I don’t think many people would say technology is stagnating. Advances are continuing in many areas and even confining ourselves to known and physically possible insights/technologies, there are key advances that would absolutely blow the lid off our way of life: strong AI, as vivid (or more) than real-life VR, vastly increased time before senescence etc.
And I think what the OP means is that in the 20th century, particularly the first half, there were a number of insights and inventions that radically changed the scope of what (destruction) mankind could achieve, and it was generally assumed that this pace of astonishing developments would at least remain the same.
I think many people have been disappointed with what has happened instead. And this isn’t just a recurring dope thread; all the pop sci sites and newspapers like the Economist have covered this topic and generally shared the view that in many ways progress has been disappointing.
I agree with that, but remain optimistic. As implied by my opening lines, I think IT (which has been the primary area which has seen exciting progress) still has yet to bear its most substantial fruit. And other technologies e.g. gene therapy, we just found things were much harder than expected and jumped the gun with how quickly we could deliver applications.
Um, no. There’s a limited amount of conventional oil, and we see the end of that coming on the horizon, but we still have plenty for the moment.
Also, conventional oil is not the only type of fossil fuel. Coal is a fossil fuel, and we have sufficient proven fields to last a couple centuries at least.
Again, you are letting your own preconceptions (and mistaken definitions) get in the way of comprehension.
All costs go up every year, on average. It’s called inflation. We begin having a problem for a particular good when costs for that good rise faster than inflation.
Food costs more, on average, every year. Clothing costs more, on average, every year. Housing costs more, on average, every year.
Sure, there are brief periods when this may not happen, but the long term overall trend in a healthy economy is for costs to go up. That’s why a lot of things are indexed to inflation.
In the case of gasoline, costs have risen higher than inflation over the last decade. But that trend is already slowing as the US is suddenly finding itself a glut from unconventional reserves.
If you don’t take inflation into account, I’m not sure what the point is.
Again, you are letting your own preconceptions (and mistaken definitions) get in the way of comprehension.
I gave you a cite that shows this isn’t true. If you are going to deny objective reality, I’m not really sure what we’re doing here.
Again, you are letting your own preconceptions (and mistaken definitions) get in the way of comprehension.
Don’t put words in my mouth I didn’t utter.
Correction: I said limited quantity. Availability is a different thing. We have sufficient reserves available for decades of use. We don’t have sufficient quantities for centuries of use. And that’s just regular oil. In a pinch, inefficient use of natural gas, coal, and other fossil fuels stretches this out past a century.
Again, you are letting your own preconceptions (and mistaken definitions) get in the way of comprehension.
And it has been repeatedly explained to you why this is nonsensical.
If we have a super fuel, it will still be cheaper to use it on slower planes. Economic problem, not technology problem. It’s always going to be cheaper to go slower, even with new fuels. That’s a fundamental physics issue, not a technology issue.
I also see you’ve veered FAR from your original point. Yes, people research new fuels. It’s happening right now. But you seem to be under the incredibly mistaken impression that it’s simply a matter of will power and applying resources. Not so. Just because we research faster than light travel doesn’t mean it is inevitable we’ll achieve it. Likewise, it is not guaranteed we’ll find a super fuel just because we look for it. We may or may not ever find it.
And none of that has to do with technological stagnation. Again, we are developing technology at a good clip. The breakthroughs might not be in the areas you like, but innovation is like that - it is fundamentally unpredictable (or else they wouldn’t require breakthroughs but merely incremental improvements).
Actual change proceeds slowly. I don’t think any of these would blow the lid off our way of life. AI? It would be mostly invisible, or appear in the form of machines that are more human, but who are no different to the average person than a human on the other end of the line. VR? Do you think that everyone would retreat to their dens with VR glasses? It might reduce travel still more, and be great for games (and porn) but would not be a major disruptor. Even aging won’t be, since many of us won’t believe we’ll die anyway. It will screw up retirement, but even now retirement planning assumes you live to much higher ages than we did 50 years ago.
Would any of these things be more disruptive than the web? I doubt it. And yet we complain about the lack of progress.
Is this from people wishing that progress was supposed to make them happy? If so, I understand the disappointment.
I can just imagine someone turning off a movie streamed from Netflix, putting away a book ordered from Amazon, and texting friends that she is getting ready to go on a date arranged by match.com and vetted by a Google search complaining that technological progress has not affected her life at all.
Except for the early part of the 20th century, and that’s the point.
That’s one scenario.
Personally I don’t see why a human mind would be the endpoint. Once you can create a synthetic general intelligence, so our understanding of minds, intelligence and consciousness begins in earnest.
Sure, we’ve tried to study the human mind, but it’s very hard to do in vivo, and every brain is different.
No, do you?
I expect it to be largely communal, and to utilize neural implants or suchlike (so going hand-in-hand with developments in neurology).
I assume you wouldn’t seriously suggest that being able to have any experience you can conceive of; indeed any experience any person or group of people can conceive of, and be more vivid than reality, wouldn’t have a big impact on how we live our lives.
Let’s not confuse the two concepts death and ageing.
I agree that much of the time we act as though we will live forever; life is all we’ve ever known, and death always feels a long way away. But most adults are painfully aware of the process of ageing, and the limits that puts on our aspirations. Having a mind with the plasticity of a 21 year old, and body to match, for 80+ years? Big change from the status quo.
I’ve already said that IT has been the area with the most exciting progress, I was thinking of the Internet in particular when I said that.
But sure, I’ll bite: it’s convenient being able to stream those things but it’s not like we couldn’t watch movies, buy books or contact friends previously.
This is what I don’t understand if there is enough fossil fuels for well over 50 years than gas prices at the pumps should be dirt cheap.It is supply and demand.
If you have 100 homes and 95 homes no one is leaving in them it should be very cheap. Same thing with food or clothes.If hardly anyone is buying it should be dirt cheap.The supply and demand play in.
I read that food prices and other shipping prices are going up because of price of fuel.
If there is no fuel shortage it should be dirt cheap. I know people who drive a big truck and almost cost $100 at the gas pumps.
If cars ran on sand it should be almost free because there lots and lots of sand for almost ever…
The problem is if there is enough fossil fuels for well over 50 years it should be very cheap.
No. It shouldn’t.
Refined petroleum products are priced at the point where the producers make a profit. If they refined all the oil right now and caused a glut, then the price would drop. But they won’t, because they are a business, and they want to make as much money off the supply as they can.
So they don’t produce a greater supply than there is a demand. Really, it is not as if you can sink a well and run your car off the bubblin’ crude. Extraction, refining and distribution all cost money, and the oil companies are not so stupid as to flood the market.
Most of the things the OP mentioned are to a great degree, victims of the 80/20 rule. By that, I mean that the easy 80% of capability and performance have already been had, and we’re spending a lot of time and money to work on that last 20%, so it doesn’t look very spectacular.
Another thing is that products and technologies develop faster these days, which is pretty much an argument against technological stagnation. Smartphones have basically gone from inception to maturity in less than 15 years, which is pretty remarkable, considering the time frames to develop other similarly complex consumer devices like cars, televisions, etc…
If they can bring the cost down to $500:eek::eek: I think you will see lot of people using it. May be not now with people having a hard time finding jobs and American middle class being destroyed.
In fact if you had very strong middle class like the 50’s and 60’s I’m sure family will go on a luxury air fight supersonic for $1,000 over $500 almost like cargo plane.
May be domestic flights under 4 hours people will choose $500 over $1,000 luxury air fight supersonic .
But I’m the one who said in the past we had supersonic flights ,nice food and nice luxury flight. Now it is very slow flights, bad food most of the time no food and feel like you on a cargo flight.You can hardly walk even after short 5 hour flight. No room and feel like people sitting on top of each other.
That why I said technology if ay thing is getting worse on this front. The airline industry so bad I would go on cruise ship than a flight.At least cruise ships and vehicle are not getting worse on this front has bad has the airline industry.
Gasoline is a refined product. We have the raw materials to produce gasoline, but it costs money to refine it.
Your comparison to houses is not correct. Once we make gasoline, you can’t use it and then sell it to somebody else. It is consumed in the process.
Gasoline is more akin to food. Market gluts aren’t good for farmers. If prices go too low, they can’t make enough on their crops. Refiners are the same way. You can’t just refine all the oil at once economically.
That has NOTHING to do with technology and EVERYTHING to do with economics.
The price of a regular airline ticket is LOWER than it used to be. As a consequence, more people fly. But also as a consequence, airlines can’t offer the sorts of amenities you want (food, space, etc). If you want those things, you are welcome to pay for them in first class. Most people prefer cheap tickets to luxury.
Those supersonic flights? Those were tens of thousands of dollars per seat in current dollars. Each Concorde seat was a luxury item. While there’s some demand for that kind of thing, there’s not enough to support it for general aviation.
Again, you are conflating a problem of economics with technology. Nothing you’ve stated here has jack-all to do with technology.
Are you saying the problem is not supply but extraction, refining and distribution cost that they are hardly profiting?
If they start extraction like crazy and stockpiling that prices will go down and they will not profit? So the problem is not supply but extraction, refining and distribution cost.
At the gas pumps we are paying lots of money not for the fuel but the extraction, refining and distribution cost?
If so why is the extraction, refining and distribution so costly? That they have to charge more for the fuel to profit?
I should add, if you want a luxury experience on an airline, we’ve made advancements in that field as well. There are flights where each ticket purchases basically a mini hotel suite.
The tickets are also hideously expensive, but you get what you pay for. And they’re deliberately targeting only select routes and a small pool of potential passengers (again, economics, not technology).
It’s only in the cheap ticket era the hoi polloi could afford to fly (which is an innovation in its own right). And with that reduction in ticket price comes reduction in amenities.
Do you work for free? Employees cost money. Electricity costs money. Water costs money.
Gasoline is cheaper than milk - which comes “free” from cows. I’d say we’re doing a good job of extracting, refining, and distributing gasoline as cheaply as possible.
Also, I should note, even if you extracted all that oil, where are you going to store it? Storage itself costs money. Leaving it in the earth until you need it is cheaper.
Do you know that a gallon of bottled water can cost twice as much as a gallon of gasoline (at the pump)? And we have a much greater supply of fresh water, which is easier to extract.
But the technology or fuel is not there that allows it to be cheaper.The technology or fuel is just too costly for the airline industry. It DOES NOT allow it to have supersonic flights and a luxury experience that not costly.
What allows the technology to allow luxury experience on a nice RV that most people can have, nice train ride or cruise ship but not a airline industry.
Hack most upper middle class people can buy a nice boat and nice RV.
Some thing about technology or fuel is just very very very very costly for the airline industry.And more so when you add in supersonic flights and a luxury experience.
It needs to be plentiful and easily extracted. We’ve already found and utilized all of those resources. There isn’t any more out there. We didn’t invent petroleum, we found it.
For automobile traffic we’re headed towards using battery power. You can charge batteries with electricity produced by oil, natural gas, coal, wind, solar, and nuclear. That is the direction we’re headed, and improvements in those technologies are likely to be where we are headed.
The energy has to come from somewhere. Either you find something that you can burn (like oil or coal) or you find something you can exploit to turn a generator (falling water, solar, wind). Exotic fuels (like rocket fuel which is much more energy dense) are already available but they cost a lot to make and will never be efficient for mass use.
We’ve explained this to you in about a half dozen threads already. Is any of it making sense to you?
Do we have supersonic cruise cars, ships or trains? No, and for exactly the same reason. Supersonic flight is very energy expensive and sonic booms basically mean you can’t fly over populated areas. Cheaper fuel doesn’t change things. You are so focused on one avenue for improvement that you fail to recognize that airline traffic has become cheaper, safer, faster (10,000 miles non-stop), and for those in first class much more luxurious. Heck, when I fly business class it’s much more luxurious than it has been in the past.
We’ve already had discussions about which period saw the most change, so I don’t want to rehash that again. I was thinking a bit shorter term than strong AI, neural implants and the halt of aging. Lots of other stuff will happen before these, such as intelligent digital assistants who understand context. Not strong AI by any means, but good enough for most people.
During each period one technology grows fastest and induces the most change. I have a Scientific American from a bit over 100 years ago, and their article on the use of small motors on farms sounds exactly like more recent articles on the use of computers and processors on farms.
When I was in college 45 years ago I could talk to my parents by phone just like my kids could talk to us when they were in college 5 years ago. But actually things are fundamentally different. They could talk to us from anywhere, for free, at any time, and that increased the amount of communication drastically. But they could share their work in a way impossible for me.
When I was in college I could have written or called high school friends, but who had the time to do that for more than a few. They use social media to keep up in a way impossible to do back then.
Horses and cars both let you go places, but cars led to a fundamentally different way of living. Computers have had at least that much impact.
The reduction in amenities has come from the airlines probing how much the flying public will accept without rebelling. Luggage charges don’t reduce ticket prices as much as increase (or create) airline profitability. The gigantic delta between coach and the business class luxury you describe means that the 99% is trapped. Even more as competition decreases.
Business class seats (not even first class) at the last minute were going for $13K from SFO to Frankfurt, by the way.