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Comment by goolulusaurs | Hacker News Reader

For some time I have been thinking about why it seems like scientific progress has slowed down compared to a century ago, and then one day I came across a clip of an interview with Professor Russell where he was saying that if technological progress continued at the current rate, then very soon humanity would drive itself extinct from the creation and use of weapons that were too powerful and too easily produced. I wonder if the slowing of scientific progress might be in some ways a saving grace, where if too advanced of technology was developed too quickly, then society would be unable to evolve in time to handle it responsibly without major potential for calamity.

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Would just like to point out that Vaclov Smil says the time period between about 1870-1910 is unmatched by any other time period before or since, excepting a sliver of the Han dynasty, as measured by the rapid surge in invention, innovation, and the rapidity with which those new ideas were employed in the broader society (rate of adoption). He goes on to say that even in today’s seemingly endless cycle of new products and legitimate advancement, we’re making only point solutions in comparison. For instance, the whole-house AC power system would be easily recognizable by Edison today. Improved, yes, but compared to going from nothing to the direct-to-home and whole-home solution set, it’s illustrative of relative stagnation. To be clear though, he said that it’s unrealistic to expect society to perpetuate those periods, as they are flukes - again, only twice in recorded history. I’m not doing the depth of his reasoning justice by any means, but I think his would bring another interesting angle to the idea that you relate from Russell.

I wonder what Edison would think of the internet, self driving cars, speech recognition, image recognition, social manipulation at scale, VR, modern medicine, etc.

Self-driving cars in his age were called horsses. Those (and donleys and mules) still remain the preferred mode of autonomous all-terrain mobility in some regions.

The US Army was actively considering resurrecting pack mules fpr use in Afghanistan as of 2011, though I don't believe that actually occurred.

Otherwise, E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909) envisions much of what you describe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops

http://www.visbox.com/prajlich/forster.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20461514 (PDF)

Something of an HN perennial.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q="The%20Machine%20Stops"

Several notable postings: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10490198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20461514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9544256

It would probably involve personal enrichment and lawsuits, judging by his record.

You've probably seen this, but for those who haven't, Bostrom's written an interesting formalization of this hunch: https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf

It seems to me the balance is between massive state power and massive individual power. I'm pretty sure about which one I fear more. That said, I think Nick's suggestions are pretty sound.

That said, I think about the call from Freeman Dyson to teach children to develop genetic engineering skills to create warm blooded plants to bring life to the asteroid belt.... Well, maybe at some point

> I'm pretty sure about which one I fear more

Which?

Not the OP, but they can both be pretty bad. Nazi Germany or the USSR on one side, or Somalian warlords on the other side. Perhaps the warlords are better, but that's not obvious to me.

Not sure if you follow Chamath Palihapitiya but his company's annual letter had a really interesting take on this: https://www.socialcapital.com/annual-letters/2019

A new space race

A common theme amongst optimists is how much technological advance we have seen and how these advances seem to be accelerating. I am of the opposite camp and believe, roughly, that the rate of progress has been steadily declining since we landed on the moon in 1969. While I can’t explain the 1970s and 1980s, the modern Gilded Age’s lack of technological progress is easier to understand. The intellectual lobotomization of smart, young STEM talent has been an explicit strategy by Big Tech fueled by unseemly profitability and hi flying stock prices. If you can’t innovate but are wildly profitable, wouldn’t you also just pay the incremental talented engineer to work for you on anything versus working for a competitor or, worse still, work for themselves and invent something disruptive that could impact your monopoly? Of course you would...and they have.

If you were a bright, ambitious engineer graduating in STEM in the early 1960s this wasn’t the case. You went to work on something meaningful. The momentum towards spaceflight was a call to arms for the smartest and hardest working amongst us. These bright men and women worked to invent new capabilities and entire ecosystems in fuel cells, gas storage systems, thermodynamic materials, engines, mechanical timers and clocks and control systems to name a few. The cost of the entire Apollo program was $25 Billion or $150 Billion in today’s dollars.

Big Tech spent $75B on R&D in 2018 alone. Put another way, this means that in two 2018 equivalents of R&D spending, Big Tech could have sent people to the moon and back. It's fair to say, however, that what we have witnessed instead can graciously be described as something less ambitious and impactful than that.

This misallocation of capital won’t end until we demand it - every government, regulator and individual now has a role to play whether you know it or not.

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