I know we got HD TV ,UHDTV ,3D TV ,tablet computers , smart phones that are like computers , 3D printing and electronics.:):) Getting better all the time.
But where technology is slowing down.
2014 Intel processor to a 2006 Intel processor vs a 2006 Intel processor to a 2000 one.
2.Airplanes - still traveling at roughly the speeds that were available 50 years ago, with some improvements in carrying capacity
Personal automobiles cars and trucks ,with some (minor) tweaks and improvements in gas mileage and such over past 50 years.
4.Getting in space is bit cheaper than 50 years ago , but still too costly for space mining or people living on the moon or mars.Rocketry not really that much better than 50 years ago.
Firearm technology has had minor tweaks and adjustments - but commonly guns are not particularly more accurate, powerful or less expensive than 50 years ago.
6.Not really new revolutionary things like the steam engine or combustion engine.
So it it seems technology is stagnating in a lot of industries where most leaps and bounds are computers ,electronics and gadgets.
I guess your question is largely based on why hasn’t there been some fundamental change in transportation or other technologies (i.e. horse vs steam vs internal combustion engine) as opposed to incremental changes in existing technology (i.e. Boeing 747, 747-100, 747-200, 747-400, 747-8).
A lot of changes would probably not be visible to you. For example, advances in materials, manufacturing techniques and whatnot would not be obvious to someone who wasn’t involved with those products or industries. But if you look at a modern 747-8 vs a circa 1969 747, there are actually a lot of differences in terms of fuel efficiency, safety, avionics, and performance.
Although I guess what you are asking is why are they basically still using turbofan jets and chemically propelled bullets instead of anti-matter drives or plasma rifles or something?
Rockets aren’t that much better than 50 years ago. They’re infinitely better than 100 years ago - when they didn’t exist.
Breakthroughs don’t usually come in established areas. Yes, we keep working on things but the big leaps come in new fields, not the old ones. That’s because we pick the low hanging fruit first and have to exert ever more effort to figure out the harder stuff.
We’ve had agriculture for thousands of years now. We’ve made a few improvements, but we haven’t had a really major breakthrough in it since the beginning. Even the big improvements in the last hundred years are the results of breakthroughs in other areas (motorized farm equipment, electronics, chemistry, computing, etc),.
So, no, I don’t see the pace of technological advance decreasing. If anything, we’re developing faster than ever before across a multitude of fields and in collaboration with partners across the globe. If the pace seems off, that may simply be because we’ve also advanced in literacy and leisure. We now have written or visual stories describing possibly unrealistic futuristic tech and we have the time to enjoy them as opposed to spending all day outdoors trying to eke out an existence from the earth.
Processor speed isn’t a bottleneck now. There are much more important areas of improvement (with mobile computing, massive multi-processors, networking)
Huge improvements in power, reliability, fuel economy, payload, power sources, safety, comfort, features, pollution controls. You haven’t driven an old car recently, have you?
We don’t need major breakthroughs in those areas. The major breakthroughs are elsewhere. Besides, what do you think practical hybrid and plug in electric cars are if not breakthroughs?
We already know how to make airplanes go really fast. The focus now is on efficiency, and there have been massive strides made in that area over the years. The difference between say, a 707 and a 787 is massive.
I don’t think technology is stagnating. It’s just very selective in what it deems worthy to pursue. Most of which is guided by the almighty dollar.
R & D ain’t free and if there’s no return-on-investment to be had in the company’s planning horizon they’ll steer clear.
Just because we want an answer to something doesn’t mean we can find it, regardless of how much money we throw at it. We’ve been working on some mathematical problems for thousands of years and still have no answer.
Even if we find an answer, convincing an entire multi-level manufacturing industry to adopt it may not always work. This is more of a problem the more levels of production are involved.
Cost of adoption is often high. While you can refit roughly the same airplane slowly with minor improvements, big revolutions often require manufacturing the entire thing from scratch. Companies may not deem it financially feasible to refit their entire fleet with supersonics even if it was only 2x the cost instead of 3 or 4x. This is especially true tied with 2, if they also have to refit factories to produce the new fuel or parts, that’s even more upfront cost for questionable financial benefit to the companies. This is part of why we have slower internet than many countries. Save the few towns getting Google Fiber, nobody is willing to foot the bill to redo the entire nation with Korea-speed internet.
With some of these things, it’s not that technology is stagnating, it’s that there are very real physical limitations that we’re approaching.
Take airplane speed, for example. We had a supersonic passenger liner (the Concorde) and it was shut down for not being profitable enough. Ultimately, the problem is that Earth has an atmosphere. If you double speed, you quadruple air resistance (at least in very simplistic math terms). So not only are you spending vastly more energy for a small increase in speed, but this resistance translates into heat, so there’s a real point where the air starts to melt your aircraft.
There are plenty of ridiculously fast airplanes in existence, but there are some real limitations here. For example, the good old SR-71 Blackbird actually leaks fuel when on the ground, because when it’s flying at top speed of Mach 3.5+ it gets really hot, and you had to design enough room for thermal expansion. We have scramjet designs like the X-43 that can hit Mach 10. Short of force fields or something “magical” like that, we’ve pretty much hit the limit imposed by physical constraints and are operating at a level where the cost exceeds any real benefit.
This line of thinking applies to automobile speed, though with some slightly different issues. For example, one of the biggest problems with automobiles is that if they go too fast, they don’t stay on the road. A 400-mph+ car is really just a low-flying plane. (If you want proof, check out the ThrustSSCand tell me that doesn’t look like a plane without wings.) As speed goes, gas mileage also goes down. (That ThrustSSC gets 0.04 mpg. Who wants to pay $100 for gas every time they go pick up groceries?)
Projectile speed: mostly the same issues. Physics dictates that momentum = mass x speed^2. So doubling speed takes four times as much energy. You can only put so much energy into a bullet. Furthermore, air resistance slows the bullet down more as it gets faster… and if you go too fast, the air will incinerate your bullet before it can go anywhere.
Anyway, I could go on. The point is that anytime you see something in technology start to plateau, the answer is almost always either (or both) 1) physical constraints in nature or 2) cost-effectiveness for the intended user.
2006 processors had single cores. Today’s processors have multiple cores. Process technology is at the 20 nm node now, a lot better than 8 years ago. Since most people are doing multiple things on their computers, having various cores and threads do it at the same speed is better than one thread going a bit faster.
The killer is power consumption, which gets higher as you go faster.
The big win from multiple core low power design is that you can put more software on your mobile device. We will all have smart digital assistants in ten years.
Big improvements here lie in automation, reliability and fuel efficiency. Remember the SST? That failed because of the market, not because of technology.
I have a hybrid. So do tons of people in California. And lots of people now have electric cars. Plus built-in GPS, self parking cars, cars with collision avoidance features, and the Google self-driving cars which drive on the same roads I do.
Except we finally have privatized this, and we can expect some improvement at long last. Again, this is politics, not technology.
Unless you count drones. Guns which can be fired only by their owner would be a big advance if the NRA allows them.
A big source of the advances in other areas is including computers in normal appliances. Just wait for the Internet of Things to really take off. You can already close your garage door from your smartphone.
I can see a future cartoon - the wife is in bed with the mailman when they are interrupted by the vacuum cleaner controlled by the husband.
Why don’t we find some “super food” that makes horses never tire and go twice as fast?
That’s one of the classic fallacies about the pace of innovation. The big innovations come in directions we don’t expect, i.e. revolution, rather than simply improving what already exists, i.e. evolution.
When people complain about the pace of innovation, they want a specific end result, i.e. flying cars, rather than general innovation. There’s plenty of innovation right now. There may not be the specific innovation you want.
Also, the specific kinds of innovation prevalent early in the 20th century were really big and flashy. Big machines, flying vehicles, etc. They aren’t necessarily any more innovative than other things, but they do make a big visual impression. The innovations of the last 30 years or so have not been flashy like seeing the world’s first space rocket but have had just as big an impact on society.
It seems like the big complaint you have is that current innovations aren’t flashy enough to suit.
It depends. For mobile devices, power consumption is definitely a kicker. But for desktops, the problem is way more in heat dissipation than power consumption. Unless you’re running a huge computing cluster or a server farm, most processers are in danger of overheating if you speed them more than they are of exceeding your outlet’s electric throughput.
All of these things are large sums of money into R&D by the military and DOD.The goal is fast planes from point A to point B. Not transporting people cheaply.
The R&D is not target for customer air flights but for the military.
New fuel and material may bring the cost down enough where it is profitable.
** 5. Firearm technology has had minor tweaks and adjustments - but commonly guns are not particularly more accurate, powerful or less expensive than 50 years ago.**
I wonder where the lack of bigger guns like you see in movies or video games like Doom is technology problem :eek::eek::eek::eek:we don’t know how to build it or the gun recoil problem.That they cannot make bigger bullets because of the recoil problem?
That if you fired the gun it will knock you on the ground.
Getting better all the time.