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School kids kept advance slabs of glass in their pockets in 1989. Pockets were bigger then and the cpu was a Z80.

Rubber condoms began large scale manufacturing in the 1930s.

Flu immunization the 1950s. Very recently upgraded with modern science, but heavily practiced as it was.

The algorithm you revere as knowing yourself only ever gets trained to learn where it can get you to spend money. Which it does in an ad supported manner.

Point you on programming bacteria. Go bio.

Transplants and health have gotten better. But healthcare in general is also less accessible and more costly.

Space is no longer pioneered by nations, it's pioneered by people making money.

I agree we're amazing, but glamorous long-shot works are fading from the world and in my consideration we are settling in for a long stretch of capitalist coasting on marginal incremental improvements. We would do well to rally against settling and re-envision ways to breath life into possibility-exploration. The inflection point for progress was two decades ago.

> Space is no longer pioneered by nations, it's pioneered by people making money.

Why is this bad? That space is a viable destination for private businesses shows just how far we've come.

To be fair, it appears that the robber barons never even tried.

How are private companies entrance into the rocket design market innovative? Changing the market model for rocket design is hardly innovation, SpaceX getting gov't and private contracts for things done previously, I don't think, is true innovation.

Exactly. I may not gain an iota out of it, but I will trade an Elon Musk over a Prince Charles any day. We are gradually moving towards a society where inheritance may not be illegal, but hopefully it will be irrelevant. To me this sounds like the greatest achievement of human race...

> We are gradually moving towards a society where inheritance may not be illegal, but hopefully it will be irrelevant.

No, we are not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United... http://www.alternet.org/fun-facts-about-rich-people-walmart-...

Are you kidding? SpaceX built a tiny but cost effective rocket engine and rocket for significantly under a quarter billion. Most of the engineering was done under the initial $100m from Musk. They borrowed from well known engine designs that were simple, uncomplex, controllable, and safe, that had only been used on a small scale (they now use 9 of them). They used the cheapest, well-known weld technique, friction stir welding for the rocket.

X33, the last great "try some crazy shit" we pulled, was cancelled after $922m from NASA and $357m from Lockheed Martin. (Leave it to congress to kill the interesting/tricky/useful stuff! Revive this project!)

X33 was 1/10th the weight of the VentureStar craft it was a demonstrator for. It was to pioneer radical new high efficiency high-control thrust vectoring engines burning the most gravometrically dense element, innovative cryonics, sstol, lighweight composite construction techniques, lifting body aerodynamics, metallic thermal protection, and unmanned flight controls. Any one of these things could produce massive massive spinoff technologies in it's wake, and would be incredibly important technologies to be able to point to, and set a new bar for progress.

It's not that private industry is bad (oh, it is), it's that private industry is boring, safe, incremental, and the only massive innovations this world have ever seen have jumped up from the shadows and stolen existing big buisnesses lunch in the split second it took business to blink. Business is the living antithesis of what is most interesting and uniquely human: the radical.

The Dude invents phone (late 1800) > phone goes wireless (1980's) > iPhone (2006-7)

Dudes invent a a computer (1940s) > availbable to public (1980ish) > internet > I know more than my teacher and my dad

Dude invents penicillin > 100 years pass > people complain about not enough donors (1990s) > stem cells(now)

That looks like a rocket ship to me... and we are about to take off as far as I can tell....so buckle up man..

Or may be not if you are still carrying the glass slab from 1989...

Sure the glass slab from 1989 may have 50x or 70x bigger "wires" in it's microchips, and it may have bigger pixels, but I see more in common with the $100 1989 device and the modern glass slab than I see difference and change. Sure, certainly the extra miniaturization both chip- and product- scale is good incremental change, but the componentry is the same and rate of progress has tapered massively.

Wireless is certainly one place we've been radically helped, and that's hugely attributable to DSP processing, which is great. But see above tapering.

How's this for some bounding? Let's go back to 2000. AMD has just dropped a 1.4GHz Athlon, and is 3 years from Athlon 64. Intel, in November drops Netburst, 1.5-2GHz. Intel says are going to take NetBurst to 10GHz by 2005.

What I'd point out is that all these advances you cite have inflection points, something that took available technology that was on the shelf and under developed and mused over, into being radically ragingly important in a very short time. And then we milk that system heavily, get huge gains, and then... and then... cross our fingers hold our butts and wait for the next thing to jump up and remake the world. This "rocket" moves in fits and starts.

It's easy and convenient to point to historical context as you do, and to convince ourselves of progress. Rather than take hold of these mix of points and see amazement, I see very small case studies in a larger world that loses the radical element, the dynamics, and creeps towards stasis. The number of things left on the shelf to develop, to fully industrialize into, is not unboundedly infinite. It's up to us to dream hard, dream big, to fight the creeping in of stasis and assert our status as homo sapien, the shaper of the world about, and we need to find big enough dreams to fuel that. To do that, we need to keep everyone dreaming and potentiated, not just the Musks of today.

Most of your post is lost on me. I am sorry, I'm not a native English speaker...neither am I particularly good at deciphering stuff written by people smarter than me...my problem, I know...sorry...

However, I would like to say that I do know the importance of shoulders of the giants our current world stands on. If there were no Intel in 1961, then most likely there would be no iPhone in 2006, if there was no DNA model in early sixties then there will be no stem cell advances now. The point I was trying to make was that the fact standing on the shoulders of theses giants gives us a better shot at the kind of problems our predecessors couldn't even dream about. So the only time better than now, will be in future....when I am long gone up in smoke....I have absolutely no reason to complain...

edit: typo

I think a pendulum is swinging in a different direction now as well.

Over the last 20 years or so, it seems like the smartest of us were spending our careers and lives building a better nervous system for the planet in the form of popularizing the internet and building services that connect to it.

Now that we seem to be in a good place with all that, and the pendulum seems to be swinging back to a more...physical place with work in self-driving cars, medicine, space, etc.

I think it's fantastic. The best photo taking app in the world won't drive me to a space port where I can catch a ride to Mars.

"...the pendulum seems to be swinging back to a more...physical place..."

Agreed.

Hardware, hackspaces and many people I know are taking welding and machining courses.

As mentioned up the tree, I'm walking about with a Cray 2 equivalent in my bag.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_851327...

Agreed, and I wonder how much things are gonna go google car/glass. Meaning ubiquitous invisible computation interfaces with at most some connected flexible ~realtime epaper as the desktop computer, no more boxes etc.

Agreed that progress is stagnant on the net.

And I'm glad there are some grass roots springing up on the well-tread physical planes. It's great that people are springing their own means here.

I pray to my gods every day that the net too starts springing up some grass roots to show for itself. This "nervous system"'s origins were the smart and the dreamers, but it's meteoric rise into the cloud has gotten it further and further away from being a thing people know and touch and can handle for themselves. I hope it's not too long for the net to spring it's own grass roots, and for people to feel the netgrass beneath their feet.

- "unwanted pregnancy, but solves most other sexual hazards": The failure rate for condoms is "18 or more pregnancies per 100 women in a year" http://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/UnintendedPregnancy/PD...

- flu, most of the common diseases wiped out: "Threat of flu pandemics has increased recently" http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/12/1/05-0983_article.htm

"Common Infectious Diseases Worldwide" http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0903696.html

- "People are using binary logic to program bacteria to kill disease."

Are you? I'm not. Anyone else here doing this and using it to help any population (white mice don't count)?

- "If any organ in my body has a problem it can be replaced with a donor version." "Each day, about 77 people receive organ transplants. However, about 18 people die each day waiting for transplants that can't take place because of the shortage of donated organs." http://www.womenshealth.gov/publications/our-publications/fa...

So your chances in the USA are about 81% that you'll get an organ transplant. After that how long will you live (w/o regard to quality of life)? Well, it's organ-dependent. Kidneys might last 20 years, but for hearts the 10-year survival rate is 55%: http://www.nmh.org/nm/heart-transplantation-overview

-"Humans without legs can compete at the Olympic level against humans with healthy legs." The only person I know of who has benefited in this respect from technological advancement is Pistorius. So make that "one human (Pistorius) without legs, in some running events,..." and I'll agree. Other disabled Olympians made it on sheer determination (no high-tech required): http://www.wired.com/playbook/2012/08/11-disabled-olympians/

"Quadriplegics not only survive, but can have a surprising level of autonomy." I'd like to hear quadriplegics' take on this. Remove the government support system and they're all gone in 5 days. Is that autonomy? This isn't technology; it's determination and the charitable nature of our society.

"Yeah, with the right kind of funding, we can have that in 10 years": Well, then, how's the "war on cancer" doing, other than sucking taxpayer's money down a corporate drain, paying for doctors' Mercedes and Rio trips and creating a government bureaucracy that will have people voting for politicians based on the state of their gall-bladders instead of on their personal freedoms? "Give me a heart transplant or give me death!" hardly seems an appropriate political slogan, but that's where we're headed.

Sure there's been progress but lay off the sugar donuts.

> "unwanted pregnancy, but solves most other sexual hazards": The failure rate for condoms is "18 or more pregnancies per 100 women in a year"

That's really surprising. What is methodology did they use to get to that number?

Condoms when used correctly are very safe. The problem is that a lot of people don't use them correctly.

A lot of pregnancies result from incorrect usage ranging from things like not putting it on right (and so risking tears, or having it fall off), to ignorant ideas like putting it on first close to ejaculation.

Checking the source, it says that 18% of all the unwanted pregnancies where using a condom as contraceptive method, way different than 18% of times using a condom end with an unwanted pregnancy.

The failure rate of condoms you cite is referring to unplanned pregnancies, 18% of unplanned pregnancies are caused by condoms. That doesn't mean that everytime you have sex with a condom, you have a 18% chance of making a baby

The author is arguing innovation has slowed to a crawl. Many of the advances you've listed have their origins in breakthroughs made some time ago.

I'd also debate the degree to which many of those are genuine advances. What seems like a great shiny achievement now may be considered foolish or irrelevant in hindsight.

Progress is indeed amazing. But how do you know it is progress, or a greater or lesser progress than before?

> What seems like a great shiny achievement now may be considered foolish or irrelevant in hindsight

The inverse holds true as well. The Romans invented a steam engine and used it to entertain random passers-by in the square with a wheel that can move in circles on its own.

As for the slowing of innovation. No. I am fairly positive the rate of innovation is increasing at an exponential rate just like it's always been.

But you have to look at the nascent tiny scientific breakthroughs to see the everyday technology we're going to lament as "Based on old innovations" thirty years from now.

I mean, what use is a shaky three-wheel car that can hardly go any faster than a walking human could? You'd be better off using a horse, what a stupid invention and utterly useless innovation.

Exponential? That's not accurate. Sure, some technologies increase rapidly, like semiconductors, but most are improving along a much flatter curve.

> As for the slowing of innovation. No. I am fairly positive the rate of innovation is increasing at an exponential rate just like it's always been.

The rate of innovation has not always increased at an 'exponential' rate. Why should it? No one would seriously suggest the rate of innovation has always increased since the year dot, in a proportionately upward curve. History has shown that we are quite capable are going backwards, forgetting previous advances, and and then relearning from the ancients (such as your steam engine).

From close up some innovation looks exponential. Take a step back and it looks like that exponential growth in one area is preceded by a breakthrough (or a series of breakthroughs), and the "exponential" growth only lasts until the ecosystem is filled.

Now take another step back. Breakthroughs themselves seem to be happening at an ever increasing "exponential" rate. Perhaps this is driven by increased wealth and education, which leads to a bigger population of researchers. In which case this trend may also eventually be limited (not "exponential").

But taking another step back reveals another trend: information is getting more available and searchable. And the burst in communications enables the formation of all kinds of creative communities.

I can't take another step back, but I can guess that it might involve artificial intelligences, DNA, and a broadening of what we consider a person. Maybe even the Singularity.

You are basing this whole rant on a misguided premise. Your quote is what he claims "books seem to be saying". The article is in fact about how cliched and unimaginative TED talks on "creativity" are, proving that you never read the article (or didn't understand it) and that pretty much everyone else responding up on your comments didn't either.

"When was the last time in living memory that a person could read most works of science fiction and say "Yeah, with the right kind of funding, we can have that in 10 years""

Depends on which works you are reading. Iain M. Banks' Culture is probably several centuries or more out of our lifetimes...

Even worse is soft sci fi masquerading as hard sci fi. What you write is correct about hard sci fi but something ultra-soft like "stranger in a strange land" doesn't even involve technology.

Which is perhaps why we are still reading it now, don't you think?

Personally, I regard real sci-fi as that which engenders new and interesting thoughts around our current versus our potential condition as sapients (hopefully). That is of course, merely my opinion, but it suggests to me that there may be a place for "soft" sci-fi too.

I would agree with your goal but disagree with your method in that taking a story and having a computer run an extensive search and replace algorithm to jargonize the story and make it less accessible makes the goal of new and interesting thoughts less achievable.

Since you're familiar with the book, and it comes up as a classic of soft sci fi vs hard sci fi as the ultimate soft sci fi example, there's a specific part of the plot where the author search-n-replaced "plain old rotary telephone" with "videophone" without altering the plot which uses shiny to distract from the story, and confuses the reader because it makes a little hole in the plot where the videophone users act like telephone users who can't see each other or their surroundings.

You can't turn SiaSL into a better contemporary hip urban drama merely by adding a bunch of slang and S+R the videophone as per above into "iPhone". Or turn it into a better medieval fantasy by S+R the videophone into a crystal ball. If he had just written something like "Be not content" as a contemporary 1950s/60s/70s hippie adventure without the interference of soft sci fi jargonizing it would have been an even better book.

TLDR is usually search and replace soft sci fi jargonizes and obfuscates without adding any depth to the story, and usually causing some damage to the plot consistency.

Usually this is where examples like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress or the TOS star trek Doomsday Machine episode get brought up as great examples of sci fi where S+R was not used and the applied tech cooperates with the human story in a consistent manner instead of being shiny but conflicting with the plot. Would it have been a better story to S+R the trek episode as a medieval adventure, no it would have sucked.

People who read the first Jules Verne wouldn't have been fae off if they'd bet 10 years?

I understand where you are coming from, but your facts are not not all correct.

> I no longer die from the flu and most of the common diseases have been all but wiped out. Hundreds of thousands of people die from seasonal flu every year, pandemic flu can kill 5% of population if let loose. SARS and the recent H7N1 flu all have pandemic potential, not realized only because of massive social response at patient isolation. Not only are we far from wiping out common diseases, a lot of them is making a comeback. Some scientists believe we are on the brink of post-antibiotics era. > People are using binary logic to program bacteria to kill disease. That is just not true. What synthetic biologists claim to be binary logic is basic common sense redefined. And the only reason they use bacteria is because they would be completely lost with an Eukaryotic cell. One should not mistake grant-hunting PR for reality. > If any organ in my body has a problem it can be replaced with a donor version. Many can be replaced with artificial versions, sometimes printed to my exact specifications. You are probably wording this wrong. No one is replacing brain for instance. And from my corner of world, considering how little we know about the inner working of the immune system, no way all organs can be replaced to individual specification. In fact I don't know any ORGAN can be fabricated to individual specs. There might be, but I would be staggered. > When was the last time in living memory that a person could read most works of science fiction and say "Yeah, with the right kind of funding, we can have that in 10 years"

> Stop lamenting the lack of progress and look around. The world is completely different than it was even five years ago. I don't think most science fictions are picturing a technical utopia nowdays. If anything, there is more than a little hand-wringing. Progress can look different to different people, and we are no longer so naive as to believe the unalloyed good of technology.

I share your belief progress is being made, but as always, haltingly, especially for their social impact. People here are generally technologists and want to believe in the intrinsic value of technology. But I bethink myself and remember Goethe's "Faust" and its caution against head-strong rush toward power and "progress."

There are people living with bladders that were made by transplanting the appropriate cells from their bodies onto a bioscaffold. It is still highly experimental, and yeah, the bladder is relatively simple compared to other organs.

Teeth and bone/joint replacements are made to fit, they also aren't living tissue.

Your points, all of them, are valid. I suspect however, given the tone of that article, that it's more of a statement of cynicism and disillusionment than one of irrefutable fact. In that context I found it amusing, if a little wordy.

I know it's a statement of cynicism and disillusionment. I'm saying there's no need for cynicism.

It's also important to note that you can only really appreciate the pace of progress in retrospect. It is incredibly difficult to appreciate how quickly things are developing when you are in the thick of it.

There was a good essay about this phenomenon on HN a few years ago but I can't find it anymore. Something about experiencing time in the rear view mirror or something like that.

It's also important to note that you can only really appreciate the pace of progress in retrospect. It is incredibly difficult to appreciate how quickly things are developing when you are in the thick of it.

I think this is true of inflection points, but perhaps not true generally. The devil is in the differentiation.

"Something about experiencing time in the rear view mirror or something like that."

The future is already here, just unevenly distributed?

The entire species has not triumphed over disease, especially not against virii. Only an unfortunately small percentage of the population who have medical insurance who live in a rich 1st world country and are somewhat lucky have triumphed (temporarily) over microbes, the rest of the species dies like flies from dumb infections. The rest of the list is innovation as defined by minor evolution or profitability or extreme rareness such that is irrelevant. I think that is the wrong definition.

Innovation is a Dr hanging out with the physicists and next thing you know the peculiar optical behavior of ultra-short wavelength xrays passing thru flesh to see bones is applied to patient care. Or resonating the nuclei of hydrogen atoms using unusual shaped magnetic fields to image the hydrogen density of living flesh is applied to patient care. Or blasting a very narrow, moving beam of radiation carves out a 3-d shape of death, surrounded by living tissue, and hopefully that dead tissue was a tumor. That's innovation.

I would contrast that to, now we'll do exactly the same thing we always did exactly the same way (although perhaps slightly faster or slightly more convenient or slightly cheaper) by looking at a pocket sized wireless graphics display instead of using a desktop sized wire connected graphics display. Boring. Maybe profitable, maybe highly profitable, but not innovative or interesting. The world is full of highly profitable completely non-innovative companies, innovation is hardly a universal positive anyway.

The thing is, all those huge innovations only look huge in retrospect. At the time they were happening it was just a slow schlep from one thing to another.

For instance, Watt is now known as the bringer of the steam age and its accompanied industrial revolution. But at the time, all he did was a really really tiny improvement on the already existing steam engine.

Or Edison is credited with inventing the light bulb. But all he really did was find a half decent way of bringing already existing electricity into homes to power already existing light bulbs. He didn't even do that very well, but it worked.

And what did either of those improve, really? Watt's engine made it possible for miners to work manually a bit longer and slightly safer from flooding. Edison did nothing a candle couldn't. Lightbulbs weren't particularly good back then.

History is littered with Huge Innovations (tm) that were super tiny and incremental when looked at from the context of the time.

I think I can add some innovation to this discussion (whichever definition of innovation you'd like) to point out the inherently illogical nature of this discussion.

Usually you only hear about innovations that are a success, failure is an orphan but success has a million fathers, etc. Therefore by the rules of logic all innovation leads to success. Surely by all rules of logic anything true in one way it true the other way, so all success required innovation. Given that scenario as starting conditions and rules of the game, minor engineering evolutionary improvements that none-the-less are eventually profitable, must be defined as super tiny incremental irrelevant forms of innovation, although they're really just boring gradual evolution.

Or if you really want to muddy the waters there's some fun analogies you can make between evolution vs intelligent design and mere incremental product development and actual innovation, and how both mental models seem to make their owners both really happy and extremely binary in their outlook toward the opposite.

This quote -

"What determines “creativity,” in other words, is the very faction it’s supposedly rebelling against: established expertise."

- is what I took from it. It's not so much about the pace of progress, as it is about an establishment that chooses what constitutes creativity.

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=14314

I agree with what you say overall. That said, I can't resist responding to one point.

Your comment on the flu makes sense from a general argument point, but not from the point of the flu. Influenza is a disease which we cannot really treat well if you get it, and we have not yet made a great vaccine that works every year.

Tamiflu and other treatments for it are simply not that effective.

It is one of the most likely diseases to cause a terrible epidemic killing millions of people.

Most deaths from flu epidemics came from secondary infection. The flu has become a political and distribution problem like food.

There are some very promising vaccines in the pipeline (including end of Phase 2 or in Phase 3) that protect well against even flu strains not specifically targeted. The risk is that, before the new generation of vaccines come out, an epidemic occurs and affects poor nations without adequate distribution of antibiotics. I know that is not what you generally hear, but it is where we are currently at.

An issue in my mind is not that innovation has stopped or even slowed. It is rather that the effort needed for innovation seems to be becoming higher as progress is made. You cannot easily put good ideas to practice due to inertia in society and economics, irrational behavior in humans, etc.

For example, for people to switch to a new idea, it is often expected to be 10X better, i.e., allow people to do something they could not do before. In principle, 1.1X better is still better by definition, but it would never see a wide adoption due to higher costs of the people to switch. If the 1.1X idea were the first one to come to market to begin with, it may have been 10X over the existing ones and thus may have seen wide adoption that the reference 1X idea saw. In other words, ideas that are 1.1X better see resistance to adoption due to what is entirely history (= past progress) even though they are ultimately still better by definition.

You and I and this topic are thinking about progress and innovation, and we have something in mind. But our terms mean nothing to the people enacting "innovation."

Capitalism is risk averse and progress oblivious. The figure of merit in capitalism is one number: profit, and you can tweak the margin factor and cross your finger on the sales factor.

There are so many possibilities out there to spring a 2X better plan that won't cost a bundle, but capitalism isn't interested in that kind of better. Merit in capital is about how big a paycheck you can slice off.

I think there are huge amounts of innovation and progress that are easily within reach, radical ways of putting us societally in gear to be able to at any turn provide for ourselves without having to draw from afar. But my merit for progress- tooliness and sustainability for the individual- isn't shared and it's not the kind of progress this world's evolved systems march towards.

Progress requires a definition of a figure of merit, and this world today has lost any sense of what it means to progress except for raking in cash. We need bootstrapping progress so people can be free to unlock new value-systems for themselves.

The technology on that list can be traced back to two scientific breakthroughs. The germ theory, from the 1860s, led to vaccines, antibiotics and surgery. Quantum mechanics, from the 1920s, led to the transistor and the laser. The list ought to mention some chemistry. That came from the atomic theory, around 1800. Once you've been told those ideas, it's a matter of working out details; the details get tricky and progress slows with time. I'm sure there will be another breakthrough on this order. If we're around to see it, no doubt it will come as a complete surprise, like all the others did.

Condoms are another matter. The Romans knew how to make them, and the problem was being allowed to. The solution wasn't a sudden breakthrough, but a hard grind over many centuries. A social breakthrough as powerful as the atomic theory could be amazing.

Here's the scary part. As you said, technological innovation and progress are continuing, but 99.99% of humans play no part in it.

If the world were post-scarcity and those "unneeded" people didn't have to work, that wouldn't necessarily be a problem. But what's happening is that, while industry and technology and innovation continue, the percentage of people who get to be a part of those things (and therefore have a chance at a decent income) is plummeting.

Also, taking a standpoint that focuses on humanistic creativity and the arts, we see that that is dying off. The 0.01% with the talent to contribute to innovation's forefront are an elite and bright group of people, but there's not enough bulk creative energy to solve the problem in an artistic way. And having taught classes before and realized that most of what society needs is education (not of the formal kind) I will say that aesthetics really matter.

Are you saying we need more people with humanities educations to imagine our way out of this mess?

I don't know. I think that formal schooling is only a small part of the equation, especially as college becomes a pre-professional finishing school for a lot of people. Our society's priorities and values are fucked up and no one in power really takes professors seriously anymore, so it probably wouldn't do much good.

We need more people who actually care about the humanities and arts, yes. I'm not sure how much that has to do with the distribution of majors. The corporate system is pretty good, anyway, at undoing whatever good is done by college.

One interesting side note is population growth, such that 0.01% means we still have about six times the population of ancient Athens working on it. If we were popping out Euripides, Arisophanes, and friends, at a rate six times higher than historical, that would be "ok". Not as great as could be imagined, but still "ok".

The best part in the modern world is not having to visit Greece or wait for papyrii to be hand copied. The bad news is we don't seem to be achieving six times ancient Athenian cultural production so 0.01% might be a bit optimistic.