# Has technological progress slowed over the last 50 years?



## Justin Swanton (Jan 5, 2022)

I really should shut up at this point but can't help responding to a few comments. As a preamble, the James Webb telescope apparently will have the ability to study planets in other systems directly and that will be fascinating. I don't know if it will be able to determine if a planet is actually habitable - probably not as so much goes into habitability - but it will add exponentially to what we know about those planets. Anyhow...


> You are right that the laws of physics aren't going to change...
> 
> ...but then they didn't change before, but this hasn't stopped us from developing technologies that utilise our ever-growing understanding of what those laws are and mean.
> 
> On the other hand, ignorance, and a lack of will to overcome our ignorance, can stop us dead in our tracks.


There have been a few discussions on the fact that for the last couple of centuries there hasn't been any lack of will to overcome ignorance. Things like the James Webb telescope demonstrate the opposite. The point is that theoretical knowledge was necessary before technology could advance. We had to have some idea of what electricity was before being able to harness it. I suggest that for the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries advances in theoretical knowledge were soon followed by practical applications, but from the second half of the 20th century until now theoretical knowledge has continued to advance but practical applications have fallen off. There is an enormous motivation for technological progress - our entire civilisation is founded on that progress - but it has nonetheless declined in more and more fields, and it's not possible to open new fields like antimatter powerplants as physics at that level is just too difficult to manipulate. A lot of i-dotting and t-crossing but how many dramatic breakthroughs?



> I say, yes. I would find it boring to live in a world where everything was explained, where there is nothing new to be discovered, where there is no sense of wonder. I agree that there are practical things that humanity can and should expend time and effort on, but what may be the defining characteristic of mankind is the search for knowledge for which practical use is currently unknown and may never be discovered. Man has often wondered how it all began and now there is an opportunity to test the ideas, to prove and disprove, and fundamentally alter our understanding. The various experiments are evidence that men can actually do wonderous things, despite repeated evidence in our daily lives that we fall short in many of our most basic tasks. The quest for increased understanding of what may never be fully understood is what can give us hope.


Agree with most of this. There is a reason why ancient cartographers put "Here be dragons" in the blank spaces rather than "Here be more goats." Curiosity with its attached capacity for wonder is a powerful thing. Perhaps rather peculiar since modern science as a complete explanation for the Cosmos rather kills curiosity. If all reality is built just on some properties of atoms and subatomic particles then what's the big deal? I suspect though that there is more behind projects like the telescope than simple curiosity. More and more I see an imperative to demonstrate that our technological future is bright and that there will be nothing we can't do, sooner or later. It sounds cynical, but IMHO there is a huge amount of PR behind these projects, aimed at cementing confidence in our techno-industrial civilisation.



> Entropy still exists. An orbiting satellite is in a constant state of free fall; without some sort of altitude boost, all satellites fall to Earth. Energy conversion and storage degrade over time. Satellites are frozen in their technical capabilities; what was launched years ago falls short of what we could ask of the devices today. The ones launched today will fall short in answering the questions of the future.


Sure. A satellite orbiting close to a planet with an atmosphere will eventually be dragged in by that atmosphere, but I wasn't thinking of that. And yes, power sources like RTGs eventually run out of power. The point isn't that satellites run forever in space, but that they have often run longer than expected. And of course they don't self-upgrade. They just last longer.


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## Ursa major (Jan 5, 2022)

Justin Swanton said:


> There have been a few discussions on the fact that for the last couple of centuries there hasn't been any lack of will to overcome ignorance. Things like the James Webb telescope demonstrate the opposite. The point is that theoretical knowledge was necessary before technology could advance. We had to have some idea of what electricity was before being able to harness it. I suggest that for the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries advances in theoretical knowledge were soon followed by practical applications, but from the second half of the 20th century until now theoretical knowledge has continued to advance but practical applications have fallen off. There is an enormous motivation for technological progress - our entire civilisation is founded on that progress - but it has nonetheless declined in more and more fields, and it's not possible to open new fields like antimatter powerplants as physics at that level is just too difficult to manipulate. A lot of i-dotting and t-crossing but how many dramatic breakthroughs?


Science (both theory and practice) is much wider than physics, you know... for which we should, during a pandemic caused by a novel virus, all be very grateful.


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## Justin Swanton (Jan 9, 2022)

Aknot said:


> It’s already a struggle for many fields that basic research does not have the funding it needs nor attracts enough researchers. Mainly due to the question you ask: what’s the use of it. But if all research was specialized it would leave gaps in our understanding that down the line will hinder further steps. Plus the fact that specialized research often means proprietary results while basic research tends to be shared for the betterment of all. However, we’re approaching the dreaded political part of this discussion so I’ll leave it there


I've not done a comprehensive analysis of this and a comprehensive analysis is what it needs, but my impression is that research requires more and more high-grade technology to make any significant advances and those advances are less dramatic than what we were getting two centuries or a century ago. I mean, a single individual in the early 19th century could largely figure out what electricity was and then invent an electric motor, all by himself. Now you need a multi-million dollar lab or more to push theoretical knowledge in physics any further. The motivation for knowledge is certainly there (a $4,4 billion collider?) but could the hesitation be that too little of too little use is being discovered? Actually this needs a book to analyse it properly.

Edit: I just realised this is becoming repetitive. Probably better to stick to what's happening with the telescope.


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## Ursa major (Jan 9, 2022)

Justin Swanton said:


> but could the hesitation that too little of too little use is being discovered?


What hesitation would that be? And how do you know that too little of too little use is being discovered?


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## Justin Swanton (Jan 9, 2022)

Ursa major said:


> What hesitation would that be? And how do you know that too little of too little use is being discovered?


Just answering Aknot. I propose that the last major advance in technology was the successful miniaturisation of computers in the 1980s onwards, leading to the internet and iphones. For technology that physically improves our lives - transport, power, homes and home appliances and so on - I'm not aware of anything spectacular since 1970 or so, but theoretical research in physics has made major advances since that date.

I can't really speak with confidence re medical research. How many major breakthroughs have there been as opposed to using older methods to cure newer diseases, such as developing new vaccines? mRNA tech is new, but it will be years before its effectiveness and safety have been confirmed.

Anyhow I'm quite happy to get back to the telescope.


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## Ursa major (Jan 9, 2022)

Justin Swanton said:


> Just answering Aknot.


Really? He didn't mention hesitation, just something we can see in just about every sphere of life, i.e. that there's never enough money around to do everything we'd like to see done. And because we see that in just about _every_ sphere of life, the lack of money in any one sphere can impact the availability of money in one or more of the others.

So what we're really seeing is that, building on the individual work you mention and all the work done between then and now (sometimes by individuals, often by teams), there are so many things to investigate further that countless decisions are made as to which research gets the money (sufficient or not) and which doesn't. Oh, and I don't think Aknot mentioned insufficient discoveries being made either.

So other than what you can think of, where do you get the idea that "too little of too little use is being discovered"? Are there records made of the number of discoveries being made? Are there records of how many of those being made are of little use (with a definition of what "little"** and "use" mean in context)? And are these records, if they exist, comprehensive? The last seems unlikely: as Aknot did mention,


Aknot said:


> specialized research often means proprietary results


which means that only those doing the research, and the companies funding them, know what's been and being done and how successfully. (Note that a lot of companies do not report their failures, whether in research or not, and they often don't report their successes if a discovery takes time to be turned into something saleable, i.e. there's no point Company A telling the competitors about something that they might put on the market before Company A can.)


** - Some of the decisions made about what use something depends on how much money it makes (or could make). A drug that can be used to cure or ameliorate a condition that affects a few dozen, or a few hundred people, but whose development costs hundreds of millions, or more, is not going to find enough (or any) buyers to make that drug break even (and that's without worrying about who it might be tested on before it goes on sale). On the other hand, the drug's potential recipients would find it of great use, if their condition were to be life-threatening.


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## Justin Swanton (Jan 10, 2022)

Ursa major said:


> Really? He didn't mention hesitation, just something we can see in just about every sphere of life, i.e. that there's never enough money around to do everything we'd like to see done. And because we see that in just about _every_ sphere of life, the lack of money in any one sphere can impact the availability of money in one or more of the others.


I suspect (rather hamstrung here as I don't have detailed statistical data) that there are problems with funding research because more advanced and hence more expensive tech is needed to push research further.

Take the James Webb telescope. It can see further in infrared than the Hubble can in visible light, but whereas the Hubble cost about US$200 million to develop and construct, the James Webb cost US$5 billion. It's a bit like the Concord. The practical limits of commercial flight seem to be subsonic jets (in terms of speed and range the most recent Airbus jets don't do significantly better than the 1952 Comet). Going supersonic with the Concord was technologically feasible, but it was far more expensive and could not be made to be profitable, so the Concord was eventually scrapped. With research funding there seems a limit to how far governments are willing to go. Take the Superconducting Super Collider - it was to be much larger and more capable than the largest existing colliders, but was cancelled because it cost too much. That's hesitation (or rather regret after US$2 billion had been spent of a budget of US$10 billion).



> So what we're really seeing is that, building on the individual work you mention and all the work done between then and now (sometimes by individuals, often by teams), there are so many things to investigate further that countless decisions are made as to which research gets the money (sufficient or not) and which doesn't. Oh, and I don't think Aknot mentioned insufficient discoveries being made either.


Again, research these days seems largely to require lots of staff, lots of hi-tech equipment and truckloads of money. Only so much money in govt coffers. The days of the solitary researcher making a momentous discovery in his garage are long gone.

Re insufficient discoveries, I think I'm on firm ground in affirming that there have been no real technological breakthroughs in the last 50 years - with the exception of information technology - that have materially improved our lives. We're no nearer the Jetsons' lifestyle today than we were 50 years ago. Take something as basic as food. Corn production in the US had been a steady 26 bushels per acre from when records first started in the 1800s until the mid 1930s. From that point, double-cross hybrid corn increased the yield by 0.8 bushels per acre each year. In the 1950s, genetic improvements in hybrid corn, fertilizer, and other developments increased the yield to 1.9 bushels per acre each year, and that increase has been constant until the present. Notice that it is the absolute increase that has been constant. The proportional increase has dropped off steadily. Later genetic techniques, especially techniques developed in the 1990s, have not affected this increase and the proportional decline continues up to today.


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## Ursa major (Jan 10, 2022)

Justin Swanton said:


> (rather hamstrung here as I don't have detailed statistical data)


So you _do_ have either not-very detailed, or not-at-all detailed statistical data, then?

Care to share?


(Frankly, it's rather a relief not to face the prospect of having to look through detailed data -- at practically _any_ level of detail -- when even a very high-level view is likely to involve seeing rather a lot of data.)


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## Justin Swanton (Jan 10, 2022)

Ursa major said:


> So you _do_ have either not-very detailed, or not-at-all detailed statistical data, then?
> 
> Care to share?


I've done it elsewhere and I don't think anyone wants me to rehash it here. What is needed is a history of scientific and technological progress over the past four centuries, detailing how theoretical breakthroughs in physics, chemistry and biology accompanied technological progress in those fields, and then evaluating the importance of each theoretical and practical advance to determine how quickly and for how long a particular field of technology moves forward and whether later advances are as substantial as earlier ones. I tried doing it for a couple of select areas like motorised and aerial transport but it would be a huge amount of work to do it for every branch of technology and I doubt anyone would want to read the end result anyway.


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## Ursa major (Jan 10, 2022)

Justin Swanton said:


> I've done it elsewhere and I don't think anyone wants me to rehash it here


A link would do.


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## Brian G Turner (Jan 10, 2022)

Justin Swanton said:


> We're no nearer the Jetsons' lifestyle today than we were 50 years ago.



Well, I wouldn't rush to gauge scientific progress by old cartoons, any more than I would use the Flintstones to judge archaeology. 

In the meantime, I've moved these posts from the JWST thread to keep it on topic.


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## Foxbat (Jan 10, 2022)

Quantum computing and fusion may be breakthroughs that we make in the next few years.

I (in my completely uninformed view) feel what is actually being described here is the law of diminishing returns. It’s not that there won’t be new discoveries, just that they get more difficult to make the deeper we delve into a subject.


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## Dave (Jan 10, 2022)

Predictions about the end of Physics are also nothing new, but rarely correct:









						Lord Kelvin and the End of Physics, which he Never Predicted
					

Discover the story of Lord Kelvin, whom no trial will absolve of having declared in 1900 the death of physics ... even though he never did.




					www.bbvaopenmind.com


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## Serendipity (Jan 10, 2022)

'No significant technological breakthroughs in the last 50 years' - sorry I had to groan at this statement from above, because I could write a textbook in response to this. So I'll stick to a few points.

1) The internet was invented 1st January 1983 (give or take a year or two) - which is c. 38 years ago - and look where that has got us (this forum among other things).
2) One of the issues why many people think there are a lack of technological breakthroughs is the lack of popular science magazine communications that catch the people's imaginations. The science fiction publishing industry seems to have given up this function some time ago (not sure there's a UK SF publishing industry any more - but that's another issue).
3) Quantum computers are already producing results - just they're not to problems that we've been trying on our more conventional computers because the technology deals with fundamentally different problem types. The trouble is it's the commercial people doing it, so you won't get much in the way of publicity about what's going on.
4) As for the laws of physics - we need to extend Maxwell's standard electromagnetic equations to include magnetic monopoles, which are required to exist because discrete electrostatic charges exist (derived through quantum physics), but we don't because there is little in the way of potential applications at the moment.
5) I'd better stop here...


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## Montero (Jan 10, 2022)

My suspicion is that many of the game changing discoveries for humans are happening in biology and medicine - and in part this is based on the development of far superior scanning technology such as MRI. With any field, the big advances happen when the tools are developed - and bootstrapping up on the tools can take decades.
A few examples - none actually involving MRI
1. Watching documentaries on surgery at Addenbrookes and Papworth at the moment - and they are now capable of doing a two day surgery for a very complicated cancer.
2. An article I posted over in the Science and Nature forum earlier - about work that has shown how very differently people's bodies respond to the same food, due to different gut biome.
3. The discovery a decade or so back that some stomach cancers were due in part to intestinal bacteria that tended to be passed down through families through contact, and bumping them off was a great, and easy, way to stop the stomach cancer that had been running in the families.
4. Shockwave therapy - I've been seeing osteopaths, physios and podiatrists on and off for the last 30 years. A new development is shockwave therapy which essentially does microdamage to the site of an old injury and prompts the body to regard it as a new acute injury and so get to work on healing it, as opposed to it being an old chronic injury that the body was ignoring. Made a massive difference to me.
5. Bacteriophages - and why the heck we are not adopting them in this country I do not know

I am also seeing a lot of new material coming out on animal behavior, with science finally getting away from "ooh no, no anthropomorphism" and actually looking at animals emotions (which is different from anthropomorphism, but an...ism was putting people off from talking about animal emotions).


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## Aknot (Jan 10, 2022)

Thread title should have a click bait warning ;D

Without a definition of what a major scientific breakthrough is I guess it can always be stated. Does finding Higgs-Boson count as much as having a proverbial apple drop on your head? Creating a nuke versus Crispr? Landing a rocket safely for reuse after sending a payload into orbit compared to just getting it up there? A thousand songs in your pocket compared to the gramophone?

I would say there are plenty of major breakthroughs. Actually, I would guess there are several times as many happening in the last 50 years compared to the 50 years prior. But also that there are so many that we don’t know of them, don’t understand them and/or can’t see them as major because of the amount of them.


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## Foxbat (Jan 11, 2022)

Perhaps the problem with new technologies is not the lack of but that they enter our lives and become  so intertwined so quickly that we don’t even regard them as technological breakthroughs.

Ask a youngster nowadays and they would probably claim that owning a mobile phone is an inalienable human right but,  thirty years ago, nobody would have cared.


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## Dave (Jan 11, 2022)

Foxbat said:


> Ask a youngster nowadays and they would probably claim that owning a mobile phone is an inalienable human right but, thirty years ago, nobody would have cared.


When my son was about 8 or 9 he couldn't believe that personal computers didn't exist when I was his age. He thought I was lying to him. 

We couldn't function without the internet and mobile phones today, especially during the pandemic. All the old-fashioned ways of doing what we do with phones, tablets and laptops every day have largely disappeared - address books, phone books, landlines and telephone boxes, bank branches, cheque books, local newspapers (with TV guides and weather reports), cameras and photograph albums, calculators, vinyl and CDs, VHS, DVDs.....


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## Foxbat (Jan 11, 2022)

It reminds me of one of my (younger) work colleagues. He was fussing about with his mobile one lunchtime and looked a bit peed off, When I asked him what was wrong he replied that somebody he’d been trying to contact wasn’t answering the text he’d sent. I then asked him if he’d thought about actually phoning the person. It turned out that he hadn’t thought of that. 

I suppose it makes me a grumpy old man that I can now say with all sincerity ‘youngsters nowadays‘


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## Dave (Jan 11, 2022)

Let me say first that I don't agree with the premise of this thread at all, but even so, and as a kind of aside (and sorry if this is now too much of a tangent), but I think the problem that some of us... cough! ....older members of SFFChrons might have is that "50 years ago" is living memory to us, and therefore it doesn't seem long ago to us. It doesn't seem like "history" at all, and more like "current affairs", however, the world has changed a great deal even if we ourselves have not.



			Remember the 1970s - Den Gamle By
		


I've been to this museum in Aarhus a few times and it has a 1974 exhibition area. It is amazing how much has changed since the 1974 - party line (shared subscriber) telephones, 8-track cassette tape recorders, photographic developing equipment, voice recorders, "pocket" calculators that were the size of a brick, Atari video game consoles, TV rental shops, bell-bottom jeans...

We also have a thread at SFFChrons to reminisce:  Old Tech thread


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## Av Demeisen (Jan 11, 2022)

Justin Swanton said:


> I really should shut up at this point but can't help responding to a few comments.


Caught up with evolution by natural selection already, Justin?


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## CupofJoe (Jan 11, 2022)

Man gets genetically-modified pig heart in world-first transplant
					

David Bennett, 57, is doing well three days after the experimental surgery, doctors say.



					www.bbc.co.uk


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## Av Demeisen (Jan 11, 2022)

CupofJoe said:


> Man gets genetically-modified pig heart in world-first transplant
> 
> 
> David Bennett, 57, is doing well three days after the experimental surgery, doctors say.
> ...


"To the sacred banks of the Nile..."


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## Justin Swanton (Jan 11, 2022)

Av Demeisen said:


> Caught up with evolution by natural selection already, Justin?


Weeelll...I was thinking more on the lines of the limitations of Intelligent Design...


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## Justin Swanton (Jan 11, 2022)

Brian G Turner said:


> Well, I wouldn't rush to gauge scientific progress by old cartoons, any more than I would use the Flintstones to judge archaeology.
> 
> In the meantime, I've moved these posts from the JWST thread to keep it on topic.



Thanks for splitting the thread. I was getting uncomfortable with the extent to which the topic was getting derailed.

The Jetsons just illustrates that the future imagined in the 1950's has fallen well short of expectations. Everyone in the 50's and 60's expected things to get much further by 2000 than they have. I think this is an indication of how fast progress was moving in the middle of the 20th century, with the presumption that progress would continue just as fast in the decades ahead.


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## CupofJoe (Jan 11, 2022)

I would be very wary of taking any entertainment source as a reliable guide to the future. At best it is an aspiration or an ideal.
 Look at Blade Runner. We are 3 years past its date and I don't see any Nexus walking about [or could I tell if they were?  ], there are no giant floating billboard, and no-one has been to the Tannhauser Gate.
Very few have ever prophesised the future correctly. Or if they have, it was mainly by luck. 
The future will far more complicated that we currently know. And it always has been.
We still don't have usable flying cars.
No-one really talks about Monorails any more [apart from The Simpsons  ]. Or Airships 
There never were atomic aircraft or atomic rockets. Or underwater cities.
We have been promised fully autonomous vehicles for many years and they are only just becoming practical vehicles.
The same goes for robot butlers.
And superfast underground travel is still in the experimental stage, and may never work commercially.
But other things have happened. 
Look at Covid. It was identified in 2019 and in about a year there there were not just one but several vaccines ready. A process that usually take several years was completed in months by using new methods of design and analysis.
There are new technologies and advancements all the time. But as others have said we take them for granted. We assume this is how it has always been.
I don't think there will be any big WOW moments for technology in the future.
People on Mars maybe... Or discovery of earth-like life elsewhere. Or maybe a real working teleportation system. But even that might just be an upgrade to your phone package.


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## Foxbat (Jan 11, 2022)

CupofJoe said:


> There never were atomic aircraft or atomic rockets.


The prophets of tech came close with this one. The Soviets flew the Tupolev Tu-95LAL around 40 times between 1961 and 65. Sometimes, the reactor was switched on but at no point was it actually used to propel the craft. The test flights were mainly to check the effectiveness of the reactor shielding.

 The advent of ICBMs made the idea of  a  nuclear plane pretty obsolete but I wonder what kind of world it would have been if this path had been followed and atomic aircraft became commonplace. Imagine the problems of investigating a plane crash site complete with damaged nuclear reactor!!!

This document mentions the TU-95LAL and has a portion of the relevant blueprint.


			https://enseccoe.org/data/public/uploads/2021/10/d1_the-future-role-of-nuclear-propulsion-in-the-military.pdf


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## Pyan (Jan 11, 2022)

However, there were several US Navy aircraft carriers that were (and are) powered by reactors, including the USS_ Enterprise_ (CVN-65) and her replacement (CVN-80). There was a cargo/passenger ship, too, the _Savannah_, and the Soviet ice-breaker, _Lenin_.


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## BAYLOR (Jan 11, 2022)

Im mystified and stunned by this.


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## Judderman (Jan 11, 2022)

I think technological advances have accelerated over the last 50 years, as there is so much improving rapidly.
Maybe individual jumps are smaller than such as inventing the wheel, or the printing press, or the first vaccine etc. But in so many aspects if you have something from 10 years ago the technology in it can seem very dated. 
We are somewhat numbed to many things in the world, including advancement, partly because we see much through media including social media. Plus most of us have comfortable lives so are not transformed by such as a first washing machine.


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## Wayne Mack (Jan 11, 2022)

I am a little unsure about the premise behind this thread. Perhaps it could be restated?

The idea that there has been no technological progress in 50 years, 1972 - 2022, is easily refuted. Today, we utilize a myriad of technical devices on a daily basis that would be astounding to a person from 1972. Likewise, many of the technical devices used in 1972 are obsolete. I am not sure, though, whether this is the underpinning for the raised point.

There have also been advances in scientific knowledge that have not led to new technical devices. Maybe some of this new found knowledge may never be exploited as consumable goods; maybe we never use the knowledge of sub-atomic particles or of the origins of the universe to manufacture some tangible device. Does this mean, however, that this knowledge is without value?

Instead of believing that technical advancement is the aim and basic knowledge is only valuable if it furthers that aim, I suggest that technical advances are just the lucky happenstance of gaining knowledge. I further suggest that the unique characteristic of mankind is the desire to understand the world around us. In addressing this basic need, yes, sometimes we find further ways to modify the environment around us to improve our everyday lives. This is an outgrowth of address our search for knowledge, not the purpose of it.

Thank goodness for curiosity, without we would no longer be human.


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## Justin Swanton (Jan 11, 2022)

Just to clarify, the thread title needs a little modification. The question is about technological breakthroughs in particular, not scientific breakthroughs in general. As stated, scientific knowledge has steadily progressed through the 20th century and into the 21st. Nobody has disputed that. There have also been some technological breakthroughs in the second half of the 20th century like the miniaturisation of computers, allowing for iphones and the internet. Nobody disputed that either. The question is whether practical application has lagged behind theoretical advances over the last 50 years, and whether the fields of technological progress are closing off, one after the other, with far less overall progress now than 50 or 70 years ago.

So perhaps rename this thread: *Has Technological Progress Slowed Over the Last 50 Years?*


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## Justin Swanton (Jan 11, 2022)

Serendipity said:


> 'No significant technological breakthroughs in the last 50 years' - sorry I had to groan at this statement from above, because I could write a textbook in response to this. So I'll stick to a few points.
> 
> 1) The internet was invented 1st January 1983 (give or take a year or two) - which is c. 38 years ago - and look where that has got us (this forum among other things).


This was covered in post #5.



Serendipity said:


> 2) One of the issues why many people think there are a lack of technological breakthroughs is the lack of popular science magazine communications that catch the people's imaginations. The science fiction publishing industry seems to have given up this function some time ago (not sure there's a UK SF publishing industry any more - but that's another issue).


Or one can argue that an overall decline in progress has rather pulled the rug from popular science magazines and SF books. Notice how nobody today is talking about a colonised solar system in 2060?



Serendipity said:


> 3) Quantum computers are already producing results - just they're not to problems that we've been trying on our more conventional computers because the technology deals with fundamentally different problem types. The trouble is it's the commercial people doing it, so you won't get much in the way of publicity about what's going on.


Quantum computers seem rather specialised - there are plenty of calculations a normal binary code computer can do just as well. They are enormously expensive to build and it appears very difficult to maintain the conditions necessary for them to function reliably. Time will tell whether they are the computing equivalent of a gold-plated Concord.



Serendipity said:


> 4) As for the laws of physics - we need to extend Maxwell's standard electromagnetic equations to include magnetic monopoles, which are required to exist because discrete electrostatic charges exist (derived through quantum physics), but we don't because there is little in the way of potential applications at the moment.


I can't comment on this. Just looking at practical applications that already exist.



Serendipity said:


> 5) I'd better stop here...


No! Carry on!


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## Justin Swanton (Jan 11, 2022)

Pyan said:


> However, there were several US Navy aircraft carriers that were (and are) powered by reactors, including the USS_ Enterprise_ (CVN-65) and her replacement (CVN-80). There was a cargo/passenger ship, too, the _Savannah_, and the Soviet ice-breaker, _Lenin_.


The Nimitz class carriers were designed in the 1960s and construction began in 1968, with the first carrier commissioned in 1975. So I would suggest it fits within the timeframe of nothing dramatic since 1970.

There have been significant advances in military tech since 1970, sure. Notice however that a longer period of time passes before the next advance, and each new advance costs more than the previous one, with the F-35 being the supreme example. Best fighter in the world but at a development cost of US$1 trillion.


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## Wayne Mack (Jan 11, 2022)

I suggest that there is a separation between 'technological breakthroughs' and 'technological progress.' I view technology improving on an incremental basis; the major technical capabilities of today did not come forth in some magical moment, but were the result of a slow enhancement process. What may be wonderous in the future likely exists today in a form that seems more a curiosity than a powerful tool. Furthermore, technical enhancement are bound in a feedback loop of manufacturing capability and consumer demand. A technology that can't be easily and cheaply manufactured cannot become a breakthrough. A cheap and easy to manufacture technology cannot become commonplace, if there is no consumer desire to use it. If there is no desire to use a technology, there is no reason to improve the technology nor its manufacture.

Some of the current technologies that might make the leap to being ubiquitous are: three-d printing, automated delivery (either aerial drone based device or ground based device), and virtual environments. Any of these that come to pass will occur not based on some breakthrough event at some point in time, but through incremental enhancement.


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## Pyan (Jan 11, 2022)

Justin Swanton said:


> The Nimitz class carriers were designed in the 1960s and construction began in 1968, with the first carrier commissioned in 1975. So I would suggest it fits within the timeframe of nothing dramatic since 1970.
> 
> There have been significant advances in military tech since 1970, sure. Notice however that a longer period of time passes before the next advance, and each new advance costs more than the previous one, with the F-35 being the supreme example. Best fighter in the world but at a development cost of US$1 trillion.


That was just an addenda to Foxbat's post on nuclear-powered aircraft: I don't agree with the original supposition.


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## tachyon (Jan 11, 2022)

Radical breakthroughs have revolutionized the biological sciences and medicine in the past 50 years. PCR is less than 50 years old. The Human Genome Project and the entire field of genomics are younger than that. This has implications beyond human health and is being used in geology, paleontology, anthropology, zoology, and beyond. CRISPR is less than 30 years old. mRNA vaccines are a brand new technology that has already transformed the world.


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## Dave (Jan 11, 2022)

CupofJoe said:


> Or underwater cities.


Oh! There will be quite soon, only not in the way you meant


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## Mon0Zer0 (Jan 11, 2022)

Slowed? We're living through technological marvels that would have been unbelievable even twenty years ago except in science fiction - deep fakes, the metaverse, cellular robots, mRNA vaccines, vat grown meat, quantum computing, boston dynamics, mass adoption of electric cars, GPT-3, IoT, reusable rockets, real time photorealistic games, drones, consumer 3d printing, self driving cars, room temperature superconductors, GPU's, Amazon Dash human labour free supermarkets, organ printing, spine repair, commercial brain/computer interfaces etc. 

Sure, a chip is still a chip and manufacturers have run up against physical limits of the medium, but the technological developments are increasing incrementally each year - these increases are almost taken for granted but they're huge!


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## mosaix (Jan 11, 2022)

Justin Swanton said:


> Thanks for splitting the thread. I was getting uncomfortable with the extent to which the topic was getting derailed.
> 
> The Jetsons just illustrates that the future imagined in the 1950's has fallen well short of expectations. Everyone in the 50's and 60's expected things to get much further by 2000 than they have. I think this is an indication of how fast progress was moving in the middle of the 20th century, with the presumption that progress would continue just as fast in the decades ahead.



Hi, Justin. I think we've fallen short of expectations because the expectations were in the wrong areas. I'm not sure where you're based, Justin, but here in the UK there was a BBC TV program called Tomorrows World that ran for a number of decades that showcased emerging technologies. It finished, I think, in 2005. Just recently there was a radio program made looking back at the history of the program. This radio program mentioned stuff that they featured that either never saw the light of day or was superseded in a matter of a year or two by something more advanced or more useful - the fax machine was an obvious example. Also, strikingly, there were areas that were hardly mentioned in the original program that have come to dominate our lives. The mobile phone was one, and a couple of computers communicating with each other that, ultimately, became the internet, another.

The very nature of expectations involves, to a certain extent, forecasting the future - something that as a race we're bad at. The one or two, and it is just one or two, people that managed to do it (probably accidentally) are the world's current multi-billionaires. They've done it in areas where technology has just enabled the exploitation of existing human desires - shopping and chatting - rather than anything entirely new.


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## Judderman (Jan 11, 2022)

mosaix said:


> ..The very nature of expectations involves, to a certain extent, forecasting the future - something that as a race we're bad at. The one or two, and it is just one or two, people that managed to do it (probably accidentally) are the world's current multi-billionaires. ..


When I worked at Mother Shipton's Caves for a while we often told people of the amazingly accurate prophecies Mother Shipton made. Carriages without horses etc. She lived in a cave though 

Mon0-Zer0 , what is loT?


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## Dave (Jan 11, 2022)

Judderman said:


> what is loT?


Internet of Things - it's inanimate objects talking to each other and co-ordinating things themselves. Probably a better definition than that. But it's turning on the heating before you get home, opening the door for the cat but not a burglar.


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## Serendipity (Jan 11, 2022)

The famous IoT (Internet of Things) hype curve... not be me I hasten to add...


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## Dave (Jan 11, 2022)

It is more than self-boiling kettles, fridges that tell you when to buy milk again, and smart home security systems. It does have some great benefits. Connected appliances are more efficient and it includes things like autonomous farming equipment, wearable health monitors, smart factory equipment, wireless inventory trackers and biometric cybersecurity scanners.


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## Foxbat (Jan 12, 2022)

Dave said:


> opening the door for the cat but not a burglar.


Do we need to redefine ‘cat burglar’ as somebody who hides near a property waiting for the cat to come home and then sneaks inside when the door opens for the pet?


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## Justin Swanton (Jan 13, 2022)

Mon0Zer0 said:


> Slowed? We're living through technological marvels that would have been unbelievable even twenty years ago except in science fiction - deep fakes, the metaverse, cellular robots, mRNA vaccines, vat grown meat, quantum computing, boston dynamics, mass adoption of electric cars, GPT-3, IoT, reusable rockets, real time photorealistic games, drones, consumer 3d printing, self driving cars, room temperature superconductors, GPU's, Amazon Dash human labour free supermarkets, organ printing, spine repair, commercial brain/computer interfaces etc.
> 
> Sure, a chip is still a chip and manufacturers have run up against physical limits of the medium, but the technological developments are increasing incrementally each year - these increases are almost taken for granted but they're huge!



IMHO the last substantial technological breakthrough was the miniaturisation of computers accompanied by an exponential growth in computing power that really got going in the 80s and is still ongoing today. That's about 40 years which makes it fairly recent compared to the other breakthroughs. It remains to be seen if it has a developmental wall as does older tech like aircraft and motorised vehicles.

Off the top of my head computers have had a significant impact on scientific research for their ability to store and correlate data; on machinery in general through their ability to fine-tune and automate performance, and on entertainment through their capacity for creating virtual worlds. CPUs in PCs no longer double in performance every 18 months since a limit has been reached as to how small one can make the transistors and how fast one can run the CPUs without them melting. But new applications are found for computer tech every day, so we haven't reached a wall yet in that department. That covers deep fakes, the metaverse, cellular robots, photorealistic games, self driving cars, GPUs, IoT, boston dynamics, Amazon Dash human labour free supermarkets and GPT-3. Time will tell whether this finally reaches a saturation point, in that machinery can't be fine-tuned or automated any further.

mRNA is new technology (actually it goes back to the 90s). The problem with it, as with all genetic engineering, is that we didn't invent the original biological machine which is so fantastically complex that we are decades away from fully understanding its workings - if we ever succeed in fully understanding them. It's a bit like developing a computer programme. Typically, a programmer spends twice as much time ironing out the bugs in a programme as he spends creating the programme in the first place. This is because the human brain can process only so much complexity at a time, making it impossible to foresee all the mutual cause and effect in very complex structures.

A living organism is far more complex than the most complex computer programme and the problem is made worse by the fact that - unlike with computer programmes - defects in genetic programming can sometimes take years to manifest themselves. The mRNA vaccine is a good example of this. Since its implementation all sorts of unexpected side-effects have appeared and we will need years to fully evaluate them. Genetic engineering is dangerous and IMHO substantial genetic engineering is reckless.

To briefly cover the rest:

*Vat grown meat*
I came across this article - Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story. -  which I found fascinating in that David Humbird, a UC Berkeley-trained chemical engineer, mentions the "walls of no" - technological limits that no amount of ingenuity can cross: _"his term for the barriers in thermodynamics, cell metabolism, bioreactor design, ingredient costs, facility construction, and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat. “And it’s a fractal no,” he told me. “You see the big no, but every big no is made up of a hundred little nos.”"_

*Reusable rockets*
Time will tell if reusability is a substantial breakthrough in launch costs or just an incremental improvement. At present, Space X charges $62 million for the launch of a new Falcon 9 and $50 million for a reused Falcon 9. We'll see if the latter price goes down. For now it represents a 12,5% saving which isn't such a big deal.

*Drones*
These represent the ability to make batteries light enough to allow for brief flights. Fun but I wouldn't call it a lifestyle-transforming breakthrough.

*3D printing*
Remember when 3D printing was going to revolutionise industry? That was until the penny dropped that it is impossible to mass-produce 3D objects since the printing process is so slow. Great for individual items but not for anything required in quantity.

* Room Temperature Superconductors, organ printing, spine repair, commercial brain/computer interfaces*
I don't know to what extent these can be made to work, will be of practical benefit and can be made cheap enough for widespread use.


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## Aknot (Jan 13, 2022)

I'm sure the first car wasn't a cost saving, nor adding the stirrup to the horse. Creating a nuclear bomb had a lot of side effects. Mankind's first flight in a balloon didn't alter travel, it took another 150 years or so for air transports to really be a thing. We didn't invent the human cell, but if that makes mRNA just another minor innovation, then why not claim that miniaturization of computers - or computers overall - are just a small step as we didn't invent the electron? 
I don't refute that there are dangers with some innovations but if that is an argument why they are not breakthroughs, then pretty much any new technology is not it either. Morality and risk, nor full comprehension, does not make something less revolutionary or disruptive. 
To me the argument to disregard the value of scientific or technological innovation for the last 50 years boils down to "I don't like it, so it doesn't count". That said, it's an interesting discussion and I'm glad you're sharing your view. It's thought provoking. I just don't agree with it.


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## Judderman (Jan 14, 2022)

It looks like Justin is on his own from the posters in this thread on the tech slow down idea. Is interesting to discuss though. As I type this on a mobile phone wirelessly connected to a fast internet connection in my home.


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## Wayne Mack (Jan 14, 2022)

Justin Swanton said:


> IMHO the last substantial technological breakthrough was the miniaturisation of computers accompanied by an exponential growth in computing power that really got going in the 80s and is still ongoing today.


I would assign different 'break through' events; events that were the final ones in a long series of occurrences. In the business world, the invention that really drove the adoption of personal computers was the spreadsheet (this has been noted by others). It doesn't matter how small or how inexpensive a computer might be, unless there is a beneficial use, there is no reason for adoption, and without a significant initial adoption, there is little incentive for ongoing enhancement. In the consumer world, the break through was the online chat room (this is my personal observation). This gave everyday people a reason to acquire computers that were low(ish) cost and transportable. This also relied on the widespread establishment of electricity and telephone networks. Looking back, one can identify these things as 'break through,' but, at the time, it was impossible to distinguish these from temporary fads.

For the the other present day items, I suggest it is too early to determine which will go on to be fads and which will make the leap to ubiquitous use.

*Vat Grown Meat* - There is a reason that space stories never address food production beyond hydroponics. The space and resources needed to raise animals is too great to be plausible. Loss of grazing land and concerns over livestock production methods are becoming a concern on Earth. Whether it is vat grown meat, plant-based meat substitutes, or something else, I see a pressure to maintain the current variety of food options in a different form.

*Reusable Rockets* - The current cost to escape Earth's gravity well is simply too great for space flight to be used in anything beyond one-off uses. Barring some other mechanism to get objects in space, I can see an ongoing economic pressure to drive further enhancements in repair and reuse and away from disposable products.

Predicting which technical products will make the leap into general usage is impossible. What is possible, is to identify underlying pressures that these product might reasonably address. There will not be a single event that drives this, rather there will be multiple, reinforcing forces that cause the leap from small scale applicability to widespread usage.

*3D Printing* - There are pressures to move away from the central, mass manufacturing model to a more distributed model. There are costs associated with large manufacturing facilities, large storage facilities, and product transportation. If consumers start to shift back from disposable products to repairing and maintaining existing products, there could be pressures to establish local printing facilities (ala current hardware stores). I'm not sure whether there would be enough justification to move to individual, in home 3D printing.

*Drones (and Robots)* - There are undeniable pressures on the 'last mile' of delivery. Either costs are going to have to escalate for manual delivery, low-cost alternative delivery methods will need to come into play, or people will need to return to pickup from a central location.


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