Ask HN: Are paradigm shifting breakthroughs rarer or is it a bias in my eyes? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are paradigm shifting breakthroughs rarer or is it a bias in my eyes?

27 pointsnewyankee70 comments

I feel that 10+ years back there used to be a lot of talk of a lot of technologies that would change the world following in the footsteps of Moore's law (although a bit more slowly).

In the decade since a lot of exciting developments have happened. Smartphones have become cheaper, world is so much more connected, EVs looking to finally breakthrough etc.

However exponential tech that takes us to something like 'singularity' does not seem to come up any more. Most growth is incremental and we hype every single Lab output with rarely seeing commercial breakthroughs.

I was personally always excited about material science breakthroughs using graphene etc. but seems like it is difficult to manufacture at scale even today.

Any specific tech or breakthrough you are personally waiting for coming to fruition ?

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> However exponential tech that takes us to something like 'singularity' does not seem to come up any more.

I don’t know who else was saying this, but the story of exponential growth leading to a singularity is/was the schtick of Ray Kurzweil, and it’s a narrative that was never true.

Kurzweil was one of the people trying to sell the idea that we will eventually unlock human immortality through technical progress. Along the way he made many dubious and false claims. One of them, for example, a key component of his story, is that human longevity has increased by many years in the last 200 years of human history. He does this by showing a graph of life expectancy that starts at a low point when disease and war was rampant, and by omitting data points immediately after world war 1, then “fitting” a completely misleading curve to the cherry picked data. The life expectancy plot at the very bottom of this page is complete bunk: https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns

So the graphs I've seen regarding technological growth look like:

https://medium.com/advanced-composite-training/what-lies-ahe...

It's hard to argue with the rate of growth, and doesn't seem to be slowing down.

This graph you linked to is also bunk, I’m sorry to say. I’m not saying that technology hasn’t advanced, but this particular framing is very, very bad.

What, exactly, is the Y-axis of that graph? How many things did it leave out? Why are 3d movies on the plot, what technology does it represent, and why are 3d movies placed after driverless cars, when in fact they were invented long before MSDOS and the internet? Where is the camera, the atom bomb, and the microscope? How about the sewing machine, hydraulic machines, the battery, or matches? The list of omissions is way way too long to list here. Why are microprocessors placed long after the moon landing, and just before word processors, when in fact integrated circuits were invented well before the moon landing, and were used for the moon landing?!? Why does this plot name a bunch of brands like Facebook, YouTube, Google, Ipad, MSDOS. What fundamental technologies did those things bring? They didn’t, and they’re included for the sole purpose of selling the idea that there are many recent advancements, but it’s cherry picking bogus data and ignoring many, many achievements of science, math, physics, and industry, before the invention of the microchip.

I agree the graph is bad - I was rushed and it was the 1st item that popped up on my search. Better graphs do exist, showing technology growth over a far longer time period (e.g. widespread use of bows, farming tech, etc).

That seems totally fair. It’s just that graphing technology progress on a plot might be an impossible task. Plus, once I’ve seen two bunk graphs in a row, now I start to suspect something about the core idea might be BS. It would interesting to see a truly plausible and convincing plot.

To show technology progress accurately and fairly, we need to include all developments, right? And we need to understand and show the precursor inventions that lead to another -- there is no technology that wasn’t born from other technology. The integrated circuit came after the transistor, which came after the vacuum tube, which came after a series of mechanical calculators. Would we have to weight the difficulty of each invention in the context of it’s technological surrounding, and the lasting impact of each invention? What should the Y-axis of the graph be?

There’s no question that human technology had a pretty big bump in the rate of progress since the printing press. There’s no denying how much our world has changed in the last hundred years, and even in my own lifetime. Cars and the internet have changed the fact of this planet, for better or worse. But is “progress”, meaning new inventions, really exponential? Seems unlikely. Is it leading to a “singularity”? Sounds like fantasy to me.

One fear I have, one thing that’s hard to see right now, is whether the invention of software has slowed down all the rest of physics and mechanics and materials progress. Software is so cheap and easy compared to anything else, that’s what most people working in technology do. It’s a bit difficult to demonstrate the progress of technology with software - what exactly is being invented. There has been some, no doubt, but YouTube and Facebook are indicators of technology scale, not indicators of technology progress, which are somewhat (but not completely) separate things. It is clear that the technology of microchips and software has just scaled from small to global. It’s not at all clear that this recent trend will continue, once everyone has a phone and internet and a self-driving car. The number of people and physical resources put a natural cap on scale. Hitting the end of Moore’s law is also changing the rate of scale as we speak.

> Any specific tech or breakthrough you are personally waiting for coming to fruition ?

Honestly, no. When I look back 40 years when there was little tech, and think about the future with more tech... I'm quite comfortable where we are now. We are in a decent middle ground where we have vast improvements vs. my childhood. But we also are a bit overwhelmed - society is still navigating the current tech and its impacts to our selves, our governments, our culture, and figuring out how to integrate tech with the whole of humanity. I think slowing down for a while to get all that sorted out is just fine before we make any new large moves.

Coming from a developing country, few people believe me when I told my US friends that I actually had a black and white television at home when small and I skipped landline phones directly for the mobile revolution. I guess every generation gets tired with too much tech after a while, although it becomes trickier where tech literacy is important for your day to day job. I am not that old but personally already trying to minimize my 'unnecessary' tech use on a day to day basis.

Technology always feels like this: the breakthrough and the “revolution” are often separated by many years. If this is hard to grok just remind yourself the internet existed in the 1970’s!

We are at that same moment (post-breakthrough, pre-revolution), for genetics and biotech. CRISPR has changed the world, but most of us haven’t noticed too much yet, and I think we can’t imagine what it’s going to be like any more than the network engineers in the 70s could imagine TikTok.

Another breakthrough that may be imminent is Fusion power, if the new magnets and associated materials the current crop of Fusion companies are touting really do make the difference to economical fusion. Geopolitics will change astronomically as the importance of fossil fuels wanes, but if it happens “fast” due to economical fusion then it may be a lot more “revolutionary” as compared to a more gradual transition via renewables and batteries.

There’s tons of exciting stuff on the horizon. It’s just hard to perceive it coming until it’s arrived :)

Fusion power is exciting but I am assuming any country that develops it first will be reluctant to share it for a few decades at least (to maintain competitive advantage), unless ITER succeeds.

I am most excited by the conjunction of speech recognition, natural language understanding, language modeling all coming together to create solid conversational AI interfaces.

There's a lot of things I could get done a lot faster if I could converse with a slightly dumb ML algo the way I would talk to a person, even just for getting tasks done, etc.

What sorts of things do you have in mind?

I've used the app Magic, which is sort of like an on-demand personal assistant. They're real people, but I'm imagining the sorts of requests I made being done by an AI.

"Get me a list of cool concerts around Valentine's Day, near my city, along with links to music by the bands involved. Buy me the tickets for the one I pick and then update my calendar and send my wife an invite. Get me an Airbnb near the venue if the concert is more than 30m from my house and schedule rideshares. Finally, give me a list of casual restaurants with vegetarian options within 20m walking distance of the venue, otherwise schedule rideshares to the restaurants I pick."

"Every night at 10pm, review my task list and make sure I completed 70% of what I committed to for the day. If I attached proofs, review those and make sure they are legit. Otherwise, request more information if it's unclear whether I met my commitment. If I don't respond with enough information, donate $50 to the Republican National Committee with my credit card and write a tweet about my failure on my Twitter account."

I want the version of Google Assistant / Alexa / Siri that actually works.

I'm possibly being uncharitable - the speech recognition is fine but to me they feel like talking to a mannequin, "there's nobody home" so to speak.

Being able to actually outsource big chunks of my executive function to a reliable assistant that can plan with me, gives timely prompts and never forgets would be life changing.

State of the art UX for this is still calendar and notes apps, want it to be Jarvis.

Yeah they don't remember the previous response, so you can't ask for the weather tomorrow, and then "what about the weekend?" Without specifying you mean the weather.

The only concern I always thought about was whether speech recognition would every be accurate enough using low processing power. The development beyond popular languages seem to have plateaued. I am sure speech recognition specifically is much better and looking at OpenAI demos blow my mind even now, but I have personally not observed significant difference in voice recognition on my Android smartphone - 2013 vs today.

We can do keyword spotting with microcontrollers now. All kinds of techniques like quantization and tree pruning are squeezing down more capable NLP models further and further. There is dedicated analog hardware being developed for in-memory compute (ReRAM, photonic). TinyML/AIoT is shaping up to be one of the most society-defining technologies of this decade.

Not true at all for me, noticeable improvements in speech recognition and it is easy to get low cpu and accurate speech recognition with a framework like wav2letter. 2013 phones hardly even had speech recognition, 2 years after Siri was released.

I do think we have to guard against our cognitive biases that often stop us from noticing gradual but continuous improvements.

My old Motorola Razr had less friction than Siri on the iPhone. Processing was local and fast … Siri gives me a beachball for a few seconds and I am unsure if Siri heard me or not so I repeat what I said again and then Siri shuts down. Hey Siri! Hey Siri!! Hey Siri #%&@it!!!!!

I'm particularly excited about VR computing (plug: https://www.simulavr.com) fundamentally changing the way we work and get things done (as opposed to just changing the way we game and entertain ourselves).

Your larger point that non-incremental progress seems to be slowing down was at one point popularized by Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen in the early 2010s. I not only agree, this was the fundamental thing that made me want to get into technology startups and build something. I think malaise over slow tech process is a great motivation to dive into tech and make the world a better place.

I think your reaction is a typical one I see; but it leads to burnout as people spend some time and realize that the vast majority of the problems left are Really Hard Problems with a sociological element. We’ve solved all of the big problems that can be solved by a small team; most “innovation” these days is just folks reinventing a wheel they didn’t know existed (which speaks to the Really Hard Problem of even knowing when real innovation has happened or are just the bombastic claims of a charlatan, and there not being enough hours in the day to differentiate between the two at scale.)

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

https://marginalrevolution.com

I think that's the typical curve of advancement. You expect it to move with noticeable linear speed, but actually what one usually perceives is that short term changes are surprisingly small, while long term changes are surprisingly large.

I mean - I took 25 years from first non-exploding V2 flight to the first moon landing. Given it took them 7 years just to build the turbo pump in the engine 25 years is quite a short time to get from a munitions deployment platform to a human space program.

I think there is stagnation in some areas, probably because everyone was been interested in finding out what you can do with the internet, but I think we've now reached the stage where it's part of daily plumbing and not exciting and new anymore, and perhaps more brainpower will be available to figure out what fancy things we can design with this ephemeral super computing capacity.

I think WWII and the Apollo project were catalysts for a lot of innovations that produced big shifts. Those are a distant memory, now.

On top of that, currently we have our best and brightest minds trying to figure out how get people to click on ads.

Even if one agrees with this uninspiring portrayal of so much of the industry, one cannot deny that there are spillover benefits.

I'm struggling to think of any spillover benefits from adtech. Nothing at the scale of things like VLSI or teflon.

There is no need to limit our thinking to hardware or materials.

From where I sit, it is easy to find spillover benefits.

First, think about all the tools and techniques used in building scalable adtech: infrastructure; architecture; inferential statistics; data science; machine learning; social experimentation; even hardware innovations to advance these things. I grant that not all of these are strictly necessary nor exclusive to adtech, but adtech's money certainly contributes to them.

Second, think about the hundreds of thousands of people (software developers, academics, etc) who work in the field and get to practice their craft and deepen their experience and knowledge. Without adtech, the field would be much smaller. These people cross-pollinate the industry.

Third, think wealth accumulation. Our time in history is special: when else have so many people have gained so much wealth so quickly? A sizeable chunk of these people want to take on non-adtech challenges and disrupt other industries.

I think big technical leaps have slowed down in "tech," meaning anything with computers.

However, giant leaps are happening and will happen biologically.

I think 2020-2050 will produce radical breakthroughs in biological—everything.

Many of these will be incremental but add up to massive changes, like most cancers being treatable with immunotherapy.

I hope that is the case as it has the potential for improving Quality of life for the humanity as a whole.

> However exponential tech that takes us to something like 'singularity' does not seem to come up any more. Most growth is incremental and we hype every single Lab output with rarely seeing commercial breakthroughs. I was personally always excited about material science breakthroughs using graphene etc. but seems like it is difficult to manufacture at scale even today.

I think at least a decent portion of this feeling can be explained by selection bias and connectivity of the internet.

When you look backwards, all you see are successes. Nobody remembers the innumerable failures that just didn't work out. Now, with a vastly connected internet, you'll hear about more potential technologies than ever before. Research organizations have stepped up their game to publicize and promote their nascent technologies, because it helps obtain funding. And funding is needed to figure out if and how tech can move from a lab into commercial viability.

So I don't think it's all doom and gloom, just that we have unprecedented access to information, and the present always feels slower than the past.

It is definitely true that every researcher has to become a great marketer and salesperson to get more funding. This results in a lot of hype for very early stage ideas as well.

I think it is a bias.

Anyways, the singularity won't happen. In physics and in reality in general, the presence of a singularity means that we are wrong, or at least, that our theory is incomplete. For example, black hole singularities, an artefact of general relativity may disappear with quantum gravity. Similarly, I think the idea of a technological singularity is just a sign that our projection is wrong.

What am I waiting? I am waiting to be surprised! We expected flying cars, we got internet connected smartphones, which I think are much more exciting.

I am personally excited about nuclear technology, but I guess I am 50 years too late, the enthusiasm has died out, still, I'd like to see fusion power actually work, and nuclear spacecraft too.

Honestly Nuclear energy with a low LCOE should've been achieved by now. China may lead the way in it, even with lots of renewables they may like having an alternative tech where they can lead.

Speaking from my personal fields of work, AI (computer vision & generative), AR, and VR, I'd say we've made tremendous progress since 2011.

I'd be really curious to hear someone in those fields justify thinking otherwise.

I'd dare to say the progress in AI from 1981-2011 (Watson, CNN's, Chess) was less than the progress from 2011-2021 (StyleGAN, GPT-3, AlphaGO).

As for VR, if you had told someone in 2011 that there would even be a mainstream company making VR in 2021 they might not believe you. Instead, many major companies are building VR and AR glasses, and the leading market one has inside-out tracking, hand tracking, done from an onboard processor, for only the inflation adjusted cost of a Nintendo 3DS at that time.

I was part of the initial 3D graphics research community during the 80's. We've seen a few paradigm shifts in my career: 3d going mainstream, the graphical UI going mainstream, the web being separate from the Internet, mobiles overtaking the desktop as the dominate computer people use, and social media overtaking broadcast news as where people get their opinions. I'd say we are in the midst of the next paradigm shift now, and that is scientific computing with DL/ML being applied to any field the data and will is available. The fruits are gonna be profound.

That is true, but breakthroughs in fields like Biology, Materials science etc. enabled by AI advances is what I was really excited about. May be we will see some news on this front by the likes of Deepmind etc.

As someone working in the field, Materials Scientists are at the point where they have heard a description of what a computer is and they are trying to invent possible uses for one from scratch.

Do you mean they were resistant to change, skeptical or have they finally found a reason to embrace new techniques due to proven success by their younger or more adventurous peers ?

They have been resistant to change until now, but also seem unable to accept that people did think about the subject in the past, any plans that I see treat the whole subject of using computers for materials science as a completely new field.

I added support for materials data to STEP over 25 years ago, they could just use software and data formats that are already available.

Lithium batteries were discovered 30+ years ago, and while there hasn't been a major breakthrough in the tech (a single-improvement that 2x+ it) if you look at e.g. prices they have been exponentially decreasing for the last 10 years, and now they are around 90% cheaper than 10 years ago. Make them another 50%-80% cheaper and e.g. ICE simply won't make sense.

On Biology for example, isn't Covid19 vaccine and mRNA in general a huge breakthrought?

Innovations and breakthroughs are best recognized in hindsight.

It is very hard to predict which combination of advancements are greater than the sum of their parts while simultaneously making sense in their surrounding economic and social contexts.

I think we are good at identifying primary impacts of innovation but average person is not able to understand secondary and tertiary impact. As a personal anecdote, living in third world country and going to college today vs 2005 I can easily see how much easier it is for a poor but motivated person to learn today using free resources. Something that was difficult even a decade back.

I think that changes are happening faster and slower than you imagine.

We are very bad at exponential math. I think changes in birth control, dating online, and social changes are faster than ever before.

The developed world will shrink and people couple up in ways people only 5 decades ago couldn't imagine.

Governments and societies are not ready for this or a system where we need to work less. John Maynard Keynes in Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren opined that, by 2030, the average work week would be around 15 hours (3 hours per work day).

I find that technology’s exponential change tapers off and looks more like an S over time, but after the flattening another S starts with a new exponential curve. Zoom out enough and it looks like steps to a staircase.

All of these are overlapping and have their own time scales.

Graphene, for example, is manufactured and used today—but not for the things it was originally hyped for.

mRNA tech has been around for decades, but clearly in its next step of exponential growth—not just in the vaccines but the “programmable” versions many companies are exploring currently.

mRNA definitely seems like the biggest story in Life Sciences now. Although I remember being very hyped about Stem Cells and their potential 10 years back. I always get a feel that development could be faster but information, money is not spreading as fast as is possible now and probably commercial interests slow down some big changes.

I like to drop this link when this topic comes up and also recommend reading anything by Vernor Vinge. My favorite is Across Realtime.

https://longnow.org/seminars/02007/feb/15/what-if-the-singul...

I'm guessing it's a combination of bias, realism, and a change in how things come to market.

On Realism. Looking back on my thinking about "breakthroughs", a lot of the things that were presented with a lot of hype turned out to be duds. The media played up a lot of things as amazing that just never made much of an impact. Now I have a more realistic view of things because I have the experience of seeing "breakthroughs" that were just not breakthroughs. I have more of an "I'll believe it when it's real" mentality which means that the number of breakthroughs I see is lower since I only see the real ones and not the stuff that gets hyped up and never really happens.

On coming to market. I think that today, something goes from idea to market very quickly. The iPhone's 6-months from introduction to market is positively slow by today's standards. By the time something can get hype, you're already using it so it doesn't feel like a breakthrough. It's just a part of life.

> exponential tech that takes us to something like 'singularity' does not seem to come up any more

Just as flying cars doesn't come up so much anymore. Sometimes we have ideas that simply remain as ideas (for the most part). Sure, flying cars do come up, but it's rare. Likewise, we also have plenty of movies about The Singularity.

> Any specific tech or breakthrough you are personally waiting for coming to fruition?

mRNA tech. Seriously, in the past two years we've seen a huge revolution in what we're going to be able to do. The vaccines are wonderful, but they're the tip of the iceberg. But if mRNA tech comes out with an HIV vaccine, treatments for lots of diseases, etc. over the next 5-10 years, we'll probably react with "yea, but that's old-hat. I had their Covid vaccine 5-10 years ago."

A really great Apple Watch. They're very good now, but I would love a watch that would make me ditch my phone. The problem is that it'll never feel like a breakthrough because it'll just be a decade or two of refining the idea as more and more people buy smartwatches. It won't feel like a breakthrough because there are too many people working on it already and because it's already a profitable idea.

The iPhone felt like a breakthrough because all the big money had ignored the space. They were content to just keep offering the same old stuff with minor tweaks.

I think one of the big shifts is in how money is approaching tech investment.

No one wants to get scooped on the Next Big Thing and so lots of money is chasing it, even before the tech is ready (and often finding ways to monetize things along the way). I think that decades ago, companies would ignore things that they thought would have lower margins or eat into established businesses. Xerox decided against computers, IBM thought that software was a crappy business so they let Microsoft be their OS, every car company decided that LiIon batteries were too expensive for cars, etc. Today, companies will keep dumping products on the market in the hope that they won't get scooped - and VCs are willing to fund small companies.

For example, Amazon never wants to be scooped. When Apple launched the iTunes Music Store, it really hurt their CD business. So they brought the Kindle to market fast so that they could become the e-book store. They brought the Echo/Alexa to market fast and have pushed it in all sorts of places - from car add-ons to glasses - even if it isn't profitable yet because they want to own the space. But it also means that by the time something becomes ubiquitous, it seems old. 15 years from now, you could be walking down the street and say "Alexa, take a picture" and some barely-noticeable device on you takes a picture of what you're seeing. But that isn't transformative. You've had Alexa for 20 years.

Breakthrough is a feeling and I think that the way things are coming to market impacts that a lot. If a company is able to put out a crappy first-gen product and then enhance it over a decade because the investor money is there to support that, then it won't seem like a breakthrough tech when it actually is great.

> 10+ years back there used to be a lot of talk of a lot of technologies that would change the world

Yea, there's still talk. I don't know what age you are, but if you were a teen 10+ years ago, you might just be interpreting the talk differently. There's plenty of talk about how blockchain will change the world. You might just be rolling your eyes at it. There's plenty of talk from Elon Musk about colonizing Mars. You might just have an "I'll believe it when I see it" attitude. Literally, people are talking about human life on another planet - literally tech that would change the solar system, not just the planet! But you might be thinking, "sure, but Musk's timeline seems unrealistic and it probably won't happen" in a way that 10+ years ago you might have thought "omg, that's going to happen! I'm going to sign up!"

I was a little more than teen 10+ years back, and sure there is a lot of talk now. But definitely much more mature about expectations and timeline. I was expecting a < 25k $ EV with > 300 mile range now. There has been considerable progress in this space, it is probably me being unrealistic 10 years back that 2020 would be totally different.

Paradigm shifts, at least in the Khunian sense, tend to happen over a generational scale, which means, firstly, that they take a considerable time to become recognised as the new paradigm, and secondly, that you tend not to see too many in a lifetime.

Easy looking back across history at all the various paradigm shifts simultaneously to wonder why there isn’t one happening now, but the collapsed time of history isn’t the same as living in real time.

I think there’s a lot of biotech development underway that will make our world look fundamentally different in the future. We’ve seen this a bit with the mRNA covid vaccine. I’m excited about the prospect of novel cancer treatments, crispr and its potential to treat genetic defects, protein folding, etc. Maybe these types of techniques can continue to benefit from even incremental progress in computer technology. I feel similarly about other fields — that progress there is just waiting on today’s computing frontier to be applied to them. This all may be an incorrect view, however. My only experience with the biotech I mentioned has been through press, which can overhype.

My main concern is that FDA needs to update its approval processes for new techniques with time especially in cases where people do not have an alternative. I am more skeptical of any new tech being accessible to global population though, it will come down in price only with time, so I am not sure if I can personally afford something cutting edge the way a billionare or multi-millionare can.

This feels like spotting people at the beach. The crowds and breakthroughs always look closer to each other from a distance.

I'd like humans to get the upgrade that enables empathy and long term thinking.

The creation of mRNA vaccines for covid was pretty impressive.

The real feat there was economic. Scientifically, that technology is quite mature

Fair, I was mostly responding to this line.

> Most growth is incremental and we hype every single Lab output with rarely seeing commercial breakthroughs.

I think e-bikes are the next thing.

You're not looking very hard. There are three major technologies that are on the horizon: solar, AI and cryptocurrency.

Solar is probably the safest bet among the three. A combination of Swanson's law [0] and Wright's law [1] have solar panels dropping exponentially, halving every 6-7 years. Battery technology needs to go hand in hand with the increased solar capacity in order to actually use it and I'm a little weaker on evidence of how quickly that's dropping but I think there's some expectation that battery technology is also experiencing it's own exponential price decrease [2]. The current US average household uses about 30kWh per day and has an average yearly energy bill of around $1200. My guess is that when solar and battery technology start to be priced in the $5k range for a 30kWh system, that's when we'll see a dramatic shift to solar. I would expect this to happen in the next 10-15 years. With solar and battery technology, you have the potential to get other unforseen events, like decentralized energy grids, ubiquitous and cheap energy etc. which all could lead to new markets and innovation.

My guess is that AI is coming in the next 10-15 years. The human brain is estimated at 2.5 petabytes [3] of information and using cost of hard disk space as a proxy for the compute and other infrastructure to create general level AI, with current trends in exponential decreases in hard disk cost (and exponential cost decreases in other compute) a $1000 petabyte hard drive will be here within the next 10-15 years. We can already see spectacular results from speech synthesis, deep fakes, language synthesis etc. Two minute papers is a train of incremental spectacular results [4]. Kurtzweil has been claiming the singularity would happen around 2030 [5] and I see no reason to suspect this to be substantially wrong. There are many different interpretations of what "singularity" means and when we can expect human level AI but most of the reasonable predictions, even ones based on "back of the envelope" calculations (like the one I just did) all lead to the 2030 range. Many predictions about AI haven't come true so people get soured on it but the ones that should be believed are based on evidence, give reasons why and when the singularity will happen and, of importantly, are falsifiable.

Cryptocurrency give the promise providing a ubiquitous payment system, capable of allowing for near instant microtransactions outside of a single nations control. HN is notoriously vitriolic towards cryptocurrency for some reason, which I've always found disconcerting since cryptocurrency is much in the same spirit as the early internet's decentralized philosophy. Cryptocurrency also gives, in my opinion, the only viable option for digital micropayments, which is something I haven't heard since the early 2000s when it was abandoned in favor of Amazon's "1-click shopping" or Ebay's payment system. Proof of work is known to be energy intensive but the response is that there's a cost to the current banking system we're paying, sometimes in the form of externalities, so it's not clear we're doing worse with PoW. I've heard, though I still don't feel like I have enough evidence to decide one way or the other, that cryptocurrency might actually speed the adoption of solar as cryptocurrency mining is an ideal energy source (sporadic, excess energy that can be used to give a return on investment, especially in areas that claim to not be able to support excess solar energy because of legacy infrastructure). I'm focusing just on the "developed nations" consumer level benefits without touching on some of the other more fundamental issues that cryptocurrency might enable through accessible banking to portions of the population that are unbanked, providing banking infrastructure to developing nations that have troubles with the current banking infrastructure and providing a unifying currency for the world. Given the average price increase of Bitcoin, I would expect Bitcoin to be used for around 10% of the worlds commerce by 2026 (around five years time). If that hasn't happened and/or we see a price of Bitcoin in the $500k to $1M range without being used in a significant way for goods and services, I would have to start thinking seriously whether there's some credence to what the detractors are saying.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects

[2] https://longtailpipe.com/2013/04/06/there-is-moores-law-for-...

[3] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-memor...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbfYPyITQ-7l4upoX8nvctg

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near#Predic...

Solar and Battery I am well versed with and follow quite closely (you can check my comment history). I am actually personally sold on LFP battery tech but despite claims of 135$/kwh prices within companies I have never seen retail prices < 300 $/kwh. I guess this decade will be better in converging retail vs B2B prices but scaling production is not a trivial issue.

Having said that, wonder what impacts global supply chain crisis and geopolitical changes will have on thi

$300/kWh is essentially what lead acid is at, which is maybe why you chose it, but, point being, there are already batteries out there that hit this mark.

In terms of availability of LiFePO4 batteries, just a quick check on Alibaba and Aliexpress shows many options for anywhere from $100/kWh to $150/kWh (if the prices are to believed, shipping is reasonable, etc. etc.).

My assumption is that this prices will keep dropping and batteries, in some shape or form, will follow their own Moore's law like behavior, becoming cheaper at an exponential pace. I'm not sure if you believe the Alibaba and Aliexpress prices or whether you consider that "consumer" or not, but the $100/kWh is essentially already here and potentially available at small scale volumes.

Scaling up production, scaling up adoption, finding markets, interleaving with local regulation, etc. are all challenges of adoption solar and battery technology for use in energy, especially in developed nations where there's a legacy infrastructure to consider. My opinion is that when the cost of the hardware is sufficiently low, there is a large pressure to adopt the new technology because the potential savings are so high. With a high potential upside, impediments to adoption are overcome.

In my opinion, the low cost of solar and batteries make this almost an inevitability and so the better question is when will it be adopted and what markets will spring out from it.

In terms of supply chain issues, this is, from what I understand, a localized problem due to the global pandemic and I would expect this to be resolved within the next year or two. This might just speak to my own ignorance on how the whole shipping industry works and maybe this is pointing to a potential other market involving supply chains, shipping containers or some other technology, that I'm missing.

Anyway, you were asking for "exciting" technology. There's kind of nothing more fundamental than energy. Solar and battery technology promise to create an abundance of cheap energy. An abundance of energy has the potential to create a booming economy, so it's not just the technology proper that has innovation, which could include things like a decentralized energy grid, smart power monitoring, etc. but also all the other side effects from energy abundance that comes with it.

Exponential tech bringing us to a singularity was never happening.

We had at least two tremendous breakthroughs in technologies that act as enablers and multipliers for other technologies since the last industrial revolution. The first was figuring out how to store, transport, and use energy. We lucked out a bit on the very existence of fossil fuels and then made an all-time great physics breakthrough discovering nuclear fission and fusion. All of these are limited by storage capacity and transmission bandwidth, and once the road and wiring infrastructure was in place, there isn't a whole lot more than incremental improvements to be had. The other paradigm shift we seemed tantalizing close to was Tesla trying to develop wireless energy transmission, but it never happened.

The second was electronic computing. When we figured out we could use transistors to print computers onto increasingly smaller circuit boards, that unlocked decades upon decades of rapid scaling potential that we have mostly done a great job of continually realizing. Computational signal transmission, unlike energy transmission, actually works fine without wires, which enabled mobile and grid computing and build out of massive richly connected networks.

These aren't going to unlock singularities, though. If we're only looking for advances in energy and computing, then yeah, of course, those were going to slow down at some point compared to when we found major paradigm shifts like transistors and fossil fuels. Wireless energy transmission and cold fusion are probably the two holy grails that could make a lot of other stuff happen, but we have no idea if they're really possible, and the past few decades of "our greatest minds are focused on how to price a CDO" shifting to "our greatest minds are figuring out how to get people to click on ads" probably isn't helping. Without the commercial incentive, research to enable larger breakthroughs probably has to come from governments, but making better governments isn't in the purview of technology. As others have mentioned, we don't have the world wars, space race, and cold war to motivate us any more. Maybe a greater US/China rivalry can actually rekindle governments that fund important basic research?

There are other obvious enablers we need beyond energy and computing, too. Transportation is one. I don't think we've made any major breakthroughs here since the automobile and airplane were invented. Widespread work from home and remote collaboration could probably go a long way toward solving this problem by doing an end-around and making people not need to move as much rather than figuring out better ways to move them.

Food production is another. Healthcare is another. Our greatest sci-fi imagines teleportation, splicing apart air molecules and putting together protein and carbohydrates, and immunity from all diseases and possible curing aging. Are those really possible? Who knows, but again, it'll take a lot of commercially unviable, largely failed, basic research to even figure this out. Thousands of people will need to spend many decades of career time, possibly entire lifetimes, achieving nothing so that one person can achieve a breakthrough.

And, at some point, we need to figure out how to keep an exponentially growing population housed and productively occupied. That isn't a technological problem. We have the tech right now to give everyone their own cubbyhole and coloring book, but humans want more than that.

people are the bottleneck

As I get older I find myself agreeing with this a bit more, but do not think it is the sole reason.

We have still a very non-creative and industrial worldview, and people really just stop caring about other stuff and stop learning after they specialize and get a job. Breakthroughs happen both as a function of connecting different specific domains and when a domain becomes generalized and its main concepts become common knowledge as part of the language.

Commercially viable quantum computation immediately comes to mind.

I am by no means an expert, although if I was younger and still in school it would be my area of focus.

I always felt that anyone who successfully creates a useful Quantum computer has low incentive to make it public. It will be a strategic advantage for the country and the people at top will decide whether to suppress it for non strategic use or not.

I have the feeling that more and more exponential tech advancements are taking place right in front of our eyes. But that the public is somehow actively looking away.

Take a look at self driving. Watch some videos from 5 years ago and from last month.

Take a look at GPT-3. I am pretty sure a lot of articles are already written by NNs these days. Put into the name of any stock into Google News and you will see a flood of articles "Why XYZ has risen/tanked today" and "Should you invest $100k into XYZ?" which probably are written by AI with some human curation. Nothing like this existed a few years ago.

Look at how "money of the people" is now a thing via crypto. Money that can be digitally transferred and not be printed by a government. This was just a dream 10 years ago.

And have you looked into DAOs? These are virtul autonomous organizations, straight out of a science fiction book. But they are provably real now.

I think that these topics are always downvoted on HN is an example of "actively looking away". Change is scary.

So a misinformation generator, staggeringly inefficient transaction databases helping ruin the planet and fund crime and ransomware, and immutable brittle smart contract "laws" to try and run society with, which cost hundreds of dollars for a tiny transaction?

Humanity could be aiming a little higher.

That's what old people said about the internet in the 90s. "So silly personal diaries and porn? Humanity could be aiming a little higher."

But young nerds loved it and understood that it would take over the world. A very similar thing is going on with AI and crypto these days.

> a misinformation generator

a great misinformation generator, the best, it can even tell tales about unicorns, what's not to like?

do you know what was the best attempt at text generation before GPT? it was LSTM word salad - this kind of text[1]:

> Once upon a time there were a man and noble princess!’ being so good- natured, and that morning, when he awoke, he found it in his hand it to the palace. The young wild hut a lived, on the bridge of two days…

vs GPT-2:

> In a shocking finding, scientist discovered a herd of unicorns living in a remote, previously unexplored valley, in the Andes Mountains. Even more surprising to the researchers was the fact that the unicorns spoke perfect English.

[1] https://towardsdatascience.com/text-generation-gpt-2-lstm-ma...

vs GPT-3:

> A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-...

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