- cross-posted to:
- technology
- cross-posted to:
- technology
Today, progress is defined almost entirely by consumer-driven, often banal improvements in information technology. The US economist Tyler Cowen, in his essay The Great Stagnation (2011), argues that, in the US at least, a technological plateau has been reached. Sure, our phones are great, but that’s not the same as being able to fly across the Atlantic in eight hours or eliminating smallpox. As the US technologist Peter Thiel once put it: ‘We wanted flying cars, we got 140 characters.’
This is from 2014? Oh snap, and the author is dead now RIP. Anyway, the article has a lot of silly points in my opinion but I'm only going to address a couple things. He says nowadays everything is incremental whereas from 1945 to 1971, breakthroughs and applied science was happening super quickly. I'll use his example of nuclear energy and physics. Nuclear reactors were not a rapid invention. The relevant physics were being figured out around 1900-1930, the prototypes were made in the 40s, and then they actually made proper reactors in the 50s. That is incremental and not rapid at all. He also says physics seems to have stalled. Look, we kind of picked all the low-hanging fruit in the physics tree. Understanding radiation is immediately useful. Weighing a quark or whatever physicists do nowadays can't really be applied to anything useful for the layperson. There probably isn't going to be anything like the 19th and 20th centuries regarding applied physics ever again.
Also, this is super America centric. China's doing so much innovating now. :some-controversy:
Oh and finally, people need to recognize that things like supersonic flight and suborbital rockets use a lot of energy. Unless you multiply our country's energy production a few times over, distribute it roughly evenly to everyone, and also don't burn the planet down with greenhouse gases, these things will never dominate.
As well, the height of government funded pure chemistry experimentation was from 1920-1970, where they were just doing some wild, dangerous stuff. While the Chinese are still dicking around with new theoretical chemical compounds, most the West doesn't bother unless it has to do with plastics, medical, lasers, or bio-technology, basically only things that further industrial application. I think the one thing I have heard of is that concrete development has come pretty far in the last 30 years, but it's literally just rediscovering and replicating how the Romans made their "self-healing" concrete and then trying to bring that process to scale. We'll see if there are any real breakthroughs in applied chemistry, but it's a tough row to hoe.
I'm interested in hearing more about Chinese chemical research if you know anything else.
The news megathread had a small one on Chinese explosives research, but there are other compounds that China has apparently been fucking around with in partnership with I think Finland for better metallurgy yields. I'll try to find the article if I can, its been like a year since I read it. China and Chinese companies sponsor an absolute shit-load of research at engineering schools across the world. Most of the time they are taking chemicals that were discovered in the late 70's and then trying to figure out how to stabilize and use them productively.
I think the biggest problem is that most of them have to be made in incredibly stable environments, like at vacuum or under an H3 pressurized area. Just really slow and deliberate processes that have to be replicated hundreds of times with small experimental variations.
pretty interesting, makes you wonder if they'll eventually hit a similar wall, and if so, were they ThreeBodyProblem'd?
I mean, I guess deus ex aliens is always possible but you just have to ignore it to make any reasonable predictions about the future. I think the three factors affecting innovation are mode of production, demographics, and what's left to discover. More people means more brains to develop technology of course. Socialism and communism means a more efficient use of resources. People talk about a demographic crisis facing China, but they over-exaggerate. Assuming China fails to reverse this, it's still not as bad as some think. The advanced capitalist countries have 1-3% of their workers employed in agriculture, whereas China has ~17%, or about 134 million farmers (they would only need around 24 million or less at 3%). Also something like 40% of college graduates in China are STEM, whereas in America it's 20% or under (obviously mobilizing your graduates properly matters too, but idk how to quantify that). So China's population can shrink for the next few decades while still growing its highly educated workforce. Even if they hypothetically reach parity with America, China's economic model is superior so they'll still be inventing things faster I think.
So the real limit to the rate of discovery, innovation, technological change, whatever, would be running out of things to discover. There is still a lot left to invent. Let's look at aerospace. The author laments the fact that passenger airplanes are basically the same as they were in the 1960s. Indeed, airplanes (and airships...) were cutting edge technology in the first decades of the 20th century, and there were lots of experiments on passenger airplanes after that (RIP flying boats). The modern form factor did it the best, so we've stuck with that, and every new plane just tinkers around with the materials, engines, wings, etc. a little bit. There's also the issue that aerospace is really expensive - new passenger planes take billions of dollars and a couple decades of development. Ekranoplan air freight, flying-wing passenger planes, and clean jet fuels could be the next big improvement, but they'd take decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to actually reach the same level of ubiquity as the classic passenger airplanes enjoy now. Who is going to develop that? Boeing? Airbus? Yeah right. And China's airplane industry is really young in comparison, so you can't count on them. The next big change in aviation won't be here for a while. However, now the space part of aerospace is booming like the airplanes were a century ago. Rockets were cutting edge in the 50s and 60s, but now in the 20s you see tons of countries and companies (mostly the US and China) developing their own rockets. Once rockets go through the same thing as airplanes did, it'll be space tugs in the 22nd century or something... So yeah, there's a lot of room for technological development still and I don't think we'll hit a wall anytime soon.
past technological progress will always seem more abrupt than one you live through yourself. reading a paragraph in a textbook makes it seem as if there there is a line in the sand where before it doesnt exist and after it is mastered. with contemporary technology there are numerous uneventful days at your bullshit job between breakthroughs to make the speed of history and progress seem glacial