Moore’s Law had processing power doubling every 18 months to two years for decades; the Atari 2600 of my youth had 128 bytes of RAM; the comparably-priced machine I’m typing this on has 8 billion. No other technology has ever improved by seven orders of magnitude in four decades AFAIK. The economic shifts that came with that made California (and more specifically the Bay Area) what it is today, and my point was that California is highly atypical.
On the other hand, I totally agree with the view that progress has overall slowed down. I think the difference is how you measure; measures that favor IT (e.g. information available) will show very different trends than other measures that may more reasonably reflect the impact of technology on human life (e.g. life expectancy, total energy use, inflation-adjusted mean family income). And even in the tech sector, most places weren’t as changed as California.
I don’t think we have serious disagreements; we’re just describing different parts of the same elephant.
Perhaps. OTOH, even the Atari 2600 was already a consumer-grade mass-market product; gene sequencing is only now getting there.
To be honest, there are a few other times and places where technological progress has been even faster like Japan between 1865 and 1945 or Shenzhen between 1975 and 2020. Nevertheless, such meteoric rises are a vanishingly small part of human history. There are lots of places and industries where the last 40 years have seen only very modest improvements, quite a few where the trend has been to modest decline, and some where the decline has been horrible (e.g. Lebanon, Yemen, Zimbabwe). In my extremely subjective, non-expert opinion, the rationalist community’s expectations for technological progress are reasonable for computer technology (until recently) but are unreasonable compared to recent trends in industries like energy, transportation, agriculture, construction, medicine, and many more. In other words, it has a strong bias toward optimism.
Moore’s Law had processing power doubling every 18 months to two years for decades; the Atari 2600 of my youth had 128 bytes of RAM; the comparably-priced machine I’m typing this on has 8 billion. No other technology has ever improved by seven orders of magnitude in four decades AFAIK. The economic shifts that came with that made California (and more specifically the Bay Area) what it is today, and my point was that California is highly atypical.
On the other hand, I totally agree with the view that progress has overall slowed down. I think the difference is how you measure; measures that favor IT (e.g. information available) will show very different trends than other measures that may more reasonably reflect the impact of technology on human life (e.g. life expectancy, total energy use, inflation-adjusted mean family income). And even in the tech sector, most places weren’t as changed as California.
I don’t think we have serious disagreements; we’re just describing different parts of the same elephant.
There are probably others. Genome sequencing is commonly cited as having been substantially faster, going more orders in fewer decades.
Perhaps. OTOH, even the Atari 2600 was already a consumer-grade mass-market product; gene sequencing is only now getting there.
To be honest, there are a few other times and places where technological progress has been even faster like Japan between 1865 and 1945 or Shenzhen between 1975 and 2020. Nevertheless, such meteoric rises are a vanishingly small part of human history. There are lots of places and industries where the last 40 years have seen only very modest improvements, quite a few where the trend has been to modest decline, and some where the decline has been horrible (e.g. Lebanon, Yemen, Zimbabwe). In my extremely subjective, non-expert opinion, the rationalist community’s expectations for technological progress are reasonable for computer technology (until recently) but are unreasonable compared to recent trends in industries like energy, transportation, agriculture, construction, medicine, and many more. In other words, it has a strong bias toward optimism.