That theory has a major blind spot: the increase in demand for a Western standard of living at an unprecedented global scale enables innovation to bring down costs.
Example: Africa has dealt with underinvestment for a long time in many areas, like telecommunications infrastructure. But because of that, many African nations have leapfrogged hardline telecommunications in favor of mobile, resulting in less spending before and after for maintenance of an antiquated system.
Likewise, we in America are dealing with the ramifications of unsustainable sprawl, where entire municipal and county budgets are exhausted just to maintain current infrastructure, particularly roads, and we have nothing left over to invest with.
All in all, that theory is limited to one's faith in humanity to adapt and thrive. We made it through the ice ages and the Toba Catastrophe.
Besides, who in the 21st century is content with aspiring to the living standards of the 20th century? The global poor, perhaps, but once they reach the 20th century, they, like most people, aspire for the 21st.
All of that is incremental and evolutionary. Here's a good example of what I mean.
Fundamental invention: radio. Before radio communication via invisible waves over long distances was impossible. After radio it wasn't. This is a fundamental qualitative change in capability.
Innovation and evolution: morse code keys to 4G/LTE and WiFi. This represents a quantitative change in capability (faster/better/cheaper), but qualitatively WiFi is the same class of capability as morse code key radio.
If the EmDrive actually worked, that would represent a new fundamental invention happening today. At this point I doubt it does, but it's an example of what such a thing would look like. In the pre-EmDrive world you couldn't propel something without reaction mass. In a post-EmDrive world you could. Qualitative step change in capability.
I think your analysis suffers from recency bias. Almost all inventions were incremental improvements on existing ideas and experiments, very few were huge Eureka! moments. Morse code was invented around 1840 and radio communication in around 1900. It took 60 years to go from wired to wireless. The first supercomputer was built in the 1960's and 50 years later we were walking around with internet connected computers in our pocket that had a few orders of magnitude more processing power than their early predecessors. That evolution took a lot of inventing to achieve, and it has fundamentally changed society. It may not have felt as transformative to you because you were alive to witness the transition and the different iterations that led us to where we currently are, but make no mistake, the level of technical advancement in the last 50 years is unparalleled to any other time in our history.
I like this comment, it may be true; it certainly should make us careful about making a final judgement. It's true of literature and art - what the next century decides was great about the last isn't obvious at the time, at all. Or not usually. If the next century lives largely in cyberspace, then we're in the golden age and No Man's Sky (a game I quite like, actually) and VR are epochal advances for all humanity. But overall, I'm a pessimist, Jane Jacobs book "Dark Age Ahead" (which is mostly about trends obvious back then) left a big impression on me.
It is widely understood that shipping containers are responsible for more global trade than any other factor, which has lowered the prices of goods around the world at a scale never seen before. The unprecedented demand for trade necessitated their adoption, but they are essentially a metal box on top of other metal boxes on top of a flat surface.
Shipping containers were a tremendous innovation but they required absolutely no new or novel technology to produce or deploy.
Another example: insulation. Energy costs are higher to heat in the winter than cool in the summer, but an extraordinary amount of energy is wasted due to insufficient insulation. Solving this problem would decrease energy costs, increase quality of life, and would require no new technology whatsoever.
I fear we in the tech sphere are sometimes too addicted to the lure of the future to imagine what we could do with what we already have.
I mean, shit, literally, could be solved by better toilets. Last I checked India had more cell phones than flushing toilets. Proper sanitation saves on health care costs later on. This is another very old technology that can prevent us from even needing high technology to solve the problem caused by insufficient sanitation and toilet access.
I'm not saying there is no value to incremental improvement, just that there is a qualitative difference between that and true invention and that the latter has stagnated since roughly the early 1970s.
The former makes things faster/better/cheaper, while the latter makes things possible.
You could still ship things across the ocean before containers. But before boats?
I predict that when the current zeitgeist finally does shift we will once again see the invention of things currently considered impossible. I can't say exactly what those will be any more than a scientist in the 1700s could have envisioned radio, though I can certainly speculate. For an early candidate my money would be on the invention of a process to reliably reverse aging in living cells, and maybe something really radical in energy like a compact high density fusion reactor exploiting a novel approach to containment discovered through machine learning. In the long term I strongly suspect that there are fundamental issues with our current models of physics (the whole dark matter 'hack' and the lack of agreement between QM and GR) and that solving this might open the door to things currently considered impossible.
BTW -- I think there have been a few fundamental inventions from 1970 to present.
- Graphene, though I don't know quite enough about materials to know if this has clear antecedents.
- The block chain, which seems like an actual novel mathematical discovery as well as a CS basic invention. It also seems pregnant with social implications since it might suggest a way to actually make communal self-governance by consensus work.
- CRISPR/CAS9
All those happened in the past 10 years or so, which fits in with the idea that the dark age is on its way out.
You're being ridiculous. I'm comparing the difference between a half century previous to shipping containers to the half century after. Boats have been around for thousands of years.
Your argument is very narrow and rigid. What you call "incremental" innovations or new uses of old technologies can vastly outweigh the impact of novel technologies, some of which take decades to reach the average Westerner, let alone the average human being.
Your argument also ignores the cumulative effects of fully utilizing existing technologies. The cure for polio existed long before coordinated efforts brought it to the brink of eradication.
Likewise, chemical birth control has been around for 50 years, and the only thing stopping it from widespread adoption - and thus a significant decrease in unwanted births and excess human consumption of scarce resources - is money and political will.
Another example - I really don't have all day but your line of argument is seriously flawed - is nuclear power. Modern reactors are safe and stable - the earthquake that flattened Fukushima left the reactor intact; it was the tidal flood that caused leakages - and we could produce a great deal of mostly-carbon-neutral energy with them, but we as a society choose not to. We don't need fancy new tech to make nuclear work, we just need funding and political will.
I suspect you, by the name of API, is falling for the old adage: to a man with a hammer, every problem is a nail.
Earth, humanity, and life itself is not an engineering problem with an engineering solution.
these are not mutually exclusive ideas, and i dont see where api is saying the innovation is bad or we should have less of it, only that we should have more invention (and presumably, more of both)
It sounds like an unsupported belief in the possibility of the "revolutionary" progress of technology which would still save the humanity in its present desire to keep "business as usual."
I'm not optimistic about that. The way I see it, the premises on which the world currently runs are unsustainable, and there's no technological miracle that will change that. Fusion is very improbable, fission can't support the growth that people got used to during the last 100 years, fossil fuels are clearly very limited, the amount of food which can be sustainably produced is limited, etc.
And we also gave up on incremental and evolutionary improvements on the last great new thing, nuclear technology. The first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was on December 2, 1942. Nuclear bomb - July 16, 1945. Hydrogen bomb - November 1, 1952. Grid connected nuclear power plant - June 26, 1954. Nuclear aircraft program - canceled 1958. US nuclear rocket program NERVA - 1959 to 1973. Project Orion, a nuclear pulse spaceship design (with an interstellar variant) - ended with the nuclear test ban treaty of 1963. Low radiation versions of nuclear explosives for seismology, mining, excavation, and construction (Project Plowshare) - canceled 1977.
I think you are right that 1970's was when society changed with the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 as the final nail in the coffin for nuclear technology advancement and use.
I don't know if I agree that the 70s through SpaceX landing weren't inventive. It seems possible that we got all the low-hanging inventive fruit from "physics" by the 1970s. Through the 90s and 00s technological invention just wasn't of the physics variety. I'd consider software/AI/sans-human information synthesis--manifestly self-driving cars--as inventive. I'd also consider DNA manipulation, both construction and editing, inventive capabilities. In this regard it's more a matter of timing, and which fields are primed for inventive leaps at certain points in history.
Example: Africa has dealt with underinvestment for a long time in many areas, like telecommunications infrastructure. But because of that, many African nations have leapfrogged hardline telecommunications in favor of mobile, resulting in less spending before and after for maintenance of an antiquated system.
Likewise, we in America are dealing with the ramifications of unsustainable sprawl, where entire municipal and county budgets are exhausted just to maintain current infrastructure, particularly roads, and we have nothing left over to invest with.
All in all, that theory is limited to one's faith in humanity to adapt and thrive. We made it through the ice ages and the Toba Catastrophe.
Besides, who in the 21st century is content with aspiring to the living standards of the 20th century? The global poor, perhaps, but once they reach the 20th century, they, like most people, aspire for the 21st.