For surely 2 centuries we have been experiencing unrelentless technological progress. But much technology depends on underlying science, and in some areas (mainly physics) the fundamental science progress is slowing down. 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. In areas like chemistry some progress is still being made for example in artificial materials, but the underlying chemical rules between all the naturally ocurring elements are quite well known and there's little more to discover.

 

For sure we still have big progress in all the areas related to electronics and computing, as well as others as genetics and medicine, but in many other areas genuine progress is getting harder (commercial jet planes nowadays are not much different from those in the 70's and we are not flying any faster).

 

Much of the latest progress in many areas has been focused on finding ways to produce the things cheaper and more efficiently rather than in pushing the technology itself further.

 

But since much of our socio-economy is based on researching, developing, producing and selling ever more advanced products, what will happen if it becomes ever harder to find any improvement in the current technologies? to put a rather stupid example, if nobody can find ways so that a washing machine can wash better, why should I replace my old washing machine as long as it works?

 

Of course companies will always have the aesthetics trends to makes us buy new products even if they are not any better than their predecessors, they will just convince us that the predecessor looks out of fashion.

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.

But at any rate, I'd say that to a certain extent technological progress draws on scientific progress. 

 

While Moore's Law is colloquially called "a law" it is not a physical or natural law, it is merely an observation and a prediction. Even when how small a transistor can practically be eventually bottoms-out as transistor geometry is ultimately limited at the atomic level, the size of the silicon substrate can increase in three dimensions essentially unchecked (there is a speed vs distance issue to address, but not every process within a system needs to occur at light-speed). If we can't make transistors smaller, we simply make chips bigger. In 1965 Moore stated that there was no reason why a large circuit cannot be built on a single wafer, (which in 1965 was 4 inches in diameter - now wafers can be 12 inches in diameter, 9 times the surface area), to date we haven't used http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wafer-scale_integration" rel="nofollow - wafer-scale integration as a viable manufacturing method.

But even if Moore's Law eventually does reach a finite limit that does not halt technology progress. An integrated circuit with 32 billion transistors is merely a count of how many "bricks" you have to build a "building", it does not limit how many "buildings" you can build, what they look like or what they will be used for. There are components in a PC that haven't changed (or progressed) in 50 years, and the PC would be as useless without them as it would without a 2billion transistor processor... The number of transistors in an integrated cuircuit does not limit technological development.

 

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In a previous thread I remarked that there have been no major technology breakthroughs in the past 20 years, and that is essentially true - every consumer gadget we have today originated at least twenty years ago, the technology they are made of is also ancient technology. We are seeing a steady progress in product development inspite of that lack of real technological innovation. Apple have achieved a everything they've ever produced in their entire history without having to invent, innovate or progress technology one single mm. Sure your new iPhone can stream movies and music, surf the interweb, it can remind you to phone your mum and to pick up the groceries, it take high-res pictures, track your position on Earth and plan your route so someother position on Earth, it can tell you which way is Up and which direction is North, it can talk to you and you can shout insistantly at it, it can identify a piece of music by "listening" and it show you where Arcturus is in the night-sky, and if you're really lucky it will have sufficient signal to allow you to call your mum - but none of those things are "new tech", they are just doing more "old tech" functions with "old tech".

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Transportation technolgy plateaued 100 years ago - the basic concepts of the bicycle, automobile, ship and flying machine hasn't advanced a great deal in that period and until http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=earth-talk-charging-ahead" rel="nofollow - battery technology has a eureka moment we will continue to use combustion as a power source - but you cannot deny that development progress in all aspects of transportation has been continued since the days of Richard Pearse, George Cayley, Ferdinand Verbiest, Christian Huygens et al. (okay - and the Wright Bros and Karl Benz) - a modern automobile is more "advanced" than its vintage counterpart.

 

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.

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.

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What?

 

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.

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.

Maybe we have to wait until our brains evolve. We basically have the same brain as our cave dwelling ancestors some 10.000 years ago. 

I'm afraid waiting for natural evolution to do that job would take too long for most humans to have the patience. But it's possible that we will tinker with genetics in order to speed up directed evolution for that purpose.

Technology and human invention/creativity is exponential in growth, not linear,  and this has been studied and even given a specific name though at the moment it eludes me. 

I won't live to see these changes since I have at best about 20 years left but it will indeed be a 'brave new world'.