The economic incentives for progress are still there, we're using current tools to design better tools in a self-amplifying feedback loop, and limits for this process seem still far away from us. We have tons of space for progress. [0]
> What if you extrapolated the speed of passenger planes in the 60s, or even 80s. Just 30 years ago.
Then I would be wrong, for economical, not technological reasons. We can fly at Mach 25 today, but for various (economic) reasons people generally don't want to even go supersonic.
> Would you be correct about the 21st century? How about space travel?
Well, we didn't get space travel, but we got the Internet. To be honest, the progress we made in the last 50 years is more amazing than people dreamed back then, but in a different way.
> That's the problem with extrapolation, and extending current trends into the future. It's actually pretty reliable — you're often right. Until you're not.
I agree. In general, the more detailed you try to get in your future predictions, the more likely it is for you to be wrong.
[0] - for instance, even re-reading and cross-correlating (in an automated way) all the medical papers that were published in the last 100 years would bring us tremendous new discoveries; we already have more science than humans can handle, but we also build tools that could handle it for us.
The economic incentives for progress are still there, we're using current tools to design better tools in a self-amplifying feedback loop, and limits for this process seem still far away from us. We have tons of space for progress. [0]
> What if you extrapolated the speed of passenger planes in the 60s, or even 80s. Just 30 years ago.
Then I would be wrong, for economical, not technological reasons. We can fly at Mach 25 today, but for various (economic) reasons people generally don't want to even go supersonic.
> Would you be correct about the 21st century? How about space travel?
Well, we didn't get space travel, but we got the Internet. To be honest, the progress we made in the last 50 years is more amazing than people dreamed back then, but in a different way.
> That's the problem with extrapolation, and extending current trends into the future. It's actually pretty reliable — you're often right. Until you're not.
I agree. In general, the more detailed you try to get in your future predictions, the more likely it is for you to be wrong.
[0] - for instance, even re-reading and cross-correlating (in an automated way) all the medical papers that were published in the last 100 years would bring us tremendous new discoveries; we already have more science than humans can handle, but we also build tools that could handle it for us.