Frankly, I think the biggest cause of the “stagnation” you’re seeing is unwillingness to burn resources as the world population climbs toward 8 billion. We could build the 1970s idea of a flying car right now; it just wouldn’t be permitted to fly because (a) it would (noisily) waste so much fuel and (b) it turns out that most people really aren’t up to being pilots, especially if you have as many little aircraft flying around from random point A to random point B as you have cars. A lot of those old SciFi ideas simply weren’t practical to begin with.
… and I think that the other cause is that of course it’s easier to pick low hanging fruit.
It may not be possible to build a space elevator with any material, ever, period, especially if it has to actually stay in service under real environmental conditions. You’re not seeing radically new engine types because it’s very likely that we’ve already explored all the broad types of engines that are physically possible. The laws of physics aren’t under any obligation to support infinite expansion, or to let anybody realize every pipe dream.
In fact, the trick of getting rapid improvement seems to be finding a new direction in which to expand, so that you can start at the bottom of the logistic curve. You got recent improvement in electronics and computing because microelectronics were a new direction. You didn’t get more improvement in engines because they were an old direction.
Your six categories are now all old directions (except maybe manufacturing, because that can mean anything at all). In 1970, you might not have included “information”… because wasn’t so prominent in people’s minds until a bunch of new stuff showed up to give it salience.
At the turn of the last century, you had much more of a “green field” in the all of the areas you list. You’re going to have to settle for less in those areas.
And there’s no guarantee that there are any truly new directions left to go in, either. Eventually you reach the omega point.
That said, I think you’re underestimating the progress in some of those areas.
Manufacturing
The real cost of basically everything is way down from 1970. Any given thing is made with less raw material, less energy, and less environmental impact.
I build stuff for fun, and the parts and materials available to me are very, very noticeably better than what I could have gotten in the 1970s.
Materials are much more specialized and they are universally better. Plastic in 1970 was pretty much synonymous with “cheap crap that falls apart easily”. In 2021, plastics are often better than any other material you can find. 2021 permanent magnets are in 1970s science fiction territory (and more useful than flying cars). Lubricants and sealants are vastly better. There’s a much wider variety of better controlled, more consistent metal alloys in far wider use, and they are conditioned to perform better using a much wider variety of heat treatments, mechanical processing, surface treatments, etc. Things that would have been “advanced aerospace materials” in 1970 are commonplace in 2021.
Mechanisms in general are much more reliable and durable, and require much less maintenance and adjustment.
I don’t believe 1970 had significant deployment of laser cutting, waterjet cutting, EDM, or probably a bunch of other process I’m forgetting about. They existed, but there were rare then, and they are everywhere now. 1970 had no additive manufacturing unless you count pottery.
It’s true that there’s no real change in how major bulk inputs are handled… because that stuff is really old (and was really old before 1970). There’s not much dramatic improvement still available, and not even that many “tweaks”.
Yeah, you don’t have MNT. Although there’s a lot of “invisible” improvement in the understanding of chemistry and the ability to manipulate things at small scales… and MNT was always supposed to be something that would suddenly pop up when those things got good enough. It might qualify as a “new direction”, but there are no guarantees about exactly when such a direction will open up.
Construction
Construction has always been conservative and has never moved fast. Given a comparable budget, 1970 construction wasn’t all that different than 1870 construction, the big exceptions being framed structure instead of post-and-beam and prefab gypsum board instead of in-place plastering.
As for 1970 to 2021, in 1970 you would have used much more wood to frame a house. Nobody used roof or floor trusses in residential construction. There was also a lot more lead and asbestos floating around… and they needed lead and asbestos, because without them their paints and insulation would not have remotely approached 2021 performance. For the most part they weren’t as good even with them. There’s also much wider deployment of plastic in construction (because plastic doesn’t suck any more). Fasteners are better, too, or at least it’s better understood which fastener to apply when and where.
I can tell at a glance that I’m not in a 1970 living room because the plugs are grounded. Also, unless it’s a rich person’s living room, the furniture is prefab flat pack particle board with veneer finishes instead of stick-built wood.
Agriculture
When I was a kid in the 1970s, the fresh food available in your average supermarket was dramatically less varied than it is now, and at the same time dramatically less palatable. Even the preserved food was more degraded. We actually ate canned vegetables at a significant rate.
If you didn’t live through maybe the 1980s to the 1990s or early 2000s, you can’t really have an idea how much better the food available to the average urban consumer has gotten.
A big part of that was better crop varieties, and I think another very big part was better management and logistics.
Energy
Energy is doing quite well, thanks, with several major, qualitative changes.
We have working renewables. Solar cells in 1970 were just plain unusable for any real purpose. Wind was a pain in the ass because of the mechanical unreliability of the generators (and was less efficient because of significantly worse turbine geometries). We’re also better at not wasting so much energy.
Batteries in 1970 were absolute garbage in terms of capacity, energy density, energy per unit weight, cycle count, you name it. Primary cells were horrible, and rechargeables were worse. You simply did not use a ton of little battery-powered gadgets of any kind. That’s partly because all the electrical devices we have now are much less power hungry, but it’s also because batteries have actually started not to suck. People in 1970 would have looked at you like you were crazy if you suggested a cordless drill, and that has nothing to do with the efficiency of the motor. By the way, that progress in batteries is based on a crapton of major materials science advances.
Yeah, nuclear didn’t happen, but that was for political reasons. One notable political issue was that fission plants are easy to use to make material for nuclear bombs. Nobody quite caught on to the whole CO2 issue until it was too late. And “nuclear homes, cars and batteries” were never a very practical idea, so it’s not surprising that they haven’t happened. You don’t want every bozo handling fissionables… and controlled fusion for power is probably impossible at a small scale, even assuming it’s possible at a large scale.
Transportation
The limits on transportation technology are energy and the Pauli exclusion principal. These are not things that you can easily change. You can’t expect new transport modes because the physical environment doesn’t change. You can’t expect a bunch of new engine types because there are a limited number of physically possible engine types.
For actual deployed infrastructure, you have to add political limits (which are probably the main reasons you don’t have much more efficiency by now)… and limits on what people want.
Doing a lot of space flight is a massive energy sink, and there is no urgent reason to waste that energy at the moment. Yes, I have heard the X-risk arguments, and no, they do not move me at all. Neither does asteroid mining. And the manifest destiny space colonization stuff sure doesn’t. Maybe the people who want all that space flight are simply a minority?
Supersonic transport is also not worth it. Speeds have gone down because nobody wants to waste that much energy or deal with that much noise (or move the material to dig huge systems of evacuated tunnels).
Medicine
Yeah, it’s a hard problem, see, because you have to hack on this really badly engineered system, which you’re not allowed to shut down or modify.
That said, cancer isn’t a single disease, and “the cure for cancer” was never going to be a thing. I think that actual medical people understood that even in 1970. There’ve actually been very significant advances against specific kinds of cancer. There are also improvements in prevention; screenings, HPV vaccine, whatever.
“Heart disease” isn’t really a single disease, either. But there’s a lot less of it around, with less impact, and not just because people stopped smoking. Even if you eat all the time and never exercise (which we’re worse about than in 1970), ya got yer statins, yer much better blood pressure meds, yer thrombolytics, yer better surgery, yer better implantable devices...
Oh, and they turned around a vaccine against a relatively novel pandemic virus in under a year. They identified that virus, sequenced its genome, and did a ton of other characterization on its structure and action, in time that would definitely have sounded like science fiction in 1970. They actually know a lot about how it works… detailed chemical explanations for stuff that would, in 1970, have been handwaved at a level just about one step above vitalism.
In 1970, you might not have included “information”… because wasn’t so prominent in people’s minds until a bunch of new stuff showed up to give it salience.
I disagree. Any self-respecting history of technology includes invention of writing and printing press. Those two are like among the most important technology ever invented. You’d have “information” category just to include writing and printing press.
Production per hour labor has increased in the USA and elsewhere.
I have 3D printer in my living room.
Transportation
Home delivery is way cheaper than it used to be. Mail order has been a thing for a long time, but good mail-order products are new. It’s not impractical to buy everything you need without going to a store.
Manufacturing + Transportation
When you combine the developments of manufacturing plus transportation you get brand new phenomena, like being able to start a consumer hardware startup out of your living room. This doesn’t affect everyone’s living room, but my living room is full of shipping supplies and my basement has a small factory in it.
War
The B-2 stealth bomber reached initial operational capability in 1997. GPS and satellite mapping are ubiquitous. Guided missiles, real-time satellite surveillance and Predator drones are more capable today than in 1980s science fiction. Laser defenses, Gauss cannons and exoskeletons are on the way.
We also do nuclear tests with computer simulations instead of physical atom bombs. This particular example illustrates how physical technologies can turn into digital technologies. Physical technologies turning into digital technologies can create the illusion that physical technology is stagnating.
The fact that some advances exist is entirely consistent with the thesis that the overall rate of advance has slowed down, as the original article points out.
I am going to push back a little on this one, and ask for context and numbers?
As some of my older relatives commented when Wolt became popular here, before people started going to supermarkets, it was common for shops to have a delivery / errand boy (this would have been 1950s, and more prevalent before the WW2). It is one thing that strikes out reading biographies; teenage Harpo Marx dropped out from school and did odd jobs as an errand boy; they are ubiquitous part of the background in Anne Frank’s diaries; and so on.
Maybe it was proportionally more expensive (relative to cost of purchase), but on the other hand, from the descriptions it looks like the deliveries were done by teenage/young men who were paid peanuts.
When I think about home delivery, my reference point is the dao xiao mian 刀削面 knife I bought in 2020 from AliExpress for $3.57 including shipping and delivery to my door. In the 1990s, the simplest way to get an exotic product like that was to fly to China.
I’m not just thinking about the ease of sending something from one house to another within my city. I’m thinking about the ease of sending something from an arbitrary residence on Earth to an arbitrary residence on Earth.
Shipping small packages from China to the US via the USPS has been subsidized—the price of mailing a Beanie Baby from Beijing to New York has been lower than the price charged to mail that same Beanie Baby from Los Angeles to New York. One of the few things the Trump administration did right was renegotiate the international postal system treaties so that China doesn’t get “developing nation” subsidies any more.
Seconded; this should really be a reply post and is a good rebuttal. Much (though far from all) of the original argument is down to not really appreciating how much sci-fi tech we do have since the 70′s
I don’t have the detailed knowledge needed to flesh this out, but it occurred to me that there might be a structure of an argument someone could make that would be shaped something like “we got a lot of meaningful changes in the last 70 years, but they didn’t create as many nonlinear tipping points as in the previous industrial revolutions.”
Fwiw, flying cars probably wouldn’t hit any such tipping point, though self-driving cars probably would.
Widespread nuclear energy might’ve meant little concern about global warming at this point, but solar & wind have been trucking along slowly enough that there’s tons of concern.
I think the internet is doing something important for the possibility of running your own 1-2 person business, which is a meaningful tipping point. There are various other tipping points happening as a result of computers and the internet, which is why I think it stands out as @jasoncrawford’s only named revolutionary technologies.
Anyway, hoping someone can steelman this for me, considering the nonlinear cascades in each era & from each technology, and seeing whether there’s indeed something different about pre-1970 and after. I’m not confident there is, to be clear, but I have some intuition that says this might be part of what people are seeing.
There are also improvements in prevention; screenings, HPV vaccine, whatever.
Given that we have relatively constant cancer death rates it’s unclear whether the changes in cancer screenings are improvements. They might very well about taking organs from people who would otherwise live healthy lives if they wouldn’t be screened.
Oh, and they turned around a vaccine against a relatively novel pandemic virus in under a year.
You could do that with inactivated viruses the way Sinopharm and Sinovac do, also in 1970. The last year saw a lot of burocracy that made vaccine production harder and there’s a good chance that people in 1970 would have been better at producing and administering vaccine’s then we are today.
They identified that virus, sequenced its genome, and did a ton of other characterization on its structure and action, in time that would definitely have sounded like science fiction in 1970.
We have a relatively poor understanding of action. We don’t have crucial information about the long-term effects of getting infected. Our instiutions took an embarrasingly long time to recognize that masks are a good idea.
Some of those issues though are political, not technological. Albeit it can certainly be argued that one of the causes of stagnation is that it’s the political and social institutions that have become inadequate at incentivising true innovation.
If you examine your first 5, limited AI agents, similar to the kind demonstrated for autonomous cars, is capable of lifting the limits.
Manufacturing—self replicating robotics would drive prices through the floor
MNT—build tool designing AI agents to crack this problem, once you make the equipment for working at this scale cheap by producing it autonomously. Tool designing agents seem to be feasible per some of Open AI’s recent results.
Construction—same robots can build the buildings at hyperspeed, pre-fabrication with human workers is already vastly faster
Agriculture—falls with the same robotics case
Energy—presently it’s governed by the need for mass solar/battery production
Transportation—building a new type of car/engine/overhead transit pods is a case of the manufacturing/robotics problem. Since it’s too expensive right now to try anything but what we already have.
Medicine is a harder problem, I have a vague idea of using very advanced robotics and AI agents to build a “bottom up” understanding of biology so that it is possible to make new interventions in living humans and know they are going to work beforehand.
Alas there are government/institution throttling issue with some of these advances. For construction, corrupt local jurisdictions can block construction of modular buildings, forcing expensive custom designs. For energy, solar/battery systems need government support for there to be demand management/grid backfeeding/permits. For transportation, even if a new modality can be found (overhead maglev tracks, underground tunnels), a government has to permit the installation.
And of course medicine is the big one. We can posit an AI agent that could design a custom edit to a single patient’s genome. Or even invent a new treatment in realtime, during the period a single individual is in the process of dying. The old model of “RCT on enough people for statistical significance and pay 1 billion dollars in fees and salaries” does not allow for such rapid iteration to be possible.
For construction, corrupt local jurisdictions can block construction of modular buildings, forcing expensive custom designs.
It’s the opposite. Local jurisdictions aren’t corrupt anymore to allow a billionaire to just pay bribes to get to build the modular buildings he wants to build.
We can posit an AI agent that could design a custom edit to a single patient’s genome. Or even invent a new treatment in realtime, during the period a single individual is in the process of dying.
While an AI theoretically could do that, we have a burocracy that outlaws such progress. As a result it’s now a lot more expensive to develop new treatments then back in 1970.
Can you clarify the second point? The first point is—and ‘corrupt’ is a relative term. But for the overall society, inexpensive and large scale indoor space allows for progress. It makes a city more productive, a country more efficient, it makes the overall pace of technological development slightly faster. San Francisco blocking construction when they are arguably America’s most productive city as it is is likely harming the city, the city residents, the state they are in, the country they are in, and to a small extent, the world.
However the benefits of blocking construction do accrue to present landowners in expensive cities who get more certain ROIs on their investments and get to maintain their views. And in the way cities are allowed to block new construction in the US (versus it being handled at a higher level of government), the only votes come from current residents, many of whom are landowners and thus invested in the current system...
It’s not possible for the people with money to pay bribes to get the policy outcomes they want. You have a middle class coalition who’s voting for politicians who block construction and the politicians fulfill their mandate.
the only votes come from current residents, many of whom are landowners and thus invested in the current system...
Politicians doing what their voters want is the opposite of them being corrupt.
This is arguable. Certain you can winnow to arbitrarily small government districts and see how the interests of a tiny area can run contrary to the interests of everyone else.
For example, a small town sheriff refusing to arrest members of the town’s most powerful extended family—who in small enough town could control the electorate—is clear and simple corruption.
It’s because I see the job of a sheriff is to enforce the laws fairly and equally, not to favor tiny subgroups of people—even if that is the ‘will of the voters’.
Similarly, I see the office of building permits to promptly and efficiently issue permits, or denials, with clearcut and deterministic outcomes. In San Francisco, instead a project can be delayed 10+ years while it gets put through endless ‘reviews’.
In my specific case, I’m one of the many (millions?) of mobile tech workers. I move to wherever the next gig is. Whether that is Bay Area or San Diego or Atlanta, etc. It’s a national market for jobs with a national pool of workers. Should the rules for construction of housing be decided by the entrenched interests of a tiny area, or at the Federal or State levels? Or should I be able to obtain housing, and should my employer be able to obtain additional office space, in a free market at efficient prices.
Arguably, as most jobs today involve interstate commerce, and workers able to move in is interstate commerce, national building codes and a “shall issue” permit system (where a jurisdiction must issue a permit, by a deadline, if the project plans meet the code and all fees are paid) would make the United States more efficient. This is how it works in Japan, where Tokyo is an example of a place that doesn’t have a housing crisis.
It’s because I see the job of a sheriff is to enforce the laws fairly and equally, not to favor tiny subgroups of people—even if that is the ‘will of the voters’.
It depends on your political system what the job of the sheriff is supposed to be. I don’t think that a sheriff should represent the interests of voters and don’t believe that it makes sense to have sheriff be an elected position.
In my specific case, I’m one of the many (millions?) of mobile tech workers.
A majority of people in California don’t think that the interests of mobile tech workers are more important then the interests of other people. In a democracy that means rich tech workers often not getting what they want.
Should the rules for construction of housing be decided by the entrenched interests of a tiny area, or at the Federal or State levels?
In a democracy that question is answered by the law. In California there don’t seem to be majorities for having those rules be made on the State level. Decisions being made at the level where the voting population wants them to be made instead of being made at the level you think best isn’t corruption. It’s just democracy.
The linked article says they are but the California government has been lobbied to not care about the will of the voters. Almost like it’s corrupt per my original point upstream.
You always have lobbying on an issue like that, and lobbying itself isn’t corruption.
California happens to have a referendum process and enough rich techis that want to build more housing to run such a referendum if it would pool well enough to have a good chance of getting passed.
It was mostly a joke and I don’t think it’s technically true. The point was that objects can’t pass through one another, which means that there are a bunch of annoying constraints on the paths you can move things along.
Frankly, I think the biggest cause of the “stagnation” you’re seeing is unwillingness to burn resources as the world population climbs toward 8 billion. We could build the 1970s idea of a flying car right now; it just wouldn’t be permitted to fly because (a) it would (noisily) waste so much fuel and (b) it turns out that most people really aren’t up to being pilots, especially if you have as many little aircraft flying around from random point A to random point B as you have cars. A lot of those old SciFi ideas simply weren’t practical to begin with.
… and I think that the other cause is that of course it’s easier to pick low hanging fruit.
It may not be possible to build a space elevator with any material, ever, period, especially if it has to actually stay in service under real environmental conditions. You’re not seeing radically new engine types because it’s very likely that we’ve already explored all the broad types of engines that are physically possible. The laws of physics aren’t under any obligation to support infinite expansion, or to let anybody realize every pipe dream.
In fact, the trick of getting rapid improvement seems to be finding a new direction in which to expand, so that you can start at the bottom of the logistic curve. You got recent improvement in electronics and computing because microelectronics were a new direction. You didn’t get more improvement in engines because they were an old direction.
Your six categories are now all old directions (except maybe manufacturing, because that can mean anything at all). In 1970, you might not have included “information”… because wasn’t so prominent in people’s minds until a bunch of new stuff showed up to give it salience.
At the turn of the last century, you had much more of a “green field” in the all of the areas you list. You’re going to have to settle for less in those areas.
And there’s no guarantee that there are any truly new directions left to go in, either. Eventually you reach the omega point.
That said, I think you’re underestimating the progress in some of those areas.
Manufacturing
The real cost of basically everything is way down from 1970. Any given thing is made with less raw material, less energy, and less environmental impact.
I build stuff for fun, and the parts and materials available to me are very, very noticeably better than what I could have gotten in the 1970s.
Materials are much more specialized and they are universally better. Plastic in 1970 was pretty much synonymous with “cheap crap that falls apart easily”. In 2021, plastics are often better than any other material you can find. 2021 permanent magnets are in 1970s science fiction territory (and more useful than flying cars). Lubricants and sealants are vastly better. There’s a much wider variety of better controlled, more consistent metal alloys in far wider use, and they are conditioned to perform better using a much wider variety of heat treatments, mechanical processing, surface treatments, etc. Things that would have been “advanced aerospace materials” in 1970 are commonplace in 2021.
Mechanisms in general are much more reliable and durable, and require much less maintenance and adjustment.
I don’t believe 1970 had significant deployment of laser cutting, waterjet cutting, EDM, or probably a bunch of other process I’m forgetting about. They existed, but there were rare then, and they are everywhere now. 1970 had no additive manufacturing unless you count pottery.
It’s true that there’s no real change in how major bulk inputs are handled… because that stuff is really old (and was really old before 1970). There’s not much dramatic improvement still available, and not even that many “tweaks”.
Yeah, you don’t have MNT. Although there’s a lot of “invisible” improvement in the understanding of chemistry and the ability to manipulate things at small scales… and MNT was always supposed to be something that would suddenly pop up when those things got good enough. It might qualify as a “new direction”, but there are no guarantees about exactly when such a direction will open up.
Construction
Construction has always been conservative and has never moved fast. Given a comparable budget, 1970 construction wasn’t all that different than 1870 construction, the big exceptions being framed structure instead of post-and-beam and prefab gypsum board instead of in-place plastering.
As for 1970 to 2021, in 1970 you would have used much more wood to frame a house. Nobody used roof or floor trusses in residential construction. There was also a lot more lead and asbestos floating around… and they needed lead and asbestos, because without them their paints and insulation would not have remotely approached 2021 performance. For the most part they weren’t as good even with them. There’s also much wider deployment of plastic in construction (because plastic doesn’t suck any more). Fasteners are better, too, or at least it’s better understood which fastener to apply when and where.
I can tell at a glance that I’m not in a 1970 living room because the plugs are grounded. Also, unless it’s a rich person’s living room, the furniture is prefab flat pack particle board with veneer finishes instead of stick-built wood.
Agriculture
When I was a kid in the 1970s, the fresh food available in your average supermarket was dramatically less varied than it is now, and at the same time dramatically less palatable. Even the preserved food was more degraded. We actually ate canned vegetables at a significant rate.
If you didn’t live through maybe the 1980s to the 1990s or early 2000s, you can’t really have an idea how much better the food available to the average urban consumer has gotten.
A big part of that was better crop varieties, and I think another very big part was better management and logistics.
Energy
Energy is doing quite well, thanks, with several major, qualitative changes.
We have working renewables. Solar cells in 1970 were just plain unusable for any real purpose. Wind was a pain in the ass because of the mechanical unreliability of the generators (and was less efficient because of significantly worse turbine geometries). We’re also better at not wasting so much energy.
Batteries in 1970 were absolute garbage in terms of capacity, energy density, energy per unit weight, cycle count, you name it. Primary cells were horrible, and rechargeables were worse. You simply did not use a ton of little battery-powered gadgets of any kind. That’s partly because all the electrical devices we have now are much less power hungry, but it’s also because batteries have actually started not to suck. People in 1970 would have looked at you like you were crazy if you suggested a cordless drill, and that has nothing to do with the efficiency of the motor. By the way, that progress in batteries is based on a crapton of major materials science advances.
Yeah, nuclear didn’t happen, but that was for political reasons. One notable political issue was that fission plants are easy to use to make material for nuclear bombs. Nobody quite caught on to the whole CO2 issue until it was too late. And “nuclear homes, cars and batteries” were never a very practical idea, so it’s not surprising that they haven’t happened. You don’t want every bozo handling fissionables… and controlled fusion for power is probably impossible at a small scale, even assuming it’s possible at a large scale.
Transportation
The limits on transportation technology are energy and the Pauli exclusion principal. These are not things that you can easily change. You can’t expect new transport modes because the physical environment doesn’t change. You can’t expect a bunch of new engine types because there are a limited number of physically possible engine types.
For actual deployed infrastructure, you have to add political limits (which are probably the main reasons you don’t have much more efficiency by now)… and limits on what people want.
Doing a lot of space flight is a massive energy sink, and there is no urgent reason to waste that energy at the moment. Yes, I have heard the X-risk arguments, and no, they do not move me at all. Neither does asteroid mining. And the manifest destiny space colonization stuff sure doesn’t. Maybe the people who want all that space flight are simply a minority?
Supersonic transport is also not worth it. Speeds have gone down because nobody wants to waste that much energy or deal with that much noise (or move the material to dig huge systems of evacuated tunnels).
Medicine
Yeah, it’s a hard problem, see, because you have to hack on this really badly engineered system, which you’re not allowed to shut down or modify.
That said, cancer isn’t a single disease, and “the cure for cancer” was never going to be a thing. I think that actual medical people understood that even in 1970. There’ve actually been very significant advances against specific kinds of cancer. There are also improvements in prevention; screenings, HPV vaccine, whatever.
“Heart disease” isn’t really a single disease, either. But there’s a lot less of it around, with less impact, and not just because people stopped smoking. Even if you eat all the time and never exercise (which we’re worse about than in 1970), ya got yer statins, yer much better blood pressure meds, yer thrombolytics, yer better surgery, yer better implantable devices...
Oh, and they turned around a vaccine against a relatively novel pandemic virus in under a year. They identified that virus, sequenced its genome, and did a ton of other characterization on its structure and action, in time that would definitely have sounded like science fiction in 1970. They actually know a lot about how it works… detailed chemical explanations for stuff that would, in 1970, have been handwaved at a level just about one step above vitalism.
I disagree. Any self-respecting history of technology includes invention of writing and printing press. Those two are like among the most important technology ever invented. You’d have “information” category just to include writing and printing press.
Also the phonograph, telegraph, telephone, radio, and television! If “information” wasn’t a category before the late 1800s, it was by then.
Manufacturing
Production per hour labor has increased in the USA and elsewhere.
I have 3D printer in my living room.
Transportation
Home delivery is way cheaper than it used to be. Mail order has been a thing for a long time, but good mail-order products are new. It’s not impractical to buy everything you need without going to a store.
Manufacturing + Transportation
When you combine the developments of manufacturing plus transportation you get brand new phenomena, like being able to start a consumer hardware startup out of your living room. This doesn’t affect everyone’s living room, but my living room is full of shipping supplies and my basement has a small factory in it.
War
The B-2 stealth bomber reached initial operational capability in 1997. GPS and satellite mapping are ubiquitous. Guided missiles, real-time satellite surveillance and Predator drones are more capable today than in 1980s science fiction. Laser defenses, Gauss cannons and exoskeletons are on the way.
We also do nuclear tests with computer simulations instead of physical atom bombs. This particular example illustrates how physical technologies can turn into digital technologies. Physical technologies turning into digital technologies can create the illusion that physical technology is stagnating.
The fact that some advances exist is entirely consistent with the thesis that the overall rate of advance has slowed down, as the original article points out.
I am going to push back a little on this one, and ask for context and numbers?
As some of my older relatives commented when Wolt became popular here, before people started going to supermarkets, it was common for shops to have a delivery / errand boy (this would have been 1950s, and more prevalent before the WW2). It is one thing that strikes out reading biographies; teenage Harpo Marx dropped out from school and did odd jobs as an errand boy; they are ubiquitous part of the background in Anne Frank’s diaries; and so on.
Maybe it was proportionally more expensive (relative to cost of purchase), but on the other hand, from the descriptions it looks like the deliveries were done by teenage/young men who were paid peanuts.
When I think about home delivery, my reference point is the dao xiao mian 刀削面 knife I bought in 2020 from AliExpress for $3.57 including shipping and delivery to my door. In the 1990s, the simplest way to get an exotic product like that was to fly to China.
I’m not just thinking about the ease of sending something from one house to another within my city. I’m thinking about the ease of sending something from an arbitrary residence on Earth to an arbitrary residence on Earth.
Shipping small packages from China to the US via the USPS has been subsidized—the price of mailing a Beanie Baby from Beijing to New York has been lower than the price charged to mail that same Beanie Baby from Los Angeles to New York. One of the few things the Trump administration did right was renegotiate the international postal system treaties so that China doesn’t get “developing nation” subsidies any more.
https://reason.com/2019/11/11/american-taxpayers-are-subsidizing-ultra-cheap-shipping-from-china/
While I don’t agree with everything, this is a top-quality comment deserving to be its own post, consider posting it as top-level?
Even better (but with more work), an SSC-style adversarial collaboration.
Seconded; this should really be a reply post and is a good rebuttal. Much (though far from all) of the original argument is down to not really appreciating how much sci-fi tech we do have since the 70′s
(Epistemic status: lame pun)
It was called “disco” in the 70s
I disagree with a bunch of this, but still upvoted for being a great comment with a lot of great data. Thanks for writing it!
I don’t have the detailed knowledge needed to flesh this out, but it occurred to me that there might be a structure of an argument someone could make that would be shaped something like “we got a lot of meaningful changes in the last 70 years, but they didn’t create as many nonlinear tipping points as in the previous industrial revolutions.”
Fwiw, flying cars probably wouldn’t hit any such tipping point, though self-driving cars probably would.
Widespread nuclear energy might’ve meant little concern about global warming at this point, but solar & wind have been trucking along slowly enough that there’s tons of concern.
I think the internet is doing something important for the possibility of running your own 1-2 person business, which is a meaningful tipping point. There are various other tipping points happening as a result of computers and the internet, which is why I think it stands out as @jasoncrawford’s only named revolutionary technologies.
Anyway, hoping someone can steelman this for me, considering the nonlinear cascades in each era & from each technology, and seeing whether there’s indeed something different about pre-1970 and after. I’m not confident there is, to be clear, but I have some intuition that says this might be part of what people are seeing.
Given that we have relatively constant cancer death rates it’s unclear whether the changes in cancer screenings are improvements. They might very well about taking organs from people who would otherwise live healthy lives if they wouldn’t be screened.
You could do that with inactivated viruses the way Sinopharm and Sinovac do, also in 1970. The last year saw a lot of burocracy that made vaccine production harder and there’s a good chance that people in 1970 would have been better at producing and administering vaccine’s then we are today.
We have a relatively poor understanding of action. We don’t have crucial information about the long-term effects of getting infected. Our instiutions took an embarrasingly long time to recognize that masks are a good idea.
Some of those issues though are political, not technological. Albeit it can certainly be argued that one of the causes of stagnation is that it’s the political and social institutions that have become inadequate at incentivising true innovation.
If you examine your first 5, limited AI agents, similar to the kind demonstrated for autonomous cars, is capable of lifting the limits.
Manufacturing—self replicating robotics would drive prices through the floor
MNT—build tool designing AI agents to crack this problem, once you make the equipment for working at this scale cheap by producing it autonomously. Tool designing agents seem to be feasible per some of Open AI’s recent results.
Construction—same robots can build the buildings at hyperspeed, pre-fabrication with human workers is already vastly faster
Agriculture—falls with the same robotics case
Energy—presently it’s governed by the need for mass solar/battery production
Transportation—building a new type of car/engine/overhead transit pods is a case of the manufacturing/robotics problem. Since it’s too expensive right now to try anything but what we already have.
Medicine is a harder problem, I have a vague idea of using very advanced robotics and AI agents to build a “bottom up” understanding of biology so that it is possible to make new interventions in living humans and know they are going to work beforehand.
Alas there are government/institution throttling issue with some of these advances. For construction, corrupt local jurisdictions can block construction of modular buildings, forcing expensive custom designs. For energy, solar/battery systems need government support for there to be demand management/grid backfeeding/permits. For transportation, even if a new modality can be found (overhead maglev tracks, underground tunnels), a government has to permit the installation.
And of course medicine is the big one. We can posit an AI agent that could design a custom edit to a single patient’s genome. Or even invent a new treatment in realtime, during the period a single individual is in the process of dying. The old model of “RCT on enough people for statistical significance and pay 1 billion dollars in fees and salaries” does not allow for such rapid iteration to be possible.
It’s the opposite. Local jurisdictions aren’t corrupt anymore to allow a billionaire to just pay bribes to get to build the modular buildings he wants to build.
While an AI theoretically could do that, we have a burocracy that outlaws such progress. As a result it’s now a lot more expensive to develop new treatments then back in 1970.
Can you clarify the second point? The first point is—and ‘corrupt’ is a relative term. But for the overall society, inexpensive and large scale indoor space allows for progress. It makes a city more productive, a country more efficient, it makes the overall pace of technological development slightly faster. San Francisco blocking construction when they are arguably America’s most productive city as it is is likely harming the city, the city residents, the state they are in, the country they are in, and to a small extent, the world.
However the benefits of blocking construction do accrue to present landowners in expensive cities who get more certain ROIs on their investments and get to maintain their views. And in the way cities are allowed to block new construction in the US (versus it being handled at a higher level of government), the only votes come from current residents, many of whom are landowners and thus invested in the current system...
Are you referring to Broad Sustainable Building? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad_Sustainable_Building
It’s not possible for the people with money to pay bribes to get the policy outcomes they want. You have a middle class coalition who’s voting for politicians who block construction and the politicians fulfill their mandate.
Politicians doing what their voters want is the opposite of them being corrupt.
This is arguable. Certain you can winnow to arbitrarily small government districts and see how the interests of a tiny area can run contrary to the interests of everyone else.
For example, a small town sheriff refusing to arrest members of the town’s most powerful extended family—who in small enough town could control the electorate—is clear and simple corruption.
It’s because I see the job of a sheriff is to enforce the laws fairly and equally, not to favor tiny subgroups of people—even if that is the ‘will of the voters’.
Similarly, I see the office of building permits to promptly and efficiently issue permits, or denials, with clearcut and deterministic outcomes. In San Francisco, instead a project can be delayed 10+ years while it gets put through endless ‘reviews’.
In my specific case, I’m one of the many (millions?) of mobile tech workers. I move to wherever the next gig is. Whether that is Bay Area or San Diego or Atlanta, etc. It’s a national market for jobs with a national pool of workers. Should the rules for construction of housing be decided by the entrenched interests of a tiny area, or at the Federal or State levels? Or should I be able to obtain housing, and should my employer be able to obtain additional office space, in a free market at efficient prices.
Arguably, as most jobs today involve interstate commerce, and workers able to move in is interstate commerce, national building codes and a “shall issue” permit system (where a jurisdiction must issue a permit, by a deadline, if the project plans meet the code and all fees are paid) would make the United States more efficient. This is how it works in Japan, where Tokyo is an example of a place that doesn’t have a housing crisis.
It depends on your political system what the job of the sheriff is supposed to be. I don’t think that a sheriff should represent the interests of voters and don’t believe that it makes sense to have sheriff be an elected position.
A majority of people in California don’t think that the interests of mobile tech workers are more important then the interests of other people. In a democracy that means rich tech workers often not getting what they want.
In a democracy that question is answered by the law. In California there don’t seem to be majorities for having those rules be made on the State level. Decisions being made at the level where the voting population wants them to be made instead of being made at the level you think best isn’t corruption. It’s just democracy.
The decisions can be made at the state level just the laws have not yet passed.
https://www.enr.com/articles/48600-housing-density-effort-fails-in-california
Yes, laws could be passed but at the moment the democratic majorities are not there for passing them on the state level.
The linked article says they are but the California government has been lobbied to not care about the will of the voters. Almost like it’s corrupt per my original point upstream.
You always have lobbying on an issue like that, and lobbying itself isn’t corruption.
California happens to have a referendum process and enough rich techis that want to build more housing to run such a referendum if it would pool well enough to have a good chance of getting passed.
Being able to distinguish people adopting a policy that you don’t like and have reason to believe to be bad from them being corrupt is very valuable.
It’s easily possible to make a referendum for moving it onto the state level in California if the population wanted that.
How does Pauli Exclusion principle limit transportation? Is this a teleportation joke? Thanks
It was mostly a joke and I don’t think it’s technically true. The point was that objects can’t pass through one another, which means that there are a bunch of annoying constraints on the paths you can move things along.