Arguing for a lack of progress today in comparison to half a century ago is simply a matter of not paying attention. Progress today in the fields I pay attention to, e.g. biotechnology and related materials science, is stupendous and accelerating.
As late as the 1940s it might have been argued that we lived in a world in the process of an exponential growth in power: storage, transmission, application, availability, falling costs. At the same time few people then saw the information revolution ahead. The high power/low computation path expected was an E.E. 'Doc' Smith future of slide rules and hand calculators contemporary with fantastical applications of raw power generation. But it turned out to be much harder than envisaged to keep that trend going for a variety of reasons good and bad.
If we'd got the power future instead of the computation future we'd all have a life expectancy much the same as it was in the 1940s, but be living in a transhuman world where $100 buys you the output of a pair of today's power stations that can be cached in your clothing. It is somewhat interesting to speculate just what would be done with that level of power in relation to practical, day-to-day concerns, but getting into orbit and about across the solar system is the least of it.
Anyway, we got the computational future because it turns out that making that happen is much easier - and probably for the best given that computation drives medicine, not power.
Could it have something to do with the increase in quality and quantity of pleasant distractions? It's in our pockets, at our desks, in our living rooms, everywhere. What if technological, political, and social progress has slowed down because it's so easy to escape? Soma in the form of apps, games, and screens. Surely it is harder now for most people to concentrate on something hard and HUGE in scope when there's something easy and fun in their pocket, ready whenever they are. This seems to be the case for me, anyway.
This ails me as well, but I don't think the people who push the world forward are tripped up by this.
I'm not a fanboy, but I just can't think of a better person to use for my example: you think Elon Musk is playing Angry Birds?
I just think some people have an insatiable desire to [do something]. They're not interested in distractions--the [something] is the distraction. They're consumed.
My father has spent his whole life consumed by pool (pocket billiards). He's hit millions of balls. He watches videos of pool matches at home on youtube, hours and hours of them. He reads weird, niche books with tales from pool's storied past. He can think of nothing else, for long.
I'm more of a generalist, often to my own disappointment. I have so many interests that I don't have those blinders on that push me to be the best at something.
But those people exist, I think, as much as ever. And now, they have a quicker path to success--my father could learn now in one year on youtube what it took him 20 years to learn by trial and error.
I have a feeling that a lot of the advances of the Golden Quarter have a lot to do with the Cold War. Parties on both sides of the war were pushed to create progress in order to best those on the other side. That kind of fierce competition doesn't exist at the same scale in today's world.
"Conflict spurs innovation, and the Cold War played its part – we would never have got to the Moon without it. But someone has to pay for everything. The economic boom came to an end in the 1970s with the collapse of the 1944 Bretton Woods trading agreements and the oil shocks. So did the great age of innovation. Case closed, you might say.
And yet, something doesn’t quite fit. The 1970s recession was temporary: we came out of it soon enough. What’s more, in terms of Gross World Product, the world is between two and three times richer now than it was then. There is more than enough money for a new Apollo, a new Concorde and a new Green Revolution. So if rapid economic growth drove innovation in the 1950s and ’60s, why has it not done so since?"
This piece is of amazingly low quality. Almost all the "discoveries and innovations" are echoes of work performed before the golden quarter. For example, Alexander Fleming noticed the effect of penicillin in 1928. The engineering of a useful drug didn't happen until 1942. Sulfanomides were in regular use in the 1930s. But, hey, let's assign "antibiotics" to the Golden Quarter.
But the laugh out loud quote is this:
"if you were a biologist, physicist or materials scientist, there was no better time to be working"
Physics is slower now because the energy levels to probe new phenonmena is getting awfully big, but biology? That is simply ludicrous. The golden age of biology is right now, and for the next fifty years. Today's material scientists are building things atom by atom, with undreamed of properties, and nanotechnology wasn't even a dream back then.
I'd summarize the Golden Quarter as that time when the low hanging fruit dropped into the exponential growth of scientific and engineering advances. But the idea that we aren't innovating at a blistering pace today - so far off the mark.
Can you recommend any other articles that share your view? The perspective of the present time is strange. I share the authors view that progress happened much more rapidly in the past, and that the future always seems 10 years out. Is that simply my brain playing tricks on me or is there any validity to it?
Really? I feel like I can do mostly the same - and possibly a little less - with my pocket device than I used to do with my PC in the 90s. (For context I grew up in the 90s as a child programmer.)
I feel like the devices do mostly the same stuff, just more of it, and more portably. With new caveats.
Obviously the hardware improvements have been incredible. The software capabilities? I'm less inclined. (Software is probably more stable - I'll give it that.)
It may be just a "distortion" of perception of the past: several decades in the past are much more "succinct" to our present view than a month half a year ago; we look at all the achievements in several decades before us at once, whereas it's an entire half of our own lifespan.
Or another way to view it, WW2 had diverted innovation towards the war effort and the non-war items were stalled until long after the war when the opportunity to commercialise many decades of work arrived within a couple of decades.
Where is my "built atom-by-atom" computer? Where is the nanotechnology? Are you talking about the water-repelling coating on my pants which died away after several washes? Where are my 3D-printed organs? That's exactly the point of the article! We see thousands of amazing things in labs every year. When I will be able to buy any of them in a regular shop? The pace at which things get from labs to end consumers is baffling! We saw DNA-made nano-robots that could deliver drugs to tumors four years ago (in a TED talk). So why all the governments didn't rush to pour billions into that project? We could've seen first results in hospitals by now.
And as I understand the article, that's what would happen had we lived in the Golden Quarter. And now we are too doubtful because we're conservative about financial risks and unfocused because we have so many advancements and we cannot fund them all.
The author is right. Only amazing (indeed spectacular, jaw-dropping!) things that I've seen in my hands or on the streets in past 20 years are miniaturized electronics (including cameras) and ubiquitous communication (internet). And GPS is cool, by the way.
Radius of a Silicon atom is about 0.11 nanometers; Intel produces CPUs that have 22 nanometers technology. Not exactly "atom-by-atom", but pretty close (only two orders of magnitude).
Thank you, you are right. But do you get my idea? That the number of qualitatively new things (that give us entirely new capabilities like "not dying from smallpox" or "flying over Atlantic") is suspiciously low in past 20 years. Yes, miniaturization. Yes, GPS. Yes, communication/information access anytime anywhere. Yes, low-clost airlines. Anything else?
My computer today can not do many things which Pentium-166 couldn't do. Navigation on iPhone 3G was as good as one on iPhone 5S (New versions of the apps are only getting slower so we're forced to buy new phone every year. But my old one was fast two years ago!)
Bitcoin. Ubiquitous news reporting (death of newspapers). Privatized space industry. Twitter. Netflix. Gene sequencing for pennies. Working from home. 3D printing.
Its easy to list whole categories of innovation, and say "Anything else?" Aren't those enough?
> Bitcoin. Ubiquitous news reporting (death of newspapers). Privatized space industry. Twitter. Netflix. Gene sequencing for pennies. Working from home. 3D printing.
Its easy to list whole categories of innovation, and say "Anything else?" Aren't those enough?
What qualitatively new capability Bitcoin gives me? What's Twitter? Online movies? Well, yes! It does not improve our lives radically but still.
> Privatized space industry.
You get the point here. Nice!
> Gene sequencing for pennies.
We need faster/wider adoption of it. Article mentions it. Right now I cannot benefit from it in everyday hospital.
> Working from home.
Was possible before. Only quantitative improvement. Although awesome.
> 3D printing
Is a good counter-example. It's been around for years. And still I didn't hear about someone who uses it on a daily basis to improve their lives. Amazing applications in medicine is the only exclusion so far. Expensive industrial 3D-printers for prototyping etc. are well expensive and not wide-spread.
> Right now I cannot benefit from [cheap gene sequencing] in everyday hospital.
I work in a lab with people who are working on developing diagnostics for transplant rejection based on sequencing the RNA from a small sample of your blood and using a trained machine learning classifier to diagnose rejection (I'm tangentially involved in this project). It's still a ways away from clinical application, but if successful, it could replace the current gold standard for diagnosis, which is an invasive biopsy of the graft that is then manually inspected under a microscope by a trained histologist.
That's a pretty big step up, from a biopsy and a histologist to a few drops of blood and a computer classifier to diagnose transplant rejection with the same accuracy. It would mean that you could monitor for signs of rejection much more often because drawing blood is much less invasive. This, in turn, would allow you to detect rejection events much earlier and take action to control the inflammation and prevent loss of the graft before it's too late. There's huge potential for quality-of-life improvements here. And I can assure you many other labs are applying the same methods to all sorts of diagnostic problems, not just transplant rejection. I could imagine a future where we have hundreds of trained classifiers for all sorts of diseases based on blood gene expression, and as a routine part of a doctor's visit, your blood will be drawn, sequenced in a matter of minutes, and run through all of these classifiers to identify any diseases you might possibly have, which can then be tested for by more accurate conventional tests now that the doctor knows what to test for.
Would you settle for not dying from AIDS? Landing on a comet? Airbags in cars? The world-wide web? (Don't laugh - that amount of information available at your desk is a qualitative change.)
Then there's the smaller stuff that adds up. In the "golden era", you had to tune up your car every 3,000 miles or so. My 2004 and 2005 cars needed tune-ups after 100,000 miles. In the "golden era", we took an un-air-conditioned car to visit my grandparents in Arizona. We did it in the summer, because that's when my brother and I were off of school. Yeah, that was fun... not. Now, you would have a very hard time buying a car without air conditioning.
The problem with this is that it assumes progress in these areas is linear. For example, it's easier to leap from bi-plane to jets than it is to go from jet airliner to something faster because a system gets more complex based on both its components and the connections between them. Simply put--there's more that can go wrong.
"Why can't I travel to my destination is less than 8 hours?" isn't so much the question as "Can we carry enough fuel to power an engine that's faster?", "Do we need entirely new propulsion?", "If elevation could help, how do we keep this thing skirting the edge of the atmosphere and still function?" etc. I don't know anything about aeronautics, so forgive my oversimplification, but this seemed like an easy to grasp example of what I'm talking about.
There has been a lot of social progress in reality. More households with computers and in more modern times, smartphones galore. Engineering of very tiny scales has grown at a strong pace especially given the difficulties and expenses of working at the smaller scales and the huge amount of mystery that still is there for how materials behave in small dimensions/quantities.
Infrastructure has improved. Internet, Wireless Cell Coverage, etc. These things have been limited not just by the available technology but by the available money.
Solar panels have gained enormous advances in terms of price and even pretty great advances in efficiency and other technological feats. Agriculture has been heavily researched and arguably improved. (although there is a large discussion which seems ready to turn into a movement before too long...of getting more investment into aquaponics, hydroponics, vertical farming, permaculture...not large monoculture farms and water pollution from agri-chemicals)
Software has come a really long way in the last few decades. Accessibility of data. Price of data storage has plummeted rather fantastically.
What still needs focus IMO is the sort of 'application of the application' ie. the use of inventions beyond just their function, what is their function ultimately solving for humanity?
There are lots of areas where we've seen significant breakthroughs. Astronomy is one. And the future for astronomy is bright indeed. The Gaia telescope will soon give us a vast trove of new data to learn from.
Virtual reality is on the brink of mass adoption. It has the potential to be more significant than the invention of the TV.
Let's not even talk about nano technology, smartphones, tablets, notebook computers, satellite tv, ...
Lots of idealization and whatnot in that article, as well as some glaring errors and apparently completely ignoring the recent developments, such as various countries (and NASA) planning journeys to the moon, asteroids, and Mars again (although the asteroids are probably because of the promises of huge amounts of wealth to be gained there)
I think the article is trying to demonstrate a contrast between the "Golden Quarter" to our current quarter.
Consider comparing the recently posted Orion project vs. the first moon landing. 8 years of development time to get to the moon vs. the estimated 22-27+ years development time to get to Mars [NASA said ~2030's for the actual Mars voyage].
I believe that's the point the author is trying to get across, that in our quarter, everything is moving along very slowly.
>> "Half a century ago, makers of telephones, TVs and cars prospered by building products that their buyers knew (or at least believed) would last for many years. No one sells a smartphone on that basis today; the new ideal is to render your own products obsolete as fast as possible."
I enjoyed the article, but this paragraph doesn't exactly bolster his argument that technological advances have ground to a halt.
Something can be made obsolete without advancement having occurred. "Oh, let's just change the design of our proprietary charging cable for our entire product suite next generation for zero or marginal benefit to the consumer."
> Sure, our phones are great, but that’s not the same as being able to fly across the Atlantic in eight hours or eliminating smallpox.
I don't understand why the author is so down on phones. You know, on the original Star Trek (which aired during the "Golden Quarter"), people found it outlandish that someone could make a communicator that could fit in the palm of your hand. Then cell phones started coming out, which is why they switched to having communicators in badges in The Next Generation. Nowadays, I guess we just take the idea for granted.
Beyond that, I have a computer in my pocket right now that is more powerful than a giant supercomputer 20 years ago.I can take photos using my phone that are higher quality than anything you could have found in a fancy camera 20 years ago and I can send it to the other side of the world in minutes if not seconds.
They killed the golden quarter when they killed the gold standard.
Innovation was replaced by massive plundering and easy money from criminal politics instead of creativity and productivity from healthy economics. The promotion of parasites who suck the tit of the state replaced the brilliant minds who gave us all the progress of that beautiful era.
Only the internet survives as a fountainhead of innovation because it still is considered ungoverned territory.
I hope that I may answer to this article with its own words:
"During periods of technological and scientific expansion, it has often seemed that a plateau has been reached, only for a new discovery to shatter old paradigms completely"
It's important to distinguish discovery and adoption. Why don't we have graphene furniture or software that works like a Bret Victor demo? Plumbing existed in Roman times, but my grandparents' generation was the first to take it for granted.
It's also important to distinguish depreciating and expansionary adoption. Each generation of Intel chips depreciates previous generations and largely replaces them in the field. The innovation increases the efficiency of computing units more than their quantity.
I think the "golden quarter" was real. It was a time of tremendous expansionary adoption. Scientific discovery has not slowed since then. Efficiency-improving adoptions haven't slowed. Expansionary adoptions have.
Why? The author rightly dismisses Cowen's hypothesis of diminishing returns but suggests something equally implausible: our attitude toward risk spontaneously changed and sabotaged progress.
In my view, civilization is a physical process and there should be a physical explanation for long-term trends like this. Cultural changes like attitudes toward risk are manifestations.
37 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 88.1 ms ] threadAs late as the 1940s it might have been argued that we lived in a world in the process of an exponential growth in power: storage, transmission, application, availability, falling costs. At the same time few people then saw the information revolution ahead. The high power/low computation path expected was an E.E. 'Doc' Smith future of slide rules and hand calculators contemporary with fantastical applications of raw power generation. But it turned out to be much harder than envisaged to keep that trend going for a variety of reasons good and bad.
If we'd got the power future instead of the computation future we'd all have a life expectancy much the same as it was in the 1940s, but be living in a transhuman world where $100 buys you the output of a pair of today's power stations that can be cached in your clothing. It is somewhat interesting to speculate just what would be done with that level of power in relation to practical, day-to-day concerns, but getting into orbit and about across the solar system is the least of it.
Anyway, we got the computational future because it turns out that making that happen is much easier - and probably for the best given that computation drives medicine, not power.
I'm not a fanboy, but I just can't think of a better person to use for my example: you think Elon Musk is playing Angry Birds?
I just think some people have an insatiable desire to [do something]. They're not interested in distractions--the [something] is the distraction. They're consumed.
My father has spent his whole life consumed by pool (pocket billiards). He's hit millions of balls. He watches videos of pool matches at home on youtube, hours and hours of them. He reads weird, niche books with tales from pool's storied past. He can think of nothing else, for long.
I'm more of a generalist, often to my own disappointment. I have so many interests that I don't have those blinders on that push me to be the best at something.
But those people exist, I think, as much as ever. And now, they have a quicker path to success--my father could learn now in one year on youtube what it took him 20 years to learn by trial and error.
Am I wrong?
"Conflict spurs innovation, and the Cold War played its part – we would never have got to the Moon without it. But someone has to pay for everything. The economic boom came to an end in the 1970s with the collapse of the 1944 Bretton Woods trading agreements and the oil shocks. So did the great age of innovation. Case closed, you might say.
And yet, something doesn’t quite fit. The 1970s recession was temporary: we came out of it soon enough. What’s more, in terms of Gross World Product, the world is between two and three times richer now than it was then. There is more than enough money for a new Apollo, a new Concorde and a new Green Revolution. So if rapid economic growth drove innovation in the 1950s and ’60s, why has it not done so since?"
But the laugh out loud quote is this:
"if you were a biologist, physicist or materials scientist, there was no better time to be working"
Physics is slower now because the energy levels to probe new phenonmena is getting awfully big, but biology? That is simply ludicrous. The golden age of biology is right now, and for the next fifty years. Today's material scientists are building things atom by atom, with undreamed of properties, and nanotechnology wasn't even a dream back then.
I'd summarize the Golden Quarter as that time when the low hanging fruit dropped into the exponential growth of scientific and engineering advances. But the idea that we aren't innovating at a blistering pace today - so far off the mark.
Just look at whatever device is currently in your pants pocket.
I feel like the devices do mostly the same stuff, just more of it, and more portably. With new caveats.
Obviously the hardware improvements have been incredible. The software capabilities? I'm less inclined. (Software is probably more stable - I'll give it that.)
And as I understand the article, that's what would happen had we lived in the Golden Quarter. And now we are too doubtful because we're conservative about financial risks and unfocused because we have so many advancements and we cannot fund them all.
The author is right. Only amazing (indeed spectacular, jaw-dropping!) things that I've seen in my hands or on the streets in past 20 years are miniaturized electronics (including cameras) and ubiquitous communication (internet). And GPS is cool, by the way.
Its easy to list whole categories of innovation, and say "Anything else?" Aren't those enough?
What qualitatively new capability Bitcoin gives me? What's Twitter? Online movies? Well, yes! It does not improve our lives radically but still.
> Privatized space industry.
You get the point here. Nice!
> Gene sequencing for pennies.
We need faster/wider adoption of it. Article mentions it. Right now I cannot benefit from it in everyday hospital.
> Working from home.
Was possible before. Only quantitative improvement. Although awesome.
> 3D printing
Is a good counter-example. It's been around for years. And still I didn't hear about someone who uses it on a daily basis to improve their lives. Amazing applications in medicine is the only exclusion so far. Expensive industrial 3D-printers for prototyping etc. are well expensive and not wide-spread.
I work in a lab with people who are working on developing diagnostics for transplant rejection based on sequencing the RNA from a small sample of your blood and using a trained machine learning classifier to diagnose rejection (I'm tangentially involved in this project). It's still a ways away from clinical application, but if successful, it could replace the current gold standard for diagnosis, which is an invasive biopsy of the graft that is then manually inspected under a microscope by a trained histologist.
That's a pretty big step up, from a biopsy and a histologist to a few drops of blood and a computer classifier to diagnose transplant rejection with the same accuracy. It would mean that you could monitor for signs of rejection much more often because drawing blood is much less invasive. This, in turn, would allow you to detect rejection events much earlier and take action to control the inflammation and prevent loss of the graft before it's too late. There's huge potential for quality-of-life improvements here. And I can assure you many other labs are applying the same methods to all sorts of diagnostic problems, not just transplant rejection. I could imagine a future where we have hundreds of trained classifiers for all sorts of diseases based on blood gene expression, and as a routine part of a doctor's visit, your blood will be drawn, sequenced in a matter of minutes, and run through all of these classifiers to identify any diseases you might possibly have, which can then be tested for by more accurate conventional tests now that the doctor knows what to test for.
Here's the paper I was involved in: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24725967
Here's a similar earlier paper that will also give you the idea of what we're up to and that I think is public access: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2041877/
Then there's the smaller stuff that adds up. In the "golden era", you had to tune up your car every 3,000 miles or so. My 2004 and 2005 cars needed tune-ups after 100,000 miles. In the "golden era", we took an un-air-conditioned car to visit my grandparents in Arizona. We did it in the summer, because that's when my brother and I were off of school. Yeah, that was fun... not. Now, you would have a very hard time buying a car without air conditioning.
"Why can't I travel to my destination is less than 8 hours?" isn't so much the question as "Can we carry enough fuel to power an engine that's faster?", "Do we need entirely new propulsion?", "If elevation could help, how do we keep this thing skirting the edge of the atmosphere and still function?" etc. I don't know anything about aeronautics, so forgive my oversimplification, but this seemed like an easy to grasp example of what I'm talking about.
Infrastructure has improved. Internet, Wireless Cell Coverage, etc. These things have been limited not just by the available technology but by the available money.
Solar panels have gained enormous advances in terms of price and even pretty great advances in efficiency and other technological feats. Agriculture has been heavily researched and arguably improved. (although there is a large discussion which seems ready to turn into a movement before too long...of getting more investment into aquaponics, hydroponics, vertical farming, permaculture...not large monoculture farms and water pollution from agri-chemicals)
Software has come a really long way in the last few decades. Accessibility of data. Price of data storage has plummeted rather fantastically.
What still needs focus IMO is the sort of 'application of the application' ie. the use of inventions beyond just their function, what is their function ultimately solving for humanity?
Virtual reality is on the brink of mass adoption. It has the potential to be more significant than the invention of the TV.
Let's not even talk about nano technology, smartphones, tablets, notebook computers, satellite tv, ...
Consider comparing the recently posted Orion project vs. the first moon landing. 8 years of development time to get to the moon vs. the estimated 22-27+ years development time to get to Mars [NASA said ~2030's for the actual Mars voyage].
I believe that's the point the author is trying to get across, that in our quarter, everything is moving along very slowly.
I enjoyed the article, but this paragraph doesn't exactly bolster his argument that technological advances have ground to a halt.
I don't understand why the author is so down on phones. You know, on the original Star Trek (which aired during the "Golden Quarter"), people found it outlandish that someone could make a communicator that could fit in the palm of your hand. Then cell phones started coming out, which is why they switched to having communicators in badges in The Next Generation. Nowadays, I guess we just take the idea for granted.
Beyond that, I have a computer in my pocket right now that is more powerful than a giant supercomputer 20 years ago.I can take photos using my phone that are higher quality than anything you could have found in a fancy camera 20 years ago and I can send it to the other side of the world in minutes if not seconds.
Innovation was replaced by massive plundering and easy money from criminal politics instead of creativity and productivity from healthy economics. The promotion of parasites who suck the tit of the state replaced the brilliant minds who gave us all the progress of that beautiful era.
Only the internet survives as a fountainhead of innovation because it still is considered ungoverned territory.
"During periods of technological and scientific expansion, it has often seemed that a plateau has been reached, only for a new discovery to shatter old paradigms completely"
It's also important to distinguish depreciating and expansionary adoption. Each generation of Intel chips depreciates previous generations and largely replaces them in the field. The innovation increases the efficiency of computing units more than their quantity.
I think the "golden quarter" was real. It was a time of tremendous expansionary adoption. Scientific discovery has not slowed since then. Efficiency-improving adoptions haven't slowed. Expansionary adoptions have.
Why? The author rightly dismisses Cowen's hypothesis of diminishing returns but suggests something equally implausible: our attitude toward risk spontaneously changed and sabotaged progress.
In my view, civilization is a physical process and there should be a physical explanation for long-term trends like this. Cultural changes like attitudes toward risk are manifestations.