetic forces became well-understood from a physics perspective; by the end of it, we had mastered electrical engineering.
It's not every day that humanity figures out how to use a new fundamental force: after all, there are only four of them. Electricity allows totally new paradigms for energy transmission and communications. It took 80 years to work through the consequences, but I think that even millennia from now it'll stand apart as a singular moment in human history, even more of a big deal than the mastery of fire.
the technology itself had largely been anticipated
True, but it's worth pointing out that one of the great inventions of 1880-1960 was science fiction.(*) There were a lot more people getting paid to anticipate the future in 1969 than in 1880.
(*) Blah blah Mary Shelley Jules Verne yeah yeah whatever.
Re:Flying Car (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about it: Liability alone has decimated the light-aircraft industry, imagine what it would do to manufacturers of flying cars. And International Law, such as the UN Outer Space Treaty and the Moon Treaty effectively prevents private efforts, as it seriously impedes private enterprise in space.
I'll at least argue this over the cold beverage of an opponents' choice. . .
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
That would be incremental progress.
No, that's bullshit. That's willingly overlooking the original invention of the Internet and of personal computers. That's also overlooking the revolutionary consequences of the popularisation and eventual ubiquity of these. Over the last 15 years, personal computers and the Internet have profoundly changed the way we live and the way we do many things.
I for one am a great example of that. I don't have a TV, I don't make or receive telephone calls, I don't go to the movies, I don't own a video game console, I don't buy music, I don't read newspapers and I don't buy pornos because the Internet superseded all of that. Not only that, but I owe my practically flawless English (I'm French) to chatting with Americans on AIM ever since I was 15, I also learnt my job mostly on the Internet (I'm a mostly self-taught DSP dev), and to top it all off I'm a self-employed software dev who makes all of his income from software sales from all around the world. That didn't affect just "us", my uncle after being divorced fell in love with a woman in South America (not Mark Sanford) he "met" on MSN, and now he lives with her there. The Internet made him move to Colombia and marry a woman he never met before, out of the blue.
If you still fail to see how personal computers/the Internet have revolutionised things you're just blind. I'm not arguing that things are going faster or slower, I personally don't think that it means anything to talk about progress rate, and I even less believe that there is any sort of general trend, just sectors that get "bursts of progress" before stabilising. I find it silly to try to bring "progress of anything" into a unidimensional variable (but if anyone disagrees please give me a reading of your progress-speedometer. Oh also, what progress wasn't "incremental"? There were steam automobiles in the late 18th century that could reach a few miles per hour. Airplanes are just gliders with a propeller, and manned gliders have flown since 875 A.D.. Telephones are just fancy eletrical telegraphs, television has evolved from so many different things (photography, radio, Nipkow disks, pantelegraphs...), and the Internet itself is just a fancy evolution of transoceanic electrical telegraphy (if you think about it, the worldwide telegraph network of the later part of the 19th century is very Internet-like). I don't see what can possibly be "non-incremental", nothing suddenly just "popped up" to cause a revolution. Many of those were centuries in the making.
Re:Flying Car (Score:2, Insightful)
This is a good time to open the floor for Moore's Law debate and whether we will continue to be able to continue our past progression into the future on the processor end of technology...
Re:Flying Car (Score:3, Insightful)
1.5 million? WTF??? You want a Sky-SUV?
My first plane, a Piper Comanche cost me less than $220,000 and it was in incredible shape like new with new wings. and I can carry 4 people and luggage for a weekend in it nicely. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_PA-24_Comanche [wikipedia.org]
1.5 million will buy you a fricking skybus.
recreational pilots license is cheap. I spent less than $1500.00 for it back in 97. Granted I had to upgrade to complex to be able to fly my airplane, but you CAN get a fixed pitch prop simple plane for cheap that you can fly daily with your recreational license...
Mooneys are great for that.
Re:Yes (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure from your western viewpoint, it might seem that way. After all you grew up with a landline.
Go ask farmers who live in areas that never had any kind of reliable way to communicate with the outside world. There are whole cultures of people who went from no phone to mobile phone overnight. They might beg to differ.
The problem with Slashdot "culture" (maybe nerd culture in general) is everything is black and white. Either a technology is magically created out of thin air and overnight changes the world, or it is just a humdrum, silly improvement of some technology that has been around since the romans.
Cluetip: very rarely is any technology truly "pulled out of somebodies ass" revolutionary. Virtually every single thing we have came from decades or even centuries of gradual refinement. But dismissing everything "mainstream" society considers revolutionary because it doesn't fit the exact definition doesn't make you smart, it just makes you a buzzkill.
Re:Two reasons (Score:3, Insightful)
What? Electronic components are easier than ever to get hold of. At my fingertips, I can search the whole of Farnell, Digikey, RS and co. in seconds for a component I want, and have it arrive the next morning - not many years ago, these companies wouldn't even deal with individuals - they only dealt with companies and so all the hobbyist was left with was whatever they could scrape together from Maplin's or Radio Shack - but these days, Farnell and RS and co are quite happy to have mail order hobbyists. If I need surplus junk or obsolete stuff, chances are it's for sale on eBay. New components I can get in a choice of forms - surface mount, pin through hole, leadless - whatever suits the project I'm working on. For a very reasonable price I can have my own 4 layer PCBs manufactured. If I just need a 1 or 2 layer board, I can make it cheaply at home using a laser printer, glossy paper, a clothes iron, copper clad board and some ferric chloride. I can essentially make custom chips in my own home (CPLDs and FPGAs). The internet is far better than the old electronics mags, it can be *searched*. It has discussion forums where you can get advice off people more experienced.
Electronics is a thousand times better today than it used to be - it's just so much more accessable.
Western progress or world progress? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps things have slowed down for us here in the developed, western world, but I have heard of an amazing shift in the third world; cell phones.
For example, in Kenya there are 37 million people. Of those, only 1.3 have electricity. No lights, no fans, no TV, no electricity at all. However, 17 million people use cell phones and the number is screaming upwards every day! Imagine what a fundamental change it is to be able to talk with anyone at a distance in a developing nation? So much of what we take for granted in the western world boils down to the ability to pick up a phone and ask for what you want, be it goods or information.
The article I lifted these figures from was discussing a solar powered cell phone, which will cut the final cord from the main grid. Now people who cannot walk to a grid connected location can still call for help, call to find a job, call to talk with a distant loved one.
In the book Guns, Germs, and Steel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel [wikipedia.org] it was postulated that the rise of the main Eurasian regions in history was mainly due to the free travel of ideas across a broad band of land where climatological and geological conditions were mostly similar, thus allowing different ideas about agriculture, living, and warfare to flow back and forth easily. This mixing of ideas is what made the Eurasian continent most often dominant over the Americas and the African continents, which are spread out longitudinally and thus cover a wider spread of terrain conditions and weather conditions.
The advent of the mobile phone will become an equalizing factor, ideas will be able to spread faster and faster among the populations of the South American and African regions and the quality of life there will begin to experience the same kind of rapid upward swell which we in the western world assume is our birthright.
(facts and figures lifted from this article; http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/08/21/solar.cellphone/index.html [cnn.com] )
Re:I believe so yes, specifically the last 5 years (Score:4, Insightful)
Hydrogen car Hydrogen is a very crappy way to store electricity. No, it's not held back by oil companies, it's held by the fact that it'd be even worse than electric cars.
Flying cars Yeah, there are so many technical and practical issues with having flying cars it's not even funny.
Body parts Religious groups? Are you fucking kidding? What's their impact? Oh yeah, sure, they put a minor speed bump in the way of stem cell research. Let's blame them for not being yet able to grow replacement brains.
So major things have not happen because of GOD and MONEY that's it.
No, major things haven't happened because they're not yet possible, feasible or practical.
On a side note, you know who you sound like? Hyde from That '70s Show. "There is no gaz shortage man! It's all fake. The oil companies control everything! Like there's this guy who invented this car that runs on water man!"
Technical Progress has Slowed? (Score:3, Insightful)
No Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaalllly?
Such a surprise!
Keep patenting and extending copyrights out to the wealthy so they can decide what is innovation and what will hurt their grand children's profits.
Keep greasing the rails so that the train of "progress" stays on the "lobbyist and collusion of government and business" tracks to monopolies so they can have ludicrous warchests of cash, locked up and not doing anything due to lack of competition. One of the great challenges Microsoft has is how to keep its enourmous cash funds out of the capital markets so it doesn't end up in a start up which would put them out of business, for example.
Then wonder why there is no capital to do any start ups or research with.
Welcome to wonderful world of corporate fascism. You play what they want to hear, you buy and use goods on their terms and the government throws you in jail if you dare otherwise.
Its here. Right now.
So when the day comes and you have to help your loved ones through hospice because we use the same protocols for cancer for the past 30 years, with corporations that deny you early prevention care because it is more profitable to make you buy extensive chemo drugs in stage 3 cancer, ask yourself this question:
What would happen if science and technology wasn't driven by greed and power to control peoples lives? No secrets about who had what idea. Everything was open, and information was freely shared. One big freaking Open Source project with one goal: improve the human condition and advance science and technology at a pace comparable to waking up and finding out tomorrow a asteroid was going to hit the earth in 24 months and destroy everything.
Science as a societal effort, pursued like every last persons life depended on it.
Its a dream right now, but I bet in 100 years we would be sending people to colonize distant star systems, with round trip journeys measurable in hours. Not millions of years.
-Hack
PS: Oh, and I bet the expansion for WoW would look just really cool. :-)
Peak of Technology (Score:3, Insightful)
As much as I want to hope, as much as I want to be optimistic and as much as I want to believe, reality kicks me in the face when I consider where humanity is right now. It's like being on a big fast comfortable train looking out the window and seeing that, a few miles ahead, the bridge we are about to cross has collapsed in the middle. You try and tell people "hey the bridge ahead has collapsed - we gotta stop this train", but instead people look at you as if you have committed some massive social fo-par, because the train is comfortable and why would they want to stop.
In itself, technology is a gift that is completely neutral, it can either free or enslave. Unfortunately the current status quo is using that gift to pressure every living system on the face of this small planet, and that includes the human race. The bottom line for all of this is the economic models (that demand the pace of technological development) address natural resources as a subset of the economy, where in fact the reverse is true.
Consider the reality of systemic human activity, in the short or long term it is not sustainable. Now consider this mind numbingly simple fact: Unsustainable systems cannot be sustained.
Our technology has never been designed to be sustainable. When you realise that you realise that technology and progress, which is often demonised as the cause of all our ills, has always been misapplied to consume resources as if they are infinite, therefore, it has always been going backwards. How is that "exponential technological growth" possible with limited resources and *without* sustainability goals?
I'm not saying it's impossible to change, actually, I think change will provide the greatest of technological challenges over the next few decades. But that would be *real* progress and it will be the masses against the vested interest groups who frame such changes as 'not realistic'. If you consider it critically and honestly the only thing that is 'not realistic' is the high energy/mass consumption configuration of our society. Until we change powers controlling the application human ingenuity and direction of technological development I suspect we are heading for a tailspin no amount of technological prowess will pull us out of.
Re:Flying Car (Score:5, Insightful)
That's it exactly -- it's about demand.
There's very little demand for faster computers and flying cars... I mean, we want them, sure, but the value we put on incremental improvements now is a lot less.
The focus of R&D has shifted from big, visible, obvious everyday things like car engines, colour TVs, and transistor radios onto finicky, small, non-consumer items like nanotechnology, gene therapy, advanced surgical techniques, robotics, and new materials. I mean, I am blown away by something new practically every day. Haven't there been two different cures for two types of blindness reported in the past few weeks, one using lasers and one using gene therapy? Then there was that nanomaterial that is supposed to make windshield scrapers obsolete. Bring it on!
It's just that we've done most of the big obvious stuff. Even when we haven't fully deployed it (renewable power, for instance) we've pretty much got the technology down.
Robots and augmented reality are probably going to be the next big game-changers, but the complexity of technology they require means they are going to be slow to deploy and improve. I mean, many people already have a GPS and a Roomba.
Either that or we need to brainstorm and come up with something that not a single SF author has anticipated. And you know the odds of that at this point...
Re:WAR, what is it good for? (Score:2, Insightful)
Hindsight (Score:3, Insightful)
I have one question for the OP, who was born in 1957. If the technological advances of today were "largely anticipated", how many millions of dollars did you make by investing in computers and internet technologies in the 80's and 90's?
Re:Flying Car (Score:3, Insightful)
Well profit is part of why Technical progress is stalling.
We have trillions of dollars being given to corrupt banksters that can't balance their checkbooks.
You should not make loans to ppl with bad credit...period...
700 + bases in 130+ Countries ??? We trying to be the new British or Roman empire ???
Save me the policing the world rhetoric...Aung San Suu Kyi has been rotting in Burma decades.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aung_San_Suu_Kyi [wikipedia.org]
How about some genocide in Sudan, no need for democracy there eh ???
Ahh, the oil profits the chinese are willing to pay the militias to do the dirty work.
Sound like a CIA op damn near.
We pay our politicians to do things we do not want done.
85% of the ppl polled were against the bailout of the Wall Street Thieves.
If you took 10% of the hose trillions and put them toward Algae Biofuel
development we could keep our oil money at home and kick start
the America back to where it used to be.
Now the plan is to bank the country and send us spiraling into a
3rd world shit hole to make us pay for being the muscle for the
British Oligarchs and money men of the world
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTbdnNgqfs8 [youtube.com]
This is all by design, and most ppl still do not believe it.
Good Luck to you all !
Re:Flying Car (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Flying Car (Score:5, Insightful)
Then you add on top of that the fact that Mr. Bush and his administration was anti-science. Public-private partnership was also a huge part of what drove a lot of the advancement we saw through the 70s, 80s, and 90s through the likes of DARPA and others. With that "backstop" money drying up, companies are even less able to justify research projects to their shareholders.
All that said, at least we are still seeing some progress still occuring. The iPhone initiated a pretty significant advancement in smartphone interface design which we have seen Palm, Blackberry, and others jump on.
blame the excessively affluent, they're stealing (Score:1, Insightful)
if all the money that was spent so that the privileged upper class can all live like kings was instead spent on science and fair wages, this world would be a paradise instead it's a hell
money truly is the root of all the real evil that there is in this world
Re:Flying Car (Score:1, Insightful)
Along with the cost of technology there is also the old saying "Necessity is the mother of invention". If there isnâ(TM)t a strong enough drive for technology it won't become available at a reasonable price, and therefore will never come to market or won't last long if it does.
The flying car doesn't exist because there isn't a need for it, because it doesn't solve a problem. It is neat to say I can fly to work now, but the problem with traffic and pollution will still exist, perhaps even more so: it takes a lot more energy to keep something flying in the air than just parked on the ground.
It is the same with computers, the rate at which cpu speeds are increasing appears to be decreasing. Some of this is due to engineering challenges, but the software that we're using today works well at the speeds the cpus can run.
Re:Flying Car (Score:2, Insightful)
Man is an idiot. (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Where is my house cleaning Robot? At Amazon, they sell for $150 (Roomba) vacuum, $300 (Scooba) floor washing.
2. Where is my robot babysitter? We call them TV. You have so many you forget about them.
3. My flying car? Anyone with a license can buy one an old helicopter for less than $50,000 What, you expect to get one without a license?
4. Where is my miraculous medical cures? Back in 1950's we did not have Lasik. We cured bad eyesight. WE CURED BAD EYESIGHT. Not to mention minimally invasive surgery and artificial hearts and pacemakers. Not to mention liver transplants. We have done so much here only an IDIOT focussed on the few things we have not cured would mention it.
5. We walked on the Moon. Yeah I know it happened before many of you were born. So what? It still happened AFTER the writer's grandmother died in 1960. We freakin walked on the MOON!
6. Computers are not simple an extension of the the 1950's version. We moved from vacuum tubes to transistors to chips. Chips are dramatically different from the tubes. As in horse to car difference. They count.
7. Those chips allowed cellphones. The interesting thing about the cellphone is NOT the radio - but the switching network behind the radio. That is dramatically different from anything they had in 1950.
8. The interenet is again another example of computer networking. That they did NOT have anything like before 1950. It is fantastic, it is remarkable, it is qualitatively DIFFERENT than the crap they had before it.
The main reasion this idiot did not recognize the differences is SIZE. Back in the first half of the 20th century we did not get 'small'. We couldn't do anything small, so we did everything huge. Bot most of the second half was doing the small things. They were just as impressive feats of technology, but they were not 'big' so the idiot ignored them. Small != unimportant.
Blip (Score:1, Insightful)
Over the last 250 years humanity has seen incredible advances in technology, but there is no reason to think this growth will continue indefinitely.
From TFA: "Itâ(TM)s simple: a chart of productivity from the dawn of humanity to the present day. It shows a line that inclines very gradually until around 1750, when it suddenly shoots almost straight up."
Since accomplishments since 1750 dwarf all previous technological advancements, on such a chart it may look like we made "gradual" steady progress from the dawn of man to 1750, but that is not true at all. In reality, the history of technological progress is punctuated by short periods of rapid development in between long, LONG periods of stagnation and even decline. The discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel, the first use of metal tools--these are developments that are thousands of years apart in human history. There is no doubt that we are currently in the biggest of such periods of rapid development, but there is no telling how long it will last.
Re:Ray Kurzweil (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Flying Car (Score:3, Insightful)
Now we have a patent system that in no way promotes progress or innovation, but rather allows large companies to squash any competition and places a burdensome tax on invention and innovation.
i don't think progress is slowing, I think this is a revisionist look at the progress around the 1900's. The automobile has been around since 1672 (in steam powered form). We got the gas engine in 1877. 1902 Oldsmobile started mass production, which was refined by Ford in 1914. A LONG history to bring affordable automobiles to the masses and the automobiles of 1914 hardly resemble the automobiles of today.
Re:Flying Car (Score:3, Insightful)
I would contend that it is much simpler to avoid accidents in three dimensions than two: you have significantly more options should a collision be imminent.
While this may be true, you will never see flying cars for the general public until people A) Take responsibility for their actions and B) Stop suing everyone/every company that might have had a hand in making a product that fails in some esoteric way.
The problem with flying cars for the general public is the failure mode. The failure mode of a normal, ground based car is to slowly coast to a stop, hopefully on the side of the road. The failure mode of a flying vehicle is to crash in a firey ball on the ground. One is exceedingly more survivable than the other. If your car conks out on the highway, chances are you are going to live and be uninjured. If your car conks out at 2000 feet, chances are you are going to be injured and/or injure someone else with your 2000+ pounds falling out of the sky.
Now with that injury comes a giant lawsuit. Even if the flying car is 25+ years old and a beater, you know someone is going to sue the manufacturer for failure. No one sues the auto manufacturer for failure on a 25 year old Buick that finally decides to kick the bucket at 70 mph on the highway... they chalk it up to poor maintenance and buy a new one.
Re:Flying Car (Score:2, Insightful)
but there are plenty of instances where helicopters safely landed without power.
Like every day at every helicopter flight school in the world for example ;-)
Autorotating landings are a required part of getting your license.
Re:Or simply (Score:5, Insightful)
To negate that argument:
1) Computer controlled
2) Ride-sharing
No need to "own" a vehicle. Pay the price of a cab fare, be driven to where you want to go, "cab" is flown back and maintained by Someone Who Wants To Not Kill His Customers.
Re:Two reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
Electronic components are harder to get hold of, and information about electronics is harder to get hold of.
Actually, that's totally wrong, but there is a problem. As someone else mentioned, there's Digi-Key, which has most of the electronic parts in existence, takes orders on line, says online what it has in stock, has data sheets for all the parts on line, and ships within hours. As recently as the 1990s, many electronics distributors wouldn't even take credit cards. Having printed circuit boards made now means designing on line (with free software, even), sending a file to a board house, and waiting a few days for the board to show up. You can even get free simulation programs (try LTspice) to try analog circuits before you build them.
The problems for hobbyists and kids aren't on the parts side. They're on the engineering side. In the 1950s, building an audio amplifier or a radio was a reasonable project. Something that turned lights on when it got dark impressed people. Now, who would bother? Nobody would be impressed. Nobody would use the thing. So why do it?
Building anything comparable to even low-end consumer electronics requires engineering skills way beyond the hobbyist level. That's the big problem. Understanding basic electronics isn't enough. You need a good knowledge of electronics (at the Art of Electronics level), and then programming skills, possibly down to the FPGA level. It's quite possible to get all these skills, but it's a lot of information to absorb.
The other problem is that surface-mount part assembly requires special tools, magnifiers, microscopes, and the precision of a watchmaker. Kids have trouble working with that level of precision. Many newer parts are surface-mount only. Yes, you can solder surface mount parts by putting a computer controlled temperature controller on a toaster oven, but even setting that up costs a few hundred dollars.
Most electronics hobbyists today are pros who build stuff in their spare time.
I would like to suggest a *different* single cause (Score:5, Insightful)
Energy density
Thje period in question marks the switch from coal to oil power.
Human progress follows the energy curve, which is something the singularity muppets don't seem to get.
You want a flying car? You need something with a damned site more energy than oil... Before it runs out.
Progress has slowed because we're getting about as good as it gets at extracting work from oil. Get back to 100:1 EROEI (Mr. Fusion) or more and we'll see much faster progress.
Re:Flying Car (Score:3, Insightful)
In small general aviation craft... a competent pilot is very likely to survive a rather large subset of such failures - basically anything excluding "wings fall off"
That's the problem; a flying cars don't have wings.
Re:Flying Car (Score:5, Insightful)
Cars are fairly precision instruments. On a 2 lane road, they pass within just a couple feet of each other. They stop within inches at traffic lights.
I've been designing a hover vehicle (not a traditional hovercraft). It'll probably always be in the design phase, but it's fun. One of the things I've seen mentioned a lot is the fact that any vehicle that doesn't have physical contact with the surface (i.e., tires on the road or keel in the water) can drift. On a banked or crowned road, a GEV can tend to float downhill if it's thrust is simply down, or off the top of a turn. A strong breeze can make it drift off in unexpected ways. Heck, in a tall vehicle, you get that with road vehicles too. Take a regular passenger van out during a Florida summer thunderstorm, and you may find yourself suddenly in the wrong lane, even though you were aimed straight.
A GEV tend to not respond to immediate stops quite as well either.
I intended to computerize a substantial portion of my stability control. Use of ultrasonic sensors to determine distance from the 4 corners should keep it flat in relationship to the road. Other sensors would sense drift outside of what the controls were doing. For example, if it sensed drift to the left or right without input from the driver, that would obviously be an error, and correct for it. It may be a breeze, or sliding down a banked turn. Even still, by using directed thrust (forced air), that would significantly impact other vehicles on the road. If my vehicle detected a slip to the right, and engaged it's right side thrusters to correct, if a vehicle was to the right it would push them to the right.
I thought it would be nice to have a vehicle hop over an immediate danger (impending accident, etc). That's fine and dandy if I'm by myself on the 3d road. What happens when I'm doing 60mph and hop over an accident, but the GEV behind me doing 80mph does the same thing. Now we've added a pile on top of the existing accident.
In reality, drivers don't do so well on 2d roads. While 3d roads could reduce traffic density, it would create many new problems. Hell, I've been hit by drivers making simple lane changes because they weren't aware that my car was there. They can't look left to make a lane change to the left. What happens when you add above and below to the equation.
There's good reasons pilots go through so much extra training, and it's not all because the vehicles are complicated. And yes, I've gone through flight school and flown. At flight school, I witnessed a near miss, because a student pilot with instructor, who had called his turns perfectly and announced his intention to land was coming down to the runway. Another (non-student) pilot taxied out onto the runway in front of him. I was on my downwind. He was on his final. We both saw him taxi out, luckily. It wasn't complicated. We all used the same radio frequency (freq for the uncontrolled tower), and there was only one active runway. Even if the other pilot didn't have a radio (not required), he was required to look and make sure it was safe to taxi out. I don't know how you miss another aircraft a few hundred feet out, with his landing lights on, unless you were just oblivious. There were 3 or 4 of us in the pattern, so it wasn't difficult to figure out someone may be landing very soon.
Except... (Score:3, Insightful)
Devaluation of human labor is certainly the problem, but it's not due to computers and robotics. Computers and robotics have not really replaced people in very many jobs. The real issue is that as a society, we've decided to allocate most of our new wealth to people who were already rich to begin with. The US economy has grown by some enormous amount since the 70's, but wages have been essentially flat. Where did the money go? For starters:
Robotics aren't the issue here.
Re:Flying Car (Score:5, Insightful)
Each of these things fundamentally changed life.
My grandmother was born in 1884 and died in 1980. She was born into "a world lit only by fire" for all practical purposes (the first Edison plant was a few years old).
I was born in 1962, when commerical nuclear power plants already existed and human beings had (just) orbited the Earth.
For the first half of her life medicine was mostly a matter of not getting sick. For the second half, antibiotics and vaccinces cut disease rates by orders of magnitude. This has not changed in my lifetime.
When she was born, horse, rail and ship were the only practical modes of long-distance transport. When I was born, cars and planes--which didn't even exist when she was born, had taken over, and have not changed much since.
When she was born, telegraphs were the only means of fast long-distance communciations and mass media did not exist. When I was born we had telephones, radio and TV, and the only change since has been the Internet and cell phones. This is the ONLY area of revolutionary technological change in my lifetime.
When she was born, people burned wood and coal at home. When I was born people used electricity from central generating stations that burned coal or oil, used nuclear power, or hydroelectric power.
The list of entire industries that did not exist when she was born that did when I was born would be long. The list of industries that did not exist when I was born that exist now would be short: biotech, software development (which existed in 1962 but wasn't yet an industry) and the Web. The semi-conductor industry existed, and many of the same companies back then are still around today: HP, TI, Sony, etc.
You have to understand what this argument is saying: it is not that there has been no change in the past 50 years, but that the pace of change by any measure has been much smaller than in the preceding 50 years.
Re:Yes (Score:3, Insightful)
+1 virtual mod.
Exactly right. We can imagine far more today than we could 50 or 200 years ago. In 1700, hardly anyone would have ever conceived of an electric light bulb. Before the transistor, the idea of a computer in every home was ludicrous. Today, we can see that Mars colonies and true artificial intelligence and vastly improved health are possible in principle. We're now in a phase of more practical than theoretical advancements, and I believe that the notion that progress is slower is primarily because we can see more clearly where we're going.
Re:Obviously it has... (Score:4, Insightful)
What do you believe the state produces? It's fueled entirely by the production of others, and the redistribution of their production.
The state produces the most valuable commodity of all, and the one that no other organization is equally equipped to produce: security.
This applies at a national-security level, at a personal security level (police), a property security level (fire departments, levees). It by rights should apply at an economic level (rent stabilization for the economically vulnerable, a social safety net, a national system to provide health care), both for moral reasons and because financial security leads to increased consumer confidence and higher aggregate demand -> driving the economy, and because the state is better equipped to do this than private industry (e.g. private life and health insurance, which aim to reduce risk/increase security). It can sometimes apply in a pathological way, such as when the security institutions of the state are used to solidify unjustly or artificially stratified social orders (think things like software patents, as well as more structured, systematized oppression in the favor of specific moneyed interests). In some cases the state also produces public infrastructure, such as highways, water and electricity distribution systems, etc. (and it tends to do a better, or at least more thorough, job of this than private investment; think of the TVA ferinstance, despite its faults).
But to claim that the state produces nothing is remarkably naive.
Re:Flying Car (Score:1, Insightful)
The problem isn't the "Big Sky, Small Airplane" theory, because there are very few mid-air collisions in the middle of trips.
Most mid-air collisions happen during takeoff/landing of the planes, so the real problem is "Small Airplane, Tiny Crowded Runway".