is progress speeding up or slowing down?

silverharp

is progress speeding up or slowing down? either in scientific knowledge or technology development. On the one hand you read statistics that there are more scientists/engineers today then in all recorded history put together. And from time to time I've caught headlines which seem to be saying we have passed a peak in development assuming I guess that it will take more inputs to get smaller gains in technology.

is it even a vaid question as the measuring stick would be open to bias?

5uspect

I saw a TED talk recently that argued that technology, for example, is growing exponentially.
http://www.ted.com/talks/ray_kurzweil_on_how_technology_will_transform_us.html
Certainly a lot of the big discoveries in science, Physics in particular, have been found in the last century and the discoveries we make today are much more incremental.

The discoveries we are making today are aided by massive increases in computational power and technology. Our ability to simulate and measure are rapidly increasing. If that is seen as progress in the sense that we replace old scientific ideas with new ones then progress is doomed. If there is nothing wrong with an old idea it is not anti-progressive to throw it out.

We're standing on the shoulders of giants but I'd say those giants would be amazed by the capabilities of modern science.

darjeeling

There's a revolution going on in biology at the moment. With current so-called 2nd-gen sequencing technology, genomes can now be sequenced in a tiny fraction of the time taken previously, and at very low cost.

The anticipated move to '3rd-gen' tech in a couple of years or less will bring another leap forward.

Scientists who've been working in genomics for years regularly say how amazed they are at the rate of progress.

nesf

Progress is speeding up (we have more researchers working today than ever before, it's almost true that we've more working in the past 50 years than all the rest in history put together to put it in context).

The problem is that it's very hard to spot this progress if you're not familiar with the area and if you don't keep up with the scientific press and only rely on mainstream press like the Irish Times and RTE for news then you'd be forgiven for thinking that almost nothing is being discovered each year. The other thing to bear in mind is that science and technology are progressing across a much broader front now than even what they were doing at the start of the 20th century. This division of resources means slower potential progress in any one area versus what is possible but greater cumulative progress versus piling all resources into one area.

silverharp

Interesting video, and agree with all the comments, a lot of stuff going on under the radar. Apart from being disappointed that I dont have my monkey butlers yet, areas like energy and alternative energy appear on one level to be painfully slow at coming up with solutions for a 21stC ,

5uspect

A lot of media on alternative energy sources tends to be, unfortunately, a lot of hot air.
The numbers often quoted in the about the level of energy that a wind turbine can produce are often theoretical performance peaks. It's not always windy in the real world as many people with their own home turbine are finding out.

The likes of wind and solar, while worthwhile pale in comparison to fossil fuels in terms of energy density that they can ever produce.

What is happening is an awful lot of research in energy efficiency. Energy recovery, energy harvesting, entropy generation minimisation, and plain and simple energy conscious design are all playing a role in this.

If we can reduce the amount of energy we're wasting then maybe we can make renewable energies more worthwhile.

Capt'n Midnight

Technology slowing down may just be because mature technologies don't appear to have changed much recently.

At the start of the 19th century we got Cars, Movies, Telephones, Radios (and electronics) , Aeroplanes, Tanks, Machine guns, Calculating machines and other stuff.

Transport hasn't gotten faster or changed much in the last fifty years, with the possible exception of electric trains. But this has more to do with the laws of physics than anything else. Cheap, light batteries will cause a transport revolution.




Big changes have been in material science, planes fly further because they use lighter stronger materials and engines can be made more efficient too. Rust is no longer a massive problem in cars. We can make reliable computers with billions of transistors/capacitors

Just look at www.instructables.org it's like popular mechanics back in the 1950's but faster, today if someone has a great idea the world can find out about it.

Kevo

We are just at the beginning. Progress in many fields increases exponentially.

Biotechnology and robotics are what excite me the most. They are about to explode.

5uspect

Ah they've been saying that about robotics for years.

Phototoxin

New answers bring new questions....

Capt'n Midnight

Kevo wrote:

Biotechnology and robotics are what excite me the most. They are about to explode.

Back in the 80's a company were going to setup a plant here to produce interferon but a breakthrough in yields meant they could use a pilot plant instead of a factory.

And then there are all the patents, some drugs are very very expensive , I nearly think that universities/labs should be publicaly funded

Some of the big biotech projects like bioethanol aren't that attractive when you look at the energy balances.



I love the quote about Gallium Arsenide
"It's the technology of the future.
Always was, and always will be"