Do we have a warped view of progress?

[todofwar]

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?

[Kerbart]

10 minutes ago, todofwar said:

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

You might even need to get used to the fact that progress (at least in physics) no longer has been going on.

Sustained nuclear fusion as a power source is something that will be here within the next 30 years–for the past 50 years now.

As you mention, particle accelerators that cost enough to bankroll a medium sized war for at least a week only confirm theories and don't reveal new unknown particles.

And our understanding of the universe depends on 90% of it being “Dark Matter.” We don't know what it is, why it's there or what it's doing. But we “know” it exists; after all, all our models agree with it. Of course, Ptolemy said exactly the same of his deferent and the epicycles. Makes me wonder what we'll think of Dark Matter a century from now.

[YNM]

Because the boom is no longer physical ? For example, single-atom field-effect gates pursued by companies are, instead of using QM, hindered by the new discoveries.

On the other hand, data about human interaction is at it's maximum today, and will only continue to grow. AIs incoming I guess.

[Bill Phil]

I think it's alright.

Sure, some examples show that it's slowing down, but recently they got a carbon nanotube transistor to outperform silicon ones. So, it's possible that computers could speed up again. And, of course, there are other things that can improve our current technology. Certain fields slow down, but it tends to be cyclic, slowing down and speeding up many times.

Really, even if our tech was starting to slow down with no possibility of speeding back up, the big changes would be more a matter of scale than anything.

[Finox]

I'd definitely say "Yes" our view of progress is warped, but it depends on your perspective.   If you look at how past ages imagined the future you'll find a common theme; they were always wrong.   People in the 1950's for instance saw progress in transportation all around them and thus imagined a future of flying cars, supersonic airliners, and rockets flying vacationers to the moon by the year 2000!   Clearly they were far off the mark.   The point is that our view of progress is always going to be filtered through the context of whats around us, the age we live in defines our viewpoint.   So in a broad historical context yes our view is warped, but the thing about progress is that it tends to come from where we least expect.   Will technology slowdown?   Maybe in computers, but I guarantee something out there is going to surprise you in the next decade or so.

[mikegarrison]

1 hour ago, Finox said:

I'd definitely say "Yes" our view of progress is warped, but it depends on your perspective.   If you look at how past ages imagined the future you'll find a common theme; they were always wrong.   People in the 1950's for instance saw progress in transportation all around them and thus imagined a future of flying cars, supersonic airliners, and rockets flying vacationers to the moon by the year 2000!   Clearly they were far off the mark.   The point is that our view of progress is always going to be filtered through the context of whats around us, the age we live in defines our viewpoint.   So in a broad historical context yes our view is warped, but the thing about progress is that it tends to come from where we least expect.   Will technology slowdown?   Maybe in computers, but I guarantee something out there is going to surprise you in the next decade or so.

Probably biology. There are so many more options available for research in biology now that computers are powerful enough to model biological processes.

[magnemoe]

2 hours ago, Finox said:

I'd definitely say "Yes" our view of progress is warped, but it depends on your perspective.   If you look at how past ages imagined the future you'll find a common theme; they were always wrong.   People in the 1950's for instance saw progress in transportation all around them and thus imagined a future of flying cars, supersonic airliners, and rockets flying vacationers to the moon by the year 2000!   Clearly they were far off the mark.   The point is that our view of progress is always going to be filtered through the context of whats around us, the age we live in defines our viewpoint.   So in a broad historical context yes our view is warped, but the thing about progress is that it tends to come from where we least expect.   Will technology slowdown?   Maybe in computers, but I guarantee something out there is going to surprise you in the next decade or so.

Yes you look at your own time and see rapid progress in fields so you assume it will continue. 
However most technology follow an trajectory more like an airplane takeoff, you start slow, yes this slow acceleration might last a long time unlike planes,  then you begin to climb faster an faster however this levels out after some time.
You notice change most then you are in the climb phase, computers are the best excample, it had an very long and pretty slow initial climb phase until we got microprocessors then an very rapid climb before slowing down the last years. Starting getting harder to make processors faster and personal computers who is the main marked is fast enough for most.
We see the same on smartphones. 
Sometimes you get new jumps, trains was very mature technology until they started with the fast trains, here it was mostly need and money who drove it. 
Its another think lots is driven by money, either its an need so technology get improved but just as often everybody invest in something during the start of the rapid climb phase. 

Today it looks like material technology, AI technology and genetic engineering is in the start of climb phase. 
 

[RainDreamer]

Also social progress are progress as well.

But I think in terms of technological progress, we are about to hit the physical limits of what we can do unless we discover a new understanding of the universe. Moore's law is about to meet it's end, as eventually we get to a point we can't just shrink the processor any more. 

[Nuke]

biotech might be a new frontier. it seems ever year they come out with new and improved ways to hack genetics.

fusion has much been a failure because they insist on going the path of most expense. there are at least 3 entities claiming breakeven fusion by 2020. but if we can make it so fusion is always 4 years away that would be an improvement over 30/50/whatever the number is.

as far as computing goes we still have some wiggle room. were meeting the limits of what can be done 2 dimensionally. however as we get better at incorporating nanotubes into our processors, even if just as heat pipes, it will allow us to build our cpus more 3-dimentionally. were already using 3d transistors to pack them in tighter, and eventually we will move towards stacked configurations. we will also be seeing more quantum exploitation as our transistors get closer to their limit. not to be confused with quantum computing, that is something different. were talking exploiting quantum effects in classic computers.

nanotech seems to be improving too.

its not that we have reached a peak in our progress, its just the technologies we associate with progress are reaching their limits. that is not to say there wont be new frontiers.

[Steel]

38 minutes ago, Nuke said:

its not that we have reached a peak in our progress, its just the technologies we associate with progress are reaching their limits. that is not to say there wont be new frontiers.

Exactly my thoughts!

I'm sure at some point someone thought that we'd never be able to travel any quicker because trains were almost as fast as they could get, then... BAM, the aeroplane is born (I'm sure it went something like that anyway) 

To put it another way, if we still measured progress by how good our steam engines had gotten,  we wouldn't have progressed much in the past century or so

Edited September 17, 2016 by Steel

[DDE]

13 hours ago, Steel said:

I'm sure at some point someone thought that we'd never be able to travel any quicker because trains were almost as fast as they could get, then... BAM, the aeroplane is born (I'm sure it went something like that anyway) 

To put it another way, if we still measured progress by how good our steam engines had gotten,  we wouldn't have progressed much in the past century or so

I dare say it wasn't that sudden. Many inventions get conceptualized for centuries before they can be delivered.

For example, the Wrights weren't the only ones to have an aeroplane in mind. There was a whole bunch of attempts with steam engines, and the gliders had been built before them. More often than not, an invention is just a combination of technologies that has not yet been attempted.

[Frozen_Heart]

There is also the counterview. Plenty of people of every generation think that we have reached the height of technology, all there is to discover has been discovered, and all there is to invent has been invented. They have always been wrong.

 

Technology will continue advancing for as long as the human race exists (bar something bad happening like the apocalypse)

[manaiaK]

21 minutes ago, Frozen_Heart said:

There is also the counterview. Plenty of people of every generation think that we have reached the height of technology, all there is to discover has been discovered, and all there is to invent has been invented. They have always been wrong.

Technology will continue advancing for as long as the human race exists (bar something bad happening like the apocalypse)

No, they haven't always been wrong.  For about 50,000 - 80,000 years, 95% of the species's existence, they were right. Nothing changed in anyone's lifetime.

The rapid advance of technology in the last three centuries came about because for the first time, the idea that all humans are created equal was taken seriously, and the idea that it was possible to get rich and respected through trade (making and selling things), rather than just by being born to wealth or fighting and taking wealth from other people also took hold.

If we stop believing that *everyone* deserves equal treatment under the law, or if it gets to be too hard to get rich by making new things, progress will stop. Seems to me that both of these are going the wrong way, but only a little so far.

Edited September 17, 2016 by manaiaK
'y' -> 'e'.

[magnemoe]

55 minutes ago, DDE said:

I dare say it wasn't that sudden. Many inventions get conceptualized for centuries before they can be delivered.

For example, the Wrights weren't the only ones to have an aeroplane in mind. There was a whole bunch of attempts with steam engines, and the gliders had been built before them. More often than not, an invention is just a combination of technologies that has not yet been attempted.

Yes, an Frenchman was actually the first to do powered flight however it used an steam engine who was under-powered, he flew shorter than Wrights first flight and could not control it. 
No followup flights so he probably crashlanded. The Wrights plane was an workable design who was used a lot the first years.
Had we not had the Wrights someone else would succeed in a few years. 

Now some technology is pretty obvious, birds fly so its possible, the rest is engineering. 
Most require a lot of work to get something useful, steam engine ideas date back to the ancient Greek and it was plenty experiments from 1500 and outward.
Other stuff is random, antibiotics is most famous, the drug industry do an lot of large scale searching to see if they find something useful. 

Now if we go back in time you get far more randomness, yes the one with the first idea is often unknown. 
Some are a bit weird: stirrup, we have used horses since the bronze age but let us wait 4000 year before we invent an simple way to make them easier to ride.
Horse collar require some knowledge of an horse anatomy but also easy. 
Printing press, you could make them easy in the ancient Egypt. 
 

[magnemoe]

48 minutes ago, manaiaK said:

No, they haven't always been wrong.  For about 50,000 - 80,000 years, 95% of the species's existence, they were right. Nothing changed in anyone's lifetime.

The rapid advance of technology in the last three centuries came about because for the first time, the idea that all humans are created equal was taken seriously, and the idea that it was possibly to get rich and respected through trade (making and selling things), rather than just by being born to wealth or fighting and taking wealth from other people also took hold.

If we stop believing that *everyone* deserves equal treatment under the law, or if it gets to be too hard to get rich by making new things, progress will stop. Seems to me that both of these are going the wrong way, but only a little so far.

The industrial revolution was an singularity event. Nobody living before could imagine how the word would be afterwards.
Increased democracy had an role as you say, however the real driver was that unlike earlier times the increase in productivity was faster than the population growth. You got an surplus, some of this was reinvested in more factories and you got exponential growth. 
Education and equality became more important later as the first obvious inventions was made, by this time you could afford it as you was way richer than before.  


 

[Nibb31]

7 hours ago, Frozen_Heart said:

Technology will continue advancing for as long as the human race exists (bar something bad happening like the apocalypse)

The question is the shape of the curve of that advancement. The actual curve, going 50000 years back, is probably an exponential one, with a few flatter areas now and then. There is no reason to believe that it will remain exponential, or even linear, forever.

In fact, much depends on the area. There are many curves that cover the many fields of science. For example, the field of fluid dynamics went exponential in the 1940's to 1960's, but advancement in that field is probably linear or logarithmic now.

[mikegarrison]

9 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Yes, an Frenchman was actually the first to do powered flight however it used an steam engine who was under-powered, he flew shorter than Wrights first flight and could not control it.

What "Frenchman"? Ader? It's generally understood that "flight" involves control together with at least some period of time when lift >= weight. There is no evidence that anyone accomplished this before the Wrights. In contrast, there is incontrovertible evidence that the Wrights accomplished it.

Edited September 18, 2016 by mikegarrison

[magnemoe]

17 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

What "Frenchman"? Ader? It's generally understood that "flight" involves control together with at least some period of time when lift >= weight. There is no evidence that anyone accomplished this before the Wrights. In contrast, there is incontrovertible evidence that the Wrights accomplished it.

As I said, he managed to do small jumps, not controlled flight. Wrights did not only build an prototype but an usable plane. 

[DDE]

3 hours ago, Nibb31 said:

The question is the shape of the curve of that advancement. The actual curve, going 50000 years back, is probably an exponential one, with a few flatter areas now and then. There is no reason to believe that it will remain exponential, or even linear, forever.

In fact, much depends on the area. There are many curves that cover the many fields of science. For example, the field of fluid dynamics went exponential in the 1940's to 1960's, but advancement in that field is probably linear or logarithmic now.

Actually, if I remember it right, I've seen a breakdown by fields, which lead to a number of intersecting parabolic curves (lifecycles of disciplines) of different height intersecting; with IT entering the stagnation period biotech being on the rise now.

[Nibb31]

1 hour ago, mikegarrison said:

What "Frenchman"? Ader? It's generally understood that "flight" involves control together with at least some period of time when lift >= weight. There is no evidence that anyone accomplished this before the Wrights. In contrast, there is incontrovertible evidence that the Wrights accomplished it.

It's really down to a question of semantics. Powered flight != controlled flight

Clement Ader was the first to succeed in powered flight, although over a short distance. No, it wasn't practical, it had no application, and the whole project was abandoned. When you look at the design of his "Avion", it was more out of sheer luck than sound engineering, but it did achieve a positive lift/weight ratio over a very short distance.

There were also plenty of unmanned powered aeroplanes that existed before the Wrights' attempts as well as manned gliders with some form of control. One can't really say that they invented "flight", as there was a lot of research and many different projects going on at the same time. It was only a matter of time before someone would have done what they did. But they definitely capitalized and expanded on that knowledge.

The Wrights did invent "controlled powered flight" and the first manned aeroplane based on proper engineering and an actual understanding of physics. They also had a good understanding of business and how to make money with their invention, which is also a large part of their success.

Edited September 18, 2016 by Nibb31

[kerbiloid]

On 17.09.2016 at 3:50 AM, todofwar said:

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

When water is already 373 K hot, it still needs several times more energy to boil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_heat

[manaiaK]

On 18/09/2016 at 11:54 AM, magnemoe said:

Education and equality became more important later as the first obvious inventions was made, by this time you could afford it as you was way richer than before. 

Actually, hundreds of years earlier. Gutenberg's printing press took off because everyone wanted to read the Bible for themselves, not just take the word of some priest for what it  said -- and they were allowed to, because a (relatively wealthy) peasant's or artisan's soul had equal value to that of a priest or a nobleman. So they, as well as nobility and priests, had the right to decide for themselves whether or not they were being led into heresy. Note: the idea of equality preceded the invention.

(Extending the idea to the landless poor, women and people with brown skins, now: that took a bit longer.   )

22 hours ago, Nibb31 said:

The question is the shape of the curve of that advancement. The actual curve, going 50000 years back, is probably an exponential one, with a few flatter areas now and then. There is no reason to believe that it will remain exponential, or even linear, forever.

This is the heart of the question. Pretty much every example from nature is an 'S' shaped curve, or two 'S's back-to-back (a bell curve).  That's not conclusive, but it indicates we need strong reasons to believe that this time is different. Just saying "Humans are clever!!11!one!" doesn't cut it.

Edited September 19, 2016 by manaiaK
Add note to first para.

[magnemoe]

3 minutes ago, manaiaK said:

Actually, hundreds of years earlier. Gutenberg's printing press took off because everyone wanted to read the Bible for themselves, not just take the word of some priest for what it  said -- and they were allowed to, because a (relatively wealthy) peasant's or artisan's soul had equal value to that of a priest or a nobleman. So they, as well as nobility and priests, had the right to decide for themselves whether or not they were being led into heresy. Radical stuff.

(Extending the idea to the landless poor, women and people with brown skins, now: that took a bit longer.   )

Yes, the printing press was extremely important, probably an requirement or at least an speed up of an magnitude of all the science discoveries during the 15-17 century. 
As I wrote over it was long overdue too, printing would be very lucrative in the roman empire.  
Main benefit was more that it increased the information flow and as you say made it more public, the people who started the industrial revolution did not work at an university. 
 

[manaiaK]

21 hours ago, magnemoe said:

As I wrote over it was long overdue too, printing would be very lucrative in the roman empire. 

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...

[Nefrums]

5 hours ago, manaiaK said:

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

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

And when I say wrong I don't mean that general relativity is incorrect, but rather that it is not general enough. Just like special relativity it does a good jobb of explaining a special case.  More general than the special relativity but not completely general.