Will technological progress slow down?

... and if so, how may that affect our society?

Edited by Gerinski - July 15 2013 at 10:08

Equality 7-2521 wrote: There's been no more productive age in the history of mathematics than the past 50 years. The progress in other fields are similar. Science isn't slowing down.

Even if you believe so, I foresee that it will eventually slow down. This is a must as long as you think science has some ultimate limit (regardless if practically achievable or not). In any thing, getting from 50% to 70% is relatively easy, when you are at 90%, just improving to 91% is much more difficult and when you are at 97% the energy required to get any further may become prohibitibe in practice. The closer you get to the ultimate limit the harder it gets to get further. This is a natural law, same as trying to accelerate towards the speed of light.

Don't worry, I'm a very tolerant person as long as insults are not being used.

Gerinski wrote: Don't worry, I'm a very tolerant person as long as insults are not being used. I know I stretched the analogy of accelerating towards the speed of light, sorry for that, it's indeed 'not a natural law' but a true fact in many aspects and it is conceivable that growth in scientific understanding might follow this principle as well, with one possible difference being that some unexpected breakthrough may trigger a completely new line of development and progress which we can at present not even conceive of.   I don't deny that a lot of progress is being made in Math (which btw is not 'a technology' which was the subject of the OP) and many other areas (among other things, because the number of people being involved in research is much bigger than one century ago), but it is also undeniable that in some technological areas it seems like we are hitting a wall. As I said fundamental physics has slowed down, some engineering areas are slowing down. Take engines, we are refining the known concepts but the diesel engine of a modern boat is basically the same as a few decades ago, the same I already said about planes. We still build houses with baked bricks (still much wood in the States) and tile roofs.  If we exclude electronics, computing and genetics / biotechnology, I'd say that progress has slowed down compared to what we experienced from the early 19th century until the 1950's, where there was not one decade without a significant step forward.

I wasn't answering your question about technological progress, because I'm really not much of an engineer nor do I pay attention to this kind of stuff at the market level. I was merely responding to the fact you pointed out that technological progress draws upon scientific progress. I just don't know if your assertions are justified.

It seems to me that you're equating local stagnation with a sort of global stagnation. We build houses out of the materials we do due to existing infrastructure and other economic reasons. Technology will grow in different areas at different times. There may not have been much progress made recently in the development of a new engine design, but we've seen great bones in solar/nuclear power. I see no evidence that suggests to me that our rate of technological growth is slowing.

Gerinski wrote: As we get further up our knowledge, progress becomes harder, sice the development of quantum mechanics from the 1920's to the 1970's little real progress in fundamental physics has been made.

I think you're barking up the wrong tree with regard to "advances". Integrated circuits (computer chips) are a great example of where you've gone wrong. The "advances" are actually there -- we see them every day. You're using them right now. Yet, IC design has become so fantastically complex that no one person can understand even the fundamentals of the design of a chip. There are teams that each work on bits and pieces of each chip design. The complexity is staggering, and it will only grow with time. IC feature miniaturization will continue for many years to come. There's some hope for three-state devices, which would dramatically increase processing power in many case. While the outside appearance of an airplane hasn't changed much, newer aircraft are more efficient. Materials and form have been improved to reduce weight and drag. We now have autopilot that controls every aspect of flying, including takeoff and landing.

The reason you've missed all of this is that you're looking for new frontiers to be addressed. You can only take to the skies once. We've gone up, down, and every which way. The only place left to go are other planets, and we're talking about journeys that take years (or even millennia if you're leaving our solar system). You can get across an ocean in hours, but nothing is going to shore up the trip time to Mars. The low-hanging fruit has been plucked.

That's not to say that there aren't lingering big questions. We still can't reconcile quantum physics (which works on small scales) and relativistic physics (which works on large scales). Hell, we can't even reconcile wave and particle. We can't solve the three-body problem. The rate of advancement has accelerated, but it's just become very hard to know anything about what's being advanced.

Not soon. That is good for medicine and all kinds of applications. On the other hand is a perfect excuse to make people buy useless sh*t every year. But whatever, it's here to stay and won't stop.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.