The "New York Times" salivating sooooo hard at the thought of a chaotic Democratic National Convention; Kamala Harris says she’s a prosecutor, not a perpetrator; Brad DeLong on John Stuart Mill...
Yes, the late 70's are the knee of the curve. I found that out as a child library rat.
Now in my late 80's I know the knee is there. The abuse I did to my body, mostly by accident, has really caught up to me. Can't run, can't jump, can't skip, can't hike, can't ride my horse, (I can but it is not safe for me or my wife) can't race my sailboat. I can drive a car safely, at least until I can't move my right leg accurately,
I can ride my electric bike. I also can write Nasty Grams to my rethuglican party friends.
I have watched friends faculties decline significantly in a year or two. I expect it is coming soon to me.
Damn! Joe is a good man and we very much need good men and women. Sad that his collapse happened in this era when the forces of evil are gathering strength. Sad that RBG didn't move on from the subprime court. Sad that Mitch McConnell joined the forces of evil.
I’ve said it many times; we are prisoners of our own lives. We create lives, families, careers, relationships that we are basically stuck with until we die, unless we do the unthinkable and walk away from it all. I think that is the appeal of Mad Men. Don Draper walked away from his old life and started anew. Mill and his wife were on to something.
Re: No. Technological progress has not slowed down:
Technological progress is not just semiconductors. While I don't think general technological progress is slowing down, the big noticeable changes are. Civil airliners have not fundamentally changed in 40 years. Autos are similar to what they were for at least 5o years, albeit with better components and now electric versions. Even computers, while more capable, seem to be mired in a rut with little very innovative, let alone inventive, in 2 decades. In healthcare, improvements continue, but breakthrough drugs are getting ever rarer, with expensive (for now) biologicals as the most interesting new treatments. Food - same as it ever was.
It is hard to see breakthrough science achievements, but a lot of "filling in".
Technologies follow S-curves, and while a few are still in the growth phase, many that once defined progress, are reaching their asymptotes. What we do have is some many mature technologies that combinations of technologies can produce many newer technologies, in some cases changing the pattern of usage. We needn't commute to work, and this allows residences to migrate further from offices. [ When will robotic avatars replace on-site work in retail - e.g. shoppers for handing off orders for grocery delivery? ]
The question is how many new fundamental discoveries and thence new technologies are being made, compared to the 19th century through to the mid-20th? I cannot see that I have seen more than a few in the late 20th to early 21st centuries. The pattern of technological development that is less inventive, more innovative, and even mostly refinement may even be a good thing.
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.
I would argue that food is less healthy today than it was 50 years ago. The "progress" has been in companies learning to process foods with more fat, salt, and sugar in order to make them more palatable, but at the cost of making them less nutritious. I'm not sure if there's a more general rule there.
Yes and no. Yes, we are eating more processed (even ultraprocessed) food, but we can adhere to the Michael Pollan eating rules to circumvent much of this by making food choices. We are aware of more pesticides, herbicides, and now PFAS in fruit and vegetables, but is that from greater use, of better monitoring? Compared to the fruit and veg I was able to eat as a Brit back in the middle of the last century, the availabity of more choice and better quality due to transport has radically improved the fresh foods. [ Admittedly, I now live in CA, so there is a better choice and quality to start with. But we still get fruits and veg shipped long distances and that is an improvement and reduces seasonality. ] While meat is now often cheaper than fruits and veg, the relentless industrialization of meat production sickens me with its cruelty.
All good points. I suspect most people eat more of the ultraprocessed foods than they did 50 years ago, but the healthier options are more available even if not chosen as often as they should be.
And yeah, moving from England to CA would make a huge difference in the fruits and veggies available to you. :)
It was a one time jump to CA. But I had already seen the issue of transport costs as fruits were shipped across Europe. Great peaches and grapes in Switzerland, poor availability and quality of same in the UK and positively miserable quality in Ireland. And Bermuda - fuggedabboutit.
But over 35 years in CA, I have seen improvements in variety. in grocery stores as the variety improvements have dispersed to the lower quality grocery stores [The local Raleys where I live has almost as good a variety as the upmarket Cosentino or even more upmarket Draegers in Silicon Valley, 30 years ago.]. And look at Costco - the food offerings are hugely improved from just a decade or two ago - with far more "ethnic" items than ever.
The big difference today is that fruits (and possibly veggies) are much sweeter today than they were 50 or 70 years ago. That makes it easier to get the associated vitamins, etc., but it also makes for more sugar in the diet. That trade-off might be worth it (I'd need a nutritionist to say), but there's probably a limit there.
I think the consensus is that we are really not designed for a world with sugar—that in the old world any time a little bit of sugar appears it is immediately gobbled up...
I am not convinced that fruits are sweeter today than in the past. Maybe that is my taste buds declining in old age. :-( However, we do get more access to fruits than vegetables today. The main issue with sugar is that corporate food companies add sugar to foods that did not used to have it added, primarily to increase consumption, and starting with children. Fructose is metabolized differently than glucose and possibly increase risk of insulin resistance. Glucose ( the other half of sucrose) is the core of our energy metalism and is used both in storage as starches in plants and for a host of other molecules in plant and animal metabolism. It is possible that eating starch for carbohydrates is better than sucrose as it does not contain fructose. But this is speculation on my part based on the reported greater insulin restance of fructose vs glucose.
#10
Yes, the late 70's are the knee of the curve. I found that out as a child library rat.
Now in my late 80's I know the knee is there. The abuse I did to my body, mostly by accident, has really caught up to me. Can't run, can't jump, can't skip, can't hike, can't ride my horse, (I can but it is not safe for me or my wife) can't race my sailboat. I can drive a car safely, at least until I can't move my right leg accurately,
I can ride my electric bike. I also can write Nasty Grams to my rethuglican party friends.
I have watched friends faculties decline significantly in a year or two. I expect it is coming soon to me.
Damn! Joe is a good man and we very much need good men and women. Sad that his collapse happened in this era when the forces of evil are gathering strength. Sad that RBG didn't move on from the subprime court. Sad that Mitch McConnell joined the forces of evil.
So what attitude should we attempt to hold on to as we contemplate the path?
Simple: If there is breath LIVE!!
I’ve said it many times; we are prisoners of our own lives. We create lives, families, careers, relationships that we are basically stuck with until we die, unless we do the unthinkable and walk away from it all. I think that is the appeal of Mad Men. Don Draper walked away from his old life and started anew. Mill and his wife were on to something.
Upvoted for that Althoff study. Wow.
Yes, it is great... Brad
Re: No. Technological progress has not slowed down:
Technological progress is not just semiconductors. While I don't think general technological progress is slowing down, the big noticeable changes are. Civil airliners have not fundamentally changed in 40 years. Autos are similar to what they were for at least 5o years, albeit with better components and now electric versions. Even computers, while more capable, seem to be mired in a rut with little very innovative, let alone inventive, in 2 decades. In healthcare, improvements continue, but breakthrough drugs are getting ever rarer, with expensive (for now) biologicals as the most interesting new treatments. Food - same as it ever was.
It is hard to see breakthrough science achievements, but a lot of "filling in".
Technologies follow S-curves, and while a few are still in the growth phase, many that once defined progress, are reaching their asymptotes. What we do have is some many mature technologies that combinations of technologies can produce many newer technologies, in some cases changing the pattern of usage. We needn't commute to work, and this allows residences to migrate further from offices. [ When will robotic avatars replace on-site work in retail - e.g. shoppers for handing off orders for grocery delivery? ]
The question is how many new fundamental discoveries and thence new technologies are being made, compared to the 19th century through to the mid-20th? I cannot see that I have seen more than a few in the late 20th to early 21st centuries. The pattern of technological development that is less inventive, more innovative, and even mostly refinement may even be a good thing.
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.
I would argue that food is less healthy today than it was 50 years ago. The "progress" has been in companies learning to process foods with more fat, salt, and sugar in order to make them more palatable, but at the cost of making them less nutritious. I'm not sure if there's a more general rule there.
Yes and no. Yes, we are eating more processed (even ultraprocessed) food, but we can adhere to the Michael Pollan eating rules to circumvent much of this by making food choices. We are aware of more pesticides, herbicides, and now PFAS in fruit and vegetables, but is that from greater use, of better monitoring? Compared to the fruit and veg I was able to eat as a Brit back in the middle of the last century, the availabity of more choice and better quality due to transport has radically improved the fresh foods. [ Admittedly, I now live in CA, so there is a better choice and quality to start with. But we still get fruits and veg shipped long distances and that is an improvement and reduces seasonality. ] While meat is now often cheaper than fruits and veg, the relentless industrialization of meat production sickens me with its cruelty.
All good points. I suspect most people eat more of the ultraprocessed foods than they did 50 years ago, but the healthier options are more available even if not chosen as often as they should be.
And yeah, moving from England to CA would make a huge difference in the fruits and veggies available to you. :)
It was a one time jump to CA. But I had already seen the issue of transport costs as fruits were shipped across Europe. Great peaches and grapes in Switzerland, poor availability and quality of same in the UK and positively miserable quality in Ireland. And Bermuda - fuggedabboutit.
But over 35 years in CA, I have seen improvements in variety. in grocery stores as the variety improvements have dispersed to the lower quality grocery stores [The local Raleys where I live has almost as good a variety as the upmarket Cosentino or even more upmarket Draegers in Silicon Valley, 30 years ago.]. And look at Costco - the food offerings are hugely improved from just a decade or two ago - with far more "ethnic" items than ever.
The big difference today is that fruits (and possibly veggies) are much sweeter today than they were 50 or 70 years ago. That makes it easier to get the associated vitamins, etc., but it also makes for more sugar in the diet. That trade-off might be worth it (I'd need a nutritionist to say), but there's probably a limit there.
I think the consensus is that we are really not designed for a world with sugar—that in the old world any time a little bit of sugar appears it is immediately gobbled up...
I am not convinced that fruits are sweeter today than in the past. Maybe that is my taste buds declining in old age. :-( However, we do get more access to fruits than vegetables today. The main issue with sugar is that corporate food companies add sugar to foods that did not used to have it added, primarily to increase consumption, and starting with children. Fructose is metabolized differently than glucose and possibly increase risk of insulin resistance. Glucose ( the other half of sucrose) is the core of our energy metalism and is used both in storage as starches in plants and for a host of other molecules in plant and animal metabolism. It is possible that eating starch for carbohydrates is better than sucrose as it does not contain fructose. But this is speculation on my part based on the reported greater insulin restance of fructose vs glucose.