Have we finally hit a wall as a species?

  1. Space travel—— I remember growing up in the 80s being promised we would be sending manned flights to Mars by now. Recently the Trump Administration has promised manned flights to the Moon: something we accomplished 50 years ago!

  2. Still no cure for cancer or AIDS

  3. Barely ZERO tech innovations since the iPhone and iPad almost 10 years ago. I thought we’d be talking to pieces of invisible glass by now, or folding up our iPads into our pocket. What the fuck, tech companies???

Am I missing something or have the last ten years been a lost decade for technological advancements? I thought we’d be further along than we were in 2009.

Bring up examples and prove me wrong. And it better not be emojis, shingles vaccines and the ability to land on comets!
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While there may not yet be a magic bullet cure for AIDS, it hasn’t been the death sentence it once was for many years. Recently, scientists have found that if babies born with AIDS are started on anti retroviral medication immediately then, after a few months or years they’re effectively cured. Scientists have also recently discovered some rare individuals who seem to have some kind of genetic immunity to the disease. They’re trying to figure out how that works with the aim of using that information to manufacture cures.

As for cancer, scientists are making progress all the time. Thing is, cancer is just an umbrella term for about 200 different diseases which cause unregulated cell growth. What works for one type of tumour won’t work for another. Progress on this score is always going to be incremental, so you need to take the long view. 100 years ago, cancer was a guaranteed death sentence. Today, the cure rate is about 50%. There’s no reason to believe that trend won’t continue. In the last few years scientists have started to figure out how to utilise the immune system to fight cancer and, while the research is in its infancy, the early results have been extremely promising.

We’re also on the cusp of an explosion of life changing tech advances in the form of smart AI. Once they perfect self-driving cars and the like, society is going to change in ways we can’t even imagine.

Foldable phones are here. But as for technologies in general, nothing is a steep line on a graph that goes on forever–instead there is a steep line that soon reaches a peak defined by practicality or fundamental physics and then goes back to a nearly flat line again. Everyone reading this has been living through one of those steep climbs in several areas–in some of those areas, there is a lot of steep climb still potentially ahead (such as biotech) but in some other areas we are reaching the flat line at the end of that growth spurt. (For instance, microprocessors.)

I know an impressive number of people who have been diagnosed with various cancers and are now either “cured” or at least in long term remissions.

I think the phones are speeding up the decadence… I judge society by the soul nutrition (music, film, comedy, literature, language) and there’s a lot of emptiness, so I just skip over to the art created before my birth. Also a good way to see how things went wrong.

How do you feel about clouds?

Many technological advances happening now aren’t in the form of consumer electronics, but what we’re able to do with data. And you’re very far off on your idea that there’s stagnation in the treatment of AIDS or cancer.

Mars missions, curing cancer, and constant leaps in cell phone technology are the only ways to measure human progress so you must be correct.

I think we will reach a finish line (not a wall) of some sort in the next 200 years, assuming we avoid the fall of civilization. We aren’t there yet, however, and even if we limit things to the last 10 years I think we’ve made significant advances.

Whats going to come out of DARPA or JPL in the next few years/decades?

As has been said, the past 100 or so years has seen an astonishing rate of discovery, invention, and refinement in all areas of science.

It would seem to me that its inevitable that there would be a developmental plateau while all this new stuff and knowledge is explored and refined to come up with even more new stuff and knowledge

If you’d asked me 30 years ago, I would have said we would start the plateauing around 2000, and I’m not even really all the convinced that we’re starting to now.

  1. As it turns out, the reason we haven’t had these advances in space travel is because the economics model of government agencies and government contracting is deeply flawed and inefficient.

    While SpaceX did use a lot of NASA facilities and resources, and Musk’s stated plans of Mars missions with humans real soon now are far-fetched, the fact is, SpaceX has done things with about 1/10 the money that NASA would require.

    No real radical advances in technology, the Falcon rockets are similar in fundamental technology to 1960s rockets, just with much better sensors and computers. Oh, and working first stage recovery - what NASA was attempting to accomplish with the Space Shuttle, but it actually is cheaper.

  2. Cancer isn’t one disease. It’s many. AIDs has a treatment that, if you have access to the daily pills you will need, you can live almost as long as you would without AIDs. Also, even more importantly, if you live a lifestyle where you are potentially exposed to HIV, you can take the same pills and reduce your chance of catching the disease to nearly zero. It’s not a vaccine and the pills have side effects (firsthand experience), but for me the side effects were bearable.

There have been advances in cancer treatment but the real flaw is human aging. No real fix for that. If a treatment was available for aging, some drug or genetic edit to block the root pathways that lead to it, it probably would also be a broad spectrum preventative treatment for cancer.

So a “cure for cancer” really is a cure for most disease. And possibly many decades away, but the point is, it’s a big problem there has been very little progress towards…but…in the 80s they didn’t have a clue as to the problem. Gene editing tools, genetic sequencing, various theories involving telomeres - progress is being made, but there are as of yet no practical tools coming from this.

  1. These boring seeming flat phones are massively faster than the original versions 10 years ago. Roughly 30 times faster, if you just consider the clock speed difference and the increase in core count. Also, there are additional sensors - the first iphone did not have a front facing camera, or fingerprint sensor, or face recognition.

Nor was there the app ecosystem that means with your phone in your pocket, you can unlock a scooter, pay for purchases at a store, listen to music of your choice endlessly streamed to you, unlock your car, or a thousand other things that weren’t really available 10 years ago because there were not enough smartphone users.

Thus while the form factor may be static, the capabilities have been radically improved.

Also, it hasn’t been totally static - the basic idea of a flat rectangle where 1 side is a screen may be fairly optimal, given all the tradeoffs, but the average phone has gotten much larger, with many phones being about twice the size of the original iphone. Also, the screens have been pushed to the edges.

As for tech advancement since 2009: there’s something huge you have apparently missed. This is bigger and more important than all of the tech advances since you were born. If it turns out like it looks, it’ll be the most important tech advance in the history of our species.

I refer, of course, to AI. There have been exponential improvements in AI capabilities in the last 10 years. From barely being able to recognize cats in Youtube videos (2012) to basically trouncing humans at recognizing images, obliterating human ingenuity at Go, Starcraft, Chess, dozens of lesser games. Walking robots are actually pretty easy to get to work now, thanks to an algorithm released in 2018.

Between 2012 and today, there’s been 300,000 times the computing power put into AI. There’s 50,000 open positions, at least, in AI in India.

Robots that have superhuman performance - superhuman dexterity, superhuman motion planning, superhuman ability to recognize objects in their environment, superhuman skill at practical skills in the real world - are entirely feasible. Yes, it’ll be another decade before they are everywhere, there are some serious software problems that need to be solved and then a rapid ramp-up to ubiquity - but they are going to happen.

And as the Go victory shows, intellectual tasks - including designing better AI - at a higher level are entirely achievable. As it turns out, in reality, a lot of tasks humans do that we might think need sentience or self awareness, don’t. I could discuss more about this but this innovation is absolutely crucial. The next form of revolution - roughly equal in consequences to the discovery of electricity - is coming. It will just need a few more years to really pick up speed, like all exponential processes, the growth rate is deceptively slow at the beginning…

Oh, speaking of ubiquity - while in your circles, maybe all your peers had a smartphone, they were not that common for most peoplein 2009. In 2018 there were 1.56 billion new smartphones sold. Part of this is planned obsolescence - smartphones have a planned approximate 2-4 year life - but this still means almost a quarter of the world’s entire population - which includes people too young or too old or too disabled to even use a phone - bought a new phone last year.

This is about the curve expected for AI driven robotics, once some fundamental problems with them are solved. Obviously a robotic worker with superhuman performance that doesn’t cost very much is something that will be adapted at a rate similar to phones.

We hit maybe plateaus now and again, but lets also remember that the rate of human technological evolution is much greater then it’s ever been (I would like to see that graph in a per capita however, as we have much more people then we ever had too, perhaps the rate of technology is related to the population).

What we have recently seen is a convergence of what was once separate and distinct technologies. Telephone, TV, camera, flashlight, 2 way radio, desktop computer and more converged into a smartphone. Hell a simple lightbulb is becoming part of the internet of things. I believe we are in the process of sorting out how to integrate all these devices as we build and refine cyberspace.

Where’s our rocket packs?

Unfortunately (or fortunately) we have become more cautious as a society. Flying to Mars is, IMO, not that difficult in itself, considering the technology that we have. If by “flying to Mars” you mean “put a person on Mars”. Getting them there safely is another matter. Many spaceships sent to Mars have crashed. People in space won’t have adequate radiation shielding. We probably have the technology to cut incoming radiation to reasonable levels, but it will weigh too much.

IMO it’s crucial to get someone to Mars. The sun will blow up several billion years from now, but obviously we want lots of space/exoplanet experience by the time that happens (assuming we survive). I personally want to see if there’s some kind of life on Mars, which would likely be something “primitive” by our “standards”, but the best tools we have so far are robots equipped with simple drills. These robots have trouble cleaning off their own solar panels. A person with a shovel and a portable laboratory is far more capable.

How many different types of cancer are there? You cannot “cure cancer”.
There is no cure for AIDS yet. For that matter, there is no cure for many other viral diseases. The “cure” for a virus is typically getting vaccinated (literally a case of prevention is better than cure).

People are working on vaccines for AIDS. They’re getting there, slowly. Scientific and technological progress is typically slower than people believe. At present there are good treatments for AIDS. It’s now a life sentence, rather than a death sentence, but it’s expensive, so not as available as it should be in poor countries.

Again, technological progress is slow.

I will give a single example, the invention of the steam engine. I’m aware that primitive versions may have existed in Ancient Egypt and/or Greece, but I’m only concerned with the case where we can track what happened properly (eg in a society that could endlessly replicate the invention, instead of losing it).

That was a period of sixty-five years.

URL: The Invention of the Steam Engine

I for one would not want to fold up an iPad into my pocket. Too many things could go wrong. That’s not more functional technology, just something that looks prettier.

Technological progress is slow. In many cases, advanced technologies are available, but they’re too expensive to be widely used. IPhones are expensive enough as it is. Do we really need plastic wrapper phones that cost 10 times what an iPhone costs?

At 1:34, is that the prototype for a well known starship?

There have been a lot of great technology advances in the last 10 years, but you may not realize them.
The “IOT” (Internet of Things) movement is advancing rapidly due to the development of tiny, powerful, low-energy, and most importantly cheap processors like the ESP-8266 and ESP-32. With the ESP-32, you can have a complete WiFi and Bluetooth system, two processor cores, 520Kb of SRAM, and 4MB of Flash for under $5. Devices like this are going to enable all kinds of cool gadgets.

That brings to mind this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzm6pvHPSGo

Even if we manage to send a manned expedition to Mars, we are mostly likely going to hit a pretty hard wall when it comes to space travel. With our current understanding of physics, manned interstellar space travel will mostly likely unfeasible for decades even centuries.

I think that’s true, but it would be pretty terrible if, 100 years down the road, we develop the ability to travel interstellar distances, but don’t dare land on an exoplanet because we have no experience with living on other planets.