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Comment by SkyMarshal | Hacker News Reader

>because I'm genuinely in agreement with Peter Thiel's argument that technological progress is actually decelerating relative to how it was moving 60 years ago

Is it possible we just covered most of the low-hanging fruit in the 1800s and 1900s, and now the only remaining discoveries that are really ground-breaking are the really difficult ones, hence the slower rate?

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It's possible, even plausible, but I think it's not so. My guess is that in the decades around 1900 America and western Europe were considerably more dynamic -- there was less overall resistance to innovation. To pick a tiny example, driver's licenses weren't required in all states until, iirc, the 1950s. Radio had decades of development before the FCC. Some doctors tested new treatments on themselves. Immigration from Europe to the U.S. was unlimited. I'm not promoting going back to those days -- I don't want to get into that argument -- but I'd like to reach better understanding of how much the growth slowdown since 1970ish is about the intrinsic difficulty of innovating vs. how much is about the way we collectively think and coordinate.

Here's some fruit that looks low-hanging today relative to its value: atomically precise manufacturing. http://www.foresight.org/roadmaps/Nanotech_Roadmap_2007_main...

thank you.

There's an (underrepresented) idea when looking at the history of tech called a Kondratiev_wave[0] that says global economic changes happen in a series of predictable peaks and valleys. If the recent trends of computing really took off in the late 1990's, we should expect the wave to stagnate between 2015 and 2030, and recede into stagnation and negative growth around 2030-2050.

I don't think this is foolproof, but it _is_ a tool and a perspective for analyzing history, and one that runs counter to the most common narrative of increasing acceleration in technological development. The physics way of saying this is that velocity is always positive (we're always going up or near-neutral) but the rate of acceleration isn't spectacularly greater than the new ones. If we really are talking about the rate of change of economic/tech growth (the rate of change of market size/capability), then we're talking about acceleration!

Anyway, this was a whole rant, but my personal take is that we tend to underestimate the amount of turbulence in history, leading us to believe that the past was a stable, peaceful and simpler time, while the present day is going nuts. This kind of thinking has fueled messianism, apocalyptic cults, futurism, dreams and nightmares for centuries, and will continue to if we don't blow ourselves up. We forget that even in places like Ancient Rome the rate of change in tech and human growth was still positive and rapid, that during the Dark Ages science and technology were still exploding in the Middle East, that the differences between 1650 and 1750 were vast in terms of human thought, that between 1850 and 1950 they were seemingly greater. There was no time of mythological stasis before the present day, and it's unlikely that there ever will be as long as we're still human.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave

Very much so.

More and more i feel that he PC and smartphone has just been about recreating the mainframe using smaller components.

The laser may well have been the last really new thing to come about.

Alan Kay spoke about it length in many of his talks.

For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o

Excellent video. I highly recommend everyone working in or with IT to see it.

I think he is right.

PCs and smartphone are mostly recreating thing from the past, and not the best things either. However, this isn't because we invented everything there is to invent. It has more to do with how research in computing is currently funded and how companies approach invention and innovation.

Making things smaller and power efficient IS invention, it's what has driven so much tech progress. Even supercomputers are a power problem now...

You probably should watch that video. This is one of its core subject. Kay makes a valuable distinction between invention and innovation, and what you describe falls into the "innovation" bucket. It's incremental. Yes, our cellphones are more powerful than mainframes of the old, but do we utilize them to the same extent?

But aren't lasers incremental too?

So are FinFETs, Quantum Wells, EUV lithography, compact linear accelerators and all the devices necessary for shrinking just "innovation"?

What's "invention then"?

radio probably is invention .. various multiplexing techniques like TDMA, FDMA, CDMA are not ..

With enough work one can convince oneself that each 'discovery' or 'invention' is a trivial follow-up of existing technology. DNA sequencing is in the post-laser era. Can you build a convincing argument as to why it's not new but the laser is new?

the first laser was built in the 60s, DNA was isolated in 1878.

Sequencing, not isolation. You might as well say that light has been observed since man has had eyes to see.

I've always thought - and described PC's as mini mainframes. Even the software we run on them is mainframe derived - Unix and VMS.

The mobile/tablet is truly the first "personal computer", which we've barely tapped yet. I am hopeful, but at the moment we haven't gone much beyond what we could do with very efficient punch card sorting.

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