I’ve read some claims that the rate of technological progress is accelerating, so, if the claim is true, this means that it has been faster from 1980 to 2015 than from 1945 to 1980.
I’m interested to know what people think because I can’t decide if that is indeed true.
Technology does not progress in a linear manner, but in bursts, and while one field shows enormous advances, another field may appear stagnant. In the past 30 years, computers and telecommunications technology has seen some impressive progress; the field of aviation, to take an example, has seen far fewer developments. We have no way what will change in a given period of time, and what won’t.
And even so, in the past thirty years we’ve built airplanes that can fly into space, developed ultralight craft that can fly on solar power almost indefinitely, built drone aircraft smaller then a Fiat that can fly autonomously or by wire from thousands of miles away, and made astounding leaps in fuel efficiency. Not on a par, I agree, with innovation in other fields, but part and parcel of a broader technological advancement.
I’d argue that in many ways the answer is yes we have progressed farther in the last 30 years than the previous 30. But I’d further argue that it’s almost entirely because of Bernard of Chartres’ observation: we’re standing on the shoulders of [del]freaks[/del] giants. Every step takes us further from the slog of basic understanding and further into refinement and flights of fancy, and the latter moves faster.
Public and personal access to technology has grown.
Mechanical to electrical, analog to digital, wired to wireless, real to virtual, original to copys (on screen, software, printers including 3D printing), All these have tended to make technology more affordable to the point that much of it has become a commodity instead of a specialty, and industrial economies of scale as well as ramping up supply material all lead to a massive uptake in use and availability of technology by the common person.
It also allows more people to ‘tinker’ with technology and we have a massive interconnection of once very isolated technologies.
So I would say the rapid advancement of technology is directly related to the availability of these technologies by the masses.
Those are all valid descriptions of the last 30 years’ accomplishments and there is no denying them, I was born 35 years ago so I’ve lived through them.
but nobody mentions the accomplishments of the 30 years before that to contrast them with (including landing on the moon, inventing the internet, the first (and now retired) supersonic passenger jet, the green revolution, etc.)
While those things were technological advances (not exactly sure what you mean by the green revolution, but anyway). The key difference is what you stated is for the privileged few, but what is today is for everyone.
A prime example is GPS, once the exclusive domain of the US military, now is in the reach of most people, and for many has become part of their day to day lives.
I think what we are now seeing is the vast merging of technology with humanity to become part of who we are, to expand our senses beyond our biological ones.
Incidentally, there have been some recent threads by a relatively new poster that argued the reverse - that the space program, computers, airplanes, etc demonstrated the pace of technological progress has slowed in the last 30 years instead. Example here.
My take has been that measuring the pace of innovation is kind of a mug’s game. Different areas develop at different times and trying to measure that in a single number can’t be done objectively.
The constant seems to be that we’ll always experience technological innovation of some sort that we can’t predict in advance.
Some areas will be fairly mature and will only progress incrementally and others will be new fields and experience explosive growth from low hanging fruit.
I realize those aren’t exactly exciting or especially insightful stances, but more specificity is usually correlated with failed predictions.
If you don’t know what t he green revolution is, you are literally ignorant of the most important series of technological advances made by humans in recorded history.
Green revolution in the context of this thread is vague at best - it encompass so much including low tech that stating it means basically nothing in the OP’s context (and why I posted as such), calling me ignorant in this context is not called for (in this case 
)
The green revolution was mostly low tech and consisted of taking existing developed world technology and using it in the developing world. It is no different than how cell phones have revolutionized the developing world, but the developing world didn’t invent then. Also you mis spelled ‘the’.
Also I wouldn’t count the green revolution as the most important, but that is subjective. I think the 18th century industrial revolution was far more important.
Yeah… the 1954-1984 era had MORE fundamental things invented and developed, but the 1984-2014 era seems to have developed things in much greater depth than prior decades.
In the following regards I’d say it is accelerating:
The world is wealthier, which means more scientists
More wealth = more $ devoted to R&D also (plus as a nation reaches high income status its economy relies more on scientific R&D to stay economically viable. Wealthy nations spend more than lower income nations). So more money and manpower
Existing knowledge is easier to access
The tools to obtain knowledge are better (medicine, chemistry, computing, etc all have better tools than 40 years ago to investigate what they are studying).
However I think we’ve picked the low hanging fruit. It is my understanding that technology follows an S curve. A flat period, then a period of rapid growth, then a leveling off. Aviation for example, the golden age of aviation was about from WW1 until the 1950s or so when many advances were made. After that things haven’t improved as much. Communications has undergone a revolution, but who knows if/when that will level off.
Once a tech hits maturity, then it becomes ripe to be replaced. Right now aviation has nothing to replace it. However if supersonic hyperloops (some are theoretically engineered to run mach 5 or faster) ever become feasible that could replace aviation for most people. Hyperloops would be faster and cheaper than aviation.
Plus you can have dramatic growth in a field w/o any consumer products being released. Genetics has improved a lot in the last 20 years, but that hasn’t yet translated into any medical technology that benefits people (by and large) other than some affordable genetic testing.
Right now I’d say we are in the middle of an S curve with alternative energy, genetics, and probably many other fields. I’d say communications is reaching maturity, but have no idea what if anything could replace it.
The development of any given individual technology follows an S curve, but technology as a whole is exponential. The trick, though, is in figuring out how to measure it.
For instance, one might naively try to measure technological progress by the speed of the vehicles we use. By that measure, technology overall hasn’t advanced much at all in the past thirty years, and for consumer use, it’s declined (30 years ago there was a commercial supersonic airliner, while today there isn’t).
But that’s the wrong measure. Suppose you measure instead the time it takes a businessman in New York to get from his office to a meeting with a colleague in Japan. Thirty years ago, that would take over a day, but nowadays, it takes a matter of seconds. It’s not that vehicles are that much faster, but rather, that one doesn’t use a vehicle to get to that meeting at all, and the meeting doesn’t even have a geographical location.
Vehicles aren’t faster, but quality has gone up quite a bit. Up until a few decades ago odometers only had 5 figures since cars rarely lasted 100k miles. Now you can get 200k miles out of a car if you do preventative maintenance. So even if one area doesn’t improve then another area might.
And… that kind of thing has been around for decades. It’s just become cheap enough to be accomplished by two knuckleheads and Skype. But if you had enough cash, you could do teleconferencing in 1984 or even before.
I guess what I’m getting at is, are we considering the commercialization of existing technologies as “technological progress”, or are we talking about more pure science type discoveries? There’s a pretty big difference, and a lot of the stuff we’re thinking about as game-changing really falls into that category, and not as “new” technology.
Technological innovation always looks like that, because when you look at new stuff that is in the mass market there were earlier prototype versions a generation ago. Inventions tend to be invented a lot earlier than people expect. When you look at how things are created there’s a generation of extremely early one-off prototypes and experiments that most people never heard of at the time, then a generation of failed products that sort of work but are superexpensive and not worth getting for most people, then a generation of mass market consumer products that are everywhere.
That means, in other words, that it’s possible that the next jet airplane or internet was invented in the past five years, and we just don’t know what it is yet. Pretty cool.
On the subject, physician and medical professor Terry Walls developed MS around the year 2000. Several years after that she used knowledge gained from animal studies of the disease to devise a regimen that would help her body deal with the disease better, and she is much more mobile than in the past.
She said animal studies are 20 (I can’t recall the exact number) years ahead of human studies on disease states, so she based her self research on that. Naturally humans aren’t rats, mice or chimps, but the kernel of knowledge needed to beat a disease like Alzheimers may already have been discovered in some mouse study somewhere, they just need to verify it works in humans and create a medical intervention around it.
It reminds me a bit of an old essay of Robert Heinlein in “Expanded Universe” first written in the 60s where he talked about how the automobile had changed American sex lives, and he predicted that there was a some current innovation that everyone knew about that would radically change people’s sex lives, except we didn’t yet know what it was. And in the 80s update he said he still didn’t know, unless it was the computer. I remember reading that and rolling my eyes at the old man’s idea that computers would change our sex lives. Like, HOW? So yeah, welcome to 2015.
For many of us the computer has eliminated our sex lives.