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Cantorsdust posted:The only question of technological progress is one of political will and funding--there's no shortage of imagination. This is very true and what I mean when I make references to everything being process improvement. But nah, lets just continue to enrich the elite few and let the commons crumble. We could be way more advanced now than we are if people would stop insisting on military victory 
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Jan 27, 2016 06:01
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evilweasel posted:Air travel hasn't gotten all tha much better in decades. Not really true since it's gotten way cheaper and more accessible as lighter and more efficient planes have been made while you've also got drastically better engines. I mean look at the differences in performance between a 747-100B vs a 747-400ER, and that's basically using the same air frame. Sure the general shape of airplanes hasn't changed much in decades, but then aside from cosmetics (and again lighter/more efficient/safer cars with drastically better engines) neither has the car.
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Jan 27, 2016 06:09
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A Winner is Jew posted:Not really true since it's gotten way cheaper and more accessible as lighter and more efficient planes have been made while you've also got drastically better engines. I mean look at the differences in performance between a 747-100B vs a 747-400ER, and that's basically using the same air frame. That's the point. It has become better, sure, but compared from the jump from propeller planes to turbofan jets it's nothing. Give me one of those sub-orbital rockets Asimov liked to write about.
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Jan 27, 2016 06:14
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I think that what they were getting at is that what made the technological advances of the late 19th and early 20th centuries transformative is the way that they replaced, or fully altered the physical means of production. They did this either through increasing the amount of energy that humans could harness by an order of magnitude, or by increasing the amount of labor that a human could control by an order of magnitude, or by fundamentally enhancing human well-being in ways that simply were not available before (antibiotics and the Green Revolution). Moreover, these advances were physical in nature, meaning they represented an entirely new leap forward in the way stuff got made. Comparatively, things like the IT revolution did not really enhance the means of production or transform it the way steam power, internal combustion engines, or electrification did. Rather, they simply enhanced the efficiency of existing productive capital and increased the efficiency of global communication -- so the transformation is logistical as someone pointed out earlier, rather than physical. While it's not really correct to say that we're in an age of technological decline or stagnation, it's probably more correct to say that what's perceived as a decline is merely a decline in the rate of acceleration of improvements to the physical industrial substrate of society. We've already tapped out those areas, since most of the major revolutions in improving base human living standards -- medicine, sanitation, industrial manufacturing and so on -- are done. We won't see another quantum leap in these, I'd imagine, until we perfect technologies that can again enhance the physical being of society by another order of magnitude, things like AI, molecular nanotechnology, and fusion power.
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Jan 27, 2016 06:14
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Biotechnology and automation. Enough said.
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Jan 27, 2016 06:50
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DrSunshine posted:We won't see another quantum leap in these, I'd imagine, until we perfect technologies that can again enhance the physical being of society by another order of magnitude, things like AI, molecular nanotechnology, and fusion power. Fusion power is totally doable. The first experimental reactors producing more power than it costs to run them have been made. ITER in France is supposed to be the first large reactor. I would suspect that as materials knowledge, superconductor knowledge, and practical experience with large-scale fusion reactors increases, the designs could be significantly improved. Then we can talk about the kind of society super-cheap energy could make. Nanotechnology is a great example of untapped potential. I don't even know enough to predict what will happen with it, but combining it with advances in molecular biology will be really loving cool. AI... I'm not as convinced we'll see any progress. However, we've gotten very good at making moderately-trainable systems like neural nets, voice recognition, pattern recognition, machine vision, etc that are poised to transform society as well. Self-driving cars, trucks, and planes are just the beginning. Properly trained, a neural-net based system can transform our thinking-work much the same way our manual work was changed. Massive pattern-recognition systems working with datasets could eliminate a large number of office jobs. Obviously, that could be a bad thing if not implemented properly to retrain workers in the short term and redistribute wealth in the long term, but that's another potentially transformative technology.
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Jan 27, 2016 07:00
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Anosmoman posted:The 1870-1940 period was more transformative because a lot of manual labor was replaced with engines and electricity and we can't replicate that because there's not that much manual labor left to replace. In 1900 washing clothes involved stirring a tub full of clothes with a big stick until it was clean. Today you push a button. 99% of the labor in that process has been automated and making it another 99% easier would require a robot butler. We're arguably in a similarly revolutionary period for white collar/knowledge-based labor right now, and have been for probably the last couple of decades. It's easy to look back on how dramatically technology has changed the workforce and assume that it was all the result of sudden technological innovation, but it's never really gone down like that.
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Jan 27, 2016 07:07
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Cantorsdust posted:Fusion power is totally doable. The first experimental reactors producing more power than it costs to run them have been made. ITER in France is supposed to be the first large reactor. My understanding is that that is only true if you do really clever accounting of the energy input and ignore most of it. We are very far from getting net energy generation from fusion. Cantorsdust posted:Nanotechnology is a great example of untapped potential. I don't even know enough to predict what will happen with it, but combining it with advances in molecular biology will be really loving cool. Nanotechnology is mostly a buzzword. We really don't have the ability to engineer things at the nano-meter scale like we do with parts in a machine shop. There is chemistry with molecules, which have always been nano-meter sized, and there is stuff like asbestos and chalk, but these things aren't engineered like designing a macro-scopic piece of metal into a shape. Going from desired result or properties to actual synthesized result isn't as straightforward as that. With molecules and chemistry, it takes many trial and error experiments and at the end you still may not get what you want, and techniques to engineer nano-dust like asbestos are crude and don't give you great control. Maybe the closest thing to nano-technology and nano-engineering is in the most sophisticated silicon integrated circuits, where intricate shapes are engineered in all three dimensions into solid materials truly at the nano-meter scale. The techniques are still not as powerful as engineering macro objects. The tooling is incredibly expensive and very inflexible and the cost can only be justified if amortized over huge volumes of products. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 07:56 on Jan 27, 2016 |
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Jan 27, 2016 07:46
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e: nvm jokes fucked around with this message at 09:18 on Jan 27, 2016 |
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Jan 27, 2016 09:16
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First of all technological progress isn't "normal", humanity spent thouthands of years on a relatively flat slope technology-wise. The last 100 years is an anomaly, so if speed of progress slows than it's just a return back to normal. Nevertheless it is still extremely fast even now, compared to history's average.
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Jan 27, 2016 09:37
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That article doesn't mention the integrated circuit once. In short, no.
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Jan 27, 2016 10:07
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silence_kit posted:There used to be way more novel stuff which eventually lead to breakthrough technologies though. If you look at fundamental physics research, they haven't really come up with that much stuff in recent history which could be engineered or which could potentially be relevant to society. In the 19th century we had advances in thermodynamics and electromagnetism which, relatively, pretty quickly gave birth to real technologies like steam engines, the internal combustion engine, electrical power, HVAC, and radio communication. In the early 20th century, we had quantum mechanics, which when applied to the physics of solids, has greatly enabled information technology and lowered the cost and increased the ubiquity of wired and wireless communication.
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Jan 27, 2016 11:01
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Firstly, anything that tries to break down history into nice, discrete chunks like the "5 Great Technological Leaps" is oversimplified garbage. History is a spectrum and things happen gradually in many places at once - trying to pin things down into neat categories is just coming up with an idea first and then trying to fit the evidence around that. However there is one area where we actually are regressing - antibiotics. Antibiotic resistance is a huge problem and it's only getting bigger, to the point where in the next 5-10 years we are going to have diseases that are totally incurable by antibiotics. Basically in some cases we are going to be back where we were before the discovery of penicillin. The big issue is that antibiotics are an extremely risky investment proposition and tend to have low returns, so for 10-15 years pharmaceutical companies have gradually stopped bothering to create new ones. This is the reason that the US and other governments and pumping cash into antibiotic research, since the market is doing the job of funding the research in this instance. There is usually around 12 years before a drug gets to market from start to finish though, so it will be a race to get the new antibiotics out before bacteria develop total resistance to them.
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Jan 27, 2016 13:02
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MikeCrotch posted:The big issue is that antibiotics are an extremely risky investment proposition and tend to have low returns, so for 10-15 years pharmaceutical companies have gradually stopped bothering to create new ones. This is the reason that the US and other governments and pumping cash into antibiotic research, since the market is doing the job of funding the research in this instance. There is usually around 12 years before a drug gets to market from start to finish though, so it will be a race to get the new antibiotics out before bacteria develop total resistance to them.
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Jan 27, 2016 13:15
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evilweasel posted:Air travel hasn't gotten all tha much better in decades. air travel is significantly cheaper that it has ever been
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Jan 27, 2016 13:26
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But that price change comes from them getting bigger and flying higher, ie- small incremental changes over time Re: the topic, I don't think it's an age of technological decline, as much as it is a result of privatization and financialization. The quintessential science project, the Manhattan Project, was revolutionary because it gathered so many talented people in one spot, funded them with oodles of money (the majority of which was actually spent on specialized industrial facilities), and got them to work on something that was known to be possible but still technically difficult. In 1996 dollars, the total cost of the project was $21 billion dollars. The proposed cost of ITER is about $15 billion dollars, spread over most every major industrial country in the world. That's a massive slip in terms of what we're actually capable of. That kind of dedication that makes the Manhattan project this storied metaphor for American Excellence, could only have been produced by a strong central government, willing to grab a lot of people together and get them to attack a well defined issue. But since the craze of Muh Tax Dollars, the idea of actually investment in the country with government money doesn't have the legs it used to. Further, the kind of people who should be working on useful technology are instead chasing higher wages in finance, working on what amounts of more & more sophisticated methods of gambling. It's not like universities aren't producing math majors! And it's not like there's a shortage of things to work on. Killing that rear end in a top hat cancer, nanotech, mind-machine interface (this by itself could create an entirely new industrial revolution), Quantum comptuers (though you'd have to do a lot more theoretical work before you could kick this into high gear), etc.
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Jan 27, 2016 13:50
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Though it's not just conservatives that have bought into this anti-science-funding mentality - I think it was Hillary Clinton in a debate who brought up the idea of a 'manhattan style project', but it wasn't for anything useful, it was for for breaking internet encryption so that the NSA could spy on people better, which for anyone who doesn't know how RSA internet encryption works is both a) stupid and b) would just ensure no one uses an American email server ever again.
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Jan 27, 2016 13:57
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DrSunshine posted:
This exactly. It's like the author of that article has never heard the term "diminishing returns". The more efficiency worked into something will make it harder to achieve the same returns on any kind of investment without a paradigm shift. Changes like that likely require a lot of unprofitable base research into how poo poo works. They will take a longer time horizon to yield worthwhile results than most people would be willing to devote. Especially if you consider the attention span of your average investor or CEO's that just want to sign a deal that lets them walk away with $30 million after tanking the company they are supposed to be making profitable.
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Jan 27, 2016 14:40
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Anosmoman posted:The 1870-1940 period was more transformative because a lot of manual labor was replaced with engines and electricity and we can't replicate that because there's not that much manual labor left to replace. There's research indicating that 47% of American jobs are at high risk of automation in the next few decades, so quite a few poor fuckers may be replaced.
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Jan 27, 2016 14:52
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This was one of the dumber articles I've seen posted here. Are we in an age of technological decline? Who gives a poo poo; that's a totally empty statement. What does that even mean? ~technology~ isn't a flat plane of linear research developments like a game of Civilization. We haven't developed as transformative a technology as [ electricity ] since the development of [ electricity ]! Ergo, we are in an age of technological decline, which is a thing I made up just now. Also maybe the economy will get worse??? probs. MikeCrotch posted:Firstly, anything that tries to break down history into nice, discrete chunks like the "5 Great Technological Leaps" is oversimplified garbage. History is a spectrum and things happen gradually in many places at once - trying to pin things down into neat categories is just coming up with an idea first and then trying to fit the evidence around that. 
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Jan 27, 2016 14:57
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The article more or less defines 'big' changes as having a big effect in the amount of physical labor that is necessary to do at home or at work. As anosmoman suggested, once 90% of necessary physical labor has been automated, all further technological improvements in the future will be by definition 'small' changes.
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Jan 27, 2016 15:34
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There is, quite demonstrably through demographic data, a diminishing return being brought to human material change by technology, and there probably will never be as big of a change as the industrial revolution unless some absurdly life-altering technology comes along like super-abundant clean cheap energy.
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Jan 27, 2016 15:40
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Information Technology could have much more impact if governments were proactive about it - but more democracy and economic mobility aren't policy goals for the establishment.
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Jan 27, 2016 15:44
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Yeah, biotech is the big thing coming down the pipe. There are very few times and places in the history of science where the rate-limiting factor of technological advancement is how many people can be thrown at the mountain of information. We are building entire statistical sub-fields just to slightly accelerate the process. We have enough of a handle on genetics at this point that we can do some truly amazing things- it's just a matter of having the time and patience to try every one of several million keys in every one of several million locks. Now, if you want to argue that major developments in medicine, agriculture, and chemical engineering are unlikely to reshape the world as much as electricity did, sure, no argument there, but there is currently a field where we're seeing the rate of technological advance accelerate.
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Jan 27, 2016 16:35
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DrSunshine posted:I think that what they were getting at is that what made the technological advances of the late 19th and early 20th centuries transformative is the way that they replaced, or fully altered the physical means of production. They did this either through increasing the amount of energy that humans could harness by an order of magnitude, or by increasing the amount of labor that a human could control by an order of magnitude, or by fundamentally enhancing human well-being in ways that simply were not available before (antibiotics and the Green Revolution). Moreover, these advances were physical in nature, meaning they represented an entirely new leap forward in the way stuff got made. Comparatively, things like the IT revolution did not really enhance the means of production or transform it the way steam power, internal combustion engines, or electrification did. Rather, they simply enhanced the efficiency of existing productive capital and increased the efficiency of global communication -- so the transformation is logistical as someone pointed out earlier, rather than physical. I'm curious if this is cyclical. Things leap forward in great revolutions, and then for a time we refine and consolidate the technologies. In turn, this sets the stage for another leap forward. I also think the author is severely underestimating the culture shock of a hypothetical 1940s person time travelling to today. Try removing yourself from all digital technology for a week and see how comfortable you feel.
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Jan 27, 2016 16:44
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A Winner is Jew posted:Not really true since it's gotten way cheaper and more accessible as lighter and more efficient planes have been made while you've also got drastically better engines. I mean look at the differences in performance between a 747-100B vs a 747-400ER, and that's basically using the same air frame. It's gotten cheaper, sure. But it hasn't gotten better: it uses a little less fuel to get from point A to point B, and the industry itself is a little better developed. But there is nothing really different - hell, sometimes you're going slower than you would decades ago. The idea that we'd have faster air travel has basically died: supersonic passenger jets are basically dead, and its not like passengers see much of a better experience - I mean, now you have the little tvs or a power jack for your ipad but that's basically it. Our advances in air transport over the past couple decades basically boil down to "well, we use less gas". I'm not buying into the whole premise of the thread as I think the computer is a fundamental reshaping of the world in a way that isn't really well covered in the initial article, but air travel really isn't something I'd say hurts the premise at all. Really, it helps it - air travel has stagnated and we no longer think that in the coming years it's going to be better. We think maybe in a decade it will be a tad cheaper (and we'll be standing upright instead of having our own seats or something equally unpleasant as it gets more and more commoditized).
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Jan 27, 2016 16:47
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The day we can mass-produce androids capable of doing most basic labor for <10 000$/unit (and an hourly cost for running them that's at or below minimum wage) we might see some big changes in the blue-collar world. We are just starting to tap into that with some basic robots for the elderly, but it's one of those big things that can really stir society up. Not that technology will "solve everything", but it will lead to some interesting changes.
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Jan 27, 2016 17:06
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What I'm saying is that we won't be seeing the same kinds of leaps in the fundamental human condition until the means of production can be fully automated and harnessed towards abolishing the 8-hour workday/40-hour work week for all, ushering in a post-scarcity era where everyone lives in abundance and all problems of economic inequality are solved. Basically full communism now.
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Jan 27, 2016 17:13
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Thank god the common definition of cool and better doesn't actually dictate scientific priorities or progress.
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Jan 27, 2016 17:24
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A Buttery Pastry posted:How do you define discoveries/advances vs. invention? Like, steam engines sorta date back roughly two millennia (though obviously they were basically just toys), but around a thousand years later you began to see slightly more practical versions, though still not useful for real industrial work. Half a millennia later you start to see industrially useful steam engines, and then a century later you have the first commercially viable ones. Depending on whether you count from the more theoretical work being done around 1600, or the commercially viable ones around 1700, steam engines had one or two centuries before they really started to make their mark. Maybe the fundamental physics research from the late 20th century needs a bunch of different fields to get to somewhere they aren't know, before they can produce practical technologies? Just like the steam engine needed improved material sciences to become a proper commercially viable industrial machine. Pointing out cases where the inventors who didn't really know what they were doing discover something, and then later physicists, inspired by the technology, fill in the gaps in understanding only strengthens my point that physics used to be way more useful than it is now. Physicists today don't do that kind of work and instead the premier physicists spend their entire careers looking for esoteric things like the Higgs Boson which nobody outside the world of high-energy physics cares about and requires a billion-dollar apparatus and sophisticated statistical analysis to be able to faintly detect. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Jan 27, 2016 |
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Jan 27, 2016 17:31
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silence_kit posted:Pointing out cases where the inventors who didn't really know what they were doing discover something, and then later physicists, inspired by the technology, fill in the gaps in understanding only strengthens my point that physics used to be way more useful than it is now. Also, as I pointed out, there was a full century from theory to commercially viable machine. For something more modern, it took a little more than four decades to go from the discovery of radioactivity to the development of the nuclear bomb. Maybe we'll have some crazy Boson Bomb in 2050 which will have made nuclear weapons obsolete? silence_kit posted:Physicists today don't do that kind of work and instead the premier physicists spend their entire careers looking for things like the Higgs Boson which requires a billion-dollar apparatus and sophisticated statistical analysis to be able to faintly detect.
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Jan 27, 2016 18:12
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I think I would be equally horrified at the prospect of my car breaking down in a snowstorm on I-80 in Wyoming without a cell phone as a 1940's person would be in at the prospect of a weekend in a 1870's Appalachian shack.  And that's something my father would have put up with just fine 30 years ago. I think people underestimate the utility and wonderment of having instant and near-ubiquitous data/telephone/GPS access from a mini computer in your pocket.
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Jan 27, 2016 18:44
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rudatron posted:Re: the topic, I don't think it's an age of technological decline, as much as it is a result of privatization and financialization. The quintessential science project, the Manhattan Project, was revolutionary because it gathered so many talented people in one spot, funded them with oodles of money (the majority of which was actually spent on specialized industrial facilities), and got them to work on something that was known to be possible but still technically difficult. In 1996 dollars, the total cost of the project was $21 billion dollars. The proposed cost of ITER is about $15 billion dollars, spread over most every major industrial country in the world. That's a massive slip in terms of what we're actually capable of. Old Kentucky Shark posted:There's 2 feet of snow on the ground and I am eating a (reasonably) fresh mandarin orange. The Manhattan Project was a several year commitment to solve one specific problem in order to win a world war. It took the finest scientific minds of the time period concentrated in one closed off city to pull it off and the result was a pair of single use bombs. Two generations later, there are probably a million corporations in the world who can get you an orange or any other portable item delivered in two feet of snow 24 hours after you order it from a different continent. Also, you are literally having this conversation with a hundred or so autistics on a platform that allows said autistics from all over the world to talk to each other in real time instead of sitting in a mental hospital tied to a chair.
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Jan 27, 2016 19:02
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rudatron posted:But that price change comes from them getting bigger and flying higher, ie- small incremental changes over time No. Really there are just diminishing returns when it comes to technological development and if anything the Manhattan project would be an example of that. Many of the earlier breakthrough technologies in transportation and electricity from the turn of the century still carry the name of the single person who primarily invented them (Edison, Ford, Tesla, Deisel). Breakthroughs have simply gotten harder and primarily blaming politics is a misinformed mistake.
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Jan 27, 2016 19:05
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I can't even imagine how someone could even think of the question posed in the op without being a drooling retard living under a rock or something. Ignoring the incredible change that has happened just in the last decade we are on the cusp of revolutions in several major fields.
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Jan 27, 2016 19:07
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evilweasel posted:It's gotten cheaper, sure. But it hasn't gotten better: it uses a little less fuel to get from point A to point B, and the industry itself is a little better developed. But there is nothing really different - hell, sometimes you're going slower than you would decades ago. The idea that we'd have faster air travel has basically died: supersonic passenger jets are basically dead, and its not like passengers see much of a better experience - I mean, now you have the little tvs or a power jack for your ipad but that's basically it. Our advances in air transport over the past couple decades basically boil down to "well, we use less gas". I think the commoditization of air travel ties into the logistics argument. The experience itself is virtually the same, but because of how much more efficient the logistics have gotten, a)the white collar job market is global instead of local b)we have next day delivery of everything c)cultural exposure for a vast number of people is now taken for granted I agree that the easy wins in most physical sciences were taken care of by the early 1900's and air travel isn't very different, but logistics is more important than everything else in the long run. To bring the Manhattan Project up again, if we knew nothing about nuclear physics and started it from scratch tomorrow it would probably take a tenth of the time. Email would eliminate the need to get everyone in the same place for five years, while computers would automate nearly all of the math and all of the modeling without even having to dig plutonium out of the ground first. You could literally outsource that part to (not China lol) and finish the first bomb in a few months.
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Jan 27, 2016 19:13
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MikeCrotch posted:
Nope, because the thing about anti-biotic resistance is that it requires many more resources than the normal bacteria. Once the environmental pressures are relieved (i.e., people say "oh poo poo these antibiotics won't work anymore) then the anti-biotic resistant bacteria will be outbred.
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Jan 27, 2016 19:17
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I mean just off the top of my head the internet and smartphones have pretty massively influenced how life works in my lifetime. My entire job and the company I work for would be impossible without them. It's super great living in a world where not being at work 24/7 is a privilege.
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Jan 27, 2016 20:02
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tsa posted:I can't even imagine how someone could even think of the question posed in the op without being a drooling retard living under a rock or something. Ignoring the incredible change that has happened just in the last decade we are on the cusp of revolutions in several major fields. Rapid incremental advancement. Like the kind that has been happening over the past few decades with IT is much harder to see when you are living it instead of reading about it in a history book. But yes the OP is dumb as gently caress.
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Jan 27, 2016 20:28
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There's an argument to be made that the rate of technological change 1940-2010 isn't as large as the rate between 1870-1940, although his "average house in 1940" example misses a big one: air conditioning. Even in 1965 only 10% of homes had air conditioning. I'd rather live in a home without a gas stove than a home without air conditioning. Then there's stuff like air travel. And not just air travel itself, but also coordinating it. I'm old enough to remember that before everybody had cell phones. If your plane was delayed or canceled, good loving luck getting this information in a timely manner to the person picking you up. They might be out to dinner or they left already. People didn't even have answering machines until the early 80s. Also, I would argue that the social changes were as great or greater from 1940-2010 than 1870-1940, particularly for women and minorities. Part of that is technological: birth control, platforms for the common person to get their message out, etc.
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Jan 27, 2016 20:30
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