How quickly do you think Technology will Evolve?

[mosaix]

1) Bigger chips.
2) Stacking layers (3D)
3) Stacking chips.

It could be argued, Ray, that that's technology 'evolving'. Not chips evolving but technology generally.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Google, Apple, Uber et al,

1. Google's motive unknown. Someone like Ford will make them, if they do it at all.
2. Apple appear only to be developing in car systems for car makers
3. Uber are only a booking system, they use ordinary cars with ordinary drivers. The question is are they employing the drivers? Lots of spin on that and everything else from Uber.
4. Tesla may be moving toward a self driving car (it sort of nearly does now)

There is no real new tech in Driverless cars. They are trying to improve the databases.
At the minute a DOS attack on the LIDAR is easy.
The liability issues are the same as with Trains, planes and Ships. There is work on both driver less/ self driving trucks and the idea or "road trains", slaved trucks with no driver that follow a lead truck (At least three European Truck companies).

Because you argued hypocritically. You said the smartphone was created due to one thing and then you said it was created due to a different thing! Funny.

No I didn't, 1998 to 2007 smart phones and data existed. The technology to do it economically is over THIRTY years old. But you either got billed per second for connect time OR about 1000x more than current data plans. Till subsidised handsets and dataplans came in only some corporates did it.
Current UK & Ireland data plans are unsustainablely LOW in price, they are subsidised by voice calls and SMS (texts cost operator almost nothing). The real cost to an operator of data rather than voice is about 350x MINIMUM per an hours solid streaming vs an hours solid talk!
(USA Cell phone system couldn't do data sensibly, too slow, in Europe, 14.4K or 28.8 K was possible in 1998 and by 2005 was 245K to 3Mbps, my fixed line was only 19K till 2005, when I manage to get 8Mbps upgrade).

Really I don't understand what you are trying to argue. Yes, since 1976 (40 years) we have seen amazing advances, those are mostly based on 1950s science and since 2002 the rate of advance has been rapidly slowing. There has been almost no new science to fuel future advances, except in Genetic Engineering.
I had a wonderful Nokia smart phone in 2002, with fax, email, web browser, real spreadsheet, database wordprocessor, outer phone LCD and keypad, inner 80 column wide colour screen. Data was billed per second of upload/download time. My employer reluctantly paid the bill. It replaced an earlier monochrome smart phone.

 

[Cli-Fi]

Moore's Law never was a law. Only Moore's target for Intel, revised 3 times. It's been dead for years.

Where is the new science to continue any rapid technological advancement?

• Genetic Engineering.
• Bulk bi-stable materials for replacing Flash memory.
• Graphene maybe for something ... Problems with production
  
• ....?

What else?

You seriously have to stop repeating yourself. Because that doesn't make it sound any better. I'm not sure how you got it in your head that a technology advancement has to have entirely new technology in it for it to be an advancement. Otherwise that would be a CREATION. Not an advancement! You have argued continuously that the tech world does not create. OK but they still advance and it some cases, they advance the world and push it forward too! Now, does the tech world create new worlds? Not yet, but it can be argued they create virtual ones

I'll give you three more examples:
1. Holograms/ Microsoft Hololens: You'll be hard pressed to find another example of that tech anywhere that isn't pitiful.
2. 3D Printing Technology: Also quite a young new technology possibly inspired by your favorite subject genetic engineering.
3. What Google is doing with Robots and indeed slight AI is quite unmatched elsewhere. Just do a google search for Boston Dynamics. I can go on for how these robots are different and more advanced than the others you see out there, but then I'd have to write you a book.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Right, getting this thread back on topic.

 

[mosaix]

Considering the fact that we have done SO much over just the last 100 years, do you see technological advancements slowing down at all?

We may well come to an end of what we can do with existing technology. Advancement in existing areas may slow but I think new areas of research will spring up as these old areas die out.

 

[Vladd67]

I think that the future of transport is extremely uncertain, because of the rise of driverless cars. Uber is already making serious inroads into the taxi business; in the not too distant future, I can see taxi firms become essentially garages for fleets of driverless cars. Were I a youngish taxi driver, I would be looking for a new job (and/or training for one) right about now.

The same phenomenon might well be the death knell for private ownership of transport, at least in cities and big towns. It's already a pain in the posterior, and an expensive one at that, to keep a car in a major city. But taxis are expensive because someone has to drive the cab; and he wants to be paid, and can't drive 24/7 if he wanted to. But if one could whistle up a robocab from somewhere reasonably close by and let someone else worry about maintaining it and keeping it charged...

I also think that various city governments are going to fight hard against driverless cars. Why? Because parking fees and penalties (and penalties for traffic misdemeanours) are a major cash cow, that's why. And robocars will not break the law - at all, most likely. That won't be the reason given, of course.

One more thing: A major obstacle might be the legal one. Say that a pedestrian (or early on, a car with a driver) is hit by a robocar. Who is responsible? The driver? There isn't one; that's the whole point. The manufacturer? The company that wrote the software?

Could Self-Driving Cars Spell the End of Ownership?

 

[REBerg]

Seems to me that the question is not how quickly technology is evolving/advancing, but where these developments are taking place. While we continuously pour resources into cell phones, self-driving cars and other non-essential gadgets, we are funneling little or nothing into our long-term survival as a species.

I resisted the smartphone for as long as I could. Now that I have one, I feel no need to replace it with the latest version. I'm sure the planned obsolescence built into an industry devoid of moral conscience will make that decision for me in the not too distant future. Therein lies the problem.

Technological change, to use a more direction-neutral word, is driven by the demands of a consumer-powered economy. As long as people are standing in line to shell out hundreds of dollars to have the latest iPhone possessing one or two more bells and whistles than the one already in their pockets, the endless series will continue.

How comforting will it be to have that iPhone 999z in a few decades when Humanity is huddled on what remains of the Earth's land mass, gasping barely breathable air, looking for a way out it never developed? Assuming that we are able to successfully redirect out efforts into saving ourselves, our technological evolution cannot possibly go quickly enough.

 

[Nick B]

Seems to me that the question is not how quickly technology is evolving/advancing, but where these developments are taking place. While we continuously pour resources into cell phones, self-driving cars and other non-essential gadgets, we are funneling little or nothing into our long-term survival as a species.

Yep. That about sums it up. The trillions spent on commercial rubbish we don't need could be spent on our actual future as a species.

 

[mosaix]

Yep. That about sums it up. The trillions spent on commercial rubbish we don't need could be spent on our actual future as a species.

It'll only happen, Quellist, if there's profit in it.

 

[hardsciencefanagain]

Creativity,a sense of exploration,the wish to ameliorate the circumstances of your fellow men are among the things most often NOT at the root of innovation.

 

[Hex]

We are getting better at human interfaces -- thankfully -- but there's still a long way to go. Speech recognition 'in the wild', for example, when the system doesn't have a restricted and expected vocabulary set to choose from (and there's background noise) is often dire. I don't know how good Siri is, but other systems are pretty appalling.

Compare a human being's ability to extract speech from a noisy background, detect humour/ sarcasm/ emotion etc. and respond appropriately and usefully.

 

[Cli-Fi]

Indeed, the profit factor matters very little in this discussion and that is NOT what I wanted the discussion to be about. People have brought up various technologies like the Driverless cars and stimulated AI to discuss. That was more in line with what I was going for. How fast do you think, those technologies will evolve. I want to talk about technology and not economics. You can all make another thread for that.

 

[Edward M. Grant]

People have brought up various technologies like the Driverless cars and stimulated AI to discuss. That was more in line with what I was going for. How fast do you think, those technologies will evolve.

Driverless cars are pretty silly. By the time they can be made to work properly, we won't need cars any more, because we'll just rent a drone wherever we want to go. Their main use would probably be exploring the Martian and Lunar wilderness, which is much simpler anyway as you don't have to worry about kids running out in the street.

AI will be twenty years away for at least the next century.

 

[AstroZon]

1. Computers will evolve from binary to ternary. They'll have to if we ever want a true thinking computer, one capable of performing self assembly, or one left to make desicions far from earth. They might be ternary / binary hybrids with binary nodes and a ternary central processor.

2. Faster than light communication. Entangled pairs are one way that is theoretically possible now - at least as far as we can send a ship or probe with an entangled pair transceiver inside. For communication across the galaxy, we'll figure out an interdimensional way to send and receive data. It will probably come from String Theory.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Computers will evolve from binary to ternary.

No. On three levels! (ironically).
Abandoned long ago as was decimal rather than binary based numbers. Binary is the most efficient.
Three levels rather than two makes the system more easily corrupted by noise. Binary is the most noise immune system. Some communications and storage systems do use more than two levels when capacity or speed is more important than noise immunity. Then there is an overhead for error correction. The encoding of data is still binary.
Computers don't and can't evolve. They are designed and programmed by humans.
Inherently all (non-quantum) digital computers are based on switches. These can only be binary, on or off. Quantum computers use Qubits which have both binary states at the same time. They have rather specialised application so won't replace ordinary binary computers.

Faster than light communication. Entangled pairs are one way that is theoretically possible now

Actually no!
The two items with entangled pairs are like randomly shuffled packs of cards, that have NOT been examined. Changing one of the entangled particles does change the other - INSTANTLY- but causality, speed of light and relativity are not really bypassed. It's equivalent to the remote shuffled cards having the order changed. Since you don't know when it happens and don't know the state, you can't tell it has happened. No information is sent faster than light. Quantum Entanglement can be used to show if an optical signal has been tampered with in transit. Never, ever to make an Ansible.
Similarly "quantum transportation" is not actual transportation.

xkcd: Researcher Translation
Hover text: "A technology that is '20 years away' will be 20 years away indefinitely."

 

[AstroZon]

No. On three levels! (ironically).
Abandoned long ago as was decimal rather than binary based numbers. Binary is the most efficient.

Inherently all (non-quantum) digital computers are based on switches. These can only be binary, on or off.

Abandoned in the early stages of of digital programming because binary was by far easier. Yes, I agree. Development teams were just trying to design operational computers. Why make it more complected than it already was? But a continued development of binary will only result in computers that can execute more and larger instruction sets. They'll get faster and be able to do more things at one time, but we'll never reach AI like that. We must take computers and languages into another dimension (figuratively speaking.)

Ternary computers operate with switches just like binary, but instead of On and Off, they have -1, 0, and +1. The end result is a computer that can make a decision of sorts, or at least computate dimensional variables. Binary programming, as good as it is, is purely linear. Right now, 56 years after the Setun ternary computer was built in the USSR, several teams are working out the necessary logic gates for modern ternary computers. I'm certainly not the only one who thinks that its the next logical progression.

I don't understand what error correction has to do with anything. Developers will certainly employ it in their ternary OSs. I also still think that the end result will be something of a hybrid, a ternary central processor and ternary memory coupled to binary data nodes. The data will be translated into ternary when needed.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

But a continued development of binary will only result in computers that can execute more and larger instruction sets. They'll get faster and be able to do more things at one time, but we'll never reach AI like that. We must take computers and languages into another dimension (figuratively speaking.)

ARM is replacing Intel x86 and is simpler and smaller instructions.

Abandoned in the early stages of of digital programming because binary was by far easier

It was a LATE idea, quickly abandoned. All the first digital computers used binary, i.e. on/off switches made from relays or valves (tubes), from the Z1 in 1938. Later transistors replaced valves.

Ternary computers operate with switches just like binary, but instead of On and Off, they have -1, 0, and +1.

Zero computational advantage and a disadvantage. Boolean Algebra needs binary.
AI isn't limited at all by computer technology, but by our lack of understanding of what Intelligence is.

High Level programming is the only viable way to do programming. Binary is only visible in it by the simpler constructs of loop exits and IF tests. More than binary tests are handled by the Case or Select type constructs that allow -1, 0, and +1, if you need them.

Ternary computers operate with switches just like binary, but instead of On and Off, they have -1, 0, and +1

No, because such structures are inefficient and switches are either on or off. It's just technobable, nonsense.

The end result is a computer that can make a decision of sorts, or at least computate dimensional variables. Binary programming, as good as it is, is purely linear. Right now, 56 years after the Setun ternary computer was built in the USSR, several teams are working out the necessary logic gates for modern ternary computers. I'm certainly not the only one who thinks that its the next logical progression.

Absolutely no serious hardware designer or serious computer scientist espouses Ternary. Ternary is no help at all for AI.

We may have Quantum Co-Processors on computers. Effectively switches that are both open and closed. Superposition. They won't replace the main core.

 

[REBerg]

Abandoned in the early stages of of digital programming because binary was by far easier. Yes, I agree. Development teams were just trying to design operational computers. Why make it more complected than it already was? But a continued development of binary will only result in computers that can execute more and larger instruction sets. They'll get faster and be able to do more things at one time, but we'll never reach AI like that. We must take computers and languages into another dimension (figuratively speaking.)

Ternary computers operate with switches just like binary, but instead of On and Off, they have -1, 0, and +1. The end result is a computer that can make a decision of sorts, or at least computate dimensional variables. Binary programming, as good as it is, is purely linear. Right now, 56 years after the Setun ternary computer was built in the USSR, several teams are working out the necessary logic gates for modern ternary computers. I'm certainly not the only one who thinks that its the next logical progression.

I don't understand what error correction has to do with anything. Developers will certainly employ it in their ternary OSs. I also still think that the end result will be something of a hybrid, a ternary central processor and ternary memory coupled to binary data nodes. The data will be translated into ternary when needed.

Where would we be today if we had always accepted existing technology as the best and only possible?
I had fun with my dog and a red laser pointer. I'm also having fun with my blu-ray disc player.

 

[J Riff]

Built-in obsolesence is unstoppable now, as millions of people look for meaningful work. If everyting worked perfectly for fifty years, like it kind of used to, the resulting bread line would stretch around the world.
I think tech evolves till it gets too dangerous for the masses, then it gets concealed and techbabbled about until no-one knows from what. Forbidden secrets of the Aztecs!

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Where would we be today if we had always accepted existing technology as the best and only possible?

I don't think anyone involved in Engineering in the 8000 years has thought that?