Back to the Future

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/03/back-to-the-future

by hhs • 6 years ago

66 33 6 years ago

thebear• 6 years ago

The discussion of sterility and sclerosis seems reasonable to me. On the subject of stagnation and repetition, I find that my perception is diametrically opposed to what the author of the book and Peter Thiel say. I am a baby boomer, and I am absolutely blown away by things like 3D printers and rocket boosters returning from space and being reused, not to mention the possibility of quantum computing. As far as the arts are concerned, I believe the difference between the olden days and today is that today, there is way more of everything rather than less. This causes an odd distortion of perception. In the 1960s, you could easily name a few progressive bands, musicians, movies, etc., because there were so few. Today, the stuff you can find on the Internet is vast, but there are no few big names to stand out. Or, more precisely, there are a few big names, but that's the repetitive stuff that the author laments. The new, creative, progressive stuff doesn't have those. Go on the Internet, you'll be surprised!

eaenki3• 6 years ago

Quantum computing, like AGI, will be 10 years away, maybe a couple more centuries. 3D printers are pretty insignificant atm. Space x and Tesla are the exception.

skore• 6 years ago

Ouch, that "Subscribe today" banner should have its fonts either embedded on the page or rendered into paths. Without that, it looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/kxie7Cb

Traster• 6 years ago

On Stagnation, I think the argument is very weak. Compare 1970 to today and we don't have any invention better than running water. Sorry what? If you want to compare centuries go ahead- but I think it's almost inarguable that life has changed much more significantly 1900-2000 than 1800-1900. Information is basically now costless to store, communication with anyone on earth is practically free, and we can literally travel to any point on earth in a matter of days. The idea that we've stagnated just seems frankly absurd to me. Are all those achievements less important than running water? I don't know, running water probably saved more lives - but Alexander Fleming was hardly a slouch in the 1920s.

If you want to only compare 1969 to now, I'd like to point out that there's a really obvious problem. We don't have 200 years of hindsight to say "Oh that invention completely changed the world". How are we feeling about Genome sequencing, how about the plethora of green energy generation technologies? How about the Electric Car? The Internet?

I just feel like the stagnation assertion is ridiculous.

honestoHeminway• 6 years ago

It feels like that to the exponential expectations we had.

eaenki3• 6 years ago

When only two guys were (mainly) responsible for (pushing) what you said, namely SJ and EM with the internet and the electric car+energy storage respectively, it’s telling. Besides it’s just three things.

There’s absolutely no excuse on why we aren’t flying commercially five times as fast and Flying personal electric vehicles.

mdonahoe3• 6 years ago

The excuse is that Society doesn't care that much about moving our meat sacks around 5x faster, when it can move minds around the planet instantly.

Instead of building flying cars, we digitized ourselves.

paulryanrogers• 6 years ago

There’s absolutely no excuse on why we aren’t flying commercially five times as fast and Flying personal electric vehicles.

Supersonic is noisy and probably has cost and safety concerns beyond conventional airliners. Physics and engineering have limited electric air travel.

There are also those boring issues like the environment and distractions like poverty, healthcare, and warfare getting in the way too.

caymanjim• 6 years ago

The only place you can fly supersonically is over the ocean, because of the noise. It's also more dangerous, and consumes vastly more fuel. The cost per passenger is enormous, and the planes can't scale up large enough to offset it. The technology doesn't exist to make it economical.

A big reason why supersonic flight isn't all that important is that the actual in-air flight time is usually under half the total trip time. If I'm flying from New York to London, the whole trip takes about twelve hours door-to-door. It takes more time to travel to the airport, wait around, board, taxi, land, taxi, go through immigration, retrieve luggage, and get to my destination than it does to fly across the Atlantic. Going Concorde-level supersonic would only reduce the whole trip time to about ten hours instead of twelve.

coldtea4• 6 years ago

but I think it's almost inarguable that life has changed much more significantly 1900-2000 than 1800-1900.

Yes, but much more insignificantly 1950-2000 to 1900-1950 -- and slowing down ever since.

Information is basically now costless to store, communication with anyone on earth is practically free, and we can literally travel to any point on earth in a matter of days

None of which is particularly exciting, and the latter is probably detrimental to the planet.

We could already communicate with anywhere instantly back with the transatlantic telephone. The rest is evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Even communication satellites we've had for 50+ years already. Heck, the base internet is 60+ years old, and the web 3 decades.

mdonahoe3• 6 years ago

Yes, but much more insignificantly 1950-2000 to 1900-1950 -- and slowing down ever since.

Here are a few more significant innovations since 1950:

0. Search Engines 1. Video Games 2. GPS 3. Medical 3D Imaging (CT/MRI) 4. Genetic Sequencing 5. 3D Printing 6. Autonomous Machines (ground robots, drones)

None of which is particularly exciting

You aren't excited about having all of human knowledge in your pocket? Does something have to fundamentally change our understanding of physics for you to get excited?

Udik• 6 years ago

We could already communicate with anywhere instantly back with the transatlantic telephone. The rest is evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Totally disagree. You could as well say that the transatlantic telephone is only evolutionary with respect to the first telegraphs (first built in 1816)- and you'd probably be more right. The diffusion of computers and computer networks- which are conceptually different from a telephone line- has changed the world to the point of making in unrecognizable. Try to explain to the average person living in 1980 what do you do all day. How you listen to music, talk with friends, read the news, read and edit an encyclopedia, order food, date, watch tv, buy and read books, play, work.

I think that our idea of progress is rooted in the past- we tend to project into the future the current trends and past successes- but progress always follows new paths and constantly changes direction. You wanted supersonic airplanes? Those would have been an incremental progress over the ones we built in the 50s. You wanted flying cars? Again, an incremental progress on that personal mobility revolution that was the car. Exploring other planets? An incremental progress from the age of discoveries, when explorers and adventurers reached and colonized new continents.

And instead what you got are computers so tiny, widespread and networked that I can take an astoundingly powerful one out of my pocket and casually tap its screen to switch on and off a 10 euro connected lightbulb that can be 2 meter or 20000km from here, because the signal goes back and forth from China anyway.

So I don't know what the future has in store, but if I think we'll get petaflop-dust particle-sized computers embedded in our brains I might be wrong. Maybe the next fifty years will be about genetically engineering completely new types of plants, or replacing parts of our bodies as they age, or new economic paradigms... who knows?

prawn• 6 years ago

Was running water exciting at the time or more a practical improvement as with the modern examples?

agumonkey2• 6 years ago

Honest question : is free a progress ? There's a boulimia in a way where people arent satisfied even with 4G and HD 24/7. There's an absurdity here that makes me think it's not important progress.

nine_k• 6 years ago

Is invention of steel a progress?

On one hand, it allows for more deadly weapons. On the other, it allows for much better tools and building stuff impossible otherwise.

There's no invention that always does only 100% certified good and cannot be turned to do bad things. Technologies are ethically neutral. For every bored information glutton there are several poor kids who now can read and watch educational stuff which they won't have a chance to ever see 30 years ago.

soperj• 6 years ago

Electric car isn't a recent invention. It was quite popular at the beginning of the 1900s.

cryptica• 6 years ago

> Information is basically now costless to store

I think this is part of a broader myth that personal data is valuable. Masses of people are predictable, always have been. You don't need data about individuals in order to sell them things. Those people who control the money supply are the ones who decide what we should buy and who we should elect, not the individual. And the more centralized the control of the money supply becomes, the more homogeneous and predictable individuals are going to be and the less valuable personal data becomes.

> we can literally travel to any point on earth in a matter of days

The credit for that innovation belongs to 1903 (the Wright Brothers) and most of the key innovations for commercial flights (e.g. allowing each plane to carry many passengers) happened over the next 50 years.

neonate• 6 years ago

https://archive.md/gjlhN

a_band• 6 years ago

"As for the world outside of MIT’s PR materials, it appears much the same as it was in 1969—just with faster computers and uglier cars."

I this sentiment is actually right, especially when you realize that Thiel has made it clear that he isn't all that impressed with the advances of the last 30 years. We've seen innovation in software but not many breakthroughs in physics and atoms. For example, the predictions of the 50s and 60s about how we would live (flying cars, greater health, space travel, cleaner, futuristic cities) seemed to hope for those breakthroughs. The reality of where innovation happened is much more depressing: pocket computers, information superabundance, and porn.

For example: there has yet to be a breakthrough in the last 50 years that could even come close the impact of antibiotics and nobody has set foot on the moon in five decades. But if you told someone that in the late 60s, I think they wouldn't believe it.

astine• 6 years ago

"For example: there has yet to be a breakthrough in the last 50 years that could even come close the impact of antibiotics and nobody has set foot on the moon in five decades. But if you told someone that in the late 60s, I think they wouldn't believe it."

This shouldn't be that surprising when you think about the situation just a little bit. Antibiotics are important because they cover a wide variety of diseases that formerly were untreatable. This is the case because they all have the same cause: bacteria. Other classes of disease, such as cancer, aren't so simple. There isn't a single treatment that can reliably cure all forms of cancer and theoretically there really can't be. It's just a fundamentally harder problem. There's a lot a low hanging fruit in basic discoveries but then we hit a wall when we attempt to apply them to more difficult problems.

Back in the 50's (I think) there was a fascination with the possibility of weather prediction. It seemed reasonable at the time that because the weather was ultimately a deterministic system we could predict it months in advance just by figuring out the physics and running the correct calculations. Then we discovered chaos theory and "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" and we realized that weather prediction was a fundamentally much harder problem than we could have predicted. We simply can't ever measure the atmosphere accurately enough to accurately predict the weather more than a few weeks in advance and even then we have to take a probabilistic approach.

There's a similar deal with fast planes as mentioned in the article. Back in the 60s and 70s all the big aerospace engineers wanted to be working on supersonic airliners like the Concord. Decades later, that effort seems to have been a waste of time. It turns out that the physics of supersonic flight present challenges and the economics of intercontinental travel don't really cover those challenges. The changes that have been made to airliners over the last few decades have been instead in terms of efficiency and safety. Even in the military sector, which can throw tons of money at pie-in-the-sky ideas has run into this. The most populous strategic bomber in the US Airforce is still the B-52 which was introduced in the mid 50s. We do have more advanced weapons, but we can't afford them, and we can't afford them precisely because of the changes that make them more advanced.

If someone in the late 60s wouldn't believe that we'd not repeat the success of antibiotics or return to the moon, it would have been because of misconceptions about the nature of the problems involved in the 60s rather than because of some form of decadence that settled in after the fact.

eaenki3• 6 years ago

It is a matter of fact that the reason we’re not flying commercially x5 as fast is NOT an engineering problem. Ditto for reusable rockets before Elon. Ditto for electric cars before Tesla. In those cases, it’s just complacency. And there are many such cases

evrydayhustling• 6 years ago

I think your argument risks being an example of how Thiel might argue that we educate ourselves into complacency. The discoverers of antibiotics had no reason to believe there would exist a treatment to cover such a broad spectrum of diseases; it's only in retrospect that we understand the mechanisms within which we say "we have found the low hanging fruit". Fleming's mode of inquiry and curiosity led him to discover a new branch of tools, but the article contends that our focus on specialization has taught us to bury ourselves in complexity and accept feeling relatively helpless.

api• 6 years ago

I would argue that we've seen only minor evolutionary advances in software in some areas, while others have actually gone backward.

I've been coding since I was a kid in the 1980s. By the late 90s I was developing multithreaded stuff in C++ and Java 2 that didn't feel all that different from today, except that Go has replaced Java for the high level server side niche.

UI development has gone way, way backward, especially on desktop. Today's experience is fragmented and clunky and just about every UI layer is ludicrously bloated. Other than somewhat better aesthetics all this complexity comes with no benefit or in many cases regression. The state of UI is absolutely horrid.

Meanwhile the Internet has become a surveillance and spam dystopia, but that's more of a social and economic problem than a technical one.

The only software advances I can name are safe multithreaded bare metal coding (Rust), somewhat more adoption of aspects of functional programming, and better dependency management. It's barely anything at all compared with say 1970 to 1990 or even 1990 to 2000.

solarkraft• 6 years ago

Most of these advances (besides flying cars, they're just dumb) are social advances, not neccessarily purely technical ones.

Our cities could be much more futuristic, but that's clearly not due to a lack of technology - it's due to a lack of clear political will. Technology regarding health could be better, but start at implementing a decent health care system that doesn't let people avoidably die because they can't avoid treatment (this is US-specific, but a bad situation made even worse by the president Thiel so vehemently supported). Space travel, again, is in a large part just a matter of funding (we could be at today's point 20 or 30 years ago).

TomMckenny• 6 years ago

Most likey we've done all the low hanging fruit: supersonic flight is categorically more difficult than subsonic yet is a diminishing return given that so much time is just spent preparing for the flight. And, Peter's opinion not withstanding, it is impossible to communicate faster than light which is where we are.

But if we have become decadent, it hardly surprising in a society where opinion is give more weight than facts and people are not even willing to preserve their democracy.

triangleman• 6 years ago

Holy freaking irony, Batman. Isn't this the guy who founded Palantir, the company enabling the current industrial/surveillance complex that will surely prevent "sclerotic" institutions from being reformed? A gay man writing in a Catholic journal about the problem of low birth rates? WTF am I reading?

Nonetheless he makes a few good points, but the irony burns!

Back to the Future

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