Comment by internaut | Hacker News Reader

Comment by internaut | Hacker News Reader

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lisper, nearly everything you just mentioned is contained within the sphere of computation or information science.

And this:

> Genome sequencing

is not a product. It doesn't do anything useful by itself. There are only 16 new biotech drugs approved each year. I am unaware of any cures for Alzheimers or other popular affliction. It is also a side effect of computation and not an advance in biological science on its own merit. No fast computer, no sequencing.

This is why the Technology Stagnation Hypothesis is a serious one.

It says there have been almost no advances outside of computation since '73. Which matches the plateau in real wages in the West. Eroom's Law is also a symptom of it.

As I see: the world massively improved from the late 1600s to the 1970s. Then improvements continued in computation and halted in almost every other area of development.

> many (most?) people are still convinced that we're on the wrong track

What I am saying is far from anecdotal.

> We're in the middle of the longest stretch of world peace in history.

We have already passed what I believe to be an inflection point.

You are correct about violence until the year 2007.

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/03/20/breaking-a-...

Now we're heading consistently in the wrong direction.

Same with health:

"Taken by itself, it could just be a random fluctuation from one year to the next," said Elizabeth Arias, a demographer with the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. But the data, which was released Wednesday, also showed that Americans collectively have lost momentum when it comes to greater longevity. Life expectancy at birth has remained virtually stagnant for the nation since 2010."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/0...

tldr; Not all is roses. Past trends were real and important and are not continuing. I make a similar rant here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12121172

I fully accept that we've had it good for a long time lisper, I've read my history, it's not that I'm unappreciative.

Observing that most high profile modern innovations rely on computation is about as good a point of evidence in favour of technological stagnation today as somebody in the 1850s positing stagnation on the basis that nearly all high profile innovations in recent years had relied on steam power or somebody in the 1930s noting that nearly all high profile innovations in recent years had relied on electricity.

A good rebuttal.

However it rests on an assumption because broad based stagnation did occur during the Industrial Revolution.

www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/Allen/unpublished/pessimism-6.pdf

There was a period of about 50 years when wages didn't change and when countless cottage industries with skilled labour disappeared. The standard of living did not increase for most people at this time. Today this has been conveniently forgotten.

The standard narrative that life improved for most people is only true if you examine economic history on a timescale of centuries.

One question that comes to mind is: are you going to be alive when a technology such as biotech brings home the bacon? Eroom's Law suggests life longevity escape velocity (as hypothesized by Audrey with SENS) is very unlikely.

In my former post there is a link to a youtube video made in 1969 by the Ford Corporation. Our grandparents expected a lot of substantive changes that have not yet occurred. I consider those reasonable projections still. I would like most of us put them conservatively at 50 years hence. Yet that would imply it took a century from our grandparent's original projections.

I make the claim that it is perfectly possible we won't have any significant results from biotechnology for hundreds of years.

Furthermore it is not crazy to speculate that if we enter a long term stagnation there is the possibility we enter a new dark age. This is not taken seriously by most men of intelligence today, and I consider that highly unfortunate because it too, is a genuine possibility, an outlier that becomes more likely with each year of broad stagnation that passes. I would like to remind the reader that by some metrics our production levels only exceeded that of the Roman Empire in the 18th century. That is 1000 years later.

tldr; More of us should be more worried. There should be far more urgency about innovation than there is today.

Wage stagnation and technological stagnation are separate issues though. I don't think anyone who has studied the period seriously disputes that the Industrial Revolution was a period of hitherto unparalleled technological innovation or that wages collapsed in some sectors, often as a direct consequence of that innovation. And - as you correctly point out, on a scale of centuries rather than the average person's experience - life definitely got a lot better for everyone as a result. It got better for the wealthier much faster, of course.

Today's enabling technology that allows greater innovation is based on silicon rather than steam power, but if anything our situation is more optimistic than before: mobile phones found their way into the hands of the poorest far more rapidly than early twentieth century home appliances, and greater resources (if not political will) exist to support the losers from today's technological change.

I don't believe in technological singularities or longevity escape velocity, but that's really not required to believe that Eroom's law is no more an inviolable rule of human progress than Moore's

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