8.5 KiB
"Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now?"
-
Author: u/None *
-
URL:
-
Score: 3
-
Created: 2013-12-15T13:34:16
Post:
Comments:
u/alexanderwales [+9] Time flies like an arrow (10 hours later)
It bothers me that he keeps saying that "robot factories don't exist". They definitely do, and the vast majority of production is done by mechanical processes. Human labor makes up a relatively small fraction of production, and is only used in those cases where it's not cheaper to mechanize - which is rare. And this is about what you would expect, given a long tail distribution of work. We've got a saying in software development that the last 10% takes 90% of the work, and I have to imagine that's definitely true of mechanization as well.
Much of the other stuff, like teleportation, force fields, teleportation, anti-gravity sleds, etc. will just never happen. The reason we got that stuff wrong is that people saw scientific advancements as being additive progress in blocks of equal size. The Less Wrong crowd will often argue that advancement is exponential - in that more and more of it is happening faster and faster - but I would actually that it's an S-curve. Initial advancements caused an acceleration, and then eventually you've done the majority of the work that you can do and you're left making incremental improvements. People might have looked from Newton to Einstein and saw these giant leaps in thinking, but it's really a matter of refinement rather than revolution.
And then to decry computation as a basically worthless consolation prize is just so ... wrong that I barely know where to begin. Basically the only thing holding robotics back right now is computation, and if we could get our "mere simulation" of chemistry working correctly, we would be well on our way to all of the revolutions that genetics still promise. He talks about not having a cure for cancer, but that's the same misunderstanding of things that pervades the whole article - "cancer" is not just one thing, and a "cure" is not going to be some miracle. The truth is, unless the Singularity actually happens, curing cancer will be a matter of curing single instances of cancer one at a time, and increasing survivability, and getting faster treatment. You won't be able to say "We beat cancer", you'll instead say "Cancer is not as common or bad as it used to be". But you probably won't even say that, because people will take the cures for granted.
A lot of this article bothered me.
u/duffmancd [+3] (18 hours later)
A lot of this article bothered me too, but there were some points that I think require some thought. The bureaucracy in research is one point that I think can really be improved on. My supervisor at uni spent 3 hours a week talking to his students, 1 hour in the lab during non-term times only, and the rest of his time writing grants, proposals, teaching, editing papers and other non-directly research related tasks. This extreme, but representative of the problems.
A point I am less sure about is the general bureaucracy in life and the need to work. I don't know if our output is enough that most people shouldn't have to work, but I do sometimes wonder how much wealth is actually being created by all the people who sit at a computer all day. It may be that, yes the vast majority of people are actually contributing, but I can also imagine that if we could re-write the world we could remove a lot of jobs without any decline in output. Does anyone have any data/more knowledge (I'm just a student) on this?
And in terms of space exploration, we really haven't been poring in the money that was being expended during the space race, and this has definitely slowed growth. There are many possible alternative methods to get to space, but none have really been explored past the design phase so we're still lighting various chemicals on fire.
u/alexanderwales [+1] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)
Oh, I definitely agree with parts of it (especially the proliferation of beaurocracy).
The big reason that space exploration has stalled out is that there aren't big enough economic incentives. Getting to the moon required NASA to be roughly 5% of the federal budget - and didn't really have anything in the way of returns. The biggest returns available in space right now are tourism, helium-3 mining, and asteroid capture. These are theoretically profitable, but not profitable at current time. They are all enormously expensive to set up. The reason that we've basically stalled out in space is that we took a significant fraction of our national budget to get there, and once that was cut back we were left without the budget to go really go back. I think we're finally getting back to the point where we might be able to start up space exploitation again, and it's a combination of new designs and heavy automation that's going to get us there. Once there's proven profit in space, humanity will start going there with more regularity.
u/IcyWindows [+2] (8 hours later)
Starts out well, but it meanders a lot.
The author also constantly asserts facts saying that "I can't prove this, but it must be true that...."
That isn't a rational argument.
u/None [+1] (10 hours later)
Well, it is called "the baffler".
u/Jinoc [+2] (22 hours later)
I can't really say much about the research aspect of the paper - we don't know, after all, what would have happened had policy taken a different turn - but the analysis of liberalism as bureaucracy is pretty interesting.
u/sicutumbo [+1] (14 hours later)
This guy is an idiot. I got pretty mad during reading the article, as this guy obviously has very little grasp of how science works and how it advances. Sure, it's easy to say "science isnt making much progress, why cant we do all the things that scifi said it would do in the 60s? Scifi was right in the 20s!" Well guess what? Science is really, really fucking hard. Sure, it was relatively simple to exhaust all the low-hanging fruit within our grasp, but that doesnt mean we'll just keep making such huge revolutions every few years. If this guy had ever actually tried going to some actual science classe, he'd realize just how fucking much we know about how things work. We aren't just sitting in some room staring at our dicks. But just because we aren't delivering new fundamental theories on how everything works every decade, doesn't mean that it gives some new-age hippie the right to say that science hasn't done anything really important in decades. Anti-gravity, force fields, flying cars, and teleportation pods are all either ruled out by our current, vast knowledge of how the universe works, or they are so impractical at the moment that they aren't even worth considering. Sure, asking someone in the 50s, they would be surprised that we dont have any Data-esque androids walking around doing our jobs, but then again that same person has absolutely no fucking clue about how hard artificial intelligence is to actually produce. In order to actually make something that can think in any way like a himan, you have to completely reverse-engineer and understand, at an incredibly deep level, the most complicated object that humanity has ever discovered. It really is not as simple as this guy seems to think. If he really wants the world to advance so much, learn how the shit you criticize works, then improve it yourself. Yes, it is hard. That is why any average guy off the street isnt producing a modern miracle every tuesday. /rant
u/None [+0] (18 hours later)
You may wish to write correctly when trying to critique an article, and you definitely want to check the author's credentials. He's not "some new-age hippie", he's one of the more acclaimed anthropologists in the field right now.
u/ArmokGoB [+1] (a day later)
What kind of bizzaro alternate universe is this person living in? We do have most of those things, and the majority of the rest either just lack funding and could be caught up to expected levels with a mantan project style effort in a few years, or make assumptions about physics that we wont be able to circumvent until we get some kind of sub-femtotech. Of the ones we don't have, for most we have good substitutes.