Comment by imakesnowflakes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by imakesnowflakes | Hacker News Reader

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imakesnowflakes

> It has been accelerating at an exponential rate for decades.

Has it really been though? Let me ask. What we usually perceive as progress comes down to few things. Mobile phones. Increasing hard disc drive capacity. Increasing memory capacity. Increasing processing speeds, and recently increasing energy density of the batteries. These things enables a lot of things to go digital/realtime and makes a lot of cool stuff possible.

Mobile phones can be thought of as amazing things. But we do that by putting big towers littered around the globe. Is that really a technological breakthrough? It is a massive engineering accomplishment. But I cannot see it as a breakthrough.

The progress we have now is mostly limited to making existing things better/more efficient. We are not inventing/discovering anything groundbreaking. Like electricity. Like Electromagnetic waves. Even like Diodes and Transistors.

Fusion is still 20 years ahead. We are still driving around in vehicles powered by burning fossil fuels. We don't really know what to do about climate changes. We don't really know how to cultivate crops economically, without heavy use of pesticides and such things. We don't even have an easy way to check if the food we buy at shops contain any harmful chemicals.

So where is the technology that has been accelerating for decades? In the duel cameras of your octa core smartphone?

Yes, it has.

Non Fusion things to think about.

RF systems, think about WiFi etc. Wireless data channels with the capacity to send hundreds of megabytes per second. Computational radar systems, magnetic resonance imaging and about a half dozen different ways to image things at the atomic level.

Materials science, building airplanes out of carbon and glue. Building skyscrapers as pre-fab blocks. Sapphire glass, tempered glass 10x harder than anything in the 70s.

Vision systems and vision equipment, from cameras that have megapixels of resolution costing just a few dollars, to dedicated object tracking and identifying sensors. Lidar as a thing.

Information retrieval on a scale that was not even imagined in the 70's. Trillions of documents accessible through a simple network protocol.

Precison machining, additive manufacturing, 3D printed rocket engines.

Privately funded space technology, from micro-satellites to booster systems.

Textiles with the feel of satin and the stopping power of ceramic plate armor. Carbon based conductors made out of graphene.

Internal combustion engines that go three times further, or have the same power with 1/3 the gasoline required.

Solar power systems that can provide 100% of the needs of a single family home for less than the cost of re-roofing.

One of the interesting ways to think about it are what tools enabled what technologies. For example the ability to make hardened glass at scale gave rise to the ability to have large screen televisions. You could imagine a 55" television in the 70s but you could not cost effectively manufacture one.

Another way to think about it is how computer games today on the PS4 or the Xbox would be inconcievable on the DEC-10 or the IBM 370 in the 70's. The GPUs themselves were simply to complex to imagine, much less design, simulate, and fabricate. Get your hands on state of the art "demo reels" from the Siggraph conferences in the 70's early 80's. Compare that to Renderman. There is no comparison.

I think as Peter gets older and has participated in bringing more technologies from concept to product, he will evolve his thinking where he understands the entire stack of things that have to be in place for something to occur, this "eco-system" if you will, which has to all be present before progress can be made. You can't study diseases effectively without microscopes, you can't analyze genetics without the polymerase chain reaction and a way to sequence DNA.

Fun to try and go through your house or office and not use anything that didn't exist in 1975. But sometimes you can only see the distance you've come when you look back to where you were before.

Yes.I see those things too.

But when I look at something that is 'modern', all I see is a highly refined/glorified version of a 50 year old thing. Mobile phones are just a glorified radio. Computers are glorified calculators. Internet is a glorified telephone network.

Sure, these things have massive impact on our existence. But that does not prevent them from being mere refinements.

So, if we figure out something like, teleportation, or anti-gravity or a way to convert arbitrary matter to energy(mc2), that would be something. An innovation/technology that will be indistinguishable from magic.

So a cure for cancer would be a glorified antibiotic? :-)

Kidding, but I hear you, the truth is that there isn't all that much that cannot be equated, at least at a high enough abstraction, to things that have been around for a long time.

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