Our tech is shit: A dissent on the claim technology is currently rapidly improving

It sounds trite, but our tech is incrementally better every day than it has ever been, and barring disaster that will continue to be true every day that we're alive to experience it.

It's a particular trait we all share as humans that we are so continuously unsatisfied with the world around us - so ungrateful almost that we've only achieved as much as we have. Part of this is with good reason I think, as we can imagine all sorts of things that might come next, and we know it's almost within our grasp. Yet there it dangles, frustratingly out of reach, and we watch years of our lives passing without that same almost tangible imagining coming to fruition.

As Blaster has said, in his excellent series of posts, all this knowledge and technology is incremental. To make the 'substance that naturally resists gravity', we first need the science that allows us to understand where gravity comes from. That will only come through incremental improvements in our understanding of QM. Now, someone might discover some such gravitron, but that partical would have to be found, then understood, then that knowledge passed on to some engineer or another to turn into whatever product. And that product may have a significant impact on us as a species, or it may be relatively trivial in the end - who knows. It may seem like a big leap forward, but really it's just the latest point in 100s of years of brilliant male endeavour, each generation building incrementally on each other.

Our tech is brilliant, and is the thing that has most improved our lives. I look around my flat and see all the tech that improves my life immeasurably, and I think it's wonderful. I think the thermostat I can control from my phone, so that I can come in from a date with a pretty girl to a flat that necessitates the removal of any superfluous clothing, is a brilliant invention. I love my induction hob that gives me total control over the food I cook. I love my digital thermometer that will send me the internal temperature of my roasting joint when I'm out lying in the sun having a beer with my brother, so I don't have to waste a minute of my life standing around the oven wondering if it's done.

The reason we put so much effort into computing is that it is still astonishingly new, and it is the greatest force multiplier available to us for understanding the world around us. I think it is rather encouraging that all sorts of smart young guys are putting so much effort into understanding Computer Science. I'm also very pleased that plenty of young nerds are getting fucking rich of some daft app or another - because these guys have money, and those of us developing ideas that are rather more R&D heavy need smart young guys who can see the potential in things to back us and help us keep moving along.

Ultimately, I sympathise a little with the OP, and share some of those frustrations - we can see all these things coming down the line, and I'd love to see them happen, love to be part of the whole wonderful ride all the way along. But our frustration and our refusal to accept the current state of affairs as adequate is really part of our genius in my view - perhaps our noblest quality. Personally I think the best thing that a man can do is participate with all his enthusiasm - as inventor if you're able, investor if you can, or if not, as grateful and tireless consumer.

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I'll play devil's advocate: it isn't that technology is not improving, but that the end goal of innovation has shifted to quite degenerate ends.
THink about the 'realistic' sexbot, or virtual reality, or driverless vehicles.
The amount of research and development time and money in all of those is staggering, but to what end? Masturbation, escapism and dependence.
Technology IS improving, because the result (maybe not the actual goal, but who knows?) of it is to bring about distraction and disconnection.
Then again, maybe people actually WANT to jerk off into a robot, to slap on a headset and immerse themselves in fantasy, or to travel without having to learn anything about where to go or how to get there. Either way, the designer wants to make something that while technically remarkable, is socially worthless, or the consumer just wants to pay for it.
Convenience is a big driver of innovations, but convenience is always a double-edged sword.
Maybe the problem is people and their preferences.

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(05-26-2017 09:59 PM)Phoenix Wrote:  Well I'd appreciate it if this thread didn't just become another (((they))), conspiracies, establishments, etc fest.

I'm sure there are other reasons behind it other than (((them))) "doing it to us".

NO - it's not {{{them}}}, who are doing it, but real tech is far far more advanced to the one that is being put out.

A quick run-down on your list about anything blocked or willfully pulled back:

+ anything that promotes higher lifespan with no patentable input (check out RIFE energy machine on cancer)
+ anything that promotes fertility and greater health without any patentable input
+ anything tech that would give us easy cheap energy and circumvents oil industry (electromagnetic energy creaters)
+ any tech that could give us fast travel - anti-grav would instantly be shelved and sound-energy-based propulsion systems would also be instantly shelved.
+ plenty of your topics are also concerned with planned obsolescence - they want our phones to break easily. It is not as if they could not make them close to unbreakable. The same goes for all other products.
+as for superior batteries - you won't get them either despite massive claims by ex-NASA workers who said that such patents and proto-types exist. Batteries that have 100 times the power we have now. Why won't we get super-powerful batteries and still rely essentially on 1920 tech with modest improvements? Because powerful batteries would make electric cars viable, also your phone would remain loaded for 100 days. Cars could maybe drive 10.000 miles before being reloaded.

I researched the topic extensively. And it is not really that much conspiracy.

Here a few choice documentaries - Foster Gamble even had the cash to travel around the world, meet inventors and hire fact-checkers:








One alternative energy concept - based on electromagnetic field of earth - many similar are out there - even better ones.




RIFE - genius and medical doctor

There are scores and scores of tech out there. They have even sometimes occasionally congressional statements by some insiders who said on record that yes - agencies have access to technology decades advanced, but cannot give it to us for various "security" concerns.

I even talked to old electronics buffs who worked in the field since the 1970s. They went to expos and saw the first LED screens in the 1970s. He even saw stuff that we don't have as of yet of LED-screens that are paper thin and can actually be folded like a newspaper. He saw that stuff in the 1980s.

Face it guys - science and technology is willfully suppressed or in terms of planned obsolescence willfully made far worse. It is mostly an economic calculation for the big boys, but occasionally they have overpopulation musings and lack of desire to pay for long pensions if cancer was 100% curable.

All of this should not really come as a big surprise frankly. The globalists behave logically.

Also I would like to add one more thing - our tech is improving despite all those things going on. We are not in a standstill. There is innovation going on. It would be just a lot better and faster if it were unfettered and unhindered.

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It's not that technology is not improving, it's just that it's not improving as fast as it could. The problem is in our perception.

The 20th century saw rapid technological advances unseen in previous human history - scientific knowledge and technological development of our civilization was growing at an exponential rate, especially after World War II. In the 1960s probably everyone expected this to continue at a similar pace, but that was in reality just wishful thinking, not a realistic possibility. Tech advance isn't dead, it just lost steam and it's fairly likely that another giant leap is just around the corner.

There's a more in-detail description of what I described in this article, starting from "How Stuff Gets to Space". It's space-related, but nevertheless - the same reasoning can be applied to technological development overall.

http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-wh...-mars.html

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Worry not. China will solve your innovation problem. Voice recognition surpassing human-level was first done in china, not the US, and it also is ahead in mobile tech and supercomputing. It recently made major breakthroughs like extracting gas from flammable ice (methane hydrate) as a new energy source, launched 'Hack-Proof' Quantum-Communications Satellite, and is about to complete the first exascale supercomter. And whether 3-d printing fits your definition of new tech or not, it is fikkin' awesome that China implanted 3-D printed blood vessels into monkeys.

Humanity will still conquer space. That's what matters.

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A startup I worked with uses deep learning to detect colon and skin tumors with 94% accuracy in real time. Needless to say that were no blue-haired freaks working there.

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(05-26-2017 10:19 PM)kosko Wrote:  The above goes for cars as well as we had great EVs in the 80s that ran well with good mileage but shady industries colluded to put a stop to it.

There's a lot of conspiratorial thinking in this thread. I know I'm not going to change your mind or the guy who thinks zero-point energy exists, other than to say that a lot of this thinking is, well, a little outdated.

At the present time if you want an electric car that doesn't cost an arm and a leg and can go over 200 miles on a charge, you can go down to your local Chevy dealer and buy a Bolt. It is not the be all end all but it is an altogether better vehicle than the fetishized EV-1 of Who Killed the Electric Car or any other mythical EVs that ran on ancient lead-acid batteries back in the day. If that's still not good enough for you, wait for the Tesla Model 3 or pending vehicles models from VW, Audi, or Volvo...or upstarts like Lucid Air (if they survive).

The reason why we don't have flying cars and warp drive is that these require revolutionary improvements in how we use energy. The reason why Elon Musk was able to build a rocket with enough net energy to launch a payload into orbit and land had to do with making it lighter (with things like carbon fiber tanks, the largest carbon fiber objects ever made) and fast onboard avionics that allows it to land itself by adjusting its waffle-iron shaped paddles. That kind of stuff is doable. Warp drive requires figuring out how to build a matter-antimatter engine which remains pure sci-fi.

So it's not so much that progress is letting us down is that we were just overly optimistic about what could be done in the 50s and 60s. Sure, we could land a man on the moon, but we could not cost-reduce the activity to the point of actually building a moonbase ala Space: 1999, certainly not during the Arab embaro era of the 70s.

At the same time, don't downplay what 1s and 0s will do to civilization.

Go look at some of the other threads here. Read about how smart phones and Tinder have upended the sexual marketplace. Being always connected all the time is changing who we are as a species in fundamental ways. Imagine if Elon Musk's human-brain interface comes about. Then you won't even have to type and look at screens anymore. Everything will be moving at the speed of thought, Borg-like. Meanwhile, computers will be achieving more and more human-like cognitive abilities.

So if you guys want to just fixate on not having flying cars and moonbases, fine, but we're really on the cusp of some sci-fi territory finally, now that we're well into the 21st century. Whether it winds up being dystopian or utopian, I don't know. But it's already radically different from the world I remember from, let's say, the pre-internet 80s, and in another decade or two it will be probably just as different from how it is now.

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The premise of OPs post seems to be based on consumer tech rather than the most advanced tech that there actually is. A very simplistic explanation is that if middle class wages were rising, and companies did not plan for two year obsolesence to increase profits, you would see much more advanced tech every day.

Anyway, there have been major advancements in computing power and big data, especially related to predictive behaviour and modelling. As we advance out quantom computing technology, expect to see even larger advances.

As for airline advancements, see below article about th Concorde. The fuel costs were ridiculous.

https://www.quora.com/Why-was-the-Concor...2000-crash

TL: DR Shit is expensive, middle class is broke, and companies care about profits over tech

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(05-27-2017 12:38 PM)questor70 Wrote:  So if you guys want to just fixate on not having flying cars and moonbases, fine, but we're really on the cusp of some sci-fi territory finally

Fifty years ago, we were promised that video phone calls and quality machine translation were right around the corner. Predictions about technology continue but somehow the promised results are usually underwhelming. Don't believe the hype.

As Peter Thiel tweeted:

Quote:We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.

The OP is not talking about incremental improvements (as documented by many posts here) but rather about technological innovations which change the way we live. On that front, I'd say that technology from the first half of the twentieth century was at least as significant. The main new technology since then is computing.

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I just want this to go mainstream:




And this was in 2010...

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(05-27-2017 03:17 AM)Jay Gatz Wrote:  - Cars. Nothing has yet to economically, by its own merit, push the gasoline combustion engine car out of general popularity. Something that was invented in 1870. Goods are still man-driven around in trucks.
As other people have written is it not very far off in to the future with Tesla as an example. Mr. Koenigsegg himself does not drive his cars normally. He drives a Tesla.

Electric cars actually predate the combustion engine car by several decades,
they first appeared as far back as the 1820s. And they were fairly common
a century ago, before they were killed by the combustion engine.

Early combustion engines were mostly powered by alcohol,
until Rockefeller's Standard Oil prevailed with the advent of
cheaper oil. We're still pretty much in that cheap oil era, for
another century or two.

Electric cars on a large scale might not be as efficient a choice
for most countries without a source of cheap plentiful energy
(like say Norway or eastern Canada with cheap hydroelectric
sources).



Columbia Electric's (1896-99) "Victoria" electric cab on Pennsylvania Ave., Washington D.C

)

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(05-27-2017 12:00 AM)Sherman Wrote:  I have noticed that some old technology is better than the new versions. Some of this is due to government regulations. For example, people who buy new washing machines find that their clothes still have detergent on them because the rinse cycle isn't sufficient. This is due to pressure from government agencies to save water, so they reduce the rinse cycle. Thus, you are actually better off with an old washing machine which rinsed the clothes sufficiently to remove all the detergent.

Another example. In Mexico, there isn't heat in the houses in the winter, so I ordered electric blankets. I had four of them work for a month and then not work anymore. I went on Amazon.com to see reviews and hundreds of people say the same thing. The blanket breaks or doesn't give enough heat. My theory of this is that the manufacturer puts in so many safety devices in the blanket to keep from being sued or to get the UL stamp of approval, that the controller is likely to just shut down or not provide heat. Better for the blanket not to work then to be sued. I opened up the controllers and found evidence for this. Like one controller had a large varistor which would only be useful if there was a direct lightening strike.

To solve my electric blanket problem, I took a pair of wire cutters and cut out the controller and replaced it with a light dimmer switch. It now works and gives me all the heat I want. It actually makes sense to learn some skills so you can take the new junk and make it work.

Sherman, I wouldn't use electric blankets, they generate electro-magnetic fields that could be hazardous to your health, given the amount of time your body is literally wrapped inside that EMF.

Get a decent down feather blanket instead, and if you really can't take the cold, use a hot water bottle. Another case where older technology is better, hehe.

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(05-26-2017 10:19 PM)kosko Wrote:  The above goes for cars as well as we had great EVs in the 80s that ran well with good mileage but shady industries colluded to put a stop to it.

The only shady industry is the government.

Back in the 80s and 90s, CARB tried to implement a sort of carbon credit thing for electric only vehicles.

GM spent millions upon millions of dollars on perfecting a fully electric car with excellent gas mileage. They worked so hard and the whole point of their investment was to reap generous carbon credit fees from other manufacturers who were behind on the research.

So you know what the other car makers did? They convinced CARB that technology wasn't good enough to get the emissions levels they wanted so they convinced them to ease up on the regulations. CARB changed the rules and then expected GM to just release their cars onto the market.

GM said no and pulled them all off of the market. Why invest so much money if you can't recoup your investment in a reasonable time frame?

Same goes for drugs, but there's a fine line between a pre FDA world and the now gargantuan bureaucratic apparatus that the federal government has become today.

But back to cars, electric vehicles have always been a joke and will be for the foreseeable future until they devise a capacitor or something to allow the vehicles to go to 400 miles and charge in under 10 minutes.

Until then, they're rich go carts of the uber wealthy to feel good about saving the environment (but fail to understand where lithium ion batteries comes from http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402...e-on-earth) .

We'll be driving our own cars and using petrochemicals for the foreseeable future. The thankful part of this all is it appears that peak oil was a lie. I expect a break through in hydrogen based fuels before car batteries become a decent challenger.

I do agree with the OP though. Why aren't we colonizing space? Why are we relying on hilariously pointless renewables when nuclear is infinitely better and more effective?
Where are our better antibiotics? Medical procedures are still rough shod at best. My wife had cancer treatments from a supposedly "excellent" research hospital and frankly they did a crap job in comparison to some of the more 2nd tier facilities. Rocket technology to me is still a raging joke. When the space shuttle and concord ended, I knew America as a whole was in decline (for the shuttle) and that transportation was taking a step back. Let's make pointless masturbatory technology instead.

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(05-27-2017 08:55 PM)The Beast1 Wrote:  I do agree with the OP though. Why aren't we colonizing space? Why are we relying on hilariously pointless renewables when nuclear is infinitely better and more effective?

Democracy and environmental concerns, basically. Or alternatively you could say that it's because the US is run by lawyers whereas China is run by engineers.

Study: U.S. "Losing Ground" To Russia And China On Nuclear Power

Quote:Approving new nuclear reactors takes as little as two years in China and Russia, but getting regulatory approval in the U.S. to build a new reactor can take up to 25 years. It took 43 years to build America’s newest nuclear reactor, which was racked by scandals, red tape and environmental concerns.

Quote:The U.S. is losing global influence to Russia and China by allowing its nuclear power industry to stagnate, according to a new study by the Global Nexus Initiative.

The study argued nuclear power is a significant element of a country’s geopolitical influence. Technological exchanges and long timeframes involved in building and operating a nuclear plant create diplomatic relationships between nations, and those ties are threatened as the U.S. nuclear industry continues to decline.

“China is poised to become the Amazon.com of nuclear commerce,” Kenneth Luongo, president of the Partnership for Global Security, said during a press conference Tuesday. “The U.S. is losing ground to Russia and China on nuclear power.”

Researchers from the Partnership for Global Security and the industry-funded Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) conducted the study.

China is set to triple the amount of nuclear power it generates by 2026, overtaking the U.S. as the country with the most nuclear power. China plans to spend $570 billion building more than 60 nuclear power plants over the next decade.

Russia’s nuclear power program is also on the rise. Some of the world’s first floating nuclear power plants are being developed in Russia, and the country is pioneering fast reactors, according to experts.

Russia plans to complete one new large reactor per year, on average, until at least 2028. Nuclear technology and the services required to run it are a “major Russian policy and economic objective,” according to the World Nuclear Association.

Vital safety, security, and nonproliferation standards will erode if the U.S. allows Russia and China to become the world’s premier nuclear powers.

“To increase its market share and thereby preserve its ability to shape the global use of nuclear technology, the United States must have both a strong domestic nuclear power program and an aggressive nuclear trade and export program,” Maria Korsnick, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), said in the press conference.
...
Worldwide installed nuclear capacity is expected to grow 60 percent by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency. American capacity will likely only grow by 16 percent over the same time period.

“Preserving the existing [U.S.] fleet is also fundamental to achieve these goals,” Korsnick said. “Without the existing fleet and the associated infrastructure it will be increasingly difficult for technological innovation to occur or to maintain a robust supply chain for our nuclear navy.”

*******

That said, solar power is not exactly pointless for China. It just installed World’s Largest Floating Solar Power Plant. Also, "this past January, China activated the massive Longyangxia Dam Solar Park. Covering 10 square miles, it generates a whopping 850 megawatts of power — enough for 200,000 households."

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(05-27-2017 05:57 PM)911 Wrote:  

(05-27-2017 12:00 AM)Sherman Wrote:  I have noticed that some old technology is better than the new versions. Some of this is due to government regulations. For example, people who buy new washing machines find that their clothes still have detergent on them because the rinse cycle isn't sufficient. This is due to pressure from government agencies to save water, so they reduce the rinse cycle. Thus, you are actually better off with an old washing machine which rinsed the clothes sufficiently to remove all the detergent.

Another example. In Mexico, there isn't heat in the houses in the winter, so I ordered electric blankets. I had four of them work for a month and then not work anymore. I went on Amazon.com to see reviews and hundreds of people say the same thing. The blanket breaks or doesn't give enough heat. My theory of this is that the manufacturer puts in so many safety devices in the blanket to keep from being sued or to get the UL stamp of approval, that the controller is likely to just shut down or not provide heat. Better for the blanket not to work then to be sued. I opened up the controllers and found evidence for this. Like one controller had a large varistor which would only be useful if there was a direct lightening strike.

To solve my electric blanket problem, I took a pair of wire cutters and cut out the controller and replaced it with a light dimmer switch. It now works and gives me all the heat I want. It actually makes sense to learn some skills so you can take the new junk and make it work.

Sherman, I wouldn't use electric blankets, they generate electro-magnetic fields that could be hazardous to your health, given the amount of time your body is literally wrapped inside that EMF.

Get a decent down feather blanket instead, and if you really can't take the cold, use a hot water bottle. Another case where older technology is better, hehe.

The brand of electric blanket I use operates on low voltage. A transformer changes the wall current to 18 volt direct current (about the same as the output of your computer's power adapter). With about 7 ohm electric blanket resistance, this gives at maximum 70 watts of power, about the same as a light bulb. Direct current doesn't induce currents in humans.

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(05-26-2017 11:22 PM)911 Wrote:  2) How LED Lighting May Compromise Your Health
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articl...hting.aspx

"One-third of the energy your body consumes comes from the food you eat. The vast majority of the energy your body needs to maintain the systemic equilibrium comes from environmental infrared light exposure"

This "doctor" seems to be confusing people with reptiles. Mammals are much hotter than their surroundings (at least the ones that are alive are), and absorbing infrared photons isn't going to enable any sort of useful work. I suppose if you're floating in interstellar space you'd definitely have a life-threatening deficit of of infrared photons, but I'm pretty sure I'm not going to freeze to death for lack of light bulbs.

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As to electric cars - there are small companies - one in Poland that transforms conventional cars to electric ones. It costs from a few grand to 20.000$ for the most expensive one. They make better electric cars than the big manufacturers and they do it cheaper. The reach of the 20.000$ transformation of the Volkswagen Golf by the way is 600 miles.

There are scores of small-time inventors who constantly come up with cheaper alternatives that somehow strangely elude the big manufacturers.

As for example for the plastic transformation back to oil and fuel - of course they can do it, but why should they? That would cut into their supply matrix even more. So they tell us the lie that plastic cannot be recycled while in truth a country full of Hobos could easily live off that business alone.

Most of the holdups are what I would call minor like with the light-bulbs. Sure - we could have close to eternal light-bulbs like they used to do in the East German Wolfram factory, but they rather want to sell us hundreds of bulbs across our lives.

Where it gets truly evil however is when utterly game-chaning tech is held up that would for example make the petrol industry and combustion engine redundant (all while claiming that you need to pay carbon taxes to save the planet). Another point is cancer research which is a joke - collecting money for cancer research just gives it to Big Pharma who pour it all back into a "better" version of mustard gas.

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just to reiterate and clarify my point.

All technology is incremental. There is always lag between scientific discovery, technological development, and market viability. It also often takes years to realize the implications of a new technology. sometimes, we don't get the advancements we expected, because we were ignorant and made flawed assumptions.

We had this romantic notion that the moon was a new frontier for human habitation. But this underestimates the nature of the challenges, both economic and technological, that must be overcome.

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Cancer research is mostly held up by the complexity of cancer itself, and the expectation mismatch i mentioned above.

New cancer treatments typically use genetic tech to target specific types of cancer, with fewer harmful side effects than say, chemotherapy.

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(05-26-2017 09:13 PM)Phoenix Wrote:  I constantly get the vibe from people that they think our technology is skyrocketing, that we're living in a new tech age, "where was all this ten years ago?!" etc.

But I disagree with this assessment of our technology.

...........

Feel free to add your own below!

Excellent thread! Glad you're sticking around Phoenix. You've got a great sense of humour and a thought-provoking mind.

I absolutely agree with your proposition that technology has not advanced at all in real terms for quite some time (if I understand you correctly). If we define technology as 'the appliance of science with regard to its utility to the whole of humanity'. I did a module on this at uni when I was doing my computer degree. Technology and Society, I think it was called. That also provoked my mind to look at this from a different angle.

I like to think of myself as a bit of an amateur Futurologist. And to understand the future we must first understand the past.

(05-26-2017 11:02 PM)911 Wrote:  A few quick points on the subject:

-We've reached peak health sometime in the late 20th century. Since then, there has been a great deterioration in environmental pollutants of all sorts. Autism rates have gone up from 1 in 5,000 to 1 in 50. Sperm counts are collapsing. Cancer rates are still rising.

-Planned obsolescence explains why the quality of products like phones or clothes have leveled off. Similarly, there is a huge disincentive in many industries against progress for commercial reasons.

-Oil is not a fossil fuel, most likely a naturally occurring mineral, the second most common liquid on earth after water.

-Broadly speaking, there were some large technological leaps which have resulted in big gains in productivity, yet those resulting economic gains haven't been passed on to the middle classes.

The problem across the board is in the political/economic system. Contrary to popular belief, technology is often downstream from this system, not upstream.

Quick points, but all excellent. I like how you are framing this. I think it's similar to how Phoenix is framing it. It's also pretty close to the angle I'm going to come in at as well. But we might fall out over the oil thing. Peak oil.

What you say about things peaking (health specifically) in the late 20th Century is more on the money than you can imagine. It wasn't just health that peaked then, everything peaked then. There have been no technological advancements this century at all. We are entering not so much a new dark ages, but some kind of age - the technological brick-wall age? The laws of diminishing return are biting hard.

(05-27-2017 01:23 AM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  What Phoenix was getting at (I'm reasonably sure) was that there are not many new technologies. It's apparent that the word "technology" itself has been subverted to be translated as "something that has a microprocessor and a screen", so that "new technology" is therefore translated as "a new way to use a microprocessor and a screen".
........

A catapult is technology. A wheel is technology. And Phoenix is correct. A more clever or useful way to arrange 1's and 0's in a hard drive is not "new technology". That's not to say that voice recognition is not useful, but it's not a new technology. A device or substance that naturally resisted gravity would be a new technology. Safe and affordable wireless energy transfer would be a new technology. 3D printing is nice, but again it is technically not a new technology. It's merely an application of old technologies.

Egfuckingxactly! I'm also reasonably sure this was what Phoenix was driving at. Again, you have helped define the argument. It is from this position that I will argue in favour of OP's general proposition.

Technology has not advanced in any real world terms for quite some time with regard to its application and utility for humanity as a whole. Certainly not in any disruptive sense, only incremental, and increments count for nothing with the larger argument at hand.

I've been having this very same argument with people since the last century. Phoenix has provided me with a framework to sling it from the hip here. It's just some light hearted musing and pondering that I'll try to pull together in to some kind of coherent whole. But please pull me up or shoot me down if I get something very wrong.

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(05-26-2017 09:13 PM)Phoenix Wrote:  But I disagree with this assessment of our technology.

I had a same discussion few days ago with a male feminist colleague. Told him that when men used to be men and spent their brainpower and energy on working on smart stuff we were moving fast.

Now sometimes roles are reversed and men go changing diapers while women work. This is why we are so stagnant.

His reply was, but smartphones...

All improvements we had were basically in information technology, the rest is pretty stagnant. What we need is a ground breaking improvement in energy. So we can finally have flying cars and other futuristic shit.

To simplify my idea we have improved software but we need to improve hardware.

Love your thinking.

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(05-27-2017 10:17 PM)BortimusPrime Wrote:  

(05-26-2017 11:22 PM)911 Wrote:  2) How LED Lighting May Compromise Your Health
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articl...hting.aspx

"One-third of the energy your body consumes comes from the food you eat. The vast majority of the energy your body needs to maintain the systemic equilibrium comes from environmental infrared light exposure"

This "doctor" seems to be confusing people with reptiles. Mammals are much hotter than their surroundings (at least the ones that are alive are), and absorbing infrared photons isn't going to enable any sort of useful work. I suppose if you're floating in interstellar space you'd definitely have a life-threatening deficit of of infrared photons, but I'm pretty sure I'm not going to freeze to death for lack of light bulbs.

Yes I could have used more conventional sources like these:

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es10...ine%2Bled&

http://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-he...-dark-side

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1) Innovation is incremental. Because you need new tools to produce your new technology, it is a itinerary cycle of improvement.
2) Because companies need to make money for their owner and shareholders, risky choices are avoided and new products are only a marginally improved version of the previous stuff.
3) "Disruptive innovation" killing companies or whole market segments is a symptom of static organizations and market actors failing to adapt to changes. Main reason 2).

Looking at microelectronics:
Innovation will take longer in the future, there currently is no new physics beyond the standard model, thus there is only space left in the Nanometer scale for new stuff. That is also why there will be less garage innovators in the future, there is only so much you can build with your own hands. Or garage inventors of the past = software developer of now

Example:
It took 20+ years and Billions of $ to lift EUV lithography from research level to production, and it still is not on a level for a 100% replacement of old 193nm technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ul...ithography

It is the only technology that will enable your next CPU with features <10 nm.
Intel will invest 7 Billion dollars on one fab for it:
https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases...y-arizona/

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The thing with the line "all tech improvement is incremental" is that any slow-assed pace can be called incremental.

I'm going to the gym, oh actually I've got to clean my gym shoes, oh I need more shoe cleaner so I've got to go to the shoe shop, oh the nearest shoe shop is closed now so I'll go tomorrow. But I'm preparing to go to the shoe shop tomorrow, so I'm incrementally progressing towards going to the gym.

No, tech progress is stagnant, especially relative to the claims about us supposedly living in a high tech age. Either side of 1900 we had oil, motorcars, radio, electricity, lightbulbs etc all suddenly exploding into our lifestyle. Now billions of dollars are going into dumbass apps like angrybird and pokemon go, and dudes are getting rich just making retail websites and churning out clickbait onto reddit and facebook. Dudes coming up with the billionth framework and programming language and combination of frameworks and programming languages to make their next app. It's all just noisy churn with us moving nowhere of significance.

I did like that post above though about Russia and China working on next gen nuclear stuff. I think what we need is the Chinese to re-assume the mantle of being the cradle of inventions. But until they have serious political re-organization I'm not holding my breath.

I'm going to ignore the typical conspiracy theory quack bullshit trying to sneak into the thread. Everything wrong in the world is always due to some indefeasible evil hidden supermen bad guys. Literally everything is "a lie" or "due to (((globalists)))" or some other quack shit. It must be horrible living your life in such a paranoid and doom&gloom manner. Hell, did one post even include "suppressed free energy" shit? Let me guess, if a physics student "discovers the truth" and dissents from the contents of his textbook, the (((globalists))) come to his house and garrote him.

I've made it a policy to add any conspiracy doom and gloomers to my block list, to try and improve the signal-to-noise ratio of this place.

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(05-28-2017 01:14 PM)Phoenix Wrote:  The thing with the line "all tech improvement is incremental" is that any slow-assed pace can be called incremental.

I'm going to the gym, oh actually I've got to clean my gym shoes, oh I need more shoe cleaner so I've got to go to the shoe shop, oh the nearest shoe shop is closed now so I'll go tomorrow. But I'm preparing to go to the shoe shop tomorrow, so I'm incrementally progressing towards going to the gym.

No, tech progress is stagnant, especially relative to the claims about us supposedly living in a high tech age. Either side of 1900 we had oil, motorcars, radio, electricity, lightbulbs etc all suddenly exploding into our lifestyle. Now billions of dollars are going into dumbass apps like angrybird and pokemon go, and dudes are getting rich just making retail websites and churning out clickbait onto reddit and facebook. Dudes coming up with the billionth framework and programming language and combination of frameworks and programming languages to make their next app. It's all just noisy churn with us moving nowhere of significance.

I did like that post above though about Russia and China working on next gen nuclear stuff. I think what we need is the Chinese to re-assume the mantle of being the cradle of inventions. But until they have serious political re-organization I'm not holding my breath.

I'm going to ignore the typical conspiracy theory quack bullshit trying to sneak into the thread. Everything wrong in the world is always due to some indefeasible evil hidden supermen bad guys. Literally everything is "a lie" or "due to (((globalists)))" or some other quack shit. It must be horrible living your life in such a paranoid and doom&gloom manner. Hell, did one post even include "suppressed free energy" shit? Let me guess, if a physics student "discovers the truth" and dissents from the contents of his textbook, the (((globalists))) come to his house and garrote him.

I've made it a policy to add any conspiracy doom and gloomers to my block list, to try and improve the signal-to-noise ratio of this place.

I believe it is because we are in too comfy a state of living. During WW1 and WW2, there was a huge increase in the level of technology, going from bolt action rifles to assault rifles within 6 years.

The scientists would have been pushed to their limits, but they would be motivated by thinking 'if we create this new technology, then it could stop the opponents from invading and killing me and raping my wife'. Obviously that's crudely put, but I genuinely think panic and fear drives innovation. So does competition, which is why the space race was such a big thing.

The invention of radar to protect our shores in WW2 surely saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Today the technology (I know I'm generalising massively here) sector is full of manginas who probably spend more time browsing reddit and talking about coffee than doing research and pushing limits.

Having said that, China is going to become the big player in technological development, probably within the next 5 years. They are already world leading in organ transplants I believe.

Surely, and I don't think anyone will disagree with me here, the biggest technological development that could happen in our lifetimes would be nuclear fusion? I know there are skeptics who trot out the 'wasn't that supposed to be invented 20 years ago' line, but one of the reasons for that lack of development is because there were only a couple of of research stations with fusion reactors. Now, there is a world collaboration on it to show that it is viable, and once that works, it's a race to get the power stations built.

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