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Tech Progress Is Slowing Down
101–110 of 118 posts
Re: Tech Progress Is Slowing Down
#102One thesis is that it takes exponentially more resources to maintain a linear growth in tech over time. When there’s not enough resource to push progress, growth slows down.
Look at the particle accelerators. It costed a tremendous amount of money to build leading to the discovery of all the exotic particles. The next version costs many times of the past ones. It just takes a lot of resource to move forward.
Re: Tech Progress Is Slowing Down
#103No it's not.
Re: Tech Progress Is Slowing Down
#104We’re in the Singularity even right now and most of the world doesn’t know it.
We don’t have millions of flying cars yet!
Most of what we have today was predicted in science fiction novels and video many decades ago.
Even the causes of a singularity were predicted (since they are what created the prediction of a singularity). I.e. AI, quantum computing, etc.
The “real” singularity happens at the point in the future where we have no conception what is going to happen next.
So the singularity stays in front of us, but gets closer and closer.
Then, at some point, change happens faster than humans can track or understand.
We are not there yet.
Re: Tech Progress Is Slowing Down
#105No it isn’t. “Tech” is only slowing down for a very narrow definition of tech. Perhaps we forget that rather recently the world created a vaccine for a novel virus using cutting edge techniques, that genome sequencing costs continue to fall, that genome construction costs continue to fall, that synthetic meats are on the horizon, that infrastructure for electric vehicles is now present in much of the world. Tech inno…
That’s anecdotal though. For an opposite anecdote, airplanes have been pretty much the same since the 70s.
> Jet airliners have become 70% more fuel efficient between 1967 and 2007.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#Histo...
I'd agree that aviation improvements have slowed way down, but they've certainly gotten dramatically better in that time frame.
And, while passenger airplanes do look similar to how they used to, we now have all sorts of drones flying around, some of which would have awed people in the 70s.
Re: Tech Progress Is Slowing Down
#106No it isn’t. “Tech” is only slowing down for a very narrow definition of tech. Perhaps we forget that rather recently the world created a vaccine for a novel virus using cutting edge techniques, that genome sequencing costs continue to fall, that genome construction costs continue to fall, that synthetic meats are on the horizon, that infrastructure for electric vehicles is now present in much of the world. Tech inno…
> genome construction costs continue to fall
On the other hand, construction construction costs continue to rise. Housing is of greater practical importance. It's a large chunk of every household's budget.
1. "Does construction ever get cheaper?", https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/does-construction...
Re: Tech Progress Is Slowing Down
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read up until the paywall
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34849488 > Archive.Is ( https://archive.today >) defeats most paywalls these days. There are other options such as https://12ft.io >. It's generally presumed that HN readers will be aware of this.
Many people, myself included, would prefer paywalled content didn’t get submitted to HN at all.
The quality of paywalled articles is low compared to the other articles submitted and the discussions that follow are significantly worse on average.
Re: Tech Progress Is Slowing Down
#108As far as I'm concerned, the author of this article has not made a strong enough argument to draw such a bold conclusion. They point to patent research, showing that innovation in areas outside of computers and electronics has slowed down. Then admits "of course" computers and electronics aren't included in this. But computers and electronics dominate our world. If you exclude them and say "tech progress is slowing d…
I wonder if there's some other measure that can be made to mark the shift in technology. For example, the processor transistor count. Maybe (desktop) systems should be judged by total system transistor count, as GPUs have replaced processors with respect to transistors. Or possibly, there should be a measure of transistors per person - many many people are carrying around phones with literally billions of dollars of…
> For example, the processor transistor count.
AFAIK no processor is hand drawn anymore, even the infividual logic cells. Everything is synthetised. Then the transistor count is useless. Is like counting lines of code to assess productivity.
Re: Tech Progress Is Slowing Down
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is "of a radical nature" the important part here, and who gets to define it? Is fuel injection radical? Seatbelts? Crumple zones? GPS? In 1909 a car had 35HP and could peak at 53MPH, and was an ultimate death trap in an accident. Hundreds of improvements, some more radical than others, led to the cars of today being better in virtually every way, including subtle ways nobody knew mattered at the time (like not fl…
That phrase is important because otherwise it wouldn't be there: it is load-bearing in that quotation. All of the things you mentioned seem like the kind of incremental improvements you get over an additional hundred years of iteration and improvement... but I think it is non-sensical to try to sell that refinement as as impressive as the burst of improvement and innovation you saw as cars were first being defined. I…
> In practice, I think a lot of people want every individual thing we do to follow some kind of exponential or even linear growth curve,
Greed.
The stakeholders just want more.
Re: Tech Progress Is Slowing Down
#110Seems like a weirdly timed article given the new S curve is about to start with ML finding numerous real world applications.
It’s funny you say “about to start” - I feel like I’m in a minority here but I’m kind of suspicious that we’re at the end of the S-curve of ML, and the real-world applications are well-known: - A/B testing for UI design - Ml modeling for ad targeting and optimization - fraud detection - image classification, object recognition and segmentation (lots of neat Snap filters, many niche CV apps with drones, industrial sen…
It remains to be seen how far GPT-like models can go. If we can teach it to be consistently better at humans in doing tasks that require intelligence, and if the costs of running the AI models are smaller than hiring people to do those things, things could get out of hand pretty quickly.
One could doubt whether GPTs really can outperform humans consistently in areas that matter, but we haven't even tried yet.