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That theory has a major blind spot: the increase in demand for a Western standard of living at an unprecedented global scale enables innovation to bring down costs.

Example: Africa has dealt with underinvestment for a long time in many areas, like telecommunications infrastructure. But because of that, many African nations have leapfrogged hardline telecommunications in favor of mobile, resulting in less spending before and after for maintenance of an antiquated system.

Likewise, we in America are dealing with the ramifications of unsustainable sprawl, where entire municipal and county budgets are exhausted just to maintain current infrastructure, particularly roads, and we have nothing left over to invest with.

All in all, that theory is limited to one's faith in humanity to adapt and thrive. We made it through the ice ages and the Toba Catastrophe.

Besides, who in the 21st century is content with aspiring to the living standards of the 20th century? The global poor, perhaps, but once they reach the 20th century, they, like most people, aspire for the 21st.

All of that is incremental and evolutionary. Here's a good example of what I mean.

Fundamental invention: radio. Before radio communication via invisible waves over long distances was impossible. After radio it wasn't. This is a fundamental qualitative change in capability.

Innovation and evolution: morse code keys to 4G/LTE and WiFi. This represents a quantitative change in capability (faster/better/cheaper), but qualitatively WiFi is the same class of capability as morse code key radio.

If the EmDrive actually worked, that would represent a new fundamental invention happening today. At this point I doubt it does, but it's an example of what such a thing would look like. In the pre-EmDrive world you couldn't propel something without reaction mass. In a post-EmDrive world you could. Qualitative step change in capability.

I disagree with your assessment.

It is widely understood that shipping containers are responsible for more global trade than any other factor, which has lowered the prices of goods around the world at a scale never seen before. The unprecedented demand for trade necessitated their adoption, but they are essentially a metal box on top of other metal boxes on top of a flat surface.

Shipping containers were a tremendous innovation but they required absolutely no new or novel technology to produce or deploy.

Another example: insulation. Energy costs are higher to heat in the winter than cool in the summer, but an extraordinary amount of energy is wasted due to insufficient insulation. Solving this problem would decrease energy costs, increase quality of life, and would require no new technology whatsoever.

I fear we in the tech sphere are sometimes too addicted to the lure of the future to imagine what we could do with what we already have.

I mean, shit, literally, could be solved by better toilets. Last I checked India had more cell phones than flushing toilets. Proper sanitation saves on health care costs later on. This is another very old technology that can prevent us from even needing high technology to solve the problem caused by insufficient sanitation and toilet access.

Shit happens, but it doesn't always have to.

I'm not saying there is no value to incremental improvement, just that there is a qualitative difference between that and true invention and that the latter has stagnated since roughly the early 1970s.

The former makes things faster/better/cheaper, while the latter makes things possible.

You could still ship things across the ocean before containers. But before boats?

I predict that when the current zeitgeist finally does shift we will once again see the invention of things currently considered impossible. I can't say exactly what those will be any more than a scientist in the 1700s could have envisioned radio, though I can certainly speculate. For an early candidate my money would be on the invention of a process to reliably reverse aging in living cells, and maybe something really radical in energy like a compact high density fusion reactor exploiting a novel approach to containment discovered through machine learning. In the long term I strongly suspect that there are fundamental issues with our current models of physics (the whole dark matter 'hack' and the lack of agreement between QM and GR) and that solving this might open the door to things currently considered impossible.

BTW -- I think there have been a few fundamental inventions from 1970 to present.

- Graphene, though I don't know quite enough about materials to know if this has clear antecedents.

- The block chain, which seems like an actual novel mathematical discovery as well as a CS basic invention. It also seems pregnant with social implications since it might suggest a way to actually make communal self-governance by consensus work.

- CRISPR/CAS9

All those happened in the past 10 years or so, which fits in with the idea that the dark age is on its way out.

You're being ridiculous. I'm comparing the difference between a half century previous to shipping containers to the half century after. Boats have been around for thousands of years.

Your argument is very narrow and rigid. What you call "incremental" innovations or new uses of old technologies can vastly outweigh the impact of novel technologies, some of which take decades to reach the average Westerner, let alone the average human being.

Your argument also ignores the cumulative effects of fully utilizing existing technologies. The cure for polio existed long before coordinated efforts brought it to the brink of eradication.

Likewise, chemical birth control has been around for 50 years, and the only thing stopping it from widespread adoption - and thus a significant decrease in unwanted births and excess human consumption of scarce resources - is money and political will.

Another example - I really don't have all day but your line of argument is seriously flawed - is nuclear power. Modern reactors are safe and stable - the earthquake that flattened Fukushima left the reactor intact; it was the tidal flood that caused leakages - and we could produce a great deal of mostly-carbon-neutral energy with them, but we as a society choose not to. We don't need fancy new tech to make nuclear work, we just need funding and political will.

I suspect you, by the name of API, is falling for the old adage: to a man with a hammer, every problem is a nail.

Earth, humanity, and life itself is not an engineering problem with an engineering solution.

You seem to be arguing that innovation is good.

api seems to be arguing that invention is good.

these are not mutually exclusive ideas, and i dont see where api is saying the innovation is bad or we should have less of it, only that we should have more invention (and presumably, more of both)

It sounds like an unsupported belief in the possibility of the "revolutionary" progress of technology which would still save the humanity in its present desire to keep "business as usual."

I'm not optimistic about that. The way I see it, the premises on which the world currently runs are unsustainable, and there's no technological miracle that will change that. Fusion is very improbable, fission can't support the growth that people got used to during the last 100 years, fossil fuels are clearly very limited, the amount of food which can be sustainably produced is limited, etc.

I think your analysis suffers from recency bias. Almost all inventions were incremental improvements on existing ideas and experiments, very few were huge Eureka! moments. Morse code was invented around 1840 and radio communication in around 1900. It took 60 years to go from wired to wireless. The first supercomputer was built in the 1960's and 50 years later we were walking around with internet connected computers in our pocket that had a few orders of magnitude more processing power than their early predecessors. That evolution took a lot of inventing to achieve, and it has fundamentally changed society. It may not have felt as transformative to you because you were alive to witness the transition and the different iterations that led us to where we currently are, but make no mistake, the level of technical advancement in the last 50 years is unparalleled to any other time in our history.

I like this comment, it may be true; it certainly should make us careful about making a final judgement. It's true of literature and art - what the next century decides was great about the last isn't obvious at the time, at all. Or not usually. If the next century lives largely in cyberspace, then we're in the golden age and No Man's Sky (a game I quite like, actually) and VR are epochal advances for all humanity. But overall, I'm a pessimist, Jane Jacobs book "Dark Age Ahead" (which is mostly about trends obvious back then) left a big impression on me.

I don't know if I agree that the 70s through SpaceX landing weren't inventive. It seems possible that we got all the low-hanging inventive fruit from "physics" by the 1970s. Through the 90s and 00s technological invention just wasn't of the physics variety. I'd consider software/AI/sans-human information synthesis--manifestly self-driving cars--as inventive. I'd also consider DNA manipulation, both construction and editing, inventive capabilities. In this regard it's more a matter of timing, and which fields are primed for inventive leaps at certain points in history.

And we also gave up on incremental and evolutionary improvements on the last great new thing, nuclear technology. The first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was on December 2, 1942. Nuclear bomb - July 16, 1945. Hydrogen bomb - November 1, 1952. Grid connected nuclear power plant - June 26, 1954. Nuclear aircraft program - canceled 1958. US nuclear rocket program NERVA - 1959 to 1973. Project Orion, a nuclear pulse spaceship design (with an interstellar variant) - ended with the nuclear test ban treaty of 1963. Low radiation versions of nuclear explosives for seismology, mining, excavation, and construction (Project Plowshare) - canceled 1977.

I think you are right that 1970's was when society changed with the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 as the final nail in the coffin for nuclear technology advancement and use.

I'm not going to say it's false. But I've love to see citations supporting the notion that technological progress has slowed since the 1970s.

Looking around me I see some evidence:

CCD Cameras: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge-coupled_device#History LEDs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode#Initial_c... Laser diodes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_diode#History LCDs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid-crystal_display#History Microprocessors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor#History

All invented before 1970. However, they were not really in the hands of consumers by this time. So, I wonder if the point of invention, or the point at which they really had widespread availability is more important?

Cloud computing is the mainframe model. ALGOL was safe, maintainable language for systems with LISP being ultimate for scripting or flexibility. Current languages mostly do what the could already do. High-performance, NoSQL databases were how mainframes started. Clustering & early distributed systems by Dec's VMS & Tandem NonStop. Xerox PARC came up with desktops. Englebart's people demonstrated all kinds of stuff in 1968:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

Most stuff I see today is just rehashes of concepts that were made from the 1960's to 1980's. The core ones you need for personal communication or running a business were all built before 1970. There's still innovation happening but most improvements were just incremental rather than ground-breaking. The most groundbreaking stuff today, like a computer in your pocket, were often result of massive, economic investment into a pile of incremental improvements by many people over time. I'm fine with this but let's not act like we're having many Xerox PARC or Doug Englebart moments.

> Cloud computing is the mainframe model.

It really, really isn't. It shares one characteristic (computation done on behalf of one client by another remote client), but pretty much nothing else. The need to pigeonhole all developments in terms of historical patterns is just revisionism.

Computation done on behalf of one client by another (more powerful) remote client, with a timesharing model, is kind of the defining characteristic of both, though. ;)

That's not at all the defining characteristic of modern cloud computing; if it were, you would call VR systems (laptop or phone does computation on behalf of video system on your face) "cloud computing."

What's different about cloud computing is the persistent connection and availability, combined with the ownership model and the resulting implied scalability.

>persistent connection and availability

I can't really comment on the ownership model, but surely a persistent connection and availability is an incremental change.

If always-on-from-everywhere is incremental, then what isn't incremental? Are smart phones an incremental change from desktops?

If we give you that, they have one breakthrough over mainframes. That makes them "mainframes that are always on from everywhere." Mainframe apps were already doing that with terminal, thin clients, web apps, and so on. It was part of modernization efforts to give workers or customers better access to data or business logic on mainframes by putting better interfaces in front of them. Situation is improved today with cloud stuff but core capability was there.

Mainframes combined most of the muscle in centralized location for weaker, thin clients (eg terminals) to use remotely. Alleged security and efficiency benefits of centralization with one set of staff handling issues for third parties. The CPU, memory, and I/O was metered with many locations charging departments per use. Used VM/370 to virtualize OS's that could run in parallel for various workloads. Scale up quickly. Later clustering and Sysplex for high availability with multiple datacenters. Specialist packages (aka platforms) for various languages or use cases. Hardware accelerators for I/O, databases, crypto, and so on.

Was I just reading a list of benefits and features of modern clouds? Young folks would think so but that was all mainframe stuff from 1960's to 1980's with key hardware & VM tech done by early to mid 70's.

What's your opinion about the causes of this "mini Dark Age"? Do you still feel that we're in it?

Around the early 1970s, the great watch-word of the culture became "back."

This came primarily in two forms: back to nature (left), and back to the Bible (right). Under the hood both embrace the naturalistic fallacy (natural equals good) and the idea that there is a proper order from which we have deviated (sin, redemption, reconciliation). This manifested as the Religious Right, the anti-development wing of the Green movement, dogmatic Skepticism (a.k.a. scholasticism), and finally the alt-right.

The alt-right is the ultimate Hegelian synthesis. I'll get to more on what I think is happening today later.

IMHO this was driven by a number of things. These are some that jump out at me:

"Duck and cover"-- this was the generation that grew up with the looming terror of instant thermonuclear annihilation. A bit of ludditeism and retro fantasy is understandable.

Social and urban decay-- by the 1970s pollution was very bad in the West and cities were becoming vast ugly slums. Families were falling apart. Crime rates were rising. Reality did not look so good. See also: duck and cover.

Disillusionment with the collapse of the optimistic and futurist 1960s psychedelic counterculture. By the 1970s the Human Be-In type stuff had given way to Altamont and Manson and "acid casualties."

This was the generation that grew up on television. Broadcast TV is the most passive form of media in history and encourages escape into fictional idealized worlds.

Finally I think we got overwhelmed on an emotional level by rapid change and rapid discovery. Years ago I was thinking about this topic and came across a photo of the Earth from the Moon. I saw it through different eyes, saw it not as an amazing picture of accomplishment but as a terrifying image of our "frightful place in the universe" as H.P. Lovecraft so eloquently put it. Look at that picture. Do you see a God who cares about us? Do you see anything that will save us? I just see a speck of dust covered with a thin film of air floating in infinite black mystery. If an asteroid came along and whacked that speck of dust, nothing would care.

There were many other things too, like the de-funding of basic research in favor of "practical" research, but I see those as secondary effects rather than primary drivers. The primary drivers are deep philosophical and emotional currents.

Capitalism kept driving innovation, but not invention. We kept taking the stuff we'd invented in the first 2/3 of the 20th century and refining it. We took microprocessors from toys to today's behemoths and we took feature sizes down to <10nm. We made cars safer, faster, and more efficient. We cleaned up the air and the water (at least in the West). We incrementally improved health care.

But we stopped inventing. I think invention requires a fundamentally progressive worldview. To invent is to posit that there is a better way that has never existed, which negates the possibility that there is or was a better way today or in the past. Invention is fundamentally anti-tradition, anti-nature, anti-status-quo, and imaginative.

It goes without saying that if you accept the naturalistic fallacy (or the theistic version) or a dogmatic and scholastic approach to knowledge there is no point in inventing. Invention is either a sin, foolish, or futile.

Fast-forward to today:

I think it's ending. If I had to put a date on it, I'd say the day SpaceX landed its first rocket. Seems a good enough piece of symbolism to me.

One of the symptoms of its end is a final blow-out phase. The alt-right, as I said above, represents a total synthesis of the retro-left and the retro-right. It combines concrete manifestations of the luddite left (anti-tech, anti-GMO, anti-health-care, anti-vax, etc.) with concrete manifestations of both the religious and secular reactionary right. As such it has swept up both 70s-liberals and 70s-conseratives. Under the hood it is driven by explicitly reactionary traditionalist thought, including but not limited to the likes of Julius Evola.

The alt-right's embrace of racism and sexism also represents a final total embrace of the naturalistic fallacy. The idea of global human equality is profoundly unnatural. Racism is natural. Gender inequality is natural.

It's true that the alt-right is partly a millennial thing, but it's being driven by boomers and late-boomers.

My prediction is that the alt-right will flame out spectacularly and then the 70s will finally be over.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNMhl7YuKEY

Edit: Thiel's backing of Trump and the alt-right is why I doubt I agree with him about the causes here. Either that or he's playing insanely "meta" 5D-chess and is actually trying to accelerate the demise of the zeitgeist by driving it to its final culmination. That would be true high magic, but I doubt it.

Edit #2: our frightful place in the universe: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/moon_and_earth_lroe...

That's a lot of interesting writing. Thanks.

Though I think the alt-right is an embracing of the worldview of identity politics that mainly comes from the left. It's a if-we-can't-join-in-fight-them response to picking sides. That's to say I don't think it's a social conclusion to a rejection of future improvements or something.

Also, if you look at my sibling post, I indirectly point out how I think some of the implications of progressive social change have inhibited progress in other areas.

In other words, maybe we're not innovating in space travel because we're too busy innovating in generational mobility, family structure, and other things. It's unreasonable, I think, to assume that changes of that magnitude wouldn't have unintended consequences in other areas.

Identity politics is quite regressive. I left that out but it's another example of 70s-liberalism and as such has become a part of the great synthesis.

I'm not sure I buy the latter part. The still-innovative cities and regions of the USA tend to be more on the socially liberal side of the divide, and if you look into the people who were responsible for all that basic invention in the past you'll find quite a mixed bag of social viewpoints from Marxism to early-SJW-ism to Naziism and eugenics to everything else you can think of.

At best I think there is little correlation between proximate political views and capacity for invention. But on a deeper level I think all of these people had a basic futuristic orientation to their thinking.

Edit: think of it this way:

Marxists, 60s "Leary era" hippies, post-WWII era American progressives, Eisenhower conservatives, and eugenicists and Nazis all believed that they were working to create a new and better world that was qualitatively superior to the existing world or to worlds of the past. They just disagreed about how and about what that new world would look like.

All the post-70s liberal and conservative regressive movements I discussed all agree that a new world is futile or foolish and that we should go back to something. They just disagree about why innovation is futile and what we should go back to.

The alt-right as the ultimate synthesis posits that we should go back to nature and the Bible and the pre-enlightenment social order. It's a totalistic anti-progressive movement.

I think you may find this interesting: https://meaningness.com/countercultures

The entire site is pretty fascinating, but your comments specifically reminded me of this subsection

> The alt-right's embrace of racism and sexism

The scope of these terms has been expanded significantly. I no longer care what anyone considers to be 'racist' or 'sexist'; I care what their values are, and if I consider them of worth.

EDIT: 'alt-right' may have changed too. Some seem to thing it just means 'alternate right', others 'code-name for racists'.

"If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago and a racist today."

Thomas Sowell

That doesn't make any sense. Racists inherently judge with a different standard.

I'm not familiar with either the quote or the person quoted, but I'm guessing it's an assertion that people who believe

> that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards

don't buy into affirmative action, and are labeled as racists by people who do.

Maybe, but more likely concepts like "it's not possible (or important) for a black american to be racist", or "when a white person makes fun of a black, they are racist, when a black person makes fun of a while they are being ironic".

Different to what? Racists hold people of different races to different standards, and so do the people who call others racist for refusing to do this.

Thank you for writing this, it adds a lot of clarity to thoughts that have been percolating in the back of my mind for a while. I always attributed the relative antagonism to innovation of the Left in the US to its Puritanical foundations, which people seem to have either never learned about or conveniently forget.

"I saw the best minds of my generation... writing spam filters." — Neal Stephenson

>The primary drivers are deep philosophical and emotional currents. "..." Capitalism kept driving innovation, but not invention.

Capitalism drove very little of the invention in earlier times, it was largely driven by World War I and II. WWII saw a large chunk of Europe and America's top minds bind together to stop the Axis, and then after the war their work could be integrated too. This led to a tremendous amount of knowledge that led to computers and the space projects among so much more. By the 70's the main gains were already fleshed out,and the system was back to private competition.

If it's a change of philosophy and behavior, it's a change towards peace, removing the absolute need to invent new things and the unquestioned resources to be able to do so.

I'd say all our innovative energy is going into social experimentation. Maybe that's the trade-off you'd choose, but if you look at what the government spends its various forms of capital on, it's mostly ways to make up for changing social structures: no more hometowns, no more social pride, no more multi-generation homes, no more homemakers, fewer multi-parent homes.

To get in front of a probable counterargument, the government also spends a lot (not as much as people think, but a lot) on military ventures, but not more than it did in the early 20th century.

Early 20th century has seen a dramatic change in universities: from teaching institutions, they became scientific ones. PHD programs were created in 19th century Germany, but became a requirement for professorship in most universities by the 20th century. The creation of these programs meant that being a scientist became a real job, and we began devoting resources to make sure the brightest minds could devote to scientific pursuit. This might have been a major reason of the scientific innovations that predates this "mini dark age".

To answer the question about the causes of this "mini Dark Age", I suggest two points to explain what has changed:

1) The transformation of the universities into research facilities has hit the moment of diminishing return. We scientists are now hyper-specialized and it is really hard to grasp even a tiny fraction of our field, whereas early 20th century scientists were expected to know maybe 10% of their discipline.

As sciences stabilize, great innovations become rarer and harder to achieve, and small incremental discoveries become the norm. The "publish or perish" environment makes scientists very cautious about their statements, non-working experiments are not published, preventing colleagues to avoid the same mistakes that must be made again and again.

2) The 70s, the decade associated with science slowing its innovation pace coincides with the liberalization of the financial market, known as neoliberalism. Welfare state is then discredited and privatization is then seen as the way to offer services. Banks, hedge funds and credit agencies are now, to put it (too) bluntly, ruling the world. This system of regulation of collective processes through finance is the world we know today and drives us toward a ever increasing productivity. It also creates an imperative for profits: some like it, some don't. But major innovation is not necessary to reap profits, like science was necessary to maintain the domination of some states over others. Major corporations do prefer small incremental changes. Heard about this new thing, iPhone 7? Not a big innovation, but perfect to turn steady quarterly profits. The way big oil consortia are now panicking even show that sometimes, innovation kills profit.

Today, scholarly grants are highly dependent on industrial partnerships, which foster mostly new uses of old tech. It is much a safer investment than trying to make fundamental changes. The productivity imperative, first implemented in factories, is now imposed on universities.

*

One of today biggest hype in tech, deep learning, was created (partly) because Y. Bengio from Université de Montréal chose to spit on big corporate money to focus on fundamental research. Another great scientist, Peter Higgs (Higgs like in Higgs boson!) said that if he had to comply to the productivity required of today's young scientists, he would never had been able to think what is driving today's physics.

Both of them had to go against the flow, but how many promising scientists chose the stable, profitable, corporate career path? You guys know more than me.

Thiel is not the only one to make that observation. Alan Kay has said something along those lines -- that there have been virtually no compelling inventions in computing for a while now [0][1].

[0] http://stackoverflow.com/q/432922/177696

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11941827

What's "a while" and what is "compelling"?

Thiel thinks that globalization of development without massive technological advancement will lead to a kind of slow Malthusian catastrophe

And yet he pretends to lack the sense to realize that there's nothing you can do about that! Globalism is the inevitable result of the capitalism and free markets which Theil purports to champion.

He wants to have his cake (freedom from coercion) and eat it too (the ability to coerce others). It's a perversion of libertarianism that's purely greedy and unprincipled to its core.

I think Theil knows this and thinks he's playing a masterful game of chess against us (the rest of the world).

Where does Thiel ever argue for or request the ability to coerce others?

Adjusting the system so that other actions are incentivised is not coercion.

Supporting the governmental bureaucracies like the NSA is by definition participating in coercion.

That's redefining coercion towards meaninglessness.