Will technological progress slow down?

Dean wrote: Gerinski wrote: Right from the OP I conceded that electronics and computing are precisely some of the few areas where we are still seeing very fast progress (as you say, at least in application if not in the fundamental technology) and I believe that we have still a long way to go before it will slow down. So? I wanted to give my thoughts on my area of expertise. Gerinski wrote:   I also predict that much of the near-future progress will be based in genetics, biochemistry / bio-engineering and possibly neuro-science. There's a lot of room for spectacular progress in these areas. If the ethics-conservatives allow it. Gerinski wrote:   But IMHO in many other technological areas (call them the more 'physical' or 'mechanical' areas) progress has slowed down. While there may be no theoretical limit to technological progress, practical and economical considerations may prevent that progress from being achievable in practice. We could make commercial planes fly faster, but they would be uneconomical so we stopped the speed progress and stay at more or less the speed they fly since the 1970's. Commercial aircraft have actually slowed since the 1970s, the modern turboprop engine does not produce high-velocity thrust of a traditional jet engine where all of the thrust was produced by combustion exhaust. These engines use jet combustion to drive a shaft connected to a big fan that produces the thrust. The advantage is they use less fuel, which either gives a better fuel to payload ratio or a better fuel to range ratio - either way, the benefit is they are more cost effective than engines that produce high-velocity thrust. The development of the turboprop engine is a technology advance where the goal is fuel efficiency, not speed.   The limits to airspeed were imposed on ecological grounds (actually most of it was probably political rather than ecological) - supersonic flight was only permitted over water, which severely restricted when the aircraft (and that would be Concorde, because to date only one supersonic airliner has ever been put into service) could operate at its design speed.   However that does not mean that technological progress in aircraft design as slowed down, it just means the goals of progress have changed.

Quite so.

In terms of radio controlled aircraft/boats/cars &c. technology has really moved on fast in the past 10 years.  However, this has used existing technology that has been improved on.

- 35 MHz. is mostly being replaced by 2.4 GHz. (and eventually that will also be replaced)
- electric power is becoming far more popular and more efficient (yet batteries can still be dangerous in the wrong hands, as a 2-stroke/4-stroke model engine can)
- radio Transmitters/receivers are mostly digital now (due partly to 2.4 GHz.)
- due to both 2.4 GHz. and smaller and more efficient electric motors, smaller indoor aircraft can now be flown on 2 or 3-channels (some even on 4-channels) -- micro-servos and receivers are obviously lighter
- there's also better covering materials and many ARTF models now use foam rather than balsa
- FlyCams are also becoming increasingly popular due to the miniaturisation of camera technology and you can even fly an R/C aeroplane from a screen now (a bit like Track IR on a flight simulator)

The fundamentals of flight/aerodynamics haven't changed and unlikely will.  Yet the miniaturisation and improvement of existing technology will continue.

I think that with social media and facebook, the perception is that certain technology is crazy. But I'd much rather look at the internet on a real screen than a 3 inch screen. Anything my iphone can do, my computer can pretty much do. And facebook is really not that special of a site, just a very popular myspace.

We need to use technology for people who need it, people dying, people who are blind. Give them all an option.

As far as Americans, technology is making them dumber and dumber. An American doesn't deserve the technology that it has.

So in a way, technology hasn't changed much. People are brainwashed to give out personal info on the web these days and it so our perception is that you can find out anything about anybody. But people across the globe are still dying, starving. A lazy American on the other hand worsens themselves by consuming technology.

Dean wrote: Atavachron wrote: Assuming technological progress is paired with our capacity to improve the mind, and assuming the mind can be improved or 'exercised', one could use the body as a physiologic example.   The fittest human beings of a given generation, even with stringent exercise and diet, can only develop physically to a certain point without the addition of some derivative or synthetic like human growth hormone or steroids.   Unless a 'brain steroid' is invented (which seems entirely plausible, and no 'smart-drugs' like hydergine don't count), it is possible the human brain will only develop to certain point on its own.   But I suspect that's a long way off as the brain surely takes much longer to fully develop than the body.   Heck you can get whipped into shape in two months.   Try that with a physics degree. There is the idea that "brain steroids" are DHA (omega-3 fatty acids) and AA (omega-6 fatty acids), both are linked to brain development and there is a theory that they were instrumental in the evolution of the human brain. There is also evidence (albeit tenuous and based upon limited fossil finds) that the human brain has shrunk over the past 250,000 years due to a change in diet away from foods rich on both those fatty acids. Of course there is a long way to go before that affects our ability to invent.

Interesting; I take 50 mgs of DHEA daily, a similar hormone that begins to diminish after about forty-five and I admit my energy and wellness have improved markedly.   Not sure about brain function as the cerebral sweet-spot seems to now be in one's forties anyway, but I'm sure it doesn't hurt.

I suppose one could argue that "brain steroids" would be detrimental in the same way longterm steroid use has shown to be harmful as well as addictive (surely a good sci-fi story in there somewhere).   But let me also say this:  it is a shame they have been abused and now so rarely prescribed by doctors.   I realize and appreciate the potential dangers but prescribed by a responsible physician, steroids and Human Growth Hormones were a godsend to people with often crippling problems as arthritis, chronic back or leg pain, old injuries, asthma, you name it--  basically any kind of inflammation that causes people to suffer can be improved by careful steroid application.   It's a pity.

Gerinski wrote: Atavachron wrote: Assuming technological progress is paired with our capacity to improve the mind, and assuming the mind can be improved or 'exercised', one could use the body as a physiologic example.   The fittest human beings of a given generation, even with stringent exercise and diet, can only develop physically to a certain point without the addition of some derivative or synthetic like human growth hormone or steroids.   Unless a 'brain steroid' is invented (which seems entirely plausible, and no 'smart-drugs' like hydergine don't count), it is possible the human brain will only develop to certain point on its own.   But I suspect that's a long way off as the brain surely takes much longer to fully develop than the body.   Heck you can get whipped into shape in two months.   Try that with a physics degree. That's another intriguing aspect to the question. Even if scientific and technological theory has no limit, will we ever slow down simply because we are reaching our intellectual limits? everything is becoming so complex that nobody can learn even a small fraction of it all, we have had to specialize massively, there is possibly a limit to what a human can learn in a lifetime (although we will likely increase our average lifetime). It may be that because of such unavoidable specialization, we miss opportunities because nobody can make the link to another area of knowledge. Scientists in the old days were very frequently multi-discipline, they worked as well in physics issues, in chemistry, electricity, thermodynamics, etc and were able to grasp useful connections between the different areas. Nowadays it's virtually impossible for anybody to know so many areas into much detail.

Edited by Guldbamsen - July 17 2013 at 07:37

I have a few unfortunately disorganized things so say on my way out the door.

-There's this notion that specialization has grown as a result of a complexification of fields or a sort of scientific necessity, this is not necessarily true. It has developed in part because of economical / bureaucratic reasons. Nascent fields have few people working in them, so specialization makes little sense. As they grow and attract others, it becomes more economical to specialize simply to increase productivity. As scientific pursuits become industrialized, the incentives to do this only increase. In the academic realm, if two people are applying for similar research grants, all else equal, usually the more specialized individual will get the grant. With this in mind, I don't think you need to worry about things becoming so specialized so as to become inaccessible to thinkers.

-Scientists today are still multidisciplinary. It's a bunch of hoopla that they're not. Just in the past decade we've seen an explosion in interdisciplinary fields like compressive sensing, topological quantum theories, quantum computing, mathematical biology.  Unification is a big deal in the sciences. We like to have multiple angles to view a phenomenon. Discovery in the vacuum of a single field can be very exciting, but it's usually not truly illuminating until it can jump the gap into other areas. The disparities between disciplines will most likely start to close in the coming years as we develop better theories of everything.

-Just because science is getting more complex, doesn't mean that it will continue to do so. For example, 300 years ago even top flight mathematicians struggled to understand the Calculus. It was simply too complex for many to understand properly. A good part of what the Bernoullis did was simply trying to teach other mathematicians the tools of the trade. Nowadays, teenagers, many of whom aren't particularly bright, get a fine understanding of the Calculus in high school.

AEProgman wrote: Dean wrote:   However that does not mean that technological progress in aircraft design as slowed down, it just means the goals of progress have changed.   Bingo!  I think this is a possible key element in this interesting topic.  You could just about substitute any technology in the place of "aircraft design" and this statement would apply.  You could, for the most part, insert "marketing" in the place of "goals of progress" as well.   Within our own engeringeering department (the place I am enslaved to for money), marketing research informs how and what to design in the next product (which pretty much does the same thing the last products did for the past 25 years, but better and smaller) even though there is a more robust and foolproof quality way of doing it, with the possibility of more breakthrough research that could occur if the funds were put into R-n-D.   If more funds were put into research and developement, I think progress would not "appear" to slow down.

Which leads to the old proverb: necessity is the mother of invention.

Dean wrote:   However that does not mean that technological progress in aircraft design as slowed down, it just means the goals of progress have changed.

Technology already has solutions for producing clean water and viable low-tech solutions at that. There are also viable low tech methods of birth-control to address the issue from the opposite direction. The problem is not one that needs technology to solve.

I'm more concerned with the population explosion, and the lack of clean drinking water for all those teeming billions-technological progress will mean nothing unless we solve these problems.

I think if technological progress slows down at any point in the next century it will be because of the people in power, not because we've reached any sort of limits.