Has the rate of technological progress slowed in the past 50 years?

What do we mean by "technological progress"? Do we mean the quantitative improvement over previous generations of technology? Or do we mean qualitative improvements in our standard of living?<p>When you can eliminate the fear of hunger, automate mindless domestic chores and provide highly-accessible world-wide transportation, these are huge qualitative changes in our standard of living. But once you reach a certain level in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, big technological improvements don't make as big of a difference in your perceived quality of life.<p>Is it really surprising that storing 2000x more music on your iPod doesn't have the same impact on your standard of living as a cheap and reliable source of food?

One of the big problems with this article, and it also applies (albeit slightly differently) to the singularity folks, is this: You are comparing normal existence today with front edge people of the past. This is easy to accidentally do, because it is much easier to see the people who really jumped all over lighting, and telephone in the past when looking from now. Further it is much more common to write about those people than it is to write about the smiths, who not keeping up with the Joneses, didn't get the telephone for another decade. There were plenty of places in the us that only used outhouses into the 70's. Horses were used for plowing and whatnot into the 1950's (tractors having been around for decades at that point).<p>My point is, in 50 years we will be writing about the curve the internet took, and my children's kids will grow up believing everyone did this internet thing fluently. It will be hard to explain to them how a lot of my contemporaries will never quite get it. Much like I still can't quite wrap my head around the telephone troubles my grandfather's parents seemed to have.<p>I guess the point is, there really is not a good way of measuring impact of technology until we can look back and go, "woah, that was a big change!" or "what a dud!". Compare period write-ups of the future of zepplins or pneumatic tubes, to current reality.

Cellphones are making a MAJOR impact on the lives of billions of people in the third world right now, and no-one's mentioned them so far. They were invented recently, and disruptive technologies and cultural artifacts based on cheap mobiles are coming thick and fast.<p>In some ways, poverty-stricken folks in Bangladesh are leaving us fat Westerners behind.

This article is fundamentally flawed in judging technological progress by its impact on "everyday life". Many of the advancements over the last 50 years have been of military or industrial application. Does this mean that they are lesser advances? Where is the cruise missile? GPS system?<p>Even important everyday items are missing, like cell phones, and cheap air travel. I own a phone that will let me call (almost) anyone in the world form (almost) anywhere in the world, while showing me where I am to the nearest 15 meters on a map composed of images from SPACE. I can travel 3,000 miles in half of a day for a weeks worth of rent. People change cities like they used to change wardrobes.<p>Obviously these are just a couple of things, and wouldn't fundamentally change his argument, but I haven't spent much time thinking of them. Asking other people's opinions of changes to "everyday life" would have been helpful, as there seems to be a serious personal bias in the article.

No, it hasn't been slowing. The author fails to see that we know more about astronomy in the last 2 years than the previous 10. More has been discovered about the brain in the last ~15 years than people knew in the last 100,000 years. Throw in chemistry, nanoscale fabrication, materials science, etc. At every level of society we have been impacted by the advancements that are occurring around us daily. People who have spent their entire lives thinking linearly have a hard time getting a sense of how much things have changed.

Great article! I don't buy the 'singularity' idea either.<p>It makes for fantastic science fiction but in the real world all resources are finite and every technology we've come up with so far has had to deal with the harsh realities of the thermodynamic laws and regular materials science. There is plenty of room at the bottom, indeed, but the bottom is not 'bottomless', and the engineering problems are formidable.<p>Sure, there is progress, and plenty of it. But to think that that progress is 'easy' or 'accelerating' belies the enormous amount of hard work that goes in to achieving it.<p>And with every step every next one becomes harder, the laws of diminishing returns.<p>I think that our illusion of ever accelerating progress has more to do with the fact that ever more people are 'knowledge workers' and 'scientists' than anything else, the greater a fraction of our society that advances our knowledge the faster we will move forward in this respect.<p>The 'uploaders' are essentially practicing wishful thinking about that great question plenty of people have had to deal with in the past: How to avoid dying.<p>Unfortunately I don't think any of the people alive today is going to be able to accomplish that feat, statistics is overwhelmingly against it, everybody that ever lived in the past has died before the ripe old age of 150 of one cause or another. And so will everybody living today.<p>If you want to be immortal your best bet is probably to write a book, compose a piece of music or make a timeless movie.<p>I'm not sure if blogging counts :)<p>And as for the singularity, there are several other scenarios, some plausible, some implausible:<p>- a plateau of knowledge after which any future gains in knowledge will come ever slower, in a world like that new scientific findings would be real headline news instead of the science section on page 24<p>- a 'wall', beyond which we will not be able to go without knowledge 'behind' the wall (physics may be up against that, or maybe not but if there is something beyond quantum may never become a settled question)

Ugh, we've been through this before. Significant technological innovations take 30 years to recognize as significant so there's always a bias when looking at the recent past. It's a measurement artifact, not reality.

Absolutely:<p><a href="http://yarchive.net/physics/effete.html" rel="nofollow">http://yarchive.net/physics/effete.html</a>