I'd recommend reading The Rise and Fall of American Growth for some useful numbers on this. Between 1870 and 1970 the standard of living increased so dramatically due to a few key inventions that the author calls "onetime" events. Technology since then has led to marginal improvements compared to, say, the widespread adoption of the filtered drinking water networks.
"Picture a man or woman of the late 19th century, perhaps your own great-grandfather or great-great-grandmother, sitting in an ordinary American home of 1890. And now pitch him forward in an H G Wells machine, not to our time but about halfway – to that same ordinary American home, circa 1950.
Why, the poor gentleman of 1890 would be astonished. His old home is full of mechanical contraptions. There is a huge machine in the corner of the kitchen, full of food and keeping the milk fresh and cold! There is another shiny device whirring away and seemingly washing milady's bloomers with no human assistance whatsoever! Even more amazingly, there is a full orchestra playing somewhere within his very house. No, wait, it's coming from a tiny box on the countertop!
The music is briefly disturbed by a low rumble from the front yard, and our time-traveler glances through the window: A metal conveyance is coming up the street at an incredible speed – with not a horse in sight. It's enclosed with doors and windows, like a house on wheels, and it turns into the yard, and the doors open all at once, and two grown-ups and four children all get out - just like that, as if it's the most natural thing in the world! He notices there is snow on the ground, and yet the house is toasty warm, even though no fire is lit and there appears to be no stove. A bell jingles from a small black instrument on the hall table. Good heavens! Is this a "telephone"? He'd heard about such things, and that the important people in the big cities had them. But to think one would be here in his very own home! He picks up the speaking tube. A voice at the other end says there is a call from across the country - and immediately there she is, a lady from California talking as if she were standing next to him, without having to shout, or even raise her voice! And she says she'll see him tomorrow!
Oh, very funny. They've got horseless carriages in the sky now, have they? What marvels! In a mere 60 years!
But then he espies his Victorian time machine sitting invitingly in the corner of the parlor. Suppose he were to climb on and ride even further into the future. After all, if this is what an ordinary American home looks like in 1950, imagine the wonders he will see if he pushes on another six decades!
So on he gets, and sets the dial for our own time.
And when he dismounts he wonders if he's made a mistake. Because, aside from a few design adjustments, everything looks pretty much as it did in 1950: The layout of the kitchen, the washer, the telephone... Oh, wait. It's got buttons instead of a dial. And the station wagon in the front yard has dropped the woody look and seems boxier than it did. And the folks getting out seem ...larger, and dressed like overgrown children.
And the refrigerator has a magnet on it holding up an endless list from a municipal agency detailing what trash you have to put in which colored boxes on what collection days.
But other than that, and a few cosmetic changes, he might as well have stayed in 1950.
Let's pause and acknowledge the one exception to the above scenario: The computer. Instead of having to watch Milton Berle on that commode-like thing in the corner, as one would in 1950, you can now watch Uncle Miltie on YouTube clips from your iPhone. But be honest, aside from that, what's new? Your horseless carriage operates on the same principles it did a century ago. It's added a CD player and a few cup holders, but you can't go any faster than you could 50 years back. As for that great metal bird in the sky, commercial flight hasn't advanced since the introduction of the 707 in the 1950s. Air travel went from Wilbur and Orville to bi-planes to flying boats to jetliners in its first half-century, and then for the next half-century it just sat there, like a commuter twin-prop parked at Gate 27B at LaGuardia waiting for the mysteriously absent gate agent to turn up and unlock the jetway.
...
'I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability.
'Of course, the standard line is that humans stopped going to the moon only because we no longer wanted to go to the moon, or could not afford to, or something... But I am suggesting that all this is BS... I suspect that human capability reached its peak or plateau around 1965-75 – at the time of the Apollo moon landings – and has been declining ever since.'
Can that be true? Charlton is a controversialist gadfly in British academe, but, comparing 1950 to the early 21st century, our time traveler from 1890 might well agree with him. And, if you think about it, isn't it kind of hard even to imagine America pulling off a moon mission now? The countdown, the takeoff, a camera transmitting real-time footage of a young American standing in a dusty crater beyond our planet... It half-lingers in collective consciousness as a memory of faded grandeur, the way a 19th century date farmer in Nasiriyah might be dimly aware that the Great Ziggurat of Ur used to be around here someplace."
>The Empire State Building was built in 15 months in 1932. It’s taken 12 years and counting to rebuild the World Trade Center. (Source: 36:00)
This is more a commentary on a broken and toxic local political and regulatory climate in New York City than a point about a lack of engineering innovation. Still, perhaps that's part of what he's talking about for some of his critiques.
"Data from the National Safety Council from 1933 through 1997 indicate that deaths from unintentional work-related injuries declined 90%, from 37 per 100,000 workers to 4 per 100,000. The corresponding annual number of deaths decreased from 14,500 to 5100; during this same period, the workforce more than tripled, from 39 million to approximately 130 million."
I think you're trying to make the point that the reason for long construction timelines is directly linked to safety. In a way, that's indirectly supporting Thiel's point. Why can't we have both? I don't see a reason that we can't have a more responsive, swift building and infrastructure development and a safe construction environment.
There are quotes from the private developer of the site that initial delays were due to the first designs for the site not feeling "inspired". So they opened an international competition that stretched on.
Doesn't sound like it's entirely due to toxic local politics and regulations.
Although this may irritate Thiel given his libertarian philosophy, the reason is rather clearly the decline of focused public research initiatives.
Whereas previously we had universities and government research arms inventing cyclotrons, rockets, GPS and internet systems, we now have an outcome where long term research, which requires a long time with unpredictable returns and a high chance of failure is cast aside in favor of rapid, iterative improvements.
I disagree. Public spending on research was far higher in 1950-today than from 1890-1950. And yet it seems technological progress was faster in the 1890-1950 period than afterward.
I agree with all that but I still wouldn't call Thiel any sort of libertarian. He spoke at the RNC, backed Trump and is in fact a registered Republican. Like many he waved a libertarian flag of convenience when that was fashionable but the dude's a right wing conservative.
I wouldn't say these sort of conservatives are pessimistic about progress so much they are opposed to progress.
Isn't there an inevitable aspect of diminishing returns here?
For example, you can't run Moore's Law forever since there are physical constraints to how close things on your chips can be.
It is obvious that any problem to which people have not turned their attention to probably has lots of low hanging fruits that will give you 'progress' very quickly and relatively easily.
I would disagree. The IoT despite being the latest fad has true possibility to change the world. We don't see this change in English speaking countries though. Why not? We are comfortable. If you go to an advanced Asian country they are just now gaining traction into the world and will leap frog this innovation. (Think Europe in the 1890s-1935.)
I think there are reasons to expect diminishing returns in the very long run (such as exhausting the search space), but they are not inevitable, at least in the short run.
If you model technological invention as combinations of more fundamental technologies, then as your stock of technologies grows, the number of new combinations should grow exponentially.
The exponential growth predicted by this model is consistent with the increasing rates of growth from the 1700s through the 1900s.
That said, I agree it seems that technological innovation (or at least its impact) is slowing. The difference in life between 1870 and 1920 seems to me to be much bigger than the difference in life between 1970 and 2020. In our fifty years, we made tremendous progress in information technology. In their fifty years, they made tremendous progress with electricity, engines, plumbing, chemicals, & radio.
Peter Thiel's emphasis is that this stagnation is coming from overregulation. My own emphasis is that we figured out what seem to be the main laws of physics by the 1930s, developed the Standard Model in the 60s and 70s, and every fundamental physics discovery since then has been an evolutionary tweak, not a disruptive re-architecting. (I'm overgeneralizing, of course, but I think the idea stands.)
I think we don't measure productivity of knowledge workers well, so we can't see how much progress we make based on IT changes. How do you measure the improvements that come from me sitting at my desk and coding up the OS? You measure second and third degree effects. You could argue windows doesn't matter compared to linux in productivity, but in either case the lives of pharmacists and ability to dispense drugs are much higher today than they were in the 50s. You can have robots count out the pills. The doc doesn't call my pharmacy, a computer manages telling them the prescription. We do have more drugs being prescribed, but I am convinced (I do need some evidence though) that the reason the economists claiming persistent lack of productivity growth is because we don't measure it accurately in the modern age. It's more that more comfort for pharmacists.
Similar feelings st the beginning of the 20th sentury... everything invented, nothing more to discover... bottom line, no body can predict the future and something amazing can be right around the corner...
Personally, I think the future is more predictable than you suggest. The standard model of physics has been stable for over half a century. New discoveries in physics typically don't throw out what came before - they make improvements that seem to be asymptotically smaller.
Of course it's always possible we discover something new and groundbreaking in the laws of physics, but given that we're having to spend billions of dollars on accelerators and telescopes, it seems less and less likely that we'll find things as cheap and as useful as electricity or semiconductors.
Looking at life now compared to life in 1967, there are many differences, especially related to computer technology, but there are also many similarities. We still have ships, trains, cars, and planes. We still have roads. We still have schools. We still have houses. We still have plumbing for water and waste. We still have electricity. We still have jobs and commutes. We still have governments and corporations and money. For the most part, the structure of modern life has been pretty stable. Of course we cannot know the future, but it feels safe to me to expect similar stability over the next half century.
Basically they say that productivity growth is sporadic, rather than continuous. I took this as a cautionary tale that we shouldn't be too hyped about the future. Keep your feet down to the earth, etc.
Just think for moment, only 50 years ago people had no idea about internet, smart phone, cell phone cd Rom, MP3, app, social media, YouTube, web page, pvr, Netflix, amazon and so one and so forth... after another 50 years, the world could be a very different place...
50 years ago Arthur C Clarke made some very decent predictions about the future. He correctly called global satellite communications, for instance. And if anything, his predictions were too optimistic. Genetic engineering hasn't changed humanity, we still haven't colonized the moon or Mars, and we're still a long way from general AI.
66 years from the invention of the airplane, we landed a man on the moon. 50 years later, we regularly fly from New York to Tokyo in 3 hours via supersonic upper-atmosphere aircr—wait a second, that's not how that turned out at all.
Same thing is already happening with technology. Progress in the last 10 years has been comparatively minimal, and it's definitely not speeding up. But at least we have IoT lightbulbs.
