Technology is slowing down less than it appears. The forms may be similar, but there have been a lot of changes and advances.
Civil airliners are much more efficient with high bypass engines and now variable gearing. They're fly by wire. They're made out of carbon fiber not aluminum. They handle air pressure changes better. Communications…
Technology is slowing down less than it appears. The forms may be similar, but there have been a lot of changes and advances.
Civil airliners are much more efficient with high bypass engines and now variable gearing. They're fly by wire. They're made out of carbon fiber not aluminum. They handle air pressure changes better. Communications and navigation are better. There are emergency auto-land systems available for small planes.
Automobiles are also more efficient and performant. A low end Kia can smoke any 1960s muscle car. They're also fly by wire and have advanced control of steering, gearing and wheel resistance. GPS has revolutionized navigation.
Computers run faster and manage power use better. Multilevel caches are standard and systems hardened against data leaks. Throughput is higher. Graphics are faster. Everything is on-chip. Special purpose processors are integrated. Computers have changed the way cars, airplanes and appliances are controlled.
New antibiotics use novel mechanisms sometimes with anti-resistance components. There are numerous antiviral drugs. Cancer survival rates have soared, especially for children. Immune system based treatments are in regular use. mRNA vaccines for a novel disease were deployed in less than a year. Surgical techniques make for shorter recovery times. Gene therapy is starting to show results. Let's add biologicals to the list. Drug discovery is a whole new animal.
Food may look the same, but the quality of things like tomatoes, berries, and corn have been improved by breeding and genetic manipulation. Shipping and preservation have improved. Express shipping and computerization have made specialty foods mainstream.
There are very few times when technology seems to be doing more than filling in. Maybe during World War II if you were on the battlefield. If you look at photo of a NYC street scene in 1900, it's all horse powered. In 1905, there are automobiles that look like carriages without horses. By 1915, horse drawn carriages are uncommon, but it was only in the 1920s that the Gleason hypoid gear let automobiles get closer to the ground to look like modern cars. Time foreshortens things.
I would argue that most of the examples you provide are improvements (innovations) not technology changes, inless any technological change, however small, counts as a change.
For example - aircraft technology changes:
1, heavier than air flight
2. inline and radial engines dribing propellers
3. jet engines (also used to drive propellers )
Fundamentally, civil airliners have not had major changes since the Comet 1 and Boeing 707. Yes, they have inmproved airframes, reduced fuel consumption with high-bypass turbofans, and fly-by wire, but those are incremental technology impreovements.
GPS is a fundamental technology that needed satellite technology which in turn needed rocket launchers and microelectronics. The fundamental technologies apart from the GPS system were at the latest 1970s technology. As Brian Arthur has suggested, technologies build upon each other in a combinatorial explosion. However, the combinations may be minor improvements or not important.
Consider computer languages. There are trees showing how languages have evolved and their lineages. However, if you look at compter langyuages today, apart from relatively minor innovations in what they can do, they are fundamentally the same at their core - translating their code to op codes that run on chips which do no radically change how they work or the op codes they use, just as we write text using the same 26 letters and punctuation that we have used for centuries.
Fundamental technology changes are fire, writing, wheel,.....steam engines, ICE, aircraft, lasers, antibiotics, transistors, television, etc, etc. For example, antibiotics were discovered in the 1920s. (Fleming, penecillin). Almost all antibiotics are still discovered the same way, and have just a few mechanisms of action on bacteria. We can now use better means of discovery, as well as using technologies to improve antibiotic effectiveness, but as a technology, they are a century old, and unless we find fundamentally new approaches, resistance will obsolte thenm all within the coming century. [ I would argue that manipulating the immune system in a new technology that can help here. The Russian invetion using phage viruses is also old and not practical, although new techniques may make them an economically viable approach in the future - arguably tailored phage viruses are true nanotechnology. ]
One way we can view technological advance is to examine how people's lives have changed. My grandfather was born in teh age of horse travel and died after he had flown in jet airliners 2/3 of a century later. I was born after WWII, and seemed to experience some major technology changes, but it isn't clear much has changed in the last 25 years. Yes, the internet (WWW anyway) has facilitated new services, some good, some bad, but in practice the fundamentals were lon in place - dead tree newspapers before online, phone ordering before online, libraries, calculators, all presaged the shift to online. Social media has supplated letter writing and printing posters, and the mail service has declined as junk mail has been supplanted by targeted advertising.
We can feel that technology has not proceeded as fast as it once did. But you are correct to say that incremental changes do accumulate. In my lifetime, airliner accidents plummeted, so that the MCAS problems that brought down 2 BA 737 MAX aircraft was so shocking. Cars are certainly more fuel efficient, safe, quiet, longer lasting, than they were when I was young. And EVs are a welcome development that appeared as battery technology for electronic devices allowed for greater power density and range. But EVs are fundamentally an old technology as milk in the UK was delivered by a milkman driving an electric vehicle that quietly traveled the neighborhood delivering the milk in the early hours. I have solar PV on my roof, but the technology of PVs was used on satellites after the mid-20th century and are only on my rook as PV price-performance has improved by orders of magnitude. The same with transistors, that chip fabrication improvements allows me to have incredible computing power on my desktop, and in my pocket.
I'm old too. I wouldn't want to live back in the mid last century when I was a kid through to post grad. Despite what I said, the smartphone is an excellent gadget. I feel naked without it when away from my house. You may also have niticed that before cellphones. clocks were ubiquitous in case you were not wearing a watch, and public phones were common place. Both are now long gone except in a few locations. Back then, one carried an address book to use a phone booth for needed phone numbers, plus lots of small change to make a call. Even as late as the mid-1990s, one needed a laptop to access information over the web. I don't miss those days, nor arranging meetings at some place and time in advance, with no way to check on why someone was a no-show (or just very late). Just watching old movies is interesting to realize how much easier it is to communicate by phone, and while moving which was all but impossible without a 2-way radio.
All of which shows that technology has improved and made our lives easier despite the downsides, but I stick by my assertion that truly new technologies have slowed up, especiallly for older technologies, and true technology leaps have moved into new, more invisible domains.
Technology is slowing down less than it appears. The forms may be similar, but there have been a lot of changes and advances.
Civil airliners are much more efficient with high bypass engines and now variable gearing. They're fly by wire. They're made out of carbon fiber not aluminum. They handle air pressure changes better. Communications and navigation are better. There are emergency auto-land systems available for small planes.
Automobiles are also more efficient and performant. A low end Kia can smoke any 1960s muscle car. They're also fly by wire and have advanced control of steering, gearing and wheel resistance. GPS has revolutionized navigation.
Computers run faster and manage power use better. Multilevel caches are standard and systems hardened against data leaks. Throughput is higher. Graphics are faster. Everything is on-chip. Special purpose processors are integrated. Computers have changed the way cars, airplanes and appliances are controlled.
New antibiotics use novel mechanisms sometimes with anti-resistance components. There are numerous antiviral drugs. Cancer survival rates have soared, especially for children. Immune system based treatments are in regular use. mRNA vaccines for a novel disease were deployed in less than a year. Surgical techniques make for shorter recovery times. Gene therapy is starting to show results. Let's add biologicals to the list. Drug discovery is a whole new animal.
Food may look the same, but the quality of things like tomatoes, berries, and corn have been improved by breeding and genetic manipulation. Shipping and preservation have improved. Express shipping and computerization have made specialty foods mainstream.
There are very few times when technology seems to be doing more than filling in. Maybe during World War II if you were on the battlefield. If you look at photo of a NYC street scene in 1900, it's all horse powered. In 1905, there are automobiles that look like carriages without horses. By 1915, horse drawn carriages are uncommon, but it was only in the 1920s that the Gleason hypoid gear let automobiles get closer to the ground to look like modern cars. Time foreshortens things.
I would argue that most of the examples you provide are improvements (innovations) not technology changes, inless any technological change, however small, counts as a change.
For example - aircraft technology changes:
1, heavier than air flight
2. inline and radial engines dribing propellers
3. jet engines (also used to drive propellers )
Fundamentally, civil airliners have not had major changes since the Comet 1 and Boeing 707. Yes, they have inmproved airframes, reduced fuel consumption with high-bypass turbofans, and fly-by wire, but those are incremental technology impreovements.
GPS is a fundamental technology that needed satellite technology which in turn needed rocket launchers and microelectronics. The fundamental technologies apart from the GPS system were at the latest 1970s technology. As Brian Arthur has suggested, technologies build upon each other in a combinatorial explosion. However, the combinations may be minor improvements or not important.
Consider computer languages. There are trees showing how languages have evolved and their lineages. However, if you look at compter langyuages today, apart from relatively minor innovations in what they can do, they are fundamentally the same at their core - translating their code to op codes that run on chips which do no radically change how they work or the op codes they use, just as we write text using the same 26 letters and punctuation that we have used for centuries.
Fundamental technology changes are fire, writing, wheel,.....steam engines, ICE, aircraft, lasers, antibiotics, transistors, television, etc, etc. For example, antibiotics were discovered in the 1920s. (Fleming, penecillin). Almost all antibiotics are still discovered the same way, and have just a few mechanisms of action on bacteria. We can now use better means of discovery, as well as using technologies to improve antibiotic effectiveness, but as a technology, they are a century old, and unless we find fundamentally new approaches, resistance will obsolte thenm all within the coming century. [ I would argue that manipulating the immune system in a new technology that can help here. The Russian invetion using phage viruses is also old and not practical, although new techniques may make them an economically viable approach in the future - arguably tailored phage viruses are true nanotechnology. ]
One way we can view technological advance is to examine how people's lives have changed. My grandfather was born in teh age of horse travel and died after he had flown in jet airliners 2/3 of a century later. I was born after WWII, and seemed to experience some major technology changes, but it isn't clear much has changed in the last 25 years. Yes, the internet (WWW anyway) has facilitated new services, some good, some bad, but in practice the fundamentals were lon in place - dead tree newspapers before online, phone ordering before online, libraries, calculators, all presaged the shift to online. Social media has supplated letter writing and printing posters, and the mail service has declined as junk mail has been supplanted by targeted advertising.
We can feel that technology has not proceeded as fast as it once did. But you are correct to say that incremental changes do accumulate. In my lifetime, airliner accidents plummeted, so that the MCAS problems that brought down 2 BA 737 MAX aircraft was so shocking. Cars are certainly more fuel efficient, safe, quiet, longer lasting, than they were when I was young. And EVs are a welcome development that appeared as battery technology for electronic devices allowed for greater power density and range. But EVs are fundamentally an old technology as milk in the UK was delivered by a milkman driving an electric vehicle that quietly traveled the neighborhood delivering the milk in the early hours. I have solar PV on my roof, but the technology of PVs was used on satellites after the mid-20th century and are only on my rook as PV price-performance has improved by orders of magnitude. The same with transistors, that chip fabrication improvements allows me to have incredible computing power on my desktop, and in my pocket.
Maybe my different perspective is because I'm old and remember the technology of my childhood. So many things were so different.
I'm old too. I wouldn't want to live back in the mid last century when I was a kid through to post grad. Despite what I said, the smartphone is an excellent gadget. I feel naked without it when away from my house. You may also have niticed that before cellphones. clocks were ubiquitous in case you were not wearing a watch, and public phones were common place. Both are now long gone except in a few locations. Back then, one carried an address book to use a phone booth for needed phone numbers, plus lots of small change to make a call. Even as late as the mid-1990s, one needed a laptop to access information over the web. I don't miss those days, nor arranging meetings at some place and time in advance, with no way to check on why someone was a no-show (or just very late). Just watching old movies is interesting to realize how much easier it is to communicate by phone, and while moving which was all but impossible without a 2-way radio.
All of which shows that technology has improved and made our lives easier despite the downsides, but I stick by my assertion that truly new technologies have slowed up, especiallly for older technologies, and true technology leaps have moved into new, more invisible domains.