I was going to point this out also.
The creation of an effective learning algorithm for multi-layer neural networks has opened the floodgates for solving difficult problems based on learning. There are many things that are changing due to this.
I think one of the issues is that substantial progress in an area doesn’t cause substantial improvements in our lives now. Even though the progress itself might “double” by some measure, things are so comfortable and so good we don’t notice it.
Using travel as an example: A sailboat might take a month to cross the ocean. A steamship does it in a couple of weeks. A Pan Am clipper sea plane could make this trip only a day or two (depending on weather and stops to refuel). Then a jet cuts the trip to only 4 hours. All of these improvements are significant and can make large differences in your life and experiences. Then the same “doubling” (of speed I guess) gets us supersonic craft which make the trip in 2 hours. Although the tech advances are significant, the change in time for most of us is now trivial.
My grandparents went from horses and a sharecropper shack with no water or electricity to a nice house in the burbs with a garage, hot water, air conditioning, telephone and a TV. This change was HUGE to them. Now an enormous amount of technological and processing improvements gets us a better TV, and a smaller phone. The same amount of advancemen doesn’t affect us that much.
One I thought was worth singling out: Watson competing against human champs on JEOPARDY. I mean, yes, beating chess grandmasters, sure; but trivia contests built around conversational responses to colloquialisms and idioms? Where each of those question-and-answer exchanges about people known by nicknames or initials or whatever may involve a bit that’s there as a joke? Where coming up with a reply comes after realizing what a veiled allusion referenced?
You could have said the same thing in the past. Back in the '50s, hell, we all had television, telephones, cars, jet planes, etc. We had antibiotics and surgery and many medicines. We had peace and a prosperous economy. We were leaps and bounds ahead of past generations, and we had no way of knowing whether this technology was as far as it could go.
As a species, I think we are out-performing every other species in the history of the world.
In fact, I suspect we are out-performing all other generations of Homo sapiens as far as technological advancements are concerned. We don’t see it because we live it everyday and take the incremental changes in stride. See the recent Uber driver thread that discusses the time traveler (a passenger who had been in jail for the past 12 years).
Between 1960 and 1970, the the number of households that had at least one TV went from a minority to a majority. Between 1965 and 1975 same thing with color TVs. By 1985, the only B&W tv you could buy would have been an ultra-portable. If you lived through these times, you didn’t notice any change. Most people in 1960 (in the US, anyway) had seen TV, even if they didn’t have a set. Most people in the late 1960s had watched color TV, even if they didn’t have a color set–they did have TV.
The OP has cherry-picked technologies to prove his thesis. As has been pointed out by previous posters, other technologies have progressed to the point that someone from 2009 would be confused if instantly transported to today.
Electric cars went from a rare, expensive cars to something the middle class could afford. I can buy a used nissan leaf for $10,000 now.
Solar panel prices dropped dramatically in the last 10 years. Panels were maybe $3 a watt in 2009, now they’re under $0.50 a watt.
In the field of anti-aging, ten years ago we understood almost nothing. Now a wide range of biochemical pathways are known, including some that existing drugs can interact with.
Smartphone apps barely existed 10 years ago. Now they are used daily by almost everyone.
People have switched from over the air and cable/satellite to streaming for TV.
Affordable wireless broadband is far more everpresent now vs 2009.
There has been a huge amount of medical data accumulated in the last 10 years. Not sure how much has been used or how much has led to new clinical data, but theres a lot of info out there.
AI has advanced pretty nicely. Deep learning has gone far after a paper written in 2006 by Geoff Hinton, that has advanced this field of AI.
Its more that different forms of technology mature at different rates. Plus some forms of maturation are very subtle (like the fact that cars today last 2x as long as cars 40 years ago).
Considering the Dark Ages in Europe lasted about 500 years, I wouldn’t consider ten years to be hitting a wall.
In 2010 scientists were able to use nanotubes as a source of energy.
In 2011, researchers demonstrated a microchip withnine quantum devices.
NASA unveiled the first 3-D printer that was affordable and practical enough for consumers in 2012. It would be commercialized as the Gigabot.
Toyota demonstrated a self-driving car in 2013.
I could go on, but I’m tired of looking up cites.
And those are just hard-core, engineer-driven, applied tech innovations. I won’t bore you with advancements in astronomy, human genetics, or biopharmaceuticals, to mention a few areas.
Why not? The state of tech demonstrated is a big deal. Space launches have gotten cheaper while probe capabilities have benefitied from more effective and cheap computing. It’s cheaper than ever to send probes out and those probes are more capable. We’re at the start of a revolution for exploring our neighborhood.
Just outside that window, in 2008 scientists announced a new strain of rice. It sounds really boring. For a big chunk of the world its a staple food source and the new strain has signifcanty higher protein content. That’s a big deal for feeding the world properly. One of the big research efforts to follow on is creating a strain of rice high in beta-carotene. Given vitamin A deficiency problems in some of the more impoverished places in the world that would be a big deal too. We mostly don’t notice changes like that in the developed world but they matter.
Last year the first gene edited babies were born. There was a “bit” of a firestorm about the ethical implications. Still there are twin girls alive today that had their genes edited. The edit was to try and make them less susceptible to HIV. That’s wildly futuristic tech in 80s science fiction and it’s happened.
The last decade saw significant improvements in prosthetics thanks to improving materials and robotics. Last year we even saw the first examples of people paralyzed by spinal cord injuries being able to be treated and able to take a few steps even if they still mostly needed crutches or walkers. Like improved rice strains most Dopers probably aren’t seeing the advances in their own lives. For those affected, especially by the bionic limbs, we’re talking about life changing tech.
And I’m one of them. Diagnosed in 2017. Treated in 2017 and now cancer-free for 18 months or so. And my oncologist told me that’s the way it would be.
He also told me that 10-15 years ago my prognosis would not have been ‘routine and treatable’.
The real moves these days seems to be in biology and not the big fancy consumer stuff. But it’s more subtle.
I really don’t know clouds at all.
IMHO, if one REALLY feels there are not enough treatments for cancer (for example), instead of complaining about it- how could that possibly help?- it might be more productive to do something about it oneself. And people are studying cancer mechanisms, but not every move they make is telegraphed to the front page of every newspaper. You can read about it in scientific journals, though.
Oooh! World-changing progress!
Try operating a gen-1 iPhone today and let us know how that compares to even a cheaper new smartphone.
I have to relatives who are alive today because of new cancer treatments.
New migraine drugs came out last year that have allowed someone I know to be nearly migraine free, down from nearly disabled.
I saw a flower yesterday that I didn’t know. I pointed my phone at it and it told me what it is.
CRISPR
Solar power had become ludicrously cheap.
Some wall. More like stairs.
Lab-grown meat is maybe worth a mention.
I’m not trying to threadshit here, but there’s a big difference between hitting a social/cultural/tech wall and hitting a wall “as a species.” And there’s a lot of the “if we can send a man to the moon, why can’t we…” trope going on here. Some things are easy to do, some are hard, and some are either impractical or actually impossible. What history has taught us is that there are going to be unexpected turns, not a straight line from inventing the steam engine to interstellar travel.
Short answer: no, we have most definitely not hit a wall.
Speaking of the “man on the moon” trope, they call the effort a “moonshot” for a reason. The Apollo program alone (I don’t think this includes the previous human rocket programs (Mercury/Gemini) or the ICBM programs that developed the fundamental tech those used) was 0.75% or, or 3/4 of a percent, of GDP. That means almost of a penny of every dollar an American produced doing anything was going into this one effort.
So there was a sacrifice made. There were dozens of other things that could have been created instead with that money. Arguably, in retrospect, had NASA’s budget been spent on a “moonshot” effort to create better computer chips, we might have had the semiconductor revolution 10 years early.
I was diagnosed with breast cancer in May 2008. Lumpectomy, chemo, radiation, ten years of maintenance meds, and when I saw my chemo oncologist in February he said unless I came down with joint pain, liver pain, or bad headaches, he didn’t need to see me anymore. Once I finish up this round of maintenance meds I won’t need another refill. I’ll still get my yearly mammograms.
So, yes, caught early enough, some cancers can be cured.
At the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.
I read an article once that described the constant flow of genetic manipulation of rice since the 50’s to be able to keep the growing population fed. Mostly it was adapting rice to grow in more varied environments.
It’s a small thing, but I just wanted to note that Captain Marvel is about to hit the billion-dollar mark, and instead of a dimly-lit one-scene cameo they had the film’s second-billed actor play a fortysomething Nick Fury despite him being a seventyish Samuel L. Jackson: the ‘deaging’ effects are, effectively, now great enough to get blandly used for so big a role in so big a blockbuster.
A decade ago, I think it would’ve looked, uh, waxy and unconvincing? But it’s now at a point where a leading-man role — not an alien or an android or whatever, just tons of That Guy With The Face stuff — can be CGI’d into a movie.