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Comment by gonvaled | Hacker News Reader

During the 200 thousand years of human history, technological progress was pretty flat. Low hanging fruit like electricity and nuclear power took a long time to develop. Most of our dreams remain just that.

Recently, apart from CS and genetics, we are stagnant.

On top, progress is trickling down pretty badly. We are wasting lots of resources on conflicts, essentially to ensure that the one percenters keep their possessions, including means of production (so that capital can further concentrate).

We will probably lay the planet to waste, by wars and resource exploitation, much sooner than technology will advance enough to save us.

The ingeniuty of the human race is not its predominant feature.

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> Recently, apart from CS and genetics, we are stagnant.

That seems a pretty weird argument to make. "Apart from all the people with black hair, nobody has black hair" These two fields alone are wide ranging enough that they can touch almost everything on earth. Furthermore, fields like material science have progressed an incredible amount due to widespread availability of computing power. So have agriculture, logistics, manufacturing, mining, medicine and education. We may yet destroy ourselves before we attain utopia, but it won't be because our technology is too stagnant.

There's no evidence that tech is stagnating but quite a lot that the pace is accelerating, perhaps geometrically. There are two reasons-- one is the integration of many more people into the western/global structure of scientific and material progress (particularly in Asia and South Asia) and the second is the complementary impact of advances across multiple fields. Consider for example, the enormous impact of internet communications tech on medical research.

The Wright brothers, working in a bicycle shop, invented fixed wing flight in 1903 and it took less than 100 years for western civilization to develop jumbo jets and space planes.

> Recently, apart from CS and genetics, we are stagnant.

Are we? And also, the developments in CS (and computational science, in general) seem to speed-up discovery in other fields more and more.

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