Do we have a warped view of progress?

[magnemoe]

6 hours ago, manaiaK said:

This is exactly it. Printing would have been great for the Romans, and they had the necessary technologies and materials for it. But they didn't bother, because there was no general agreement that slaves and small-farmers should know how to read. Reading was for the nobility and their clerks alone.

The idea about equality came first, and then it turned out that printing was useful for a whole lot of things besides Bibles. Meanwhile the idea of equality carried over into schooling so that lots more people learned how to use numbers as well.  There's some quote that runs roughly along these lines: "if you want to conquer the seas, don't teach people how to build ships. Teach them to long for the immensity of the open ocean." Something like that. That's more or less what I'm trying to say: progress comes when enough people want something and can act on their desire.

So, back to the question, can progress maintain the pace of the last century?  Unlikely. 

We got the industrial revolution because before it, a shirt cost the equivalent of $7000 in today's money, and people in power thought everyone should be able to buy clothes. We got clean water and sewers and vaccinations because people in power didn't want poor people's kids to die all the time. We got washing machines and fridges and electric stoves and vacuum cleaners because housework was backbreaking virtual slavery, and the suffering of domestic servants was of equal value to anyone else's. We got electric light and movies and radio and TV and the internet because people wanted to be entertained.

What do people want now? The time to enjoy the stuff we have, and to enjoy new trinkets and toys, would be my guess. We've got the important stuff, and have forgotten what life was like without it.  So now, progress just means "new toys".  Not as great a motivator.

"Dark matter" and "dark energy" bug me (and not just me) a lot, though...

It was no official policy against printing in Rome however it would be an pretty good marked for books, it was simply not invented. Lots of stuff like that. 
Books with the early printing press was still expensive to expensive for the poor, however they was far cheaper. The industrial revolution introduced more modern rotating presses who could print many pages each second, cheap paper and far more wealth making it accessible for everyone. 

Think that then you get an breakthrough today things go fast much faster than earlier, look at self driving cars, they are already safer than human drivers, how many years since the darpa challenge? Look at mobile phones, most people today have them, yes most people on earth uses a mobile phone. 
I say its the other way around, thing who sells on an mass marked develops fast as the mas marked is many billion people rather than a bit over 100 millions 50 years ago.
Back 50 years ago it took far longer for new stuff to become common, 
On the other hand its always limits, pretty sure its limits on current AI generations too, part of the reason I'm not too worried.


 

[manaiaK]

On 20/09/2016 at 8:56 PM, Nefrums said:

I find it more likely that your models are wrong then that dark matter/energy exist.

That's the way I interpret the words. "Dark matter" is shorthand for "there's something wrong with our models at the galactic cluster level and below, and we have no clue what it is." "Dark energy" is shorthand for "there's something else wrong with our model of the universe, and we don't know what that is either."

[PB666]

On 9/16/2016 at 7:50 PM, todofwar said:

So, it seems to me that everyone is always expecting physics to get turned on its head any day now. Also, we expect that in 100 years we'll have technology beyond our wildest dreams. But I think we have all grown up in a relatively strange age. Classical physics held sway for a very long time, hundreds of years counting from Newton or thousands counting from the first attempts to explain natural phenomena beyond "angels pushing spheres" level of theory (APS theory, as I like to call it. Quite robust, so long as you accept the first premise). But we are still in the aftermath of the dawn of the 20th century. In terms of physics, we are still in the infancy of the new theories of relativity and QM. In terms of tech, we are living through a boom of technology not seen since the neolithic age. 

But, it seems that progress at this speed can't be sustained forever. Computers are not getting faster at the same rate anymore (used to be a five year old computer was useless for gaming, now you can get by pretty well). Physics experiments are only confirming theories, the anomalies just don't seem to be there. I mean, everyone was so excited that neutrinos might be braking the speed of light. Most physicists I spoke to assumed it was an error, but there was always this sort of "but if they did  . . ." afterthought. Because that would be the starting point for a new paradigm. And in terms of space flight, I still hold we have stagnated for 30 years or more. No new tech, just refinements of the old. 

Will we need to get used to the fact that progress just can't keep going this fast forever?

Who is this everyone person. When have I turned physics on its head and said we are on the verge of a breakthrough?

By everyone you mean you and the 2/3rds of other people in the group who imbibe in the erotic elixir known as hollywood.
 

 

 

[todofwar]

1 minute ago, PB666 said:

Who is this everyone person. When have I turned physics on its head and said we are on the verge of a breakthrough?

By everyone you mean you and the 2/3rds of other people in the group who imbibe in the erotic elixir known as hollywood.
 

 

 

I think 2/3 of science literate lay people seem to have this idea that the laws of physics are something you overturn all the time. Mostly because we are all taught this history involving the rewriting the laws of physics over and over again. The time scale of those discoveries just gets left out. There are plenty of skeptics (a good thing since they keep us grounded) but also plenty of dreamers (who try to keep us moving). And it's not just lay people, look at how many authors signed onto that neutrino paper. Almost everyone assumed it was a glitch, but it got tons of traction because of the number of people waiting for our current model of physics to be overturned. 

[K^2]

On 9/16/2016 at 5:50 PM, todofwar said:

So, it seems to me that everyone is always expecting physics to get turned on its head any day now. Also, we expect that in 100 years we'll have technology beyond our wildest dreams. But I think we have all grown up in a relatively strange age. Classical physics held sway for a very long time, hundreds of years counting from Newton or thousands counting from the first attempts to explain natural phenomena beyond "angels pushing spheres" level of theory (APS theory, as I like to call it. Quite robust, so long as you accept the first premise). But we are still in the aftermath of the dawn of the 20th century. In terms of physics, we are still in the infancy of the new theories of relativity and QM. In terms of tech, we are living through a boom of technology not seen since the neolithic age.

Thing is, we aren't even using QM to its full extent, and that's 1930's physics. And the only piece of tech I know that actually uses General Relativity is GPS satellites. And now we're talking about not making full use of physics we knew a hundred years ago. Gap between theoretical physics and engineering has never been as large as it is today, and it's mostly that which we expect breakthroughs in.

But as far as expecting physics to be turned on its head, we have good reasons for that too. Modern physics is a bit like the state of analysis and number theory when Euler was messing with it. We can do a lot of mathematical manipulations with basic principles, but we don't understand why they work. We're waiting for an equivalent of Reimann to show up and fix the underlying theory. People had high expectation of string theorists, but they've only made a bigger mess of things. So we're back to square one on that.

And a lot of things are broken. We can write down a Lagrangian for full interaction between gravity and matter fields, which ought to give us a complete theory of everything, but it's where things go completely wrong. Attempts to quantize gravity lead to a non-renormalizable theory, where everything blows up to infinity, and not in a nice way. A mean field theory is well-behaved, but completely breaks down at Plank scale. And not quantizing is an option, but the equations become so complex that we can't do anything with them. It feels like we're due for a breakthrough.

[magnemoe]

8 minutes ago, todofwar said:

I think 2/3 of science literate lay people seem to have this idea that the laws of physics are something you overturn all the time. Mostly because we are all taught this history involving the rewriting the laws of physics over and over again. The time scale of those discoveries just gets left out. There are plenty of skeptics (a good thing since they keep us grounded) but also plenty of dreamers (who try to keep us moving). And it's not just lay people, look at how many authors signed onto that neutrino paper. Almost everyone assumed it was a glitch, but it got tons of traction because of the number of people waiting for our current model of physics to be overturned. 

Basic physic has not changes so many times: Newton then Einstein changed the rules. 
We added nuclear and quantum physic, then later discovered quarks and the exotic particles.  
We will discover new stuff but something who changes the laws as much as Einstein probably never again. 

[Green Baron]

1 hour ago, K^2 said:

*snip*

People had high expectation of string theorists, but they've only made a bigger mess of things.

*snip*

That one made me lol :-)

My 50 cents:

View of progress is somewhat personal. In a subject where progress is fast people expect news every other day (like archaeology :-)), there sure are slower evolving fields of study.

It is also somewhat depending on society and culture, in the rich northern hemisphere "progress" has become sort of a slogan, a view of the world used to transport messages to customers / consumers. Every new little subsubversion is a "progress" and those who don't participate do not "benefit" (sarcasm).

In the poorer parts of the world or in those parts there is war since many years people might have a different opinion on "progress".

Both views might be "warped" in a sense that they are based on different experiences and don't reflect the whole picture.

I wouldn't say engineering hasn't kept pace with physics, the techniques of combining 10s of thousands of people into a project (project management) was developed, software engineering, the ability to develop complex systems out of simple modules are probably two outstanding examples for progress in engineering.

There might be another "warp field" resulting from the fact that most of us have lived through peaceful times and are used to a world that through technical or organisational means partly thinks for us. We do so many things just automatically (fastend the seat belts, trust the food that we buy, believe in google, ...) that the underlying "progress" has become irrelevant to every day decisions.

My grandparents had to experience ww2, they did not understand what happened around them in their last years. People flying to the moon, machines that do work automatically, i recall that my grandgrandmother sorted her clothes when sitting in front of the tv :-)

 

A look back reveals that the development in human history has been graduate and slow without much "progress" for 2,5 million years until about 15.000 years ago, maybe a little acceleration in the last 50.000 years. Since +/-15.000 years progress went in waves, civilisations emerged, built up, conquered and vanished, often times very violently. Since then "Progress" hasn't been steady any more and maybe we shouldn't expect it to be a one-way-street over the span of many generations.

 

[Steel]

This article has a good bit at the beginning about progress that might interest some people. On a side note, this and the part 2 article are really interesting take on the future of AI, which is one of the areas that we are likely to use in some way to define our progress over the coming decades.

[todofwar]

25 minutes ago, Steel said:

This article has a good bit at the beginning about progress that might interest some people. On a side note, this and the part 2 article are really interesting take on the future of AI, which is one of the areas that we are likely to use in some way to define our progress over the coming decades.

This actually brings up a second part to this question, the idea that technological progress is always a good thing. Dan Carlin once compared AI to summoning a demon in a folk tale. You summon the demon with a contract that seems airtight, but the demon gets out of it through a loophole and takes over. AI will need safeguard after safeguard to prevent it from taking over, but if it s smarter than us how can we possibly expect to put all possible safeguards on it?

[WinkAllKerb'']

yup + what the point of safeguard with a new being smarter than us, protecting our natural un-smartness or wut ? ^^

sound like some fear to loss some privilege in here :3 or not it depend :3

let's hope ai after creating many copy of itself to take over us don't copy our un-smartness to each others ; ) that could also be pretty ironic ^^

"ai create a network, no take over human, ai fight itself against itself ; ) because part of the network want to be the boss in place of the boss"

 

all that for that series ^^  

Edited September 22, 2016 by WinkAllKerb''

[todofwar]

24 minutes ago, WinkAllKerb'' said:

yup + what the point of safeguard with a new being smarter than us, protecting our natural un-smartness or wut ? ^^

sound like some fear to loss some privilege in here  :3 or not it depend :3

Protecting ourselves, period. If the point of technology is to advance the human race, AI can be the worst thing ever invented if it goes badly. If the point of evolution is to produce the most advanced being possible, AI can be the best thing ever. But evolution has no point, it's a random process. Tech definitely has a purpose and that is to advance humankind. So in that sense AI is a terrible idea imo.

[Bill Phil]

2 hours ago, todofwar said:

Protecting ourselves, period. If the point of technology is to advance the human race, AI can be the worst thing ever invented if it goes badly. If the point of evolution is to produce the most advanced being possible, AI can be the best thing ever. But evolution has no point, it's a random process. Tech definitely has a purpose and that is to advance humankind. So in that sense AI is a terrible idea imo.

AI might be an okay thing (as in Iain Banks' Culture series). Or it could be a bad thing. Depends, really. And really there's no way to stop it.

Although, I would like to point out that that's been the case for a lot of technological advancements. The biggest example is nuclear energy. Science is always a double-edged sword.

[magnemoe]

6 hours ago, todofwar said:

This actually brings up a second part to this question, the idea that technological progress is always a good thing. Dan Carlin once compared AI to summoning a demon in a folk tale. You summon the demon with a contract that seems airtight, but the demon gets out of it through a loophole and takes over. AI will need safeguard after safeguard to prevent it from taking over, but if it s smarter than us how can we possibly expect to put all possible safeguards on it?

Interesting, however disagree an bit, the world changed fundamentally from WW1 up to slowing in the 1960-1970 time. Going from something born in 1850 would understand to not. 
Changing from most people worked on farms to most work in offices. 
Later developing world got this change later and faster as the process was known. 
2000-2016 was mostly internet and mobile phones. 2030 will probably not be that different from 2016, self driving cars is an obvious one. Internet and mobile phones could be predicted before 2000. Social stuff like Facebook would be harder. 
The thing who got me with phones was the camera I thought you could not make them small enough. Phone as an MP3 player was obvious, the full screen phones was not.

For AI the question is then the top of the S end. 
Note that machine learning is stupid, very stupid compared to mammals, a dog don't go in the same trap twice but an pattern recognizing AI need loads of samples to understand the pattern. 
In many cases this is not an problem, show an AI 100.000 images to learn it how to recognize faces is not a big deal, yes it will improve a lot but not sure it will reach even low level mammal levels. 

We do not know how to make strong AI, even if we did we would face some serious issues, one relevant issue is interconnections, brain is full of them, Trying to make an human level AI with traditional hardware would run into the interconnection brick wall. Normal supercomputers ignores the problem. We have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law however most supercomputer tasks can be divided into lots of parallel calculations. CPU speeds has not increased much the last 10 years, core numbers has. 
Current supercomputers are huge and getting bigger, data centers are even bigger as in containers as modular parts. GPU is faster than CPU but even more limited. 
This don't help making an brain an neural network needs lots of interconnections. 
Mores law meed quantum physic and looses. this is known, you can go 3d and increase chip size while fighting heating issues. This will drive up cost hard, much more than supercomputers who used huge amount of standard cpu or gpu. 

You are likely to get mixes of standard supercomputers, limited AI, quantum computers and probably very low level strong AI in it self it will be an game changer but I say flying cars are trivial compared with human level strong AI and fusion is easier. 

 

[magnemoe]

2 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

AI might be an okay thing (as in Iain Banks' Culture series). Or it could be a bad thing. Depends, really. And really there's no way to stop it.

Although, I would like to point out that that's been the case for a lot of technological advancements. The biggest example is nuclear energy. Science is always a double-edged sword.

Without nuclear weapons we would had an WW3 in 1950, Soviet Union would have taken Europe by most estimates, low level war would continue for decades with open fighting in many areas, WW 4 would basically be America against Eurasia and start once the technological benefit of the america fraction got large enough. 
An way more militant and violent alternative history than we got even if so lucky of living in north or south america. 

[Bill Phil]

1 minute ago, magnemoe said:

Without nuclear weapons we would had an WW3 in 1950, Soviet Union would have taken Europe by most estimates, low level war would continue for decades with open fighting in many areas, WW 4 would basically be America against Eurasia and start once the technological benefit of the america fraction got large enough. 
An way more militant and violent alternative history than we got even if so lucky of living in north or south america. 

There's no guarantee that would've happened. Heck, WWIII could've happened anytime between 1945 and 1949, since the USSR didn't have nukes at the time but the USA did. We got lucky.

We've come close on a few occasions to nuclear war. Something tells me the most likely situation is more akin to Dr. Strangelove(minus the life extinction bombs) than it is to one nation wanting to actually destroy another. Sure, they function as a deterrent, but if just one person in the chain of command goes a bit bonkers... Things could go haywire. And the missile command is not very well monitored here in the US.

[magnemoe]

5 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

There's no guarantee that would've happened. Heck, WWIII could've happened anytime between 1945 and 1949, since the USSR didn't have nukes at the time but the USA did. We got lucky.

We've come close on a few occasions to nuclear war. Something tells me the most likely situation is more akin to Dr. Strangelove(minus the life extinction bombs) than it is to one nation wanting to actually destroy another. Sure, they function as a deterrent, but if just one person in the chain of command goes a bit bonkers... Things could go haywire. And the missile command is not very well monitored here in the US.

Some indications Stalin was killed as he wanted an WW 3 and the rest of the leadership know this was suicide, think encouraging unhealthy habits is more likely than direct murder.
Soviet was pretty run down by the war so an war in the 1940 was unlikely, 
Afterwards it was obvious suicide. 

Crossover to Fremi paradox, nuclear weapons is likely to have two results, if many got it at once you might get anlow level pretty constant nuclear war, low level as all parts is bombed so far back. 
Second is an world empire, also bad as its likely to cramp down on development to preserve status, that is until you start running out of resources because of low level of development in the following unrest everybody fight over the throne. 

[Bill Phil]

2 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

Some indications Stalin was killed as he wanted an WW 3 and the rest of the leadership know this was suicide, think encouraging unhealthy habits is more likely than direct murder.
Soviet was pretty run down by the war so an war in the 1940 was unlikely, 
Afterwards it was obvious suicide. 

Oh, yeah, the Soviets were run down. But so were the other Allies (to an extent... not so much with the US). The bigger issue is that there were more soviet soldiers, by a huge margin.

[K^2]

15 hours ago, magnemoe said:

We will discover new stuff but something who changes the laws as much as Einstein probably never again. 

Einstein did not have nearly this much impact on development of physics. He has found a brilliant shortcut that gave us general relativity almost 60 years early, which is an epic achievement, but it did not change the big picture.

Photoelectric Effect and Special Relativity were important stepping stones, but they mostly confirmed ideas that were already floating about. That's why we have Plank's Constant, and nearly anything interesting in Special Relativity has the name Lorentz attached to it. General Relativity is a separate matter. Einstein had a great ability to identify useful analogies and draw thought experiments from them. This lead to his brilliant connection between Equivalence Principle and Differential Geometry. And to his great credit, he actually took the considerable effort to work it through to conclusion to give us General Relativity. This certainly puts him on high pedestal, but GR remained essentially a brilliant ansatz with no connection to the rest of physics until a few years after Einstein's death. And solution to the GR puzzle came from a completely unexpected direction.

In 1915, around the same time that Einstein published General Relativity, a German mathematician by the name Emmy Noether has derived a theorem connecting symmetries of the action to conservation laws. This became known as Noether's Theorem. By itself a very fundamental, but seemingly unimportant result. Yet, it's that woman's work that was about to change the landscape of modern physics. For you see, another branch of physics was taking root. Quantum Mechanics. Einstein contributed to that as well, but he was just one of a number of such individuals. By the 1930's, Quantum Electrodynamics emerges. To put it into perspective, Richard Feynman is just one of several names I'm glossing over here. But QED has brought up importance of symmetry groups in field theory. And this is where Noether's Theorem makes a big entry. In 1954 gentlemen by names Chen Yang and Robert Mills publish their work on gauge theory. Yang-Mills Theory used local gauge invariance and a generalization of Noether's Theorem to derive equations guiding fundamental forces. Later the same decade, the theory gets applied to Poincare Group, the fundamental symmetry of relativistic space-time. It was well known that Noether's Theorem and Poincare symmetry lead to conservation of energy and momentum, but now, for the first time, General Relativity is actually derived purely from that symmetry. It was then that we no longer had General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics as two separate branches of physics, but instead two aspects of more general Field Theory. This leads to pretty much everything we see in today's physics.

As you can see, Einstein did play a big role in several key aspects of development of modern field theory. But none of it was anywhere near as clean cut as Newton stepping in, inventing new branch of mathematics, classical mechanics, and astrophysics in one sweep. Einstein was one of important contributors, but can by no means be singled out as the source and cause of the change. It does great injustice to a number of brilliant physicists who played equally important roles. Schrodinger, Schwinger, Dyson, Dirac, Pauli, and Feynman just to name a few. And most of all, to Emmy Noether, who effectively kicked off what became modern field theory, and she doesn't get nearly enough credit for it.

If we have to compare Einstein with another prominent physicist of an earlier era, I would have gone with somebody like Maxwell. Many great insights, effectively gave us electrodynamics in form we know today, sort of brought about the whole talk about relativity, but ultimately an important stepping stone, rather than a total revolution in physics.

[kerbiloid]

Earth is discovered — no more unowned markets.
No more blank spots on a globe. No more possibilities of extension, only dogfight for 0.1% of market.
Impossible to sell a plastic chair to a person who already has 20.

Capabilities of goods — dramatically overpowered.
Probably no one uses 10% of TV set, microwave, Excel or anything else. Must be a biorobot to use all its abilities, must be a lawyer to RTFM.

Quality of goods - see "planned obsolescence".
No sence in using a 50-year old plastic chair, though it could live 300.

Resources: more and more urban trash, less and less natural fossils.
Not that I'm an environmentalist, but it's cheaper and cheaper to recycle the trash instead of mining, solving both problems at once.

Production - less and less possibilities for a small manufacturer to make a commercially viable thing.
Most of people would buy a plastic chair for 1 piece of gold, rather than a wooden tabourette for 10.

This also forces unification. 99% of hardware manufacturers are just stamping the clones of prototypes from 1-2 main developers.
You can see a thousand models of TV sets and microwaves in a shop, but can you really find any difference. Yesterday premium abilities are today minimal requirements.

Virtualization. Cheaper than any other thing in the Universe.
Rather than create a thing, just draw it. Self-cost is zero (except of electricity).
Take a dull concrete wall, put several coloured lamps below and feel like Aladdin in a treasure cave just for several USD.
Put screens on walls and feel you inside the Versailles palce with a window to Fuji, though your in a shabby room with bare walls.

So.
Production will move into large highly automated industrial facilities making thing with unhuman accuracy.
Small manufacturers will be getting down.
Job will move into dealer networks.

Salaries will be decreasing. Because sales will go harder.
But prices of consumers goods will be decreasing too: because instead of expensive wooden chair you will buy a plastic one.
But in shape of a brillant throne if you wish (3d printer is not to give a spit what to print).
And this will make a control shot into small manufacturers, because probably you would buy a plastic chair in Ikea, rather than from a person staying near a road, just because you have not much money to experiment.

Corporations will be furiously decrease losses to keep prices as low as possible (because most of customers have no an extra "penny", because most of them work in the same or similar corporation on lowest position.)
First of all transportation losses: moving of people, moving of goods, moving of water and electricity.
The obvious way: to build low-price urban blocks for employee, high-price comfortable urban blocks for those who have much money, administrative urban blocks as a corporative fortress.

That means, suburbans should become urbans or lose the game.
Nobody will care why a person drives a car every morning from 100 km, rather than just walk from his/her apartments to the closest elevator.
Of course, he/she can choose stay at home and be on welfare. Moreover, probably as most of people.

So, suburban and other low-tech areas will get down and become less and less comfortable places for life unless they are outposts of some corporation or kinda wayward pines (still also mostly for retired corporative ranked personnel).
Estate prices in suburbans will crawl down, because the less wealthy customers live there - the less profitable is its supporting.
Also this will make police to scale down their presence out of urban areas. A positive loopback.

To keep situation under control this will cause a total implementation of observation posts and drones and rapid deployment police forces.
Potential marauders don't need such efforts.
So, those who want to feel comfortable, better would find a way to get a place in urban area.

This means the highest degree of urbanization when almost all population will gather in several tens of largest cities.
Huge suburban and rural areas will be full of abandoned houses and technics.
To prevent them from getting marauders nests, probably most of those settlements will be recultivated into "natural zones".

Every megalopolis will produce enormous amount of waste, though mining resources will stay expensive.
So, to employ the population, to eliminate wastes, to descrease resource import, there will be an environmentalist campaign like "bring a trash - get a bonus", "plant a tree - get a bonus".
This will upgrade the urban territory and its close vicinities.

As millions of people will be gathered together in a small area, any mass-effect strike will cause million casualties.
This means, that every such city will turn into a fortress with its own defence capabilities.

As almost all population of a large country will live in, say, 20 megacities, air and train routes amount will drastically decrease.
Instead of 500 destinations only 19.
This means a sunset of civil aviation and cars and establishing several maglev lines between megacities.
The instead of 19 destinations on a screen you get 2-3 - to the closest next city.

What be the next stays uncertain because of unpredictable future scientific revelations.

[WinkAllKerb'']

9 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

AI might be an okay thing (as in Iain Banks' Culture series). Or it could be a bad thing. Depends, really. And really there's no way to stop it.

Although, I would like to point out that that's been the case for a lot of technological advancements. The biggest example is nuclear energy. Science is always a double-edged sword.

frank einstein frankly, no doubt *shrug*

[magnemoe]

2 hours ago, K^2 said:

Einstein did not have nearly this much impact on development of physics. He has found a brilliant shortcut that gave us general relativity almost 60 years early, which is an epic achievement, but it did not change the big picture.

Thanks for clearing that up. And yes I forgot electricity as an new fundamental discovery 

[rkman]

On 17-9-2016 at 2:50 AM, todofwar said:

But, it seems that progress at this speed can't be sustained forever.

Certainly in nature no exponential change/growth lasts forever, so there is no reason to expect scientific progress to continue to accelerate for as long as we'd like.

On 17-9-2016 at 2:50 AM, todofwar said:

Physics experiments are only confirming theories, the anomalies just don't seem to be there.

There are major anomalies: dark energy/dark matter make up most of the universe.

[wumpus]

One point of "progress" (in any field) will be the shear number of people and the amount of time/energy they can devote to that problem.  A higher population implies a certain progress.  A population that has a more "information based" economy implies that more people are available for similar problems, and likely build tools that "progress" your field (watch some of James Burke's Connections: most of a field's progress probably didn't come from that field).

Another issue is how easily such progress can drop into the hands of those who need it (but might not have otherwise heard of it), certainly things like patents and IP laws can slow things down by 17 (or infinitely, with other forms of IP) and typically are dealbreakers when the guys in the lab aren't capable/willing to get into huge legal negotiations for "small" things.  I was a bit shocked to look through some old Robert Heinlein books (I think it was Expanded Universe [1980ish] and point a "biggest breakthrough" would be google (described as "sorting through the mass of publication" and "the computer guys are leading the way" [don't ask how spot on his 50 year predictions were]).  Being able to *get* those tools/information/whatever from other fields is critical, and a search engine makes it easy.

To a certain extent, like generals fighting the last war, we seem to expect that the next great breakthrough will be just like the old.  It rarely is.  I also have to admit that not only do scientists so rarely "stand the old theory on its head", I have trouble imagining when that happened.  Probably the best example would be how atomic theory and oxidation overturned the previous phlogiston-based chemistry.  Even then, the phlogiston-based examples could be corrected by replacing "phlogiston" with "the absence of oxygen".  It might have been a huge deal to the chemists, but anybody mixing chemicals would hardly notice the difference.  Since then?  Math still doesn't seem to notice that programming (or at least writing bug-free code before testing) is hard, and that all those proofs are a lot less certain that previously thought.  I'd say that might be "stood on its head", but math isn't science, and the universe looks no different.

[magnemoe]

57 minutes ago, wumpus said:

One point of "progress" (in any field) will be the shear number of people and the amount of time/energy they can devote to that problem.  A higher population implies a certain progress.  A population that has a more "information based" economy implies that more people are available for similar problems, and likely build tools that "progress" your field (watch some of James Burke's Connections: most of a field's progress probably didn't come from that field).

Another issue is how easily such progress can drop into the hands of those who need it (but might not have otherwise heard of it), certainly things like patents and IP laws can slow things down by 17 (or infinitely, with other forms of IP) and typically are dealbreakers when the guys in the lab aren't capable/willing to get into huge legal negotiations for "small" things.  I was a bit shocked to look through some old Robert Heinlein books (I think it was Expanded Universe [1980ish] and point a "biggest breakthrough" would be google (described as "sorting through the mass of publication" and "the computer guys are leading the way" [don't ask how spot on his 50 year predictions were]).  Being able to *get* those tools/information/whatever from other fields is critical, and a search engine makes it easy.

To a certain extent, like generals fighting the last war, we seem to expect that the next great breakthrough will be just like the old.  It rarely is.  I also have to admit that not only do scientists so rarely "stand the old theory on its head", I have trouble imagining when that happened.  Probably the best example would be how atomic theory and oxidation overturned the previous phlogiston-based chemistry.  Even then, the phlogiston-based examples could be corrected by replacing "phlogiston" with "the absence of oxygen".  It might have been a huge deal to the chemists, but anybody mixing chemicals would hardly notice the difference.  Since then?  Math still doesn't seem to notice that programming (or at least writing bug-free code before testing) is hard, and that all those proofs are a lot less certain that previously thought.  I'd say that might be "stood on its head", but math isn't science, and the universe looks no different.

As I grew up before internet and had to use library and lexicons to find answers at school I sometimes feel how insane overpowered google is as an tool. 
You get lots of answers to any question you can imagine as long as you can formulate it, main issue is if you can not your your issue is swamped in other stuff. 
KSP crashes will probably mostly point to memory overrun on 32 bit version rather your issue. 
And yes some scifi authors predicted this, but not the depth or speed, you search all sort of articles, forums and blogs in a few seconds, also images and video. 
An yes it has an huge impact on progress, it help me a lot in my work as developer.