Tech Progress Debate

compared to what though ? are we assuming a linear rate of development ? in evolution organisms change gradually with occasional bursts, and the same seems to be true of human tech evolution. There are periods of stagnation with tiny increments or even regress in places, then there are rapid bursts of unpredictable change, often enabled by information from one area reaching another previously unrelated one.

That's how progress works. I would hope in 60 years time they're not still considering 2021 to have been the peak of technology

There's nothing to suggest technological growth will be exponential forever. It's just as likely we've gotten all the easy stuff the last century and now everything else is much harder.

It's a logical fallacy that just because some technology experienced some period of exponential growth, all technology will always experience constant exponential growth.There are plenty of counter-examples to the scaling of computers that occurred from the 1970s-2010s.We thought that humans would be traveling the stars, or at least the solar system, after the space race of the 1960s, but we ended up stuck orbiting the earth.Going back further, little has changed daily life more th

For basically everyone of an age to being reading HN, we've essentially never known anything other than technology (and life in general) improving over time, often exponentially.If you've never seen this talk by Jonathan Blow, he's makes a rather compelling argument that we don't necessarily have any reason to believe this will continue:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRH

It's not exponential, it's sigmoidal. Technological progress is slowing down and becoming more specialized. Most of what we have today we also had 25 years ago, if you ignore electronics.

Yes. Technological progress is almost always slower than people imagine.

i think it s much more widely acknowledged:https://quillette.com/2019/02/21/whats-happening-to-technolo...https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch

I think it's a mistake to assume that technology advancements will come in great leaps and bounds since the day of the wright brothers are over... we've been out of our atmosphere and to the bottom of the sea and made nukes++ and transistors at nm levels. Humanity has been so experienced in the domain of physics for so long that there is no low-hanging fruit left within the periodic table. The physical world has limits that our higher order thinking has identified and relentlessly stru

What I know is that technological progress was very slow, until suddenly there was a breakthrough and it rapidly accelerated. Now, we have enough of the fundamentals down that new technological breakthroughs are happening extremely rapidly. What a time to be alive, of course, but what suggests alien civilizations wouldn't follow the same trend of rapid acceleration rather than constant growth?