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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

I just finished reading Mitchell Waldrop's book The Dream Machines which is largely about J.C.R. Licklider and it has a lot of stories about the things Metcalfe is talking about during the 60's and 70's and into the 80's. It's a long, detailed book and I recommend it.

After finishing the book it made me feel like progress has slowed tremendously. Look at the changes from 1960 to 1970 or from 1970 to 1980 and compare that to 2010 to 2020. The last decade produced lots of incremental improvements but where are the giant technological shifts?

I was born in 1970 and if I look back over my life, the giant change was going from a non-networked world to a networked world. I think it's similar to how my grand parents could remember the world before and after commercial flight or how my great-grandmother remembered the arrival of automobiles.

I wonder what it is my kids will point to 40 years from now. A colony on the moon or Mars maybe?

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I wasn't around those earlier decades so I don't have that perspective, but I do remember the transition from dial up to Tracphones to smartphones and IMO the change hasn't slowed down, it's just become more distributed.

I recently designed a PCB for a custom built 3D printer for a tenth of the cost (fab + assembly) of a board of similar complexity I made nearly a decade ago and the final cost of the 3d printer (based on an open source design) was a 20th of the price of the Stratasys Dimension Elite I purchased, also a decade ago. One of my next projects is to make a DIY semiconductor fab using just TI DLP micromirrors and a microscope because I want to experiment with DIY bio microfluidics - all based on technology and knowledge so common that it has trickled down to the hobbyist level. We've now got people building electron microscopes and genetically modifying organisms in their garages!

The robots I've worked with in clinical diagnostics are much more advanced now than they were a decade ago and are now cheap enough for the average lab. The metrology instruments and machining tools necessary to make high precision parts have become commonplace at manufacturers, factory automation robotics like 6-DoF arms have trickled down to the researcher and hobbyist level in the last 5 years, and agriculture is currently going through it's n-th revolution with software, remote sensing, and data science.

Every time I leave an industry for a few years and come back, the pace of change is staggering - it's just hidden behind the iron curtain.

CRISPR is at least as big an innovation as the ones you mention. Perhaps you are biased to the areas where you have the most familiarity ?

I didn't think of CRISPR and related genomics work. It definitely has potential to change the world like commercial flight or the internet, but I don't think it has yet...

Definitely something I need to keep thinking about. Biology probably is the next area to see some giant advances like physics did 80 years ago.

I think the most recent big shift, on a society level, was taking that networked world from our offices and homes to mobile devices. It‘s not exactly between 2010 and 2020 but definitely between 2000 and 2020.

I'd say it started in a relatively primitive way around 2000 with mobile WAP, fairly widespread texting, etc. You then had Blackberries and Treos. It was around 2010 though that the iPhone (introduced 2007) was really taking off.

genuine question (asking because i have a biased perspective): why dont you consider advances in ai to be a major shift? in the past decade, there has been a rapid increase in capabilities in computer vision, language understanding, robotics, etc.

The technology has advanced a lot but what major changes have these advances in AI really made to the average person's life? I can't think of any that are anywhere near as dramatic as the invention of cars/air travel/the internet/smartphones.

AI is largely used for surveillance and advertising. Great.

AI researchers have been over-promising and under-delivering for 70 years now.

It seems like AI has settled into making discriminators. Maybe intelligence really is just pattern matching and grouping? I don't think it is, but I could be wrong.

It doesn't seem that AI and robotics over-promise. Sure, we're not at AGI, but if you look at the potential(i.e. startups) to replace jobs, there are tons of that.

The same was said of expert systems in the 1980’s. Yes, there’s potential, but that potential hasn’t been realized yet. At least not to the point where people compare the impact of AI to the impact of semi-conductors and integrated circuits.

It will take time. Like every big innovation.

The question is: will the potential be fullfiled.

Maybe, given the many startups doing real work with machine learning(besides the many that just hype), it's reasonable to guess that that the potential Will be fullfiled.

Many cognitive scientists would argue that it's also about building models which include statistical/Bayesian models but more than that.

To your broader point, it's not hard to find some specific domains of machine learning where there have been huge advances. But zoom out and look at the broader picture and the results aren't so impressive.

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